Animal Bodies and Biopolitical Power

‘If a lion could talk we could not understand him’

The political subjectivity of animals in western culture is still a fight that remains a space of uncertainty, vulnerability and cruelty; the animal body has become part of the political landscape that exclusively belonged to the security of human health and well being that was enabled because of the animal rights movement. It is to question why the exploitation of animals in our society is seen agonizingly differently under our socio-political system that continues to value the rights of humans higher than that of the exploited animal body. Exploring biopolitical governing enables us to exemplify the stark commonalities and differences between the human body and the animal body and to unrest and challenge the register of mainstream biopolitcal governing.

The notions of biopolitics constructed by Michel Foucault is a method of governing whereby laws, surveillance, protection and control in society are executed through, ‘governance of the soul’, effectively created through the biopolitical examination and knowing of the human body through objectification where the human becomes the subject. Foucault sees these biotechnologies as a regulation of the body designed by the government as a descent of moral technologies, which inscribe themselves upon the body. This develops intern how we come to see our self as a human subject, ‘through governmental practices the self-regulating individual is produced’, these techniques of discipline are negotiating and regulating the body, coined by Foucault as govermentality. To transcend this into the animal body we can seek to uncover alternative motives in what Foucault suggests as the uncovering of regimes of truth, in the notion of effective history through the process of genealogy.

To diagnose the present is a beginning of a genealogical history and understanding, ‘the notion of history of the present seeks to use our involvements and contemporaries to problematize dimensions and regions of social existence and personal experience’ this enables us to locate in particular the nucleus of governing power and how it has established itself within the human body, this identifies that there was a ‘body prior to power’. The human body is a cite, the original cite of repression like that of the animal body that Rudi Visker confronted exposing this problem in Foucault’s genealogy,  ‘if power also represses, then there is an instance which is repressed and this instance is the body’, the boundary of the human body and animal is interrupted here. To discuss Aristotle who describes man as the ‘political animal’, the human body is beyond the animal body because of its inclusion and capacity to live in a political society. Here the biopolitical connection is within the bodies origin of ‘bare life’ existing between both species that define the landscape of the political human body and that maintains this boundary and limits the rights of the non-human.

The question of animal sentience in moral technologies of contemporary law is continuously challenged and opposed when laws are being formulated, ‘the very composition of society has been at stake in the law-making techniques that have aimed at protecting the animal from mistreatment or securing its welfare’, it questions the inclusive and exclusive of the moral boundaries of the animal body that parallels a society where classifying the human body is also in question. In Post humanism, Cary Wolfe argues that the humanities would have to become the post-humanities to question humanism, that intern would radically change the subjectivity of the animal body and human, ‘the free agent, the citizen builder, the inner self,’ animal studies decenter the human from humanities and fundamentally implicating the ‘schizophrenic’ way that society treats the animal body as Wolfe expresses. International and national legislation is the governing politic of the human relation to the animal; in 2006 an animal welfare strategy was formed by the European union for the equal treatment and life equality of animals across the whole of Europe. Cary Wolfe examines a way in which the animal body is disrupted through framing a ‘newly expanded community of living’, where violence towards the animal body through juxtaposing biopolitical laws and methods exist throughout different nations.

In 2008 the Environmental department of Spain granted rights to the Great apes based upon a traditional model of human rights acts outling three basic rights: 1. Right to life, 2. Protection of individual liberty, 3- prohibition of torture. This act and protection conjoining the human body and the ape body as a political law suggest that government’s need to ‘keep animal lives and death derealised in order to continue with our plans’. The idea of society protecting the ape relieves them of moral and ethic responsibility as Judith Butler describes, ‘there is less a dehumanising discourse at work here than a refusal of discourse that produces dehumanisation as a result’, contrasting this to the protection of the ape to that of millions of animals slaughtered everyday for consumption and capital. Butler uses the example of Guantanamo Bay in the dehumanisation of prisoners that were referred to and labeled detainees, here there human rights do not exist because they are not thought of as prisoners therefore the animal body in the factory is bound in a discourse that is a process of ‘derealizing lives and death’, to keep them out of a frame of ‘real lives’, the re-labeling of animals as food deprives them of human rights compared to the pet animal in the domestic home.

