In February 1994 the California Board of Education banned the use of Alice Walker’s “Am I Blue?” from a statewide English test because it was “anti-meat-eating.” Marion McDowell, president of the California Board of Education reportedly said that the conclusion of the short story—when the narrator spits out the steak she had been eating because she is eating misery—“could be rather disturbing to some students who would then be expected to write a good essay while they were upset.”27 Fascinating in this decision is the epistemological control exercised here: no one challenges the fact that Alice Walker’s essay may be speaking the truth; it is eliminated because the truth might be upsetting. Again, we see that emotions are related to truth and, as McDowell implies, that the growth of knowledge may contribute to the development of appropriate emotions, truly outlaw emotions.
The Categorization of Animals and the “God” of the Man of Reason
What results from an anxious knowledge stance that objectifies animals and disowns outlaw emotions is an ahistorical and disembodied view of animals. The knowledge claims gravitate to categories that would apply in most, if not all cases, across history and specific individual situations. And this is exactly their problem. The debate about what is uniquely human, and what it is about animals that makes them nonhuman, takes place precisely in the zone that theologies of liberation have shown to be false—the zone of absolutes. Definitions or categorizations regarding animals function as absolute truths. Such absolute or universal knowledge claims represent the logic and interests of the oppressor. Grounding one’s claims in ahistorical absolutes demonstrates bad faith. To cling to certainty in categories such as animals represents a political decision and avoids a risky and potentially destabilizing discourse.
In discussing the way categories of knowing influence perceptions, Michel Foucault described a passage from the writer Jorge Luis Borges that provides a different ordering of things. Borges wrote about a Chinese encyclopedia in which animals are divided into “(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”28 According to Foucault this passage “shattered . . . all the familiar landmarks of my thought.” Because these categories are alien to our experience, this example provides the vehicle for Foucault and Sharon Welch—who cites it in her feminist theology of liberation—to explore the relativity of truth claims and of ordering experiences. Foucault points out that the dominant culture, too, may be relying on categories that function as absolute but are actually as contingent as Borges’s fabulous organization of animals. Pushing this insight, I would argue that such absolutes as our current categorization of animals may be as contingent and false as Borges’s example. Seeing Borges’s categorization of animals only as the vehicle to expose t he falsity of absolutes is one option. While this fictional classification may operate to disrupt one’s notion that existing categories can be adequate or accurate, it could also direct us to the fixed categorizations that still operate when we think of and interact with the other animals. I would turn such insight about absolutes and universals back toward that which prompts such insight—the categories we cling to in oppressing animals.
What we perceive here is that the fabulous categorizations of animals reflects on another level—a level that has so far been unacknowledged—the actual situation of animals who have been categorized by humans. While there appears to be a logic to these familiar animal categories, they may simply represent the arbitrary logic of the oppressor:
(a) animals who are edible; (b) animals who are not edible; (c) animals who produce food for us while living (cows, goats, chickens, bees); (d) animals living as companions in households; (e) animals living in households but not wanted (vermin); (f) animals whose bodies can be experimented upon; (g) animals who can be worn; (h) animals who have social networks but no consciousness; (i) animals who use tools but are not humans; (j) animals who can be hunted; (k) animals who no longer exist; (l) animals who are in danger of extinction; (m) etcetera.29
These examples are not fabulous and fictional, they represent everyday relations that are predicated on acceptable boundaries arising from universal truth claims of what is uniquely human. These boundaries and the structure of relations they legitimize are as suspect as any other form of traditional knowledge posited as universal and absolute. They result from what Donna Haraway calls “the god trick.”
The God Trick
The god trick refers to the positioning of those who hold to a traditional notion of objectivity: that one can transcend body, personal and cultural history, and thereby acquire “pure knowledge.” In Marilyn Frye’s terms, the god trick sees with an arrogant eye. According to Donna Haraway, “those occupying the positions of the dominators are self-identical, unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again.”30 In dualistic patriarchy, those occupying the positions of the subjugated, therefore, are marked, embodied, mediated, imminent. Haraway argues further that knowledge arising from this positioning of the subjugated is situated knowledge, and because situated, therefore responsible, whereas knowledge arising from a place where one has the illusion of a view of infinite vision produces unlocatable and thus irresponsible—that is, unable to be called into account—knowledge claims:
The standpoints of the subjugated are . . . preferred because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all knowledge. They are knowledgeable of modes of denial through repression, forgetting, and disappearing acts—ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively. The subjugated have a decent chance to be on to the god trick and its dazzling—and therefore, blinding—illuminations. “Subjugated” standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world.31
Virginia Woolf provides an excellent example of someone engaging in the god trick in her classic feminist text, A Room of One’s Own. She demonstrates the way absolute and universal categories work, the way one claims to see comprehensively:
I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.32
How comforting to hold such firm beliefs as the bishop! Yet, in Donna Haraway’s words, how irresponsible are such knowledge claims. Irresponsible precisely because they appear unable to be called into account. (How does one, after all, prove who does go to heaven?) How much thinking patriarchal beastly theologies used to save us! Once we believe that any authority or our theology has decided the question of the status of the other animals, then we can, without any qualms, safely abdicate thinking, feeling, responding to the issues that arise concerning the exploitation of animals. The surest way to short-circuit justice is to believe that the question of exploitation has already been settled and we are not the responsible parties in the debate. We let someone else perform the god trick and then chose it as our own methodology.
