The Question of the Animal

Rate of Slaughter of Chickens, Pigs, and Cows in the United States, 2008


Through the intensification of carnophallogocentrism, animals are increasingly entrapped, enclosed, corralled, and sacrificed both symbolically within a single term and literally within what Barbara Noske (1998) calls “the animal industrial complex.” Derrida notes that the conditions under which animals are subjected today are “conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation” (26). Just as farmed animals have been reduced to the general singular “meat,” so has their suffering been hidden from presence “in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide” (26).
http://picasaweb.google.com/Adam.Weitzenfeld/TheIndustrialMeatComplex#


Free Range Studios (2003) The Meatrix




PETA (20014) "Meet Your Meat"

NOTCOT: Banksy's Village Petstore & Charcoal Grill from Jean Aw on Vimeo.

Banksy (2008) "Village Petstore & Charcoal Grill"




To Love or Kill: Man Vs Animal



The Onion (2010) "Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday"






Koko All Ball






Hero dog saves another after it was hit in the highway.






Dans Le Couloir De La Mort (Death Row)






Maxine's Dash for Freedom






Georges Franju (1949) Le Sange de Betes










Nature's tools! How birds use them - David Attenborough - BBC wildlife


Wild crows inhabiting the city use it to their advantage - David Attenborough - BBC wildlife


Birds With a Memory to Envy


Christian the Lion



Leopard seal teaches photographer how to catch penguins



Monkey kitten


Crow adopts kitten


MUST WATCH: A Lioness Adopts a baby antelope. A short documentary that will open your eyes.


Leopard saves baby baboon


HIPPO SAVES IMPALA


Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry Part A 3/5


Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry Part A 4/5


Shirley and Jenny reunited


Dog Cat Rat


Dog and Elephant, odd couple


snake Hampster


The Orangutan and the Hound


The Tortoise and the Hippo


Mississippi Baby Squirrel Adopted By Mother Cat Learns How to Purr


Polar bears and dogs playing

Existential Animal: The Inhumanity of Man

Philosophy in Film:
Existentialist Film Series

Fridays 2-5pm @ ENV 190

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. Man wants to know that his life has counted, if not for himself, then at least in the scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace of meaning.

The paradox is that evil comes from man’s urge to heroic victory over evil. The evil that troubles him the most is his vulnerability; he seems impotent to guarantee the absolute meaning of his life, its significance in the cosmos... Men cause evil by wanting to heroically to triumph over it, because man is a frightened animal who tries to triumph, an animal who will not admit his own insignificance

-Ernest Becker in Escape from Evil (1975: 4, 135, 151)

INTRO

[SEP 10] Waking Life (Richard Linklater 2003)

DEATH

[SEP 17] The Seventh Seal (Ingar Bergman 1957)

[SEP 24] Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa 1952)

IDENTITY

[OCT 1] Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman 2008)

[OCT 8] Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze 1999)

MEMORY

[OCT 15] La Jette (Chris Marker 1962, 26min)

[OCT 22] Memento (Christopher Nolan 2000)

POSTHUMAN

[NOV 5] Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshi 1995)

[NOV 12] Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982)

APPLICATION

[NOV 19] Flight from Death (Patrick Shen 2003)

* Also watch some great animal documentaries.

The Humane Myth: Le Sang des Betes

Gastronomica:

This 22-minute documentary established Franju as a formidable French filmmaker, and the slaughterhouse as a horror house within contemporary society. Here, a peaceful Paris suburb also yields an endless carnage of sheep, cattle, and horses, bludgeoned to feed meat-loving humans. Franju's work is viciously graphic and surrealistic, perfectly and simultaneously attractive and repulsive.

I think it is naive for people to think that industrial slaughter has made killing more humane or cruel than it was previously; in some ways it may have become even more "humane." Niether "Old MacDonald's farm" nor "humane" killing of animals ever existed ni the past. Both are romanticised images of a past that never was and never will be--just as is the "noble savage." Each are abject misrepresentations, revisionist apologetics, a denial of our own crimes.

Anyways, I think Franju's Le sang des bêtes (1949) may be one of the first documentaries on slaughterhouses and illustrates this point. I at least cannot watch the scene with the calves and not feel the perversity of such a relationship between humans and other creatures. Slaughter can never really be a compassionate and dignified act. At its worst, it is cruel, unnecessary, and arrogant. And at its best... well such only exists ni the abstract, an abstract whereby we intend only human character and experience, not the experience of the animal other who falls victim to our whims.

[Fastforward to 3:00, 7:50, 14:00 for the "best" of the worst examples. From 14:00 on, it's difficult not to be moved to anger andd/or tears or both. I think this video highlights the wrongness in killing naimals much better than Meet your Mea and similar videos that concentrate more on the suffering/welfare (it seems that death may even be a good thing in the case of those CAFO animals). Here we do not care how well the animals are treated before, we are regardlessly disgusted by the disloyalty and arrogance inherit within slaughter]

Sexuality = Animality = Mortality?

Obviously, many snakes and spiders are highly venomous and potentially could give humans fatal bites. To what extent are these fears evolutionary and cultural constructs?

Is it possible that the fear of these particular animals has been heightened by not only their cultural construction but also the heigtened fear of death in many modern/industrial Western cultures?

A little while back, lisa @ Sociological Images made a post on the use of arachnids and spiders in safer sex PSAs to represent sexually transmitted infections.Interestingly, the snake--a mythologically feminine animal--here is associated with men (for obvious reasons). The spider, of course, is often associated with women (think about the Greek myth of the spider as well as other Spider woman myths around the world) as well as the film noir notion of the black widow who lures in men with her sexuality and murders them.

While the spider is an acknowledgement of female sexual agency, the symbolism represents it in a fatal way in which the archetypes of womb and tomb are resurrected in our conciousnesses. Women's sexuality (at least in many Western cultures) has thus been associated not only with procreation but also with the destruction of life--as is "the animal" or animality. Thus, the intersections between sexuality, women, animality, and mortality.

Are these intersections with mortality partially responsible for the loathing of women, sexuality, and animality in Western history?


ASLO: See more STI PSAs from Europe and the linking of sexuality to (male/phallic) violence: 1, 2