This Side of the Fence: Some Remarks on the Animal Liberation of the Anthropos

Abstract

Informed by body-phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory, this aphoristic essay comprises a consideration of some of the more dire consequences of human Empire-building among anthropic animals. The notion of human teleology, active beneath social class, gender, and other anthropic qualifiers, is theorized as a dead end, an abstraction translated into real power and propped up at the cost of actual bodyselves—fully corporeal living individuals—and attentiveness to their needs. In this context, animal liberation, usually referring to ending the domination of other animals at anthropic hands, is posited as pertinent to anthropic animality, especially under late modernity’s “desomatizing regime”. Animal liberation, it is held, speaks to each and every one of us, though in ways depending on the specificity of our lived situations, and unmasks the ultimate absurdity of attempts to overcome our animal condition, attempts historically coalescing precisely in human Empire.

1.

Murray Bookchin [1] once proclaimed ecstatically that,

After thousands of years of torturous development, the countries of the Western world (and potentially all countries) are confronted by the possibility of a materially abundant, almost workless era in which most of the means of life can be provided by machines… For the first time in history, technology has reached an open end… technology itself passes from being a servant of man’s immediate needs to being the partner of his creativity… We can only ask one thing of the free men and women of the future: to forgive us that it took so long and was such a hard pull.

(p. 115)

David Ehrenfeld [2] summed up this outpouring of techno-utopian hope by saying that “Humanity is on the march, earth itself will is left behind. Great changes will occur. Although we cannot forecast them all, we know at least that Lady Luck and Mother Nature, the twin governesses of humanity’s infancy, no longer will call the tune” (p. 54). We never got to where Bookchin would have us arrive, and probably never will. In fact, Ehrenfeld, the author of The Arrogance of Humanism, mocks Bookchin’s position. We know, if our eyes are not shut completely to the lived reality around us, that our destiny is not exactly in our hands, that it is nothing like a clean sheet of paper on which we can write anything we wish [2] (p. 54). There is no open end for technology, no blank sheet for our future, no clean slate. However, the dynamics of the ever-growing human Empire suggest a strong contrary conviction, namely that with enough cunning and force the sheet may be rendered blank. Expressing these imperialist inclinations, the history of modernity is above all a history of growth and aspiration to control. According to James C. Scott [3], “It is no exaggeration… to view the past three centuries as the triumph of standardized, official landscapes of control and appropriation” (p. 35). Manifested in structures and relations of unprecedented scale, complexity, and ubiquity, human teleology is bent on remaking the world on which its own existence depends.

2.

The flavor of Bookchin’s persuasion is enjoyed by many. Thinking they are emerging from the slime of animal prehistory, anthropic bodies arm themselves with scientific objectivity, linguistic, numerical, and monetary standardization, cultural suppression of the senses and impulses, and technical mastery. The growing edifice of our fears and aspirations swells in all directions, fueling everything from the writing of books, through construction of temples and industrial megastructures, economic exploitation, the machinations of bio- and nanotech industries, to the wholesale domination of our sentient kin. All of these developments elevate an abstract humanity just as they trample the living individual. Involving as little as a kneeling old woman’s daily prayer and as much as exploratory missions to Mars, the very diversity and ubiquity of these processes attest to a potential in the anthropic animal to become experientially severed from its sensuous reality. This potential culminates in relentless efforts at keeping the world as such at a distance sufficient for it to be unable to affect the subject. However, because the world will not stay away at all, efforts at control are endlessly frustrated. “Every time I try to turn my back on the world, I turn around and there it is,” Daniel Higgs [4] points out. Admittedly, the appearance of keeping the world at a distance has allowed for a critical view of some of its previously unscrutinized blind spots. In some of them, oppression and exploitation, well hidden, thrived. However, this appearance of distancing also reinforced and amplified them, unleashing powers so terrifying as to make any sane animal cringe. Consistent with the suppression of animality required for the development of human Empire, it has almost invariably left a denuded existential and ecological landscape wherever it spread the furthest.

3.

