Seeking Justice in the Anthropocene: The Shape of Things to Come

by Jodey Castricano

Every living thing affects its surroundings. But it’s said that humanity is now influencing every aspect of the Earth on a scale akin to the great forces of nature. Many agree that we've been changing the world around us for millennia although the scale and speed of change in the last 60 years has led scientists to call events since the 1950s the 'Great Acceleration'. Have human beings permanently changed the planet? That seemingly simple question suggests that the so-called Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age has given way, since the industrial revolution, to the Anthropocene”—that identifies the human species as a force now altering the planet’s biosphere. The Anthropocene, from anthropo, for “man,” and cene, for “new”, implicates human-kind in mass extinctions of plant and animal species, the pollution of the oceans and the alteration of the atmosphere, among other serious and even irreversible impacts. As Ben Dibley states, “the notion of the Anthropocene…vividly captures the folding of the human into the air, into the sea, the soil and DNA” (“’The Shape of Things to Come’: Seven Theses on the Anthropocene and Attachment” (139).
In more urgent terms, the human is now seen as “a force imperiling” itself as well as the planet with respect to the earth system and is “an emergence that is simultaneously an emergency” (Dibley 140). Indeed, the Anthropocene is a term increasingly entering public and policy discourses, including those of the humanities and social sciences. But in this regard, the entry into such discourses remains curiously even disturbingly all too familiar because even though the Anthropocene is spoken of in geological terms, at the epistemological and ethicopolitical level it remains wholly faithful to human exceptionalism and the particular antagonisms and nostalgia regarding “the human” in relation to, or distinct from, “Nature.” Indeed, even though the superior-to-nature paradigm is failing it nevertheless struggles to assert the notion of human mastery reminiscent of the Enlightenment, which all along has depended for its vitality on speciesism.
Indeed, contemporary debates about what counts as being human in the context of the Anthropocene take us to the water’s edge regarding the way that this epoch not only remains indebted to the dream of a distinction between the social and natural world but also, and more significantly, remains grounded in a certain violence which, as Derrida points out, is nothing less than “the purely instrumental, industrial, chemico-gentic treatment of living beings” (“Violence Against Animals 73). Of course, Derrida is referring to the “industrial, mechanical, chemical, hormonal, and genetic violence to which man has been submitting animal life for the past two centuries” (“The Animal That Therefore I Am” 26) and reducing it to “raw material”(Dominik LaCapra 161). Indeed, one could argue that in regards to such raw material, the Anthropocene has allowed for the unprecedented subjection of the animal, who, singularly and en masse, is “converted into the analog of particle board” (161). This hyperindustrialized conversion beats at the heart of what Cary Wolfe has called “that fantasy figure of ‘the human” (“’Animal Studies,’ Disciplinarity, and the (Post) Humanities”, 120). Indeed, if anything characterizes this epoch it is the nonrecognition or disavowal of any claims inhering in the other. In this regard, the question of social justice in the Anthropocene is a sticky one that shows itself as being in thrall to liberal humanism but undeniably inextricable from the question of the animal as well as the current, ethical turn to that question which is necessarily grounded in posthumanism. In other words, to seek justice in the Anthropocene means to disengage, however precariously, with the concept of “the human” that, as Wolfe says, “the human falsely ‘gives to itself’” (118), and this can be accomplished only by including the long-disavowed question of the animal and calling into question the speciesism that disavows it.


Biography:
Jodey Castricano is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, where she teaches in the English and Cultural Studies programs and is a Research Fellow with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. In English her specializations are in 19th century literature (gothic) as well as in cultural and critical theory. In the case of the latter, her primary area of expertise and ethical concern is in posthumanist philosophy and critical animal studies with extended work in ecocriticsm, ecofeminism and ecotheory. She has presented and published essays in ecocriticsm and critical animal studies and was a member of an International Working Group with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), which has recently released Normalizing the Unthinkable: The Ethics of Using Animals in Research (http://www.oxfordanimalethics.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/Normalising-the-Unthinkable-Report.pdf ) . She is the contributing editor to Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World (Wilfrid Laurer University Press 2008). A second collection of essays in critical animal studies, Animal Subjects 2.0: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World Vol. II, of which she is co-editor and contributor, is forthcoming in 2016.

