Animal Worlds: Critical Reflection and Bibliography
From the early conceptions of this project, we sought to better understand the human / animal dichotomy and endeavoured to bridge the gap between this species divide. Yet to our dismay, the very language available in conceptualising the ‘animal’ is rooted in an anthropocentric logic that actively obstructs any potential for cognitive connection within interspecies communication. Our examination of theory and literature demonstrated a pervasive attitude of superiority in humanity, and subsequently inferiority in animality. To be ‘animal’ is to be villainized as a ‘beast’, ‘savage’, ‘brute’; an individual who is governed by senses rather than reason. To be classified as an animal is to be separated from that which is not human. When we refer to people who lack those human attributes of morality or intellect, aspects that we hold in such high esteem in our species, we degrade them by saying that “they are acting like animals.” This active dichotomy of animal / human that is directly paralleled to feeling / thinking, became the crux of our engagement with the Animal Worlds project.
The anthropocentric nature of language enables human beings to mistreat and use animal bodies in ways that entirely alienate the cognitive, emotional and feeling capacities of non-human beings. The ongoing language of ‘animal’ and its associated connotations of inferiority, based on a criterion of rationality, permits humans to degrade animals. This is a constant exploitative rhetoric that is proliferated by the English vernacular. Employment of such anthropocentric measures have produced greater global inequality where authoritarianism, hierarchism and communitarianism disregard individual (animal) freedom. This degradation thus blinds humans to alternative modes of communication found within the animal world. We often ignore or devalue the semiotic processes that exist outside organised human language. These modes of reasoning have conditioned the continual exploitation of animals throughout human history.
It was our increasing awareness in these biased patterns of thought that inspired us to propose a new benchmark towards animal human relations. Drawing on the thoughts of Calarco, Derrida and Haraway, we seek to propose that, rather than perpetuating the human/animal dichotomy, we should recognise the ‘human-animal’ or the 'humanimal'. We must see that humans are not apart from animals, but rather with them, sharing the same ecosystems in a horizontal relationship. Our aim in the Animal Worlds Project is to restructure the ongoing conditions between humans and animals, and employ an ecologically sustainable framework.
At each stage of the ‘Animal Worlds’ chapter, we explore the different ways in which we can re-conceptualise animality. Our photo-essay attempts to expose the violence that we commit on animals in the name of science. Our exploration of ‘Flowers for Algernon’ encourages empathy and recognition of the unique individuality of all living beings. Our short film seeks to represent the non-human subject’s perspective as valuable. Through these, no longer can we say that the animal is an inferior being relegated to the background. ‘Human’ and ‘animal’ are one and the same.
Bibliography
Aristotle. History of Animals, Book 1,Translated by Richard Cresswell, St Johns College, Oxford, 1887, pp. 1-23. Web.
Calarco, Matthew. The Question of the Animal: On Philosophy and Animal Studies (Introduction). Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York, Columbia UP. 2008. Print.
Calarco, Matthew. Thinking through animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction. Stanford University Press. Vol. 11. No. 2. 2015. Print.
IntlForum. “Eileen Crist: Confronting Anthropocentrism” Youtube. 2014. Web. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkFj9uPKXo
Keio University. “Pigeons Show Superior Self-recognition Abilities To Three Year Old Humans” Science Daily. 2008. Available at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080613145535.htm
Keyes, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2007. Web.
Roy-Faderman, Ina. "The Alienation Of Humans And Animals In Uplift Fiction". Midwest Studies In Philosophy, vol 39, no. 1, 2015, pp. 78-97. Wiley
Larson, Charlie. “With Affection and Humour, Patricia Piccinini probes the boundaries of human and other” The Conversation. 2018. Web. Available at: http://theconversation.com/with-affection-and-humour-patricia-piccinini-probes-the-boundaries-of-human-and-other-94026
Latimer, Joanna. ‘Being Alongside: Rethinking Relations amongst Different Kinds’. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 30, no. 7, 2013, pp. 77-104. Web.