Judith Butler’s account of ethics where violence as a response to acts of dehumanisation by further violating principles of justice obscures the violation and right of the animal body, that can be reflected through the vulnerability of bodies over others. Our current state of uncertainty exposes both the human body and animal body. Judith Butler through a process denaturalisation argues that, ‘violence against those who are already not quite living, that is, living in a state of suspension between life and death, leave a mark that is no mark’, we can regard this to the lives and death of the animal body in the slaughterhouse and laboratory of the present day, the animals are not seen in these spaces but we see is the advertisement of an idyllic traditional farming landscape. The animal testing and slaughterhouse violences are heavily guarded and hidden compared to our society that freely shows murders of the human body on the news and in film, the act of looking at the death of an animal is horrifying to our culture.  When the human is in a vulnerable state we identify with an animals fragility to harness our emotions, the novel Disgrace by J.M Coetzee allows the violence and suffering of the non human body to be identified through the human actions. Upon the exposure a teacher who coerced a student with sex describes the encounter as, ‘slipping under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing… as though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck…poor little bird’, the women’s state of exposure is compared to the killings of animals and in that moment of subjection she becomes non-human.

Nicole Shunkin, Animal Capital 2009, exclaims it is a ‘question of the animal’, by tracing the biopolitics of human and animal capital a challenge to philosophical realism through locating how the, ‘politics of capital production’ and animal life interrupt one another in our social climate. Shukin’s analysis determines how we can look at the fetishtic functions of the animal, ‘capitals incarnations in animal figures and flesh pivotal to extending the examination of biopower beyond its effects on humans’. An instance of this is Maclean’s Canada advertisement of the Beaver anatomy as a visceral figure of the nation, the beaver also being the official emblem of Canada. This symbolism of the animal body and the body of Canada was ‘a tool of affective governance to involve Canadians in a project of nation identity building and unity’, the beaver presenting a ‘nature, self-evident nation’, it presents the human life form as one that was naturally ‘born rather than made’, the animal becomes a political discourse of power functions as a ‘hinge allowing powerful discourses to flip or vacillate between literal and figurative economies of sense’. The sign of the animal allows the political state to operate and create ideologies from a seemingly natural order. This obscures the biopolitical structure through the popularisation of the animal body as a cultural symbol. This can be reflected in Cary Wolfe’s ideas that this state engages in the use ‘sovereignty’ in its act of homogenising nature as an effective cover up of powers structures and boundaries.

The technology of law has always acted to valuate species, differentiating them as an object of consumption or as a collective or individual body. In 1899 the penal code was first used to recognise all animals within the law, individualised as a body with the capacity to feel pain, the law cited, ‘whoever should be guilty of gross or malignant mistreatment of animals, or whoever aids or abets such an act, will be punished by fine or imprisonment' including the medical laboratory in this situation of violence and pain. However simultaneously the laboratory was granted exemption from this law in the name of science and experiments that were vital ‘ in order to be able to alleviate pain and improve human health, and hence they were serving a higher purpose to human ends’ therefore the animal hierarchy of the ‘sentient’ animal was created to serve the progress of human biological and social technology. What was now contested as opposed to pain was what was termed a ‘decency issue’ not in effect of the animal but to the issue of how the mistreatment of the animal would affect the public, the law in which this was embedded was in a ‘society that had to be protected and defended’, one that was protected from immorality and the animal body through the subjection of the body itself.

A separate law on animal protection was created in 1935 known as the Animal Protection Act, defining the treatment of animals as an ethical and moral issue of obligation as the animal body had become integral to society, ‘animals were to be treated well, so that were not to be exposed to any unnecessary suffering’ in any environment an animal was handled they had a responsibility of care and different care was needed for individual types of animals. This can be contrasted to the strategy for animal welfare created by the European commission in 2012 describing animals as, ‘sentient beings with intrinsic values’, the discussion of recognising the animal and human body as a paralleling unity is still struggling to develop in laws that permit the subjugation of animals where descriptions of there ethical treatment and care are not recognised by societies. Therefore in present time rather than entrusting written laws of animal welfare that as Marianne Constable in 2014 critiques, ‘that they in their wording take part in composing the collective in quite distinct and radically different and conflicting ways’. We see here that the capacity of language is a main boundary between the human and animal, where the animal body is excluded because of its incapacity to verbalise. The human capacity for language and action that allows them to form a civil society and what implicates the animal outside of society, ‘that begins with the body and its potential’, the consciousness and language of the human which sets this hierarchy through the sovereign power.