Animal voices: history, agency, and the politics of language

by Eva Meijer

The view that nonhuman animals cannot be political actors because they cannot speak is common in both philosophical tradition and political practice. This view seems to be false in two respects. It refers to a flawed conception of political agency and, second, it ignores the fact that animals clearly do communicate, with each other and with humans. Seeing animals as mute does not simply reflect a misunderstanding of their capacities: it is interconnected with the way humans have defined language and politics and has led to rendering animals silent as a political group.
In his later work, Derrida shows how the question of who speaks is interconnected with anthropocentrism. Philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, saw language as solely human territory, as the defining characteristic that separates humans from all other animals. Recent research in different fields of study challenges this view of animals and language. In fields of study as biology and ethology new research about animal languages, cognition and culture, is presented everyday. In critical animal studies, poststructuralism, posthumanism, and other fields, the human-animal binary and human exceptionalism are challenged. The recent political turn in animal ethics also emphasizes animal agency, and human-animal communication.
However, questions about animal languages and interspecies communication remain underexplored. This is unfortunate, for theoretical but also for practical political reasons: language and communication offer us a way to gain insight into the worlds of other animals, and can guide us in building new worlds with them. If we view other animals as subjects with their own perspective on life, we need to think about how they can have a voice in questions that concern them. In my presentation I will therefore argue we need to rethink language with other animals. This means critically rethinking the interconnections between ‘animal’ and ‘language’ in the Western history of thought, and it means rethinking language with other animals. In the presentation I will first briefly discuss the relation between ‘animal’ and ‘language’ in the philosophical tradition. Building on ideas developed in phenomenology, I then sketch the outlines of an alternative, non-anthropocentric, view of language, as embodied and embedded in practices. I end the presentation with some remarks about how interspecies languages and animal voices can and should inform the larger project of animal liberation.

Keywords: animal languages, human-animal communication, animal agency, non-anthropocentrism, animal phenomenology


Biography:
Eva Meijer is currently working on a PhD project in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, titled 'Political Animal Voices', in which she develops a theory of political animal voice. She teaches the course 'Animal Ethics and Politics' at the University of Amsterdam and is the chair of the Dutch study group for animal ethics. Recent publications include 'Political communication with animals' in Humanimalia: A Journal of Human-Animal Interface Studies, and 'Stray Philosophy: Dog-Human Observations on Language, Freedom and Politics' in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies. In addition to her academic work, Meijer works as a novelist, visual artist and singer-songwriter.  

“An Alligator Got Betty”: Dangerous Animals as Historical Agents

by Krista Maglen

In 1932 four year old Betty Doherty was taken from the grasp of her older brother by a fourteen foot crocodile in Far North Queensland. Through an examination of historical sources as well as the work of psychologists, cognitive scientists, and zoologists, this paper explores the role ascribed to the crocodile as well as other ‘dangerous’ animals that have bit, stung of consumed settlers across Australia, and asks whether and how they might ‘act’ or be given voices within our reading and understanding of the past. Animal historians have begun to ask questions about historical agency through analyses of domesticated or working animals, and interactions between people and wild mammals. Insects, fish, and reptiles, however, remain anonymous and non-specific, disappearing back beneath the waves or into the dark holes from which they emerged, and yet they were often agents of great change in the human lives they encountered. This paper asks whether historical agency and intent can be found in these less sympathetic and less ‘knowable’ creatures, and examines how historians might conceive of watery predators or venomous creatures that disappeared from sight or perhaps were never seen at all. 


Biography:
Krista Maglen is an assistant professor in the history department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her first book explores the defining of risk and demarcation of space through practices and policies of disease control in nineteenth century Britain. Her new work examines similar themes in relation to dangerous native animals in Australia.