The God Trick and Animals
In Woolf’s description of the bishop’s knowledge claims the traditional spatial hierarchy of heaven and earth recalls the literal hierarchy of humans and animals, men and women, since, as Virginia Woolf reminds us through the bishop’s self-proclaimed authority, humans may go to heaven, but animals are earthbound. Of course his opinion represents a defensive position: there is self-interest in believing that animals (at least those who are consumed) do not go to heaven. To imagine
that we would meet animals in heaven, may be a disquieting thought for those who eat them.33 Yet, whether cats or farm animals go to heaven is not the point, to imagine heaven as separate from and above earth decenters our here-and-now relationships with all that live on earth. The parallel hierarchies of space and power (heaven over earth, humans over animals), enact a distancing that allows us to become disengaged from animals and the earth. This distancing allows us to become godlike—in Haraway’s terms, “unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent.”
While we may be godlike in the way we can create and dispose of animals, we actually are marked, embodied, mediated. The choice before us is to cling to the God–human–animal hierarchy and inevitably continue to see God as an old gentleman, or affirm the relevance of our own—and animals’—sensory experiences. Options other than an objectifying epistemology exist.
Agreeing Not to Play the God Trick
Among other things, theologies of liberation interpret sin as domination, and direct our attention to structures of domination and ex ploitation. Traditional, universal truth claims are exposed as false. Whereas there is a tendency to universalize animals, actually no one animal nature exists. Animals are particular, embodied, social creatures, not representatives of a measurable and thus “timeless” or disembodied quality. Moreover, developments in ethology and the other sciences are undermining the human/animal dualism by pointing to evidence of animal consciousness, language, tool use, and other attributes previously considered the sole province of human beings. Our capabilities are continuous with those of the other animals, not discontinuous.
Patriarchal beastly theologies derive from an epistemological stance that presumes universal categories and removes the knowers from any position of responsibility at all. But the god trick is an illusion. As Lorraine Code argues, we do not know “the world” as objective observers who are separate from the world. Hopefully, we wish to know the world as “moral and epistemic subjects who know and understand by positioning themselves within a situation in order to understand its implications and see in those implications contextualized, situated reasons for action.”34 But in order to so position ourselves we must be willing to reexamine universal categories.
Not only is the dominant culture coercive—constructing universal categories and absolutes where they do not exist—it has an ability to absorb a radical viewpoint, an epistemological challenge, and eviscerate it so that it looks like the argument is about ontology. As long as we are debating ontology, the epistemological is invisible. This serves the dominant culture’s perspective. What should be suspect, and a question of consciousness—for instance, universal categories that cast animals as consumable—is rendered valid and inevitable.
An Excursus on Ontology and Epistemology
Epistemological and ontological issues recur throughout this book. They are particularly pertinent to theological discussions. When feminist theologians devoted close attention to the Genesis 2 story of creation they did so in part because it provided theological justification for an ontological situation—women’s subjugated status. To get at the ontological, these theologians reinterpreted Genesis 2. They argued that the story of Eve’s heeding the serpent and disobeying God, thus being told that she would be subject to her husband, was not actually about the woman being untrustworthy and sinful, nor did it mandate women’s subordination. Similarly, as we saw in the previous chapter, attempts are made to interpret Genesis 1 to break the ontologizing of humans as dominators of animals and the rest of nature.
But these defenses keep the debate on the ontological level, when what is needed is a focus on knowledge claims and therefore on epistemology. The epistemological is always framing a discussion, an approach, a theology. It is often invisible or actively concealed.