From a triumphantly distanced perspective, be it that of a satellite photograph or data distilled in a statistical chart, things may still look neat and even under control. Yet, in order to arrive at such a conclusion and perspective, animal nature has to be depreciated and the real losses swept out of view. Meanwhile, the animal body, living in the midst of things, stands and falls as the first and last obstacle to the petrification of the lifeworld, and it is our somatic constitution that makes it so. The fleshy, bodied self is an extension of reality, easily reached by its permutations, brought into the purview of experience through our deceptively familiar animal condition: our sensuousness; practical engagements and the need to make sense of things and somehow to belong to the world; our frustration and suffering of change, pain, and death. However, innumerable and obstinate the campaigns waged to eradicate this condition, the all-too-often disagreeable aspects of our somaticity seem not only ineradicable, but also inextricably linked to all anthropic joys and possibilities of fulfillment. Yet even Nietzsche, who took it upon himself to establish the existential centrality of the body and to make affirmation of life the guiding thread of a post-decadent humanity, “reflects a desire to skirt over rather than absorb or be absorbed by the materiality of life” [5] (p. 185). Subscribing to the prevalent denigration of animality, his Übermensch “has overcome animal nature, organized the chaos of his passions, sublimated his impulses, and given style to his character” (Kaufmann, cited in [6], p. 56). No, he has not. Such a being does not exist. Only those who have repressed themselves do. It is they that have given impetus to human Empire.

It goes without saying that “humanity” is not a monolith, and that it consists of ever more increasingly fragmented segments turned against one another even as they are implicated into a progressively complicated and fraught whole. Still, for some purposes, and for my purpose here among them, it is possible to distinguish a common impulse beneath humanity’s various lines of fracture. It is in this context that I wager that, while denigration of animality is significantly mediated by class, gender, race, and other anthropic social divisions, it constitutes a more originary rupture that complicates them all. Like nothing else, opposition to “the animal” brings colonizers and colonized, men and women, blacks and whites, socialist and capitalist together around a common project of humanizing the world. Like nothing else, this opposition has fueled the emergence of the globalized megamachine, whose reality is undiminished by the fact that it is based on a “false,” “human” unity. The KKK-minded call the black poor dogs and monkeys in an attempt to “animalize” them and thus show that, since they are unable to lift themselves out of their animal condition, they deserve to remain in it. The Black Panther repays the oppressors by calling white cops pigs. As everyone in an anti-animal culture well understands, this is supposed to be an insult.

However, this understanding is nothing new. For instance, as regards the populations of hunting-gathering Mbuti Pygmies and their sedentary, village-dwelling neighbors, “The Mbuti referred to the villagers as ‘black savages’ and ‘animals,’ and did not consider them to be real people. The villagers similarly referred to the [lighter-skinned] Mbuti as ‘savages’ and ‘animals,’ nor did they consider the Mbuti to be real people” [7] (pp. 164–165). This should sound perfectly familiar, and there is no reason to think that these African communities simply picked these categories up from the Europeans they encountered. This unity of striving against whatever is perceived as “merely animal,” as opposed to the human, is the other side and consequence of suppressed animality.

4.

Empire is built with our hands but over our heads. It is no longer amidst the places that we go about everyday that our fates are decided. No matter where we are stuck in the ever more decimated structure of the division of labor, or in what geographical location on the globalizing grid, our dice are always rolled elsewhere. One can live next door to a presidential palace and be worlds away from how one’s own fate is decided. Having become objects of management, we have minimal direct access either to the logic of how we are governed, or to the means by which actual governance is carried out. We have arrived at a crossroads where structural powers, oftentimes at odds with one another, discharge their contradictions from a distance onto our fragile frames. We are “still” perceiving beings, fully reliant on direct sensuous contact for coherent worldly interaction. However, for centuries and more we have been undergoing an accelerating loss of relative bodily autonomy, gradually entering vast technical networks of production, exchange, and control, of which we have none but the most tenuous grasp. Administrative routines and hierarchies, spatial dislocation, clock-time discipline, virtual reality, and impossibly complex labor and subsistence processes banish us from the mill in which our lives are ground.

Bodily embeddedness and centrality of lived experience of place go hand in hand in one’s life, and both are ruled out under modern estrangement. “Place” fades, extorted for the riches it harbors. Its genius loci is devalued and soon extinguished, its inhabitants pushed aside, put to work, or exterminated. The emergence of megalopolis requires this, unable to exist without clearing away the world’s odd and literally outstanding aspects through pervasive standardization and flattening. Modernized places, carved empty of all non-exploitable specificity and open to arbitrary remodeling, produce disconnected selves (cf. [8], pp. 86–97). Under so-called “space-time compression,” if we are swept up by it, we go more places than ever before. However, most of them are just stops. Additionally, after a while they all feel like stops, even home.