The Spontaneous Horse: Understanding what liberation means from the horse’s point of view.

by Francesco De Giorgio & José De Giorgio-Schoorl

As horses are often seen as anxious, unpredictable animals, there is a fear to let them express themselves, convinced that this might be dangerous and that they will hurt themselves, or human involved, in unknown situations. They learn to live a life in which they wait for human commands, forgetting that they have their own true intention and unique interests. But the human focus on controlling their behaviour, actually makes them anxious and unpredictable animals. Which is a strange
vicious circle.
The same reasoning often leads to denying them their social behaviour. In our society horses live often in social isolation, where they can’t express themselves through social behaviour. But even when they live with other horses, the groups are usually not permanent, not familiar or familiar-like. With a lot of changing dynamics in these groups, their interaction is often focused on reactive and defensive behaviour. It is seen as ‘normal’ competitive behaviour. However, in family or family-like groups, these behaviours actually happen only in rare cases, not in random daily routine. Social behaviours in horse families are subtle, small gestures and often not much visible behaviours that have an important
cohesive function for a herd, as well as for a balanced individual development of each member of that herd.
Another very important group of spontaneous behaviours is investigative/explorative behaviour, fundamental for the correct development of cognitive functions. People often use methods and tools that deprive the horse of the opportunity to explore his context, other horses, and human as well. Horses are asked to pay attention to us, but in that moment they are actually distracted from the situation the horse self was focussed on.
The reduction of the spontaneous behaviour happens already during the initial training of young horses. In these moments the horses live a strong reduction of their natural spontaneous behaviours to improve instead behavioural expressions, which are functional anthropocentric desires. Operant conditioning applied during these moments (both negative or positive reinforcement) drastically reduces spontaneous behaviours and with that reduce equine welfare. The reactive behaviours that are trained instead are too often mistaken for freedom of expression in the human interaction, as most people are not aware of mental chains. The horse displays macro behaviours that please us from an anthropocentric point of view, but at the same time show micro signals of internal conflict.
It is fundamental learn how to give the horse the possibility to explore his own world and express spontaneous behaviour. Learn how to develop a coexistence without training, based on understanding of the socio-cognitive abilities of horses. Learn to be curious and open towards the expression of another, is fundamental for sound social-emotional experiences in a society where focus is more on performance then on relationships. Both human and horse should have the freedom to understand their internal motivation and mental reasoning, to process their own information, rather than being conditioned to respond to anthropocentric expectations. As liberation is a state of mind, also for horses.


Biography:

Francesco De Giorgio (author - presenter)
Learning Animals, Study centre for Ethology and Zooanthropology
Born in 1965 in Italy, where he is a renowned biologist, ethologist and applied behavioural researcher, Francesco De Giorgio is specialized in equine and canine ethology. He is founder, developer and facilitator at the Learning Animals International Institute for Zooanthropology, where he focuses principally on the study of animal-human interaction, animal personal growth and rehabilitation. Graduating from Parma University in 1989, Francesco began his career as an independent field researcher, supporting several universities whilst indulging his lifelong passion for horses and dogs as an Equine and Canine Learning Professional - helping owners to enhance their relationships with animals.
Described by the former Director of the International School of Ethology (Erice, IT), Danilo Mainardi, as “a man who works with his head and his heart and his hands”, Francesco walks the talk - integrating scientific knowledge into ethical day-to-day practice.
A champion of equine and canine welfare, Francesco provides expert support for institutions occupied with animal Health and Welfare (e.g. in equine mistreatment cases), has served on a number of ethics committees, and acts as an advisor to courts and equine rehabilitation centres.
Both a speaker and lecturer, Francesco speaks regularly on ‘Cognitive Ethology in the Animal-Human Relationship’. He also lectures at several universities and has presented to numerous conferences and symposia on ethology, cognition and zooanthropology and published two books; The Horse- Human dictionary (italian) and The Cognitive Horse.

