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Animals in Biopolitics and the Discourse of Ethical Evasion

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Animals in Biopolitics and the Discourse of Ethical Evasion MSc Dissertation of SANA ALI MEDIA@LSE MSc Dissertation Series Compiled by Bart Cammaerts, Nick Anstead and Ruth Garland The Silence of the Lamb: Animals in Biopolitics and the Discourse of Ethical Evasion Sana Ali, MSc in Media and Communications Governance Other dissertations of the series are available online here: http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/mediaWorkingPapers/ ElectronicMScDissertationSeries.aspx MSc Dissertation of SANA ALI Dissertation submitted to the Department of Media and Communications, Lon- don School of Economics and Political Science, August 2015, in partial fulfil- ment of the requirements for the MSc in Media, Communication and Develop- ment. Supervised by Professor Lilie Chouliaraki The Author can be contacted at: [email protected] Published by Media@LSE, London School of Economics and Political Science ("LSE"), Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. The LSE is a School of the University of London. It is a Charity and is incorporated in England as a company limited by guarantee under the Com- panies Act (Reg number 70527). Copyright, Sana Ali © 2015. The authors have asserted their moral rights. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys- tem or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher nor be issued to the public or circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. In the interests of providing a free flow of debate, views expressed in this dissertation are not necessarily those of the compilers or the LSE. MSc Dissertation of SANA ALI The Silence of the Lamb: Animals in Biopolitics and the Discourse of Ethical Evasion Sana Ali __________________________________________________ ABSTRACT This paper is a contribution in the growing work of scholars in the multidisciplinary field of animal studies. It delves into the question of how news about animal suffering evokes ethical positions while evading engagement in the ultimate question of what humanity’s ethical re- sponsibility towards non-human animals is. This research comes at a time where our concern for the ‘welfare’ of non-human animals is at an all-time high, while our exploitation of non- human animals has also reached unprecedented levels, with grave consequences for the envi- ronment, human health, and our ethical identities. Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics, dis- course and ethical subjectification of the self are used to understand the way power works to normalize our ‘morally schizophrenic’ institutions and social practices vis a vis animals. In choosing these concepts to examine ethical evasion this paper aims to fill the lacuna in the discipline of animal studies which tends to take as its starting point the conceptual frame- work of ‘Othering’ animals. This research avoids this circularity inherent in overlooking an unsolved problem (the nature of the human-animal difference) by conducting an investiga- tion of how people are led to form themselves as ethical subjects in relation to non-human animals in the first place. A Critical discourse analysis of three case studies where human treatment of non-human animals is being condemned finds that other discourses co-opt the animal-human discourse in all of the cases. These distracting discourses are critical in evad- ing the ethical question of human-animal relationships, permitting the readers to view them- selves as un-implicated in the societal processes which exploit animals, while inviting moral outrage by assigning blame elsewhere. 1 MSc Dissertation of SANA ALI INTRODUCTION Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect human kind has suffered a funda- mental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it (Kundera, 1984). The question of who we are has always been inextricably tied up with determining what we are not (Levinas, Smith & Harshav, 1998). Our membership in the commune of humanity delimits our understanding of universality. And it is this universality that forms the basis of all the moral achievements we pride ourselves on, and all the idealistic undertakings of mo- dernity that we imagine we exert ourselves for. Human rights, humanity, human dignity, the humane and the inhumane, human progress; these are all concepts that flow from the notion that the most basic building block of human identity is our belonging to the human species (Parekh, 2008). The banality of this view is the source of its power. There is another more ‘universal’ identity, that gets lost in the dark corners of our social consciousness and it is that of sentience, life, of ‘bios’ (Esposito, 2008). The implications of this are evident in the ever- growing incoherence between our large scale institutionalization of non-human animal ex- ploitation and our obsession with seeing ourselves as an ‘animal loving’ or ‘humane’ society (Baker, 1993). How do we understand the reality that ‘at the very historical moment when the scale and efficiency of factory farming has never been more nightmarish, in which the oceans are being overfished by advanced techniques to the point of collapse, some animals are re- ceiving unprecedented levels of care, so much so that the pet care industry in the US grew in total expenditures from $17 billion in 1994 to $45.5 billion in 2009’ (Wolfe, 2013: 53)? Legal scholar Gary Francione (2008) has described this state of western society as one of ‘moral schizophrenia’ (135), and this dissertation is an investigation into how discourse rec- onciles the existence of competing ethical imperatives to legitimize and promote the continu- ation of this condition. Theoretically, this project is inspired by and draws upon Cary Wolfe’s work in elaborating biopolitical thought to describe the power acting on animals within hu- man society1 and aligns itself with the goals of critical animal studies. While plenty of work in field has been done on the discourses of animal use and abuse at the site of welfare cam- paigns (Cole, 2011), TV programme and films, (Plumwood 2000) advertisements (Tovey, 2003) and even school textbooks (Wadiwel, 2009) there is a scarcity of material which ana- 1 See Cary Wolfe’s ‘Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame,’ 2013. 2 MSc Dissertation of SANA ALI lyzes news discourses that relate directly to animal ethics, a dearth this paper aims to fill. The purpose of news, presumably, is to report on anomalous incidents, indeed that is what makes something ‘newsworthy’ (Fowler, 1996), but in light of the systematized abuse of millions of animals2 in Western developed countries, these news pieces have to a serve a critical role in representing these incidents as unusual and immoral, making them a valuable untapped re- source. Aside from this empirical gap, there is also a theoretical void which this new disci- pline thus far has suffered from, in its reliance on the concept of ‘Othering,’ which I will elab- orate on in the Theoretical Review section. The importance of understanding how ethical positions are discursively formulated while le- gitimizing and naturalizing the systemic oppression of animals for human advancement, is vast, not just for the cause of animals, but other oppressed groups. A growing body of aca- demic literature in the past decade has come to recognize the commonality of different kinds of oppression and seeks to advance a holistic and multidisciplinary approach to understand- ing interlocking systems of global domination (Adams & Donovan, 1995). Critical animal studies, is one such school, which seeks to deconstruct and denaturalize these systems, while embracing the inherently political nature of knowledge construction. In this sense, the school shares common themes with the methodological goals of Critical discourse analysis which is also based on a Foucauldian understanding of power and language. The multidisciplinary and proudly political nature of both made them ideal conceptual partners for this project, which seeks to problematize our view of ourselves as an ‘ethically conscious’ society, comfort- ably blind to the ‘lived realities’ (Boyde, 2014) of the animals caught in webs of biopolitical domination. THEORETICAL REVIEW Animal studies A close examination of the government of animals by humans is vital for an anthropology of biopolitics: for an understanding, that is, of the many ways in which humans themselves have been governed as animals in modern times. (Pandian, 2008) 2 See The Invisibility of Evil: Moral Progress and the ‘Animal Holocaust’ (Costelloe, 2003), Cruel Intimacies and Risky Relationships: Accounting for Suffering in Industrial Livestock Production (Purcell, 2011) and Meat past and present: research, production, consumption (Pedersen, 1995) 3 MSc Dissertation of SANA ALI ‘Animal studies’ is an interdisciplinary field that draws on postmodern notions of identity and representation to put preconceived understandings of the relationship between humans and animals under a critical lens. It is an expansion of cultural studies, which set as its goal ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’ (Horkheimer, 1982, 244), and as such seeks to understand the way acts of cultural production and identity for- mation lead to the oppression of non-human animals (Sorenson, 2014). The rise of animal studies also coincides with developments in scientific research that have blurred the once sharp distinction between humans and other animals. Language, tool use, even morality are no longer considered confined solely within human capacity (Weil, 2012), raising questions about Cartesian and Kantian humanist ethical systems, which are based around a distinct binary between human and non-human subjectivities, in fact classifying animals as things (Nocella, 2014). These developments have brought with them a new wave of the animal rights movement, triggered by Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation (1975), which following Jeremy Bentham, argued for a ‘biocentrist’ (1948) ethic: animals being de- serving of ethical consideration as part of a cohesive moral and philosophical perspective (Sperling 1988, 82).
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