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Animals under Capitalism (25th of May) Plenary Speakers: Dr Robert McKay (Sheffield): ‘The Were-wolf Hunger of Capital’ Professor Kate Soper (London Metropolitan): ‘Amid the alien corn: capitalism and animal life’ 1. Animals under Capitalism Dr John Miller (Sheffield): ‘Natural Capital and Useless Creatures’ Dr Sue Walsh (Reading): ‘Animals and Society’ Dr Maan Barua (Oxford): ‘Lively commodities and encounter value’ 2. Capitalism, Theology, Art Brandi Estey-Burtt (Dalhousie University): ‘The Animal Messiah: Saving the Soul Under Capitalism.’ Estela Torres (Independent Artist): ‘From the Passion of Christ to the Calvary of Animals’ Professor Richard Merritt and Professor Scott Hurley (Luther College): ‘Encountering Animal Bodies: Taxidermy, Art, and Ethics’ 3. Legacies Dr Jonathan Saha (University of Leeds): ‘No Country for Old Crocodiles: Colonial Rule and the Commodification of Animals in British Burma, c.1880-1940’ Cato Berg and Knut Nustad (University of Oslo’): ‘Trout, temporalities and capitalism in the Aurland Valley, Western Norway’ Professor Peter Boomgaard (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies): ‘How Capitalism in Indonesia Stimulated Livestock Numbers per capita, as well as Tradition through Stockbreeding’ 4. Interspecies Relations Dr Vincent Chapaux (Université libre de Bruxelles): ‘Interspecies Relations in Science-Fiction Movies and International Law’ Dr Michael Lawrence (Sussex): ‘Cattle Drives, Capitalism and the Hollywood Western: Red River (1948)’ Nike Dreyer (University of Konstanz): ‘Pigs as Pseudo-Subjects in a Capitalist Regime’ Main page Kate Soper By way of some initial reflections on a poem by Derek Mahon, my talk will consider the multiple, and often conflicting, ways in which capitalism may be said to have impacted on animal experience. The focus here will be on the specific forms in which capitalism has continued and intensified a perennial division in human culture between abuse and love, instrumental and affective responses to animals. From there I will move into a brief survey of the engagement with animals on the part of leftwing/Marxist critics of capitalism. Here, by and large, there has either been silence, or the development of naturalist and anti-humanist positions of a kind that have been carried over into the contemporary post-humanist paradigm, with its emphasis on humananimal affinities and continuities. I myself will put the case for grounding a more animal-friendly eco-politics in recognition of what is distinctive to human beings, both as agents of environmental crisis and as alone in a position to take action to counter it. In the process, I shall ask how we might improve the experience of animals in a post-capitalist, post-consumerist social order, and sketch a few ways in which that might draw on both traditional/pre-modern and postmodern modes of production and consumption. Robert McKay In his analysis of the tendency to extension of the working day, Marx (no doubt deliberately reconfiguring the Latin proverb homo homini lupus est) described the production of surplus labour as capital’s ‘were-wolf hunger’ for accumulation (Capital, vol. 1 ch. 10). The gothicism is arresting and troubling: for when capital itself is not just lupine but werewolf, the essential violence held just apart from human nature by the Latin irony returns and attaches to it with uncanny and ubiquitous force. The Werewolf of Paris, a sensational novel of lycanthropy set against the background of the Commune of 1871, was written and published in America in 1933 by the communist and vegetarian Guy Endore (1901-1970). In it, a drama of hyper-excessive consumption and blurred human/animal boundaries figures what is an intractable problem for leftist thought after the commune. This is the apparent contradiction between an expansive, egalitarian spirit of community and individual selfishness, greed and desire—what Thorstein Veblen in 1923 called the ‘steadfast cupidity’ of humanity that finds its economic realisation in capitalism. The intractability resides precisely in the ‘nature’ of that contradiction: just how steadfast is cupidity? how ‘natural’ is human greed? The novel’s focus on consumption raises difficult questions in the politics of eating—and not just because it is written in the context of Marxian explanations of capitalism’s responsibility for the widespread famine created by the Great Depression. If the progressive thesis is that not only the difference between surfeit and suplus but consumption and competition per se are political-economic effects of capitalism, suppressing humanity’s more essential communal spirit, then how do we make sense of the apparently ‘natural’ acts of consumption (of meat) that condition human relations with animals? Might not the solution to the were-wolf hunger of capital be a strict vegetarian diet? This talk will think through these questions, reading Endore’s novel in the context of ideas about animals and equality in radical left thought from the Paris Communards to Endore’s American contemporaries, and those of a dissenting Sigmund Freud. John Miller For the economist Dieter Helm, ‘conservation is about ... hard choices with economic consequences’. To ensure a sustainable future, we must place an ‘economic value on nature’. Without