Subject, Object, Abject
The essential thing about killing an animal is that a subject becomes an object. Kind of sounds as if I’m getting ready to embark on a grammar lesson here. Which in a way I am: the grammar of death. Because the way we frame and discuss death, I think, structures the inner emotional reaction we have to it. This phenomenon holds true for the death of humans and non-humans alike. Dying requires a syntax that limns the subject/object divide.
The difference is that, generally speaking, when a human dies, other humans—especially those who were close to that now dead human—project a subject status back upon the object that is now a lifeless corpse. (I’m sorry this is so dark). This can be a literal and quite immediate experience. Just last night I was reading an article in The New Yorker in which a father glimpsed his son’s corpse on a gurney and thought “he’s looking right at me.” It can also be a historical process. Much of history is about telling stories that restore life to decaying bags of bones.
By contrast, when an animal dies, we quickly confirm that animal’s objectification (in a million ways) and project that object status back upon the animal, a handy-dandy way if there ever was one to justify our choice to eat that once-subject-now-corpse for lunch and say “yum.” This process is immediate, even fooling the slaughterhouse workers, and historical in the sense that the animals we ate for dinner, like most subjects in the history of the world, are forgotten forever. As if they never existed.
Much of this process is dictated by forces of which we remain passively unaware. You see a mound of literally disjointed chicken parts at the meat counter. It is hard to find even the ghost of subject status in a pile of wings, legs, thighs, and breasts. What you see, what commerce places before us, are instead objects as inert and meaningless as Nerf balls. This dismemberment, we sense, is by design. Dis-member, as in: you are no longer a member of the chicken clan. As in, you, object, chicken, have been dissed from your membership. For consumers who never spend time with living and breathing chickens, not only is it hard to reconstruct the parts and recall the subject membership that the pile of parts once, well, embodied. But it never crosses our little noodles to even undertake such a task. We forget the animal’s existence in order to consume the animal’s parts. Kind of strange if you ask me, and perhaps the reason I find writing about the history of weeds more exciting than the history of kings.
The comparative ease of objectification with animals, not to mention the forgetting, not only makes dinner taste less guilty, it makes it easier to imagine (should you choose to try) the once alive chicken as an objectified subject. I mean, if something can be legitimately hacked into pieces and placed under a display case to be exchanged for money how could “it” have ever been anything but an object, a plaything for our pleasure, a living being in the minds of crazy animal rights nuts alone? This backward projection, as well as the total erasure of subject status, sort of helps explain why psychopaths who murder humans will sometimes cut them up into parts or, in some cases, run their corpses through a wood chipper.
Anyway, happy Sunday.
tomorrow: got artificially sweetened milk?
“It is hard to find even the ghost of subject status in a pile of wings, legs, thighs, and breasts.”
Your use of the word “ghost” reminds me of the trailer I just watched to the movie THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE: http://vimeo.com/59741668.
Thinking back on the dismembered, depersonalized parts of the chickens I used to eat, I now realize that when I helped my mom cut the cold, slimy skin off the cold, smooth flesh, it never entered my mind that the substance I was holding had once been a living, breathing bird. I had been programmed not to think backward to BIRD but to think forward to FOOD — to the sight-smell-sound-taste-and-tactile sensations I would be experiencing an hour after popping those breasts, legs, thighs, and wings into the oven. The most vivid memory I have is of snapping the wishbone with my sister at the end of our Sunday noon meal of chicken, rice, butternut squash, and cranberry sauce, which we mushed together, casserole-like, on our plates. Little did I know how successfully we had been brainwashed, by the mental machine called culture, to believe that these “ghosts” were never live beings. That they weren’t real. I’m grateful to have wakened from that lie and to now be helping others awake from it.
This reads like a muy macho reimagining of Carol Adams. Carol’s point was that female bodies are objectified and instrumentalized — and finally consumed by the patriarchy and this progression extends to all female animals, both human and non human. I am currently working on something extending Prof. Spivak’s work to animals, specifically post-Colonial animals, and your reference to the poultrygeist asks that we reinterpret the question “Can the subaltern speak?” and ask if (dis)membered animal consciousness and histories are (dis)embodied in a pile of Buffalo wings. My answer is many of the entangled kinships of the chicken clan were never allowed to exist under the artificial conditions of genetic selection, breeding, desocialization, industrial production, forced molting, feeding, estrangement from the natural or even the outdoors, etc. I also say that in today’s pot you revisit the theme of the social hieroglyph which I am obsessed with, and ask the reader to consider an extension of that concept beyond the Marxist conditions of production, toward the Social to ask if animals possibly ever have subject status. (The capitalist sovereign says no). Academic jargon aside, this was a very worthy blog post which could easily be expanded to flesh out several key implications. loved it.
