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Animals As Biopolitical Subjects

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Animals As Biopolitical Subjects CHAPTER 9 Animals as Biopolitical Subjects Matthew Chrulew During a 1965 interview, Michel Foucault was asked by Alain Badiou to give his opinion about animal psychology. In part of the exchange he stated that, “when a psychologist studies the behavior of a rat in a maze, what he is trying to define is the general form of behavior that might be true for a man as well as a rat; it is always a question of what can be known about man.”1 Foucault here includes the sciences of animal behaviour and mind within his develop- ing genealogy of the human sciences as regimes of knowledge and power that objectify and subject the human subject.2 There is of course a great deal of truth to Foucault’s statement: the practices and discourses of animal psychol- ogy, zoo biology, ethology and associated fields are recognisably part of that “anthropological machine” by which the human is produced and defined in relation to the nonhuman animal.3 But insofar as Foucault’s diversion of atten- tion back towards the human sciences disregarded the exposed animals that are the subjects and objects of such experiments—rhetorically indicated here by the proverbial lab rat in a maze—this response also indicates the overall anthropocentrism that he shared with most philosophers of his generation and milieu, a species humanism that persisted alongside, and perhaps even in support of, his celebrated antihumanism. Yet divested of this latent anthropocentrism, Foucault’s thought offers indis- pensable tools for the analysis not only of the natural and biological sciences, but for human-animal relations more broadly. Even if the experimental delin- eation of animal behaviour is “always a question of what can be known about man”, it is not only that; indeed it is, most directly, an exercise in the produc- tion of knowledge about animal subjects, knowledge that relies upon and in turn helps produce and refine technologies of power over those animals. In the 1 Michel Foucault, “Philosophy and Psychology,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, volume 2, ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 249–259 (256). 2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002). 3 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/978900433��3�_0�� Animals As Biopolitical Subjects 223 course of the same interview, Foucault made some remarks which go some way towards summing up his critical project as a whole: “I don’t think psychology can ever dissociate itself from a certain normative program. Every psychol- ogy is a pedagogy, all decipherment is a therapeutics: you cannot know without transforming.”4 These remarks could equally be applied to animal psychology and related sciences: even if in essentially different ways, they, too, are indis- sociable from normative and transformative programmes. Of course, such sci- ences more easily take the behavioural and biological norms they define and produce as natural. But as much as they might deny or eliminate the transfor- mations that accompany their production of knowledge, every animal science is a training ground, every lab a circus, every zoo a theatre. Nothing prevents us from turning the archaeological and genealogical methods by which Foucault articulated his suspicion of the human sciences on to the sciences of animal biology, and their modes of subjection. Indeed to properly account for human-animal relations today, we must understand animals as biopolitical subjects in the full Foucauldian sense of the term. Very few theorists of biopower deal with animal subjectivity— not to mention animal subjectification. Most accounts of biopower are, of course, concerned with the animalisation or biologisation of human politics, with the political wagering of the life of the species, and largely ignore animals themselves.5 Those that do address the lives of nonhuman animals often con- sider them foremost as bare lives and vulnerable bodies, the mechanised, objectified and subjugated targets of human violence. Thus otherwise robust accounts of how animals are subjected to discipline and biopower tend to bypass or avoid the question of animal subjectivity. Yet it is precisely this dimension—that of the subjectification of nonhuman animals by various dispositives of power/knowledge—that distinguishes contemporary relations between humans and animals. 1 Foucault, Finitude and Animal Subjectivity Two relatively unknown texts argue that the recognition of animal subjectiv- ity is in fact an important, if somewhat implicit, corollary of Foucault’s writ- ings. In his monograph, Saïd Chebili explores figures of animality throughout Foucault’s work, in relation to power, to madness, to Raymond Roussel’s 4 Foucault, “Philosophy and Psychology,” 255. 5 Matthew Chrulew, “Animals in Biopolitical Theory: Between Agamben and Negri,” New Formations 76 (2012): 53–67..
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