Biopolitcal power in the analysis of Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign forms around a techno-scientific evaluation of the animal and the object. The concept of the human state and institution is founded upon sovereignty where both ideals are created upon there differentiation to animals. Within our societies the governing of bodies is a distinction between violation and killing, the sovereign power which acts to both protecting animal bodies and slaughtering them as argued in Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer in 1998 that, ‘in our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of the man’, therefore justifying a violent poetic against the animal body which directs to what Hobbes states, ‘life in the state of nature was violent and insecure’, whereby separating the human that is the rational body and the violent animal body secures the states ideals and forms a domestic, controlled society.  

Upon this separation of human and animals Giorgio Agamben describes that the animal arises as a political body, in Homer Sacer, ‘the division of bare life from political life as the mythical origin of politics’, therefore the condition of the human body is only treated differently to the animal body through governmental laws and conditioning, ‘the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’, the human body can be seen as originally animal however the state distinguishes it as a man therefore it is protected. The dystopia film of 1968, Planet of the Apes challenged conventional thinking creating a social critique of the human race presenting a future where civilisation has collapsed by nuclear obliteration. The film challenges assumptions and our continuing present beliefs which is that of human superiority over all over species. It was a necessary evil for the apes to brutally repress the human body because they lacked humanity and effectively destroyed themselves, as the apes reads in the film, ‘beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Shun him; drive him back into his junle lair, for he is the baringer of death’, the apes however did not murder the humans; a trait of decency that the apes possess that the human race never presents in totality towards the animal body.

The traditional and continuing anthropocentric vision within society is challenged by animal studies and its mergence into the biopolitical. The site of this understanding of life in human genocides lies within ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, Foucault describes this device rooted in the classical age as the sovereign that, ‘exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring’, this power formulated a hold over lives to suppress and control through deduction of blood, material things and the body. It is the inclusion and separation of bodies that are deemed worthy of life that is at the root of biopolitical power in relation to race and the Nazi Holocaust, this immediacy of the sovereign power begins and ends with his words, ‘word conflates into a single moment all aspects of the biopolitical sovereign decision’, Agamben argues this is the immediacy where the body is reduced to bare life outside any political status or belonging, ‘the muselmann is not only or not so much the limit between life and death; rather he marks the threshold between the human and the inhuman’, the body is neither outside or inside. A territory of where the animal life and body exists.  

Nazi Germany as Agamben states is the society ‘which has generalised biopower in an absolute sense that is really quite: but has also generalised the sovereign right to kill’, therefore a thanatopolitcal society has been created, the politics of death. The threshold within todays society is, ‘modulates the limit of the threshold’, the concentration camp in Nazi Germany was the limit of this. Therefore it has been sensitively modulated alongside that of the holocaust and industrial farming of animals as stated by Elizabeth Costello, ‘it was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies’, and also by the Henry Ford assembly lines who provided Hitler with considerable influence. The making of the camps by Himmler was, ‘drawn from American factory farming and genetic science’, the processing of bodies identifies directly with that of the animal body. To mediate this is the interview of Alex Hershaft, an animal rights activist and holocaust survivor and identifies the matter of justice at hand, ‘It’s because that’s the root. If you want to be effective, you work at the roots. That’s the most universally accepted form of oppression. People sometimes will ask, why animals? And my answer is, it’s not about the animals. It’s about us. It’s about who we are, how we treat the least defensible, the most oppressed, the weakest in our society. What does it say about us?’, it is this analogy of the Jewish Holocaust to the factory farming of the animal body that presents our capability of oppression not victimhood, but the act of the sovereign power who subjects both the animal and human body at its root to animalistic violence. ‘Human and nonhuman lives are deeply woven together’, the dimensions of biopolitical life between the human body and animal identifies the parallel subjugation of both bodies under the ‘sovereign’ power of government.

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