José De Giorgio-Schoorl (co-author)
Learning Animals, Study centre for Ethology and Zooanthropology
Francesco’s partner in both life and work, Dutch born José De Giorgio-Schoorl personifies the bridge between equine perception and human understanding. Their shared passion for horses and keen insight in social dynamics brought them together and today they live in the Netherlands with their eight horse companions, four dogs and two cats.
After many years of change adviser and personal development consultant, she is, today, a renowned proponent of the zooanthropological approach, working for the change in awareness and understanding of the Animal-Human Relationship.
As consultant and teacher at the Learning Animals Study centre for Ethology and Zooanthropology, José strives to improve people’s understanding of cognition and relationship dynamics, and in so doing to enhance their relationship with animals.
Contending that a firm grasp of equine cognition is the vital first step to understanding horses’ behaviour, José is a real force for change; inspiring and promoting fresh thinking in her writing and in her lectures and creating effective personal growth trajectories for individuals through free interaction with horses.
A regular guest lecturer and speaker in zooanthropology and personal growth, José has presented to conferences and symposia throughout Europe.

Contact:
Learning Animals, Study centre for Ethology and Zooanthropology
info@learning-animals.org | www.learning-animals.org
0031 (0) 644834881 | Achterstraat 64, 5388TP Nistelrode, Nederland

Expanding the Harm Principle to a Posthumanist Ethic: John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1869) enhanced by Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman (2013)

by Brandon Taylor

Rosi Braidotti convincingly argues that “the posthuman condition introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species” (2). In doing so, she destabilizes authoritative Western political theories. However, her accomplishment does not eliminate so much as enhance the possibilities for Western philosophy's canonical proclamations of both autonomy and the establishment of a universal ethic. Braidotti's assertions, in concert with John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle, provide a practicable ethical foundation that may be stripped of its inherent imperialist, colonial tendencies. In the same way that basic liberation theories have emerged from repurposed or reinterpreted texts, Braidotti's theory ruptures the conception of the autonomous individual human and thus expands the ethic to also include all nonhuman animals. I will bind these assertions with some of the canon's more productive ethical frameworks, such as the Harm Principle. I analyze the extent to which Mill's assertion that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (627) can be broadened into more inclusive language to formulate a modified and more comprehensive principle, with respect to the insights of posthumanism. Consequently, this work will disassemble and reform the Western canon of philosophy, once galvanized by its strictly Western anthropocentric ideology of the White Heterosexual Male, to encompass modern critical theory.
This combination generates a formidable resource for nonhuman animal liberation theory situated in the language of its oppressive other, which will further the cause for viable legal recourse toward those violating the Braidotti-based universal ethic of Mill's expanded harm principles. My essay will subsequently enlarge the practicable resources of animal liberation theorists through an expansion of the basic unit of common reference within the Western philosophical canon.


Biography:
Brandon Taylor is currently an English Major at UBCO, specifically focusing on the later poetry of John Milton. He has been accepted to the UVic MA program under the supervision of Dr. Gary Kuchar. He is currently working on a project that will situate Milton within the Western philosophical tradition of modern liberalism. He has been published in various newspapers across British Columbia as well as in OCular: A Student Anthology (2013) and Papershell (2015).

The immortal life of the species? Political Theology and Animality in Arendt’s The Human Condition

by Diego Rossello

In suggestive, and often neglected, passages of The Human Condition, Arendt lays out the specific historical condition of the human being according to the Greeks. She writes: “Immortality means endurance in time, deathless life on this earth and in this world as it was given, according to Greek understanding, to nature and the Olympian Gods” (18). Thus, according to Arendt, the specifically historical condition of human life was conceived, for the Greeks, in contradistinction to two immortal ways of being: Gods and natural life. A few lines later Arendt expands on this idea and writes: “[m]en are the mortals, the only mortal thing in existence, because unlike animals they do not exist only as members of a species whose immortal life is guaranteed through procreation” (18-19). In this paper I will suggest that this description of animal immortality has important consequences for Arendt’s understanding of the political. Arendt assumes that natural life, and therefore also animal life, is somewhat self-sustaining, a-historical and, ultimately, immortal. Arendt’s understanding of animal life as immortal resurfaces, I will argue, in her understanding of the anti-political condition of animal laborans. According to Arendt, “animal laborans is indeed only one, at best the highest, of the animal species that populate the earth” (84) which means that animal laborans remains caught in the “ever recurring cycle of biological life” (99). Moreover, this ever-recurring condition of (human and non-human) animal life, this immortality of the species, is later assimilated by Arendt to a Christian perspective where “the immortality of individual life became the central creed of Western mankind, that is [...] with the rise of Christianity, did life on earth also become the highest good of man” (316). Consequently, Arendt consistently pits human mortality against animal and Godly (or Godly infused) immortality. What this opposition implies is that animal immortality rivals with, or even impedes, human attempts to reach the worldly immortality that political action can provide. However, Arendt’s vindication of the specifically human, worldly, and political access to immortality is made at the price of construing a peculiarly worldless, immortal animal-God that, ultimately, threatens to destabilize her own understanding of the human political condition.


