----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thanks for opening this vital can of worms, Julie. I was first alerted to these
issues by vegan colleagues at an Animal Studies conference in Australia earlier
this year. We were talking about new materialism, which for me has been so rich
an opening for my thinking, and Fiona Rapsey Probyn asked the same sort of
questions you raise about real material political and ethical concerns. I think
the way you put it about “the real material lives of the animals they theorise”
provides an acid test for new materialism and one that will be the key question
I’ll put to theories now — thank you. Given that all thinkers have limitations,
there are still important things that Haraway and Braidotti have to offer, I
think -- though I certainly agree these are serious limitations to new
materialism thinking when it cannot recognise the different pains suffered by
things and by lab animals and food industry animals. I guess what I wonder is
are these limitations inherent to new materialism or can it be ethically and
politically attentive to the real material lives of animals.
best
Norie
www.out-of-sync.com <http://www.out-of-sync.com/>
https://workingworms.net <https://workingworms.net/>
http://unlikely.net.au <http://unlikely.net.au/>
> On 12 Oct 2017, at 6:11 am, Julie Andreyev <jandr...@ecuad.ca> wrote
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi Meredith
>
> Thank you for pointing out the Braidotti reference, and reminding us of her
> concept of zoe.
>
> I’d like to open a bit of a worm-can so see if there is room for debate on
> Braidotti’s, and Haraway’s thought on more-than-human animals. I do
> appreciate the creative thought that both philosophers present on the
> vitality of other animals, and our need to expand our thought and ethics. The
> recent speculative fiction by Haraway is an example. However both theorists
> fall short of extending their thought into applied practice that is
> meaningful for the lives of other animals. In their writing they stick with a
> utilitarian view on other animals, such as supporting work on animals in the
> laboratory. They seem to have a fatalistic, or entrenched anthropocentric
> view, that the lab and meat industry is a given, indisputable fact of
> contemporary culture, and that this warrants the continued exploitive actions
> of humans. For example, while Haraway talks about ‘companion species’ her
> version of this category includes those animals utilized in labs and food
> industry. How may a companion relationship be actualized in this hierarchical
> and harmful, even lethal system? In an similarly un-problematized way,
> Braidotti draws some equivalents between living beings, and those
> computational intelligences produced by humans. I would argue that real live
> animals are presented with more risk than computers.
>
> My question about both Braidotti’s and Haraway’s thought is: What is at stake
> for the real material lives of the animals they theorize?
>
> best
>
> Julie
>
>> On Oct 10, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Meredith Drum <meredithd...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
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>> Dear Empyre
>>
>> I am writing in response to Benjamin’s post about animal research films,
>> specifically the three rats films. I was pleased that Joyce Wieland’s ended
>> the post. Hers is refreshing and funny - a nice shift after the
>> frustrating, humorless films by Miller and Mowrer. The difference between
>> the albino lab rats, bred over many generations as science products, and the
>> wild, brown rats (staring as political dissidents in Wieland’s piece) bring
>> me to Rosi Braidotti’s use of the terms bios and zoe. The lab rats are
>> clearly bios, animal life that has value within capitalism. While Wieland’s
>> rebellious brown rats are part of zoe, which Braidotti champions as a vital,
>> materialist and affirmative life-force, part of a post-anthropocentric
>> shift. While Wieland is using her rats for allegory, celebrating resistance
>> in humans not in rats, her film does point toward the positivity of zoe.
>>
>> Best,
>> Meredith
>>
>>
>>> On Oct 9, 2017, at 4:52 PM, Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa <basch...@ucsc.edu>
>>> wrote:
>>>
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>>> First off: Thank you Margaretha for moderating such a fascinating
>>> discussion! I’ve been really interested in what has been said so far, which
>>> resonates with my own work in generative ways.