this, the argument runs, environmental catastrophe will continue to accelerate and the Anthropocene extinction will proceed unabated. So we are poised, in Helm’s analysis, to move away from that ‘ghastly Marxist dialectic … them versus us, proletariat versus bourgeoisie, the environment versus the economy, capitalist versus the environment’ into a bold new world of ecological accounting, heralded by the idea of ‘natural capital’, defined by the UK’s Natural Capital Committee as ‘the stock of natural ecosystems on Earth including air, land, soil, biodiversity and geological resources’ (in short, everything). If nature can be valued, nature can be saved, all we need is a framework within which to initiate what Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley call capitalism’s ‘ecological phase’. Although the term has been in circulation at least since the 1990s, the last two or three years have seen a rapid foregrounding of natural capital in policy debates. To some critics, particularly those involved in pro-animal movements, the potential consequences are chilling. As Kathryn Yusoff concludes, ‘[a]ccording to the logic of “natural capital”, the nature that does not … service us has no place in the world’. As a thought experiment in response to this coming world, I imagine the ethical call of a perfectly useless creature, one that fails to contribute, even in the most indirect form, to ecosystem services and economic interests and one entirely unamenable to the dubious ideological work of cuteness: a being whose inconsequential, bland life achieves nothing except, ironically, to construct the limit of a politics in which ethics is replaced by auditing. Main page Sue Walsh In this paper I want to turn back to a book published back in 1991, Keith Tester’s Animals and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights. I want to return to this text because nearly twenty-five years ago Tester was already effectively making the argument that Kari Weil makes in Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (2012), which is to say that the recent theoretical turn to animals grows out of, ‘a weariness with post-structuralism’s linguistic turn and a resulting search for a postlinguistic and perhaps posthuman sublime and […] an often conflicting turn to ethics that raises the question of our human responsibility to the animal–other’ (Weil, xx). Tester presciently noted the history within animal oriented studies and animal advocacy of a suspicion of language and culture that we can now read as a precursor of the more recent counter-linguistic turn in theory which has led to a focus on affect as that which can provide access to the reality and truth behind or beyond the obfuscations of language and culture. Tester’s Animals and Society challenged animal advocacy to account for itself, and though it was given some recognition at the time of its publication, and subjected to critique by animal advocacy oriented critics (animal studies not yet being established as the umbrella term for this field of interest), it still raises questions for animal studies, particularly through its Foucaultian informed Marxism which asks animal advocacy to consider that it may be complicit in a capitalist fetishism of the animal. Main page Maan Barua Rendering nonhuman life for sale is a fundamental facet of contemporary capitalism. Political economy extensively examines how nature is commodified, but fails to analyze the difference liveliness of animals makes to processes of commodification. Drawing upon empirical work on lions and elephants in the political economies of tourism and biodiversity conservation in India, this paper proposes analytics for understanding commodification and accumulation in relational and less humanist terms. First, it develops Haraway’s concepts of ‘lively commodities’ and ‘encounter value’, foregrounding animal ecologies to rework political economic categories of the commodity, labour and production in more-than-human terms. Second, it examines how lively commodities and encounter value configure political economies, mapping their specificities and economic potential. The paper advances potential diagnostics and vocabularies through which ecology and non-dualist accounts of agency might be integrated into the nature-as-resources approach of political economy. Main page Brandi Estey-Burtt In J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, protagonist Elizabeth Costello tells listeners that she is motivated to oppose factory farming of animals so that she might save her soul. Coetzee’s turn to animals and animal ethics has been well documented in critical scholarship, as has Costello’s philosophical and poetic resistance to the commodification of animal bodies in The Lives of Animals. However, the religious connotations of Costello’s statement as well as her claim that “an animal is an embodied soul” have all but been ignored or even denied. Yet Costello’s repeated invocations of both her soul and the souls of animals bespeaks a central way of theologically understanding the lives of animals that profoundly conflicts with the capitalist patterns of commodification she decries. I read her emphasis on animal souls in connection with the Christian iconographic tradition of representing Christ as a lamb, in which the animal body does not simply function as