Wherever it is most modernized, anthropic social life becomes a site of gripping alienation, disjointed from the rest of the natural world through what Foster, Clark, and York [9] frame metaphorically as a “metabolic rift.” As Jerry Mander [8] has pointed out, “The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being” (p. 87). Or, rather, the connections are concealed through a mediation that leaves us with a sense of arbitrariness when “the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question… solely the product of human mental processes” (p. 87). While other animals are born and die in extermination camps commonly referred to as factory farms, for instance, the anthropic bodyself—the fleshy subjectivity that listens, looks, moves, touches, copes, rests—is likewise weakened and disabled (cf. [10]) amidst all this, and, thus, all the more likely to go about her day as usual. With the triumph of official order over vernacular practices, of standardization over quality, of power over freedom, of size over meaning, she stands at a disadvantage before “the rise of large-scale hierarchical organizations, of which the state is only the most striking example” [3] (pp. 35–36). Through these structures, operating as if from beyond and always at a remove, modern relationships of domination have come of age, remaking the very ground on which we might try and resist them. As the animal that we are is constricted and subjugated by these quintessentially human developments, what we come to need is not human but animal liberation.

5.

The “full-bodied” quality of meaning-making—a prerequisite of thriving animality—diminishes for us with the growth of institutions and infrastructures beyond our somatic reach. If we are condemned to meaning (p. xxii), as Maurice Merleau-Ponty [11] had it, then the point is what sort of meanings we arrive at and how those meanings will impact our overall lived situation. In this context, multi-sensory experience is overshadowed by the proliferation of abstractions borrowed from a world that has already been condensed into image, word, or number, and ingested through narrow cerebral channels. With intensifying specialization of skills and tasks, notably within the age-old bifurcation of work into manual and “intellectual,” most of our bodily potential becomes increasingly obsolete. Disabling division of labor and concomitant deskilling are reflected in the fragmentation and impoverishment of our animal sensorium, facilitated by the highly controlled, engineered environments in which many come to live out their lives. Instead of being grounded, we are plugged in.

Perception, which attunes the living body into its world, cannot hold in a flux of ever-shifted artifice. It takes a stable, tangible, and familiar milieu for its dynamic not to go awry. As this requirement makes perception ill-suited to living in a chronically quick-paced and transient environment, we adapt by taking up what John Dewey [12] called “bare recognition” instead. “Bare recognition is satisfied when a proper tag or label is attached, ‘proper’ signifying one that serves a purpose outside the act of recognition—as a salesman identifies wares by a sample. It involves no stir of the organism, no inner commotion. However, an act of perception proceeds by waves that extend serially throughout the entire organism” (p. 53). Thus, having a simple meal with friends in a relaxed atmosphere, for example, is an experience incomparably richer than reading about the most magnificent and sophisticated dish in a cookbook. However, while cookbooks abound, opportunities for the former are growing scarce. With intensifying mediation, experience becomes as shadow of itself, and the differentiated unity of the bodyself is broken up. The metabolic rift is not just socio-ecological but also “somatological” at the same time (cf. [13] esp. pp. 76–77; see Husserl [14] for the origins of the notion of somatology, albeit placed in a dualistic, largely Cartesian framework).

6.

You cannot safely remove yourself from the worldly equation. Under the suppressive conditions that such attempts foster, not only is lived experience diluted, but “unlived” experience grows thicker at the same time. Individual “[z]eal for doing, lust for action,” uneasily coexistent with social apathy, “leaves many a person… with experience of almost incredible paucity, all on the surface. No one experience has a chance to complete itself because something else is entered upon so speedily. What is called experience becomes so dispersed and miscellaneous as hardly to deserve the name” [12] (pp. 44–45). This is Dewey writing as early as the 1930s. Since then, this process has only become more entrenched. As our actions align us with managerial and commodity logics, we are forced to relearn how to think, see, and feel, so that we can accept administrative directives and recommendations as our surrogate guides to the world. This is a rational response of our animal bodies to the changing material circumstances of life. The protocols to which we are subjected (and which we are increasingly prodded to carry out on ourselves) are to the bodyself all but incomprehensible, lacking its thick somatic quality and originating in some vaguely disconnected ethereal plane. According to Zygmunt Bauman [15], “dense and tight networks of social bonds, especially based on territory, must be cleared away. It’s the brittleness of those bonds that allows the powers to work in the first place” (p. 12). As real bonds are broken, abstract ones are engineered as substitutes but fail to fill the void. Instead of being eliminated, the “quantum uncertainty of the transition back and forth between meaning and flesh” [16] (p. 11) is recast into pervasive confusion.