In the previous chapter I described the death of Jimmy, and how it precipitated ontological questions: Why are some animals seen as consumable? What I had previously “known” rationally, that I ate animals, I now “knew” as an embodied truth—and one with serious moral implications. I felt the fact that I consumed animals resonating throughout my bodily self in a shock wave of horrified fascination and irredeemable immediacy. And a realization radiated from this felt truth, this embodied knowing: what I am doing is not right, this is not ethically acceptable. In a sense I began to ask myself: On what grounds have I accepted the ontologizing of animals as edible?
What I “knew” through my bodily self was, as Josephine Donovan states: “We should not kill, eat, torture, and exploit animals because they do not want to be so treated, and we know that.”35 This embodied knowledge involved recognizing that whereas I had ontologized animals as consumable, exploitable, violable, I could do so only through the god trick, by following the methods of any oppressor in believing the illusion that this was a universal perspective, i.e., that no other ontological possibility existed such as that the other animals might want to be treated otherwise, as inviolable. As Donovan recognizes, another perspective exists, that of the animals so violated. Integrating this perspective within the reality of my life required me to change my diet and my moral framework. In this sense, mine was the sort of knowledge that feminist philosopher Lorraine Code describes when she envisions knowledge that does not seek to control “nature” but instead lets “nature” speak for itself.
I questioned the ontology that permitted oppressive actions and controlled “nature,” and began to seek an alternative ontology. But I also began to recognize that what has been cast as an issue of ontology—i.e., are animals “meant” to be eaten?—is much more centrally a question of epistemology. The epistemological questions feminists explore regarding the social construction of “women,” knowledge, science, and culture address knowledge claims that are pertinent here. What do we know about animals? about human beings’ differences from the other animals? about how the other animals experience their relationships with human beings? and how do we know it? How do we know, for instance, that animals do not suffer when being killed to become food? that animal experimentation is the only way to advance medical knowledge? Who is making these knowledge claims about the other animals and on what grounds? What do we actually know about animal consciousness? about the standpoint of animals? about what commonalities we truly share with the other animals? about the ways animals experience themselves and other animals? Questions such as these problematize the knowledge claims that accompany the acceptance of the value dualisms and value hierarchy of patriarchal beastly theology.
From questions such as these we begin to see that the current ontological condition of animals as violable has less do with their beingness, than with our consciousness. Animals need not be destined to become humans’ food (ontology). That we see them as food or clothes is a construct of perception, cultural intervention, a forced identity (epistemology). The representation “animal” is what we are given to know.
The epistemology of the “human” who sees “animals” as usable creates the world of the human/animal dualism. The way we humans look at animals literally creates them as usable.36 This means that in life “human” and “animal,” like “woman” and “man” are “widely experienced as features of being, not constructs of perception, cultural interventions or forced identities.” Both species and gender are “lived as ontology, not as epistemology.”37 As Catharine MacKinnnon observes, what is occuring is a “transformation of perspective into being.” And if it succeeds ontologically, human d ominance does not look epistemological: “Control over being produces control over consciousness.”38 This is why so many debates focus specifically on animals’ beingness: because the shift from perspective to being (from epistemology to ontology) is, if successful, hidden from view. The role our consciousness plays in all of this remains concealed.
Catharine MacKinnon points out further that “when seemingly ontological conditions are challenged from the collective standpoint of a dissident reality, they become visible as epistemological.”39 Animal defenders offer such a dissident reality,
saying, “Animals aren’t meant to be eaten or experimented upon! Eating animals and experimenting upon them is not inevitable! Their meaning in life does not come from their being consumed!” Those who challenge animals’ exploitation are knowing subjects who have recognized their position in, and accountability to, the animals’ world. What has been hidden is brought into view.
Transforming Beastly Theology
Because women’s roles were declared to be subordinate to men as a matter of God’s will, a part of the feminist theological task has been the breaking of the authoritative/ontological association that predetermines questions of authentic being. Feminist theology begins with experience as a corrective to the authority/ontological situating of women as other. A similar process of beginning with experience opens new possibilities of relationships with animals. As testimonies of numerous people reveal, when people experience the realities of the slaughterhouse or the factory farm, they are less likely to want to see themselves as corpse eaters and the other animals as flesh. Outlaw emotions may prompt epistemological shifts.
Many defenders of the other animals came to their positions through radical intersubjectivity, through the second-person relationship of knowing another animal. Here, too, is the sort of knowledge that does not seek to control “nature” but instead lets “nature” speak for itself. Such resituating of nature as a speaking subject is illustrated in Vicki Hearne’s Adam’s Task: “It occurs to me that it is surprising that ‘I don’t know, I haven’t met her’ is rarely the response given to ‘Can Washoe [the chimpanzee] talk?”40
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