Main, Douglas.“Why Koko the Gorilla Mattered.” National Geographic. 2018. Web. Available at: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/gorillas-koko-sign-language-culture-animals/
Peggs, Kay. ‘The ‘animal-advocacy agenda’: exploring sociology for non-human animals’. The Sociological Review, vol. 61, 2013, pp. 591-606. Web.
Regalado, A. (2018). Pig-human chimeras are being gestated in the U.S.. [online] MIT Technology Review. Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/545106/human-animal-chimeras-are-gestating-on-us-research-farms/
Scishow. “The First Human-Pig Chimeras.” Youtube. 2017. Web. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCM3UpkRms8
Strommen, Hannah M. "Animals in Literature and Theology (Special Section" Literature & Theology. An International Journal of Religion, Theory and Culture 31.4. (2017) 383 - 471. Web.
Science and Cocktails. “Animal Emotions and Empathy with Frans De Wal” Youtube. 2017. Web. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leCDilISCEc&t=41s&list=PLaIbAMDa6qjz-Mh9kdfigwms8DJDOyRMo&index=13
Ted. “What Animals and Thinking and Feeling | Carl Safina” Youtube. 2015. Web. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9KeyKVuLHU&t=71s&list=PLaIbAMDa6qjz-Mh9kdfigwms8DJDOyRMo&index=14
Turner, Lynn, Ron Broglio, and Undine Sellbach. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
“Genetic Scientists now creating Human Animal Hybrids.” Youtube. 2017. Web. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8QUf5_kOko
“The Story of Wounda the Chimpanzee and her hug to Jane Goodall during her liberation” Youtube. 2014. Web. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mw8uXDRTIw
“Human-Pig Hybrid Created in the Lab-Here Are the Facts.” National Geographic, National Geographic Society, 26 Jan. 2017, news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/01/human-pig-hybrid-embryo-chimera-organs-health-science/.
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The human capacity for language enables us to philosophise upon the lives of animals and plants, but also has the power to cast non-humans as an ‘other’ (as commented in this post). Despite humanity’s reliance on non-humans for existence, we are quick to denigrate them as something below us. Perhaps the lack of a shared language is to blame, where our inability to communicate our thoughts directly with each other creates a barrier to empathy. However, bridging the distance caused by the lack of language shared between man and animal is animism, as argued by Nurit Bird-Daivd. Animism provides an interface for a deeper understanding with non-humans, where the modes of being of other animals can be recognised.
“Talking” is a short-hand for a two-way responsive relatedness with a tree—rather than “speaking” one way to it, as if it could listen and understand. “Talking with” stands for attentiveness to variances and invariances in behaviour and response of things in states of relatedness and for getting to know such things as they change through the vicissitudes over time of engagement with them. To “talk with a tree” —rather than “cut it down”—is to perceive what it does as one acts towards it, being aware concurrently of changes in oneself and the tree. It is expecting response and responding, growing into mutual responsiveness and, furthermore, possibly into mutual responsibility. (77)Rather than futilely attempting to talk with a tree using our human language, we create a conversation by keeping track of the way our actions affect the other. This cycle, where one influences the other, which causes the other to influence us, is a unique language that is created through the intra-actions of humans and non-human.
Our failure to recognise the ways in which non-human nature is trying to speak to us can lead to devastating consequences. Animals are unable to speak against how they are perceived as inferior to humans. This is a still from 1958 documentary White Wilderness, which is infamous for creating the myth that lemming commit mass suicide as a means of mitigating over-population. The reality was that the lemmings were pushed off the cliff by the film producers. It reveals human’s extraordinary ability to impose their own narratives onto non-human nature, which is easy due to their silence and inability to argue.
This video, titled The Turning Point, by Steve Cutts defamiliarizes the way in which we see ourselves; a way to view ourselves through the eyes of an animal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7LDk4D3Q3UWorks cited:
Bird-David, Nurit. “'Animism Revisited': Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology, vol. 40, no. 1, 1999, pp. 67–91, doi:10.1086/200061.