The antagonism between official and vernacular orders in social life [3] (ch. 2), with the former arising from the latter to dominate it the name of order, is coextensive with the split within the anthropic bodyself between unconscious life activity and the fossilized form of consciousness that gathers up parts of that activity to drive a wedge in the rest. While fleshy unconsciousness constitutes subjectivity, orienting the live body around its world, consciousness, an amalgam of the many impulses that otherwise run freely through and across our living tissues, is called upon from our earliest years to subdue it. Constricted anthropic consciousness comes to life above all as individual efforts at policing self and other. Much like the modern state towers over daily life’s ungoverned rhythms, which would supposedly drown society in chaos in its absence, consciousness towers over the bodyself. Like the state, consciousness is held to protect and preserve life, be it of the individual or the community, even as it reduces it to a set of procedures and formulas. Both prohibit life from developing through spontaneous interaction, without crutches and a stick over its head. Consciousness would ultimately reduce it to the motionless security of nothingness. The state, in turn, would culminate in totalitarian control where all unofficial activity has been terminated.

Statism and consciousness can be defended only at the expense of the vernacular and the bodily, only from a position, which views life as constantly under threat and siege, a position, that is, of paranoia. Fear, certainly not unwarranted at this point in the prophecy’s self-fulfillment, further blights the world with spikes—from surveillance systems to guns and fences and cages. “Thorn bushes spring up wherever the army has passed” [17] (#30). The unconscious reservoirs of anthropic bodily life are cramped not only by external constraints typical of modern urbanism but also internally, by the enthronement of an inner despot who will keep things in check “on the inside.”

7.

With changing systemic demands and conditions of life, anthropic imagination comes to be celebrated as the pinnacle of human achievement. Actually, though, the rise of the imagination in the practical axiologies of anthropic life is a sign of “permanent emergency,” consisting in an extension of the natural body beyond its healthy limits, and resulting in relative “desomatization.” That we come to rely to an enormous extent on the imagination—variously framed but well understood as symbolic thinking—is one indication that full-bodied experience becomes increasingly unattainable. It is the progressive remoteness of our ends, snatched from us or otherwise receding beyond our sensory horizons, that makes us think, like the scientist, “in symbols, words, and mathematical signs” (cf. [12] p. 16).

The imagination is almost uniformly credited for opening up our worlds beyond that which can be directly sensed and lived. However, we would not be so interested in made-up worlds if it were not for the concomitant desolation of our own world. As we are transported into made up realms, our experiential ties to the actual conditions of our subsistence and meaning-making further elude us. The imagination steps in when meaningful inter-corporeal relations are kicked out the door, and it helps finish the job. It can be better understood through an analogy with telecommunications technologies, which are one of its manifestations. Telecommunications make up for the separation created with the uprooting of the bodyself from direct contact with the determinants of its reality We can call up a loved one on the phone and applaud the opportunity, but we would not need a phone if we could see and embrace them instead (cf. [18] pp. 38–39).

We cook up wondrous worlds in our heads just as this one withers away. Virtuality and extropia are the next high-point of this process of deepening “self-absenteeism,” a vice-turned-virtue, piled up on chronically contracted bodily awareness, itself narrowed down from a comprehensive and fluid field of auratic perception into the cold linearity of a myopic beam. The dominance of the scalpel of compartmentalized perception gives the lie to invocations of the importance of presence to anthropic life. In a world that instrumentalizes sentient bodies through a “narrow obsessiveness with technicality” [19] (p. 43), there are ever fewer enclaves for them to decontract and find a semblance of experiential fullness. And even these efforts seem awkwardly contrived, for “What Zen practitioners strive for a lifetime for, our ancestors had by birthright” (p. 43). This last assertion we cannot verify, of course. But even if our ancestors were not born into anything as smooth as “the rich wholeness of unmediated existence” [20] (p. xvi), their experiential life cannot possibly have been as disturbed as ours.