a tool of salvation but as the central image of ethical, redemptive relationships. I therefore argue that the artistic merging of human and animal in the figure of the Messiah both blurs human and animal distinctions as well as offers an incarnational vision of the embodied soul of animals that resists capitalist paradigms of consumption. In particular, I look at Jan van Eyck’s central piece “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” from the Ghent Altarpiece as well as Francisco de Zurbaran’s several Agnes Dei paintings to demonstrate how Christian iconography provides a theological response that challenges capitalism’s predations on the animal body. This artistic tradition conceives of the animal as a Messiah figure, a conception that highlights useful modes of relationship based on our mutual enfleshment of souls rather than a denial of the souls of animals. Main page Estela Torres The current environmental crisis is a reflection of the unbalanced relationship man has with nature and its animals. This can be attributed to the position man ascribes himself, as the center of creation, and consequently the belief of animals as inferior beings and at man's service. This arises ethical as well as theological questions about man's role and stewardship regarding animals and nature. The aim of my recent artwork is to approach these questions and have this two disciplines come into dialogue. Animal's Passion and The Carrying of the Cross are two series of drawings started in 2013 in conjunction with the research on Animal Theology, inspired by Andrew Linzey's Animal Gospel and Animal Theology as well as the orthodox approach to creation. The aim of these drawings is to translate in images and in discourse the suffering of Christ as a persecuted innocent put to death, with the suffering of the innocent and the voiceless put to death, which are the animals. This is done by the confrontation of images taken from internet about animal mistreatement with those of religious representations taken from the history of art such as scenes of Crucifixions from Velazquez, Ribera, El Greco etc. My proposal would be to show these two series with a power point together with a detailed description of the drawings and the theological findings. Main page Richard Merritt and Scott Hurley Artists committed to socially engaged practice confront a significant challenge when trying to differentiate their work from other artists who use the same media, but do not have the same social and political commitments. This problem is particularly significant when encountering the work of conceptually driven artists that make use of taxidermy. Exploring comparatively the work of artists such as Damien Hirst, Angela Singer, Kate Clark, Pascal Bernier, Amy Stein and Cai Guoqiang, we note instances of superficial similarity, shock aesthetics, and vastly disparate visual strategies. Underlying this complex network of visuality rests an interconnected web of agendas sometimes reifying, sometimes questioning, and at other times antagonizing human and nonhuman animal hierarchies. Historically the use of taxidermy arose out of the colonial tradition of exotification of “otherness,” treating nonhuman animal bodies as artefacts of colonized nations. Consumed en masse in ‘proto” museums, sideshows, and Wunderkammer, the animal body was objectified and commodified by the act of looking, of gazing. In this paper we examine how the tradition of spectacle is transformed by and also persists in contemporary arts practice. It is our contention that each of the works we are examining is a societal institution that constitutes a networked model of human and non-human animal relationships. Central to our approach is an examination of “the encounter”: How does the spectator’s encounter with the object of art without knowing the artist’s intentions shape the understanding of the encounter and its effects? Irrespective of intentionality in what way does the work interrogate human and non-human animal relationships? What are the ethical questions implicitly posed by the work? And finally, how does the visceral nature of the art and its practice within a capitalist economic system informed by speciesist ideology contribute to or challenge the commodification of the animal body? Main page Jonathan Saha It is impossible to state just how many crocodiles were killed in British Burma with any precision. But we do know that by 1880 the reptiles were targets for eradication. The colonial state gave rewards to those who turned in their carcasses. This system proved effective. In fact, it proved too effective. Rumours circulated that enterprising villagers were breeding crocodiles, killing them as soon as they hatched, and turned in their bodies in exchange for the bounty. These types of duplicitous practices were often reported in the colony. Indeed, they appear to be common to many colonial contexts. In this paper I argue that they were the unintended consequences of state policies intended to encourage the commodification of wildlife. This argument means opening up new historiographic ground. Whilst imperial representations of animals have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years, what has been neglected in this literature is the emergence another powerful mode of representation: the rendering of animals