Richard Twine na Animal Rights Zone

Na Animal Rights Zone można poczytać naprawdę interesujące wywiady. Ostatnio przeczytałam wywiad z Richardem Twinem.

Kim jest Richard Twine:

Dr. Richard Twine is a sociologist currently based at Lancaster University, UK. His path to writing on Critical Animal Studies began in the early/mid 90s through an encounter with feminist and ecofeminist work, notably authors such as Val Plumwood and Carol J Adams. His PhD, completed in 2002, was an examination of critiques of dualism in both ecofeminist theory and sociological knowledge.

wybrane fragmenty, które szczególnie mi się spodobały:

Every social movement has its own specificity but perhaps this is broadly analogous to discrimination against feminist men or against perhaps white anti-racists.

It is ridiculous that a non-violent way of living and one that potentially is the best option in terms of mitigating climate change has to struggle for acceptance but then shifting the meaning of the ‘human’ is bound to be resisted by the majority.

I’m tempted to cheekily define dualism as what happens when you start doing philosophy without first ridding yourself of Christian dogma.

I know what it’s like to attend animal science conferences with their corporate presence and celebratory tone of novel ways in which to instrumentalize animals and to make them more productive. It’s like entering into a rather uncanny moral universe which has the power to shock the ‘average citizen’ who is distanced not only from the slaughterhouse but from the networked bodies of scientific knowledge that work behind the scenes to discipline animal bodies for human consumption. It was certainly enough to finally push me from vegetarian to vegan 7 years ago.

CAS is expressly anti-capitalist. I don’t think you can reduce the myriad forms that the human exploitation of other animals takes to capitalism, yet neither do I think you can separate them from it.

Finally we must avoid a dualism between academic/activist, theory/practice. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that such distinctions can be read as reformulations of deep rooted dualisms between mind/body, or reason/emotion. Most people are practicing both to an extent. Thought is located, embodied and passionate, and Practice can be informed by theory and so on.

one of the easiest ways in to these issues is to discuss the feminization of veganism, and to ask why practices of care are feminized (and NOT to fall back into some view of ‘women’ as more ‘naturally’ caring than ‘men’), and to explore the masculinization of meat.

Very few people choose to eat meat/dairy – they are born into cultures where this norm precedes their existence They are then usually successfully recruited to this norm and its related practices.

So if meat eating and say car use are gendered masculine as we generally believe them to be, then this is also shaping the persistence of these practices. We need to ask how we can curtail the life of a given practice and how we can contest and erode the various sets of norms that support particular practices. I’m increasingly interested in a sociological approach called ‘practice theory’. This is influenced historically by writers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault but is increasingly being applied to the sustainability/climate change agenda (see work by Elizabeth Shove for example). Here the focus is less on individual behaviour change, but in an effort to be more sociological puts the focus (and the ‘burden of change’ if you like) on practices themselves. A given practice is assumed to have a biography made up of objects and materials, various embodied skills and competences, and various images and meanings. People act as carriers of different practices. Practices capture and lose carriers over their ‘career’. [Of course we could equally apply this to thinking about why veganism as a practice may lose or gain carriers as well as why meat/dairy consumption does – or indeed why so many people invest themselves in normative gender]. So this may be a productive way of looking at things that I would certainly like to investigate further.

If we are pushing veganism as a panacea we won’t, I think, achieve the more radical social change required. Capitalism will simply co-opt and accommodate veganism as a lifestyle choice as it is already doing.

The struggle for the lives of other animals ought not to be seen as separate from the struggle for the lives of oppressed humans. So I would hope that animal activists learn from and support struggles for feminism, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, queer politics and disability politics and also take their message to these sites of struggle.

CAŁOŚĆ TUTAJ

Tak, ARZone to miejsce bardzo ciekawe i inspirujące, przy czym nie duszne, pojawiają się różne głosy. To miejsce - i to mi się bardzo podoba - wspiera jakby nowy nurt działania. Po pierwsze jest to zachęta do aktywizmu poinformowanego, po namyśle, dyskusji, bez kultu ruchawki, czyli bez tego zawołania "róbmy coś, szkoda gadać, przecież wszyscy chcemy dobrze" (bez dogłębnego pytania, co róbmy i czym jest dobro). Bez pozostawania na poziomie interfejsu, jakby powiedziała Sherry Turkle, która ostatnio panoszy się w moich zwojach. Fragment o Turkle z książki "Prognozy. Trzydziestu myślicieli o przyszłości":

"Bardzo nam (...) odpowiada "odbieranie rzeczy na poziomie interfejsu", bez kłopotania się czy prób zrozumienia tego, co się za nim ukrywa. Gdy zaczynamy doświadczać komputerów w ten sposób, jesteśmy bardziej skłonni zaakceptować ideę, że nie ma potrzeby "zaglądać pod maskę" w innych dziedzinach życia. "Macintosh posłużył za nośnik [postmodernistycznej] idei, że poszukiwanie głębi i mechanizmu jest jałowe, że postawą bardziej realistyczną jest badanie świata przemieszczających się powierzchni niż zagrzebanie się w poszukiwaniach źródeł i struktury" - dodaje Turkle".

Turkle porównuje wczesne komputery, ociężałe, wymagające wstukiwania instrukcji, podobne raczej samochodom, do obecnych, z interfejsem, po którym mogą się ślizgać dzisiejsi użytkownicy, mając styczność tylko z powierzchnią. "Oceniając wszystko po interfejsie", nie uświadamiamy sobie, że jesteśmy w stanie zmienić "ukryte założenia".

Wracając do ARZone - po drugie jest to miejsce powracające do reganowskiego abolicjonizmu, post-francione'owskie. Francione zrobił duży szum, nie dało się kilku rzeczy nie przemyśleć słuchając i czytając go, jednak przyswajając to, co cenne z jego wersji abolicjonizmu, można iść dalej i szukać dalej strategii działania i języka aktywizmu.

Well done I hope it was a life changing experience