>>>
>>> I thought I’d take the opportunity of being paired with such an exceptional
>>> group of practitioners working in collaboration with nonhuman animals to
>>> discuss my own research as a kind of alternate- or pre-history of such
>>> work. I study the films produced in scientific contexts and am currently
>>> focusing on the animal research films made by behavioral psychology
>>> throughout the 20th century. These include the primate films made by Robert
>>> Yerkes and the pigeon films made by B.F. Skinner. But for the purposes of
>>> this conversation, I think the most useful works are the laboratory rat
>>> films that were made by psychologists such as Neal E. Miller, O. H. Mowrer,
>>> and John B. Calhoun. Examples of a couple of these films can be viewed here:
>>>
>>> “Motivation and Reward in Learning” by Neal E. Miller
>>> https://archive.org/details/Motivati1948
>>>
>>> “An Experimentally Produced ‘Social Problem’ in Rats” by O. H. Mowrer
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2jS0J86d5U&t=7s
>>>
>>> These filmmakers used the combination of rats and celluloid to create
>>> models of human behavior and history which played influential roles in
>>> generating educational programs, military policy, and anthropological
>>> theories. In the above examples Miller is claiming to demonstrate how the
>>> process of learning operates in both humans and nonhumans, while Mowrer is
>>> attempting to image how the psychological stratifications of class emerge
>>> in particular experimental settings. These are clearly meant to reflect not
>>> only on rodent behavior but also the rules governing human society. Unique
>>> among these figures are the films of John B. Calhoun, who claimed to not
>>> only simulate human social structures past and present, but also in the
>>> future. Calhoun built massive industrial “utopias” for his lab rats and
>>> then filmed their interactions in these spaces over several generations.
>>> (An image of Calhoun in one of his cities can be viewed here:
>>> http://ru-an.info/Photo/QNews/n28969/1.jpg?dummy=1456779958) Based on these
>>> observations, Calhoun produced a series of dire predictions about the
>>> effects of over crowding in urban spaces, which he claimed would lead to
>>> violence and “deviant” sexual behaviors, and which were deeply rooted in
>>> heterosexist and racist fantasies about the dangers of the city. He
>>> proposed that he could design a city where such moral pitfalls could be
>>> eluded, and spent most of his career designing and re-redesigning new
>>> environments for his rats.
>>>
>>> Many of these films, and Calhoun in particular, are ethically and morally
>>> bankrupt examples of thinking alongside/with animals. Calhoun largely
>>> failed to acknowledge any personal responsibility towards either his
>>> animals in the lab or the communities they were meant to model (refusing to
>>> acknowledge what Haraway calls the “shared suffering” of the lab). In this,
>>> he stands as a warning for the dangers of an absolute management without
>>> mourning, of the position of disembodied design while resisting any
>>> connection to the subjects of that design.
>>>
>>> At the same time, as Elaine rightly points out, we are not in a position
>>> where we can be seduced into being monopolized by mourning. We have to
>>> build new structures, imagine new possibilities, shape new futures, and to
>>> do so requires engaging in morally muddled collaborations and comparisons
>>> with animals. From this perspective, Calhoun and his peers can perhaps be
>>> seen as interesting examples of people thinking the future alongside animal
>>> partners (even if they weren’t acknowledged as such) which were
>>> structurally central to creating policies in their historical moment.
>>> Without forgetting the dangers and moral hazards of their approach, many of
>>> the behaviorist filmmakers stand out as singular examples of human/animal
>>> collaborations that directly impacted the discourses and policies of major
>>> governmental, educational, and legal institutions. Calhoun was engaging in
>>> a reactionary brand of co-written speculative fiction with his animal
>>> test-subjects, which had lasting effects on his political and cultural
>>> milieu. How might we design our own models for such collaborations? How can
>>> we produce not only visions of the future in which animals continue to
>>> exist, but also create systems that allow animals to participate in the
>>> process of speculation itself? What institutions need to be created for
>>> such speculations to have a lasting impact?
>>>
>>> I'll conclude with an interesting alternative and detournement of the rat
>>> research film genre, Joyce Wieland's 1968 "Rat Life and Diet in North
>>> America," which might help in answering some of the above questions:
>>>
>>> https://vimeo.com/18594507
>>>
>>> Looking forward to reading everyone's posts throughout the week!
>>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>> -Ben
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
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