8.

Say you want a life outside a mental cage. You cannot wish away the dominance of the symbolic and the abstract distinctive of Empire. The highly complex nature of our built and institutionalized environments forces us to habitually assume a narrowly specialized, analytical and atomized view of things. A legion of metaphors, originating in the life of the bodyself but reified as independent thought, populates anthropic lifeworlds in tandem with structures that are tangible but unrelatable without its assistance. Anthropic coping more than ever before requires the manipulation of symbols severed from their carnal origins. It is here that, at the cost of our perceptual life, our faith is invested. Those, even when not called for, seep into every vestibule of life. When watching birds swoosh through the sky, we cannot help naming and classifying them, as if prodded by an inner ornithologist. We are present to the virtual and absent to the actual. As sub-symbolic reality is erased from experience, representations come to crowd out their referents until they refer solely to one another. No wonder, then, that nothing but language and play of arbitrary signs seem to remain, a habituated substratum of a wholly manufactured reality. John Zerzan [21] sums it up this disarray, as expressed by some of its main proponents, “The self has always only been a trick of language, says Althusser. We are sentenced to be no more than modes through which language passes, Derrida informs us” (p. 82). Into this deep and turbulent sea the bodyself is thrown without a compass. This bears serious consequences for our being in the more-than-abstract world. For instance, while full-bodied perception tolerates much ambiguity, when the anthropos crowds it out with intellectualization and its associated tensions, her expectations for cognitive precision increase manifold. Subsequently, whatever is not directly grasped as an intellectual formula, in turn, easily becomes a source of gripping anxiety. Emotion—as impulses that cannot be banished—then comes back “through the back door,” pathologically expressed as the backdrop of unfulfilled intellectual expectation, often through added anger, malice, and resentment. Though this is not exactly what Freud [22] denoted by the “return of the repressed” (pp. 197–201), his term seems fitting.

The highly contrived nature of our surroundings also corresponds to the sense of split between anthropic bodyself and its lifeworld. The sense that one is a conduit for the world, and so that one belongs to it and expresses it, is lost—as is the corresponding sense that anthropic energies flow from elsewhere and gather in the organism, to be disseminated again into the world as the two—animal and world—flow together. The ego comes to be seen as creator, endowed with the power of radical agency, of making things happen and of being their source and point of origin. This projection, registering not only in arcane idealist and not-so-arcane materialist philosophies, but most of all in everyday (un)lived experience, is wholly divorced from the actuality of the experientially decimated anthropos. However, it is, in a sense, a necessary illusion, the mystification of real disempowerment of the modern anthropic bodyself. This very self, in a move not altogether unreasonable, hastily assumes the socially constructed imperatives of forcing a now-hostile world into submission, of recasting it into what Heidegger [23] called Bestand, translated mostly as “standing reserve.” This is a sign of weakness masquerading as strength. Fantasies of power, dumped on the shoulders of an unseen humanity, are the correlate of increasing powerlessness and estrangement of the bodyself.

9.

Ludwig Feuerbach [24] famously deemed God an externalized projection of human potential. Scores of social critics, from Marx [25] to Fromm [26], Merleau-Ponty [10], and Bookchin [1], have broadly shared this sentiment, walking in Feuerbach’s footsteps and beyond. However, now humanity itself ought to be recognized as an externalization of animal suppression. Latching on to its teleology, the anthropos hands herself over to the real, “impersonal” forces that disable her further—to the state, the party, the market, to science and technology, all in varying degrees and configurations. Dominated by the politician, by the bureaucrat, the capitalist, the scientist and engineer, her being is stretched beyond the healthy limits determined by its own carnal constitution. While our cerebra are overloaded, our flesh exploited as breeding grounds of abstraction, our senses are starved and desires lie dormant, reduced to passive recipients of inputs from administrative decrees, or aroused in controlled settings so as to preempt visceral resistance.