into exchange values. Responding to Nicole Shukin’s call for researchers to excavate the material histories of economic and symbolic power rendered innate in the fetishized bodies of animals, this paper uncovers how animals became commodities for exchange in colonial Burma through an analysis of everyday interactions with the state. It pays particular attention to the granting of of rewards to encourage the slaughter of some animals and the use of licences to regulate the preservation of others. By exploring the commodification of animals through their entanglement with these artefacts of state authority, the paper offers a more-than-human history of colonial rule. Main page Cato Berg and Knut Nustad The shifting relationship between people and fish in the Aurland River of western Norway enacts temporality at different scales. Up until the 1880s human-fish relations formed part of subsistence engagements for the many small farms in the valley. With the arrival of British fishermen, new relations between fish and people were established, redefining human-fish relations as sport. The subsequent recasting of the river as the largest hydroelectric project in Norway from 1969 was hailed as a triumph of industrial and capitalist progress. While this sequentialisation evokes notions of time as progressing, there are other temporalities at work here as well. Disillusionments with narratives of progress led to longings for ‘nature:’ the river as it was first encountered by the British sport fishers, before its capitalist transformation. But the fish that make this river home are part of other temporalities as well. Most contemporary fishermen consume fish as sport through catch and release, evoking two different and entangled scales of temporality: fish are released into the river to fulfil their cycles of reproduction, they are caught at the end of the season to obtain their roe and milt, and the river is restocked with fry. These practices in turn enable human-fish relations that are meant to evoke another temporality, that of a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, non-regulated natural river. These processes in turn go hand in hand with the ever-increasing reliance on capitalist modes of production and distribution of objects, technologies and knowledge. The paper seeks to examine these intertwined relations by comparing pre-capitalists to later capitalist perceptions of the river and its non-human actors, though a focus on different temporalities, both progressive and cyclical, and further by connecting these to debates on capitalism, climate and landscapes. Main page Peter Boomgaard For many Asian countries, stockbreeding in the past is a badly documented phenomenon. Much of it occurred in out-of-the-way places, and statistics prior to 1900 are often absent or of questionable reliability. Relatively good figures are available for Java (Indonesia), and developments regarding that island will be at the centre of our discussion. In all likelihood, the growth of the number of horses in Java was higher than that of the population between 1600 and 1850. Much of this growth was linked to the activities of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, and became more pronounced from the late eighteenth century. VOC and other merchants needed horses for transport, both of people (horse riding, carriages) and trade commodities. The latter use increased strongly after 1800. After 1850 the trend reversed. In Java growth of the number of buffalo between 1800 and 1850 also outstripped the increase in the number of people. This was also linked to increased demand for transport, but also to the need for animal traction of ploughs, linked to increased population growth, which, in turn was stimulated by Dutch colonial policies. The number of cattle increased as well in this period, but not as fast as that of the buffalo. After 1850 the growth of cattle numbers accelerated, while that of buffalo slowed down. Finally, outside Java, for instance in Sulawesi (Celebes), the growing number of buffaloes appear to have been used mainly in sacrifices, as conspicuous consumption. This phenomenon as such was much older than 1800, a local tradition, but the growing involvement of local people in international Capitalist trade enabled them to slaughter larger numbers of buffalo during the death ceremonies of the well-to-do. Main page Vincent Chapaux International law, as a normative order, is often seen as very “animal friendly”. The most famous international norms regarding the animals are usually explicitly drafted to protect them from “commercial predation” (e.g. Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). Even when it comes to animal welfare, international agreements are often depicted as being ahead of most domestic systems (see. e.g. the welfare provisions of the Lisbon treaty of 2007, art. 13). These elements are accurate but usually tend to hide the fact that international law, as a system, has been conceived as (and still mainly is) an anthropocentric order. International norms regarding property in general, and intellectual property in particular, allow human beings to own not only animals but entire species (providing that the humans claiming ownership of these species have modified them sufficiently on a genetic level). The same can be said of international trade law, a regime that (until recently) had always rejected animal conservation or animal welfare claims. Seen from the perspective of international law, human domination is by far the most important rule in the relations between humans and animals. In that sense, international law facilitates rather than oppose the advanced capitalism of our contemporary societies. This article confronts the representations of human/nonhuman relations emanating from international law with those emanating from mainstream science-fiction movies (usually distributed and broadcasted worldwide). It shows that - aside from survival films – mainstream science-fiction movies mainly offer an alternative view of interspecies relations, one that is based on the respect of every intelligent and/or sentient being, regardless of their species. The article concludes by exploring some hypothesis that might explain the differences between the anthropocentric logic of international law and the anti-speciesism tendency of these mainstream and often “global” movies. Main page Michael Lawrence This presentation examines the practical logistics and the promotional tactics associated with the representation of cattle drives as generic spectacle in the Hollywood Western, focusing on Hawks’ Red River (1948), the most famous depiction of the drives that constituted the ‘Beef Bonanza’ of the 1860-80s. For Corkin, Red River endorses ‘a system that enables goods to move unimpeded’; the film adapts ‘frontier mythology’ to endorse ‘corporate capitalism in an international context’ (2000: 76, 89). And for Sklar, the film is about ‘commodity production’; he notes that both the film’s director and its protagonist are ‘struggling to find a market and gain a return on his investment of time and toil’ (1996: 153). But the cattle at the centre of both these profit-driven enterprises—the original drive and the Hollywood production—are rarely privileged in accounts of the film’s ideological substance and significance, just as they are routinely marginalised in scholarship on the Western as a genre (exceptions include Calder 1976 and Tompkins 1992). But Red River was connected to the meat industry at every stage of its production and promotion. The resourcing and management of the cattle for the shoot resulted in escalating costs: the budget ballooned by $800, 000. The difficulty of working with recalcitrant cows delayed things further: Hawks became exasperated by the studio’s concern: ‘Go out and tell fifteen hundred cows what to do!’ he stated (McCarthy 1997: 423). However, once the drive scenes were completed the cows used in the film were sent to market, and, in Hawks’ words, they ‘made a hell of a lot of money selling them after the picture was over’ (McBride 1996 [1982]: 149), thus replicating the sale of the herd at the end of the film (the cows travel by train to slaughterhouses in Chicago). When Red River was released, tons of beef were given away as part of the publicity campaign; the steaks were labelled ‘part of the cast of the forthcoming screen epic’. This paper will focus on the film’s relationship with capitalism by examining the cattle’s status as bio-capital for both the businessmen depicted in the film and the businessmen who were making the film, and by reconsidering the surplus value (the generic spectacle of the stampede) the film generates in the interest of its own market value. Main page Nike Dreyer I’d like to give an insight into the artistic practice of Wim Delvoye and his Art Farm. On this farm close to Beijing, the artist farms pigs to tattoo them while anaesthetised. He then harvests their skins after their natural death. The tattoos on the pigs grow with them; they often depict Western symbols of tattoo culture. Delvoye stresses the point that the pigs get to live a longer and potentially more fulfilled life than their fellow pigs in the mass industries. The pigs in his installation do signify something distinctly different than pigs used to in a time of pre-modern animal keeping. It is not about their meat, but they become individuals that have distinct tattoos. Animals have not been subject to this tradition in decorative terms. In a way these pigs represent the pressing for individualization, that capitalism puts on Western individuals. In order to be a full-fledged member of capitalist society individuals have to consume and create an individual style, again based on consumption. Yet Delvoye’s system of individualistic pigs implodes when he sells their skins and they again become an object of capitalism. Even though one could argue their lives were not as meagre as the lives of pigs in large scale cattle breeding their inanimate but colourful skins pose questions. Are we ourselves the pigs that will be skinned in a capitalist regime? Or do the skins remind us of the fact that pigs have skin the colour of our own – then why do we still exploit them? I would argue that Delvoye’s work takes a step into the direction of understanding animals more as individuals. Yet his work is deeply critical of the capitalist system and he himself employs its methods. Accommodation and Transport 1. Accommodation recommended by the University of Bristol can be found here: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/university/visit/stay.html 2. 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