Abstract
Bringing together the discussion and arguments from the book’s three main parts, Chap. 10 shows how orders of knowledge, socialised senses and emotions, and the entitled gaze work rhizomatically, in a nexus of power/knowledge/pleasure, to trap ‘food’ animals in their ‘rightful’ place—that being a state of domination. The mechanisms of power that shape how animals and meat persistently ‘make sense’ are summarised. The chapter then considers whether it is possible that ‘food’ animals could ‘make sense’ in other ways, or be permitted to make no (human) sense, and what sort of dis-ordering of power/knowledge/pleasure this would require. It ends with a critical reflection on the overall contribution of this book and the sort of further research it might prompt into questