Anticapitalism - Social ecology - Antispeciesism. Debate on the need for
an intersection of struggles - second contribution ---- The termspeciesism was coined and introduced into the debate on the animal
question in 1970 by Richard Ryder, an English psychologist who had
repudiated animal experimentation for ethical reasons, and was
popularized by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (1975) and by Tom Regan
in Animal Rights (1983). For Singer, speciesism is «a prejudice or
attitude of prevention in favor of the interests of members of one's own
species and against those of members of other species». Prejudice that
operates according to the same mechanisms that regulate intra-specific
violations of the principle of equality: «The racist violates the
principle of equality by attributing greater weight to the interests of
members of his race when there is a conflict between the interests of
the latter and those of members of another race. The sexist violates the
principle of equality by favoring the interests of his own sex.
Similarly, the speciesist allows the interests of his species to prevail
over the superior interests of members of other species. The pattern is
the same in each case».
More recently, this definition of speciesism has been joined by others
that emphasize the connection between speciesism and material practices
of animal exploitation. Among these, one of the best known is that of
the sociologist David Nibert, according to whom speciesism is «an
ideology created and spread to legitimize the killing and exploitation
of other animals». For Nibert, speciesism is not so much a prejudice,
but rather a justificationist ideology developed to account for the
practices of oppression of animality (including human oppression).
Consequently, speciesism and anti-speciesism are to be considered
historical phenomena subjected to and shaped by material, economic,
cultural and social forces that also involve human society and that need
to be understood and opposed politically.
Among the many criticisms that can be leveled at these definitions, the
most important is that all these ways of conceiving speciesism are based
on a fixist and essentialist, almost Linnaean, idea of the notion of
species, seen in one way or another as a natural fact. Starting (at
least) with Charles Darwin, the "species" should not be seen as a mere
biological descriptor, since the English naturalist himself stated in
The Evolution of Species that «the term species[is]applied arbitrarily,
for reasons of convenience, to groups of individuals that are very
similar to each other». As the epistemologist Jean-Jacques Kupiec
argues, «Darwin does not say what species are but what they do: they
vary continuously» and goes on to state that, if Darwin's «genealogical
conception» «had been accepted and assimilated, the term "species"
itself would have had to be abandoned and replaced with that of "line"».
It should also be emphasized that speciesism does not operate between
species but between two very particular "species": the Human and the
Animal - two real twin abstractions with an oppressive function. This
was well highlighted by Jacques Derrida, who proposed replacing the term
"the Animal" with the term "animot": animot in French sounds like
animaux (animals, plural) and contains the term "mot" (word) to indicate
the role that carnophallogocentrism has played in the devaluation of
other animals and animality in general, including human animality.
Indeed, if we think about it, both the mechanisms of animalization,
which accompany, justify and enable the exploitation of specific groups
of humans, and the contemporary techno-scientific enterprise, capable of
producing engineered hybrid organisms, and capitalism, which does not
stop at the species barrier and is actually based on putting any body to
work, as long as it can be re/productive, show that the species is more
of a political/performative construct than an innocent, naive and
neutral description of groups of living beings that are very similar to
each other. It is no coincidence that its main boundary - Human/Animal -
can be redrawn, with great ease and depending on the interests at stake,
by the same system that is based on the most intransigent ideological
acceptance of that same boundary.
If this is the case, we can affirm that we have never been speciesists
or that the definitions of speciesism that have followed one another
over time are insufficient because they have not grasped that it is
precisely behind the presumed essentialist fixism of the notion of
species that what we could call the transformist and oppressive mobility
of speciesism is hidden.
To contribute to the construction of an anti-speciesist policy that is
up to the task it faces, let us define speciesism as the species norm in
which the lethal encounter takes place between an ideology that
legitimises the institutionalised dismemberment of bodies and the set of
devices that enable and effect such dismemberment. The main performance
of this semiotic/material complex is to separate the bodies that matter,
that must be safeguarded, protected and sacralised, from the bodies that
do not matter, that can be exploited and killed with impunity.
Starting from ideology, speciesism can be thought of as a machine. A
machine similar, in terms of functioning, to what Giorgio Agamben called
the «anthropological machine». Both of these machines work, in fact, to
produce Man - what is meant by Human -, separating him from bare life
through a complex operation that, revolving around an empty centre, uses
mechanisms that are, simultaneously, excluding and including.
The concept of an empty center indicates that, beyond the historical
differences that have characterized its functioning and its "products,"
the speciesist machine is set in motion by definitions established a
priori of what the Human is. In other words, the materialization of the
human is not the result of the empirical discovery of identifying
biological traits, but the bureaucratic certification of the presumably
natural origin of current social relations. In short: what appears to be
the product of the work of the speciesist machine is in reality what it
is called upon to justify. What gives this machine all its operational
effectiveness is precisely the empty center, where the short circuit
between production and justification of Man occurs.
As for the synchronism of the mechanisms of exclusion/inclusion, it can
be said that, like all machines, the speciesist machine also produces
(includes) by dissipating energy and accumulating waste (excluding) -
and vice versa. These phenomena are inseparable: the inside and the
outside are formed together and "fold" one onto the other; inclusion
(recognition, social intelligibility, humanity) is achieved through the
rejection (removal, invisibilization, dematerialization, animalization)
of certain traits and certain groups, and exclusion through the
appropriation and capture of who and what is excluded.
With these premises it is possible to define the three mechanisms
through which the ideological component of the speciesist machine
operates: 1) the definition of the "property of the species of Man"
(definition established a priori that the machine must return unchanged
but with the "certification of naturalness"); 2) the measurement of the
distance between the standard reference species and all the others; 3)
the hierarchical distribution of species according to an order inversely
proportional to the aforementioned distance (the greater the distance
from the proper of the Human, the lower the position that will be
occupied along the scale of beings). In short, the empty center is the
species not understood as a biologically mobile genealogical line but as
a tragically malleable essence capable of producing, in the continuous
"remixing" and "repositioning" of the inside and the outside,
specialties (which sacralize some human characteristics and the bodies
that conform to them) and phenomena of speciation (the animalization of
bodies that can be dismembered with impunity).
Massimo Filippi
https://umanitanova.org/decostruire-la-specie-prima-parte/
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