Building on long-standing developments of estrangement, modernity takes up the bodyself and throws it spinning into a whirlpool in which it cannot take a foothold. This is the process of desomatization, a twofold betrayal of animal nature—of self and all those crushed and swept aside along the way to humanity. When one points to “animalistic tendencies” in the anthropos as both causing and denoting his cruelty, something crucial is necessarily overlooked. One fails to see behind the cruelty a reaction to the failed hopes and strivings of the disfigured anthropos for a non-animal humanity. One fails to realize how those hopes and strivings, increasingly defining him, poison him with frustration and rage, charge his long-frustrated instincts with warped energies, and furnish him with the tools, technologies, and infrastructures of domination necessary to carrying out a mutilation, murder, or massacre. It is under the banner of humanity that one is deemed a filthy animal—the same banner under which the lives of millions, perniciously “animalized,” have been devoured in perhaps every single war since time immemorial. With growing complexity and distance setting the tone, this happens over and above the preventive capacity of the alienated anthropos thrust on a path away from herself and from the only world she can inhabit.

10.

The animals we are—even if do not know how to be ourselves—require a milieu aligned with the somatic foundation of our bodies. We need our environments to be meaningful to the bodyself without drowning it in unrelatable imperatives, so that we can inhabit them at the point where they impact our real wellbeing. We need a world in which it is alright to be an animal and where it is possible to be a good one; a world in which it is ok, even as anthropos, not to be human—that is, not to devote one’s vital energies to overcoming one’s animal condition. With growing scale and complexity putting inner and outer generals and bureaucrats to work, this becomes not only unlikely, but also fought against as foregoing of human responsibility, which is really a responsibility for keeping a wretched reality on its feet. We are after all the only kind of animal to have to try, through a set of institutionalized, militarized checks on our shared fears, not to massacre our entire world with the push of a red button. This is no way to live. However, the vital dimension of animality, of sensuous spontaneity and playfulness as expressive of the whole self, is easily overlooked within objectivist discourses which preoccupy themselves with reified quanta and managerial technique while neglecting ruptures in the interface of body and world. Animal liberation is not an affair external to our lives, especially these are grasped in their actual, moment-by-moment unfolding. On the contrary, it concerns the core of our lived circumstance. As long as we fail to grasp ourselves as animals (see, e.g., [21]) through and through, and instead insist on the overcoming of our inclusion in the world, whether through technological armature or symbolic arbitrariness, we will not be able to resettle into a world in which we actually live and die—a world out of which we grow but which is not of our making. Bodyselves, in their unimaginable variety, are the sole measuring rods that unbroken reality. And it is only a reality that is not altogether fragmented and beyond reach that they can truly be a part of without breaking themselves up in the process.

Bodyselves need body-scale. However, “degrowth” is something of a euphemism. It would seek to miniaturize domination. Not that there is no merit in reducing its magnitude and mediated mystification. What is required, however, if the anthropos is to live sanely, that is, among and not above the other animals of the earth, is a wholesale dismantling of the class-, war-, silicone-, and abstraction-ridden human Empire. This spells the death of the human, for there is no Empire without the human and no human beyond Empire. No naive love of nature stalks these thoughts, and certainly no misanthropy—only a staunch anti-imperialism; a sense that Empire is possibly the harshest that nature has ever been. The need for a comprehensive view of animal liberation, one that includes ourselves along with all the other animals subjugated by Empire, is rooted in our common besetment with a system that dismisses all non-instrumental embeddedness. The cow and goat are imprisoned from birth to death and sucked dry as if they were milk dispensers. But even those of us animals who remain directly uncoerced and physically unrestrained are trapped in quite an abstract cage, with very real contours, that never ceases to expand. We are engulfed by a paradox of an absolute freedom that requires the suppression of recalcitrant libidinal forces, which alone make any freedom meaningful. In the end, turning against animal facticity is an investment in devaluation, and offers rapidly diminishing returns. The desomatizing regime, which propels the expanding cycle of contemporary crises and culminates in socioecological disarray and routine extermination of billions of animals a year, puts in question both the existence and the rationale of modern civilization. But the regime may in fact be nearing its natural limits. Sooner or later the real world comes knocking on the door. As Ehrenfeld [2] put it, the “stubborn beast flesh” always grows back (p. 82).