Biography:
Diego Rossello obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science at Northwestern University under the supervision of Bonnie Honig. He is professor of political theory at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and is the editor of the journal Revista de Ciencia Política. He has published articles, reviews and interviews in the following journals: Revista de Filosofía, Notre Dame Philosophical Review, New Literary History, Theory and Event, Political Theory and Philosophy Today. He is currently working on his first book manuscript that deals with the politics of human-animal indistinction in modern sovereignty. He can be reached at: drossello@uc.cl

Animal liberation as the ability to overstep ourselves

by Roberto Marchesini

In order to understand deeply the issue of animal liberation, it is mandatory to consider the existential supremacy of being-animal as a shared meta-predicative condition (both in human and non-human beings). Liberation is what emerges from the categorical ruins and the revision of what lies at the ground of labeling and exclusions, that is to say ontological anthropocentrism. A frequent mistake has been made in thinking to solve the ethical problem by avoiding the comparison with the ontological aspect, also because of the bogeyman of naturalistic fallacy, that is a useful fiction used by humanists to make only the human being worthy of consideration. The facts do not produce values, but they are relevant in the issue of values. The aims of this paper are: 1) to show that an a-speciesist hypothesis is not possible by maintaining the division between facts and values; 2) to show how the dichotomy between description and prescription can be overcome starting from a post-humanistic frame. Nevertheless the concept of liberation needs to be reconsidered by avoiding the obstacles which do not allow to read beyond appearances and lock the constituency of individuation in the strict etographic expression (umwelt). The liberation movement does not care if you show your existential supremacy through the predicates of cats, horses, wasps or human beings. It does not matter the level of awareness which supports the supremacy, it does not matter if what you express is the outcome of a decision and, moreover, if you are able to abstain, control or pose distance, to transcend an here-and-now moment, etc. According to an ontological explanation, you are the owner because you belong to yourself, because you are not moved by an automatism but you are free to use your own equipment by realizing creative events: to transcend your phylogenetic heritage (and thus your taxonomic membership) is your natural state. No animal liberation could be possible if a cat is considered nothing more than a simple cat and a human being is nothing less than a human being. It is necessary to create a new ontology, which puts in the middle of the discussion the sovereignty of our dotation and the possibility to transit towards infinite temporary results. As long as the animal is fixed into its specie-specific predicate, no animal liberation could occur and nevertheless it could occur if we maintain the passive or minor conception to claim it. To be an animal is a constant attempt to the status quo and an active rebellion against restrictions. I would like to show that the concept of animal liberation requires some shiftings of meaning, starting from a liquid and relational ontology, which transforms freedom into the ability to overstep ourselves. 


Biography:

Roberto Marchesini is a historic Italian activist for animal rights, philosopher and ethologist. He began working as an activist in the early '80s, becoming a key figure in the Italian landscape of animal rights with the text-investigation on the intensive farming Oltre il muro. He continued his activities in the ethologic and philosophical field trying to argue a thought capable of redefining the role of non-human animals in a non-anthropocentric way. With the text Post-human (2002) he became one of the most important representatives in the Italian philosophical landscape. He is author of more than fifty publications in academic journals and texts.