Right, the absent referent:
http://www.caroljadams.com/interconnectedoppressions.html
I’ve been thinking lately that maybe we aren’t particularly speciesist; maybe we just objectify everything/everyone.
We don’t just factory-farm animals, we factory farm children. Almost all schools (even private ones) are nothing more than factories, where everything is standardized, children are removed from natural surroundings and forbidden to do perfectly natural things (like get up and move around freely). The same goes for most adults in most workplaces. What is a cubicle if not a cage? How much time do workers spend outside? It seems to me they only go outside to smoke or to walk to their cars.
Is the person who gets you coffee in the morning a subject or an object? Based on how most people treat him/her, I would say object.
I’m sorry, but I think this is much bigger than the animals humans eat.
A friend came to mind when I read your remarks, Mountain.
She home-schools her three sons in creative ways. Each of them has developed unique talents and interests.
She is also a mom to five rescued dogs and several smaller animals (fish, turtles, etc.).
On top of that, she’s a successful professional business woman who is always available to her clients, whether she’s at home, traveling with her husband and boys on business/pleasure trips, or taking their tennis-playing son to tournaments around the country.
Because my friend is so giving — and so keen on living in a way that objectifies no one — it didn’t surprise me when one day a year or so ago she asked me to tell her my ethical reasons for not eating animals. Not wanting to influence her with my own views, I emailed a few quotes from an author I knew she admired. Less than a week later, she announced her decision to go vegan.
Since then, she hasn’t wavered in the slightest. Nor has she pressured her husband and children to follow suit. On their own, they’re all individually leaning, to one degree or another, into eating more animal-friendly meals. (Maybe one day she’ll ask me about monoculture crops; you know how I’ll respond!)
The way this friend lives reminds me that none of us need wait on society before we start treating other sentient beings, human and non, as intrinsically valuable individuals (subjects) instead of utilizable, tradable, expendable instruments (objects). Whether we begin or end our de-objectifying process with animals isn’t the point. The point, I believe, is that we must include animals — that is, we must stop being speciesists — before we can claim to *not* be the third word in the title of this blog.
“Broiler” Chickens • Thinking Like a Chicken
24 February 2013
Eliminating the Suffering of Chickens Bred for Meat
One Green Planet http://www.onegreenplanet.org
Posted on February 22, 2013 by Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns
“The question has been asked whether the suffering of industrially-raised chickens could be scientifically eliminated. What if scientists could create chickens and other farmed animals whose ‘adjustment’ to pathogenicity consisted in their inability to experience their own existence?” Please read this entire blog & circulate. Appreciative comments on One Green Planet directly following this article are welcome and – appreciated.
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/eliminating-the-suffering-of-chickens-bred-for-meat/
“Eliminating the Suffering of Chickens Bred for Meat”
Corrected Link:
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/eliminating-the-suffering-of-chickens-bred-for-meat-2/
This afternoon, after finishing “Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights” (by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka), I found in the footnotes (#18 of Chapter 2):
“The evidence shows that the more people sharply distinguish between humans and animals, the more likely they are to dehumanize human outgroups, such as immigrants. Belief in human superiority is empirically correlated with, and causally connected to, belief in the superiority of some human groups over others.”
The authors continue: “When participants in psychological studies are given arguments about human superiority over animals, the outcome is greater prejudice against human outgroups. By contrast, those who recognize that animals possess valued traits and emotions are also more likely to accord equality to human outgroups. Reducing the status divide between humans and animals helps to reduce prejudice and to strengthen belief in equality amongst human groups (Costello and Hodson 2010).”
In the Bibliography: Costello, Kimberly and Gordon Hodson (2010) ‘Exploring the roots of dehumanization: The role of animal-human similarity in promoting immigrant humanization’, Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 13/1:3-22.
And a blog sent to me by a friend today opines on this deadly trait of human in-crowd hubris: http://veganelder.blogspot.com/2013/02/it-hasnt-been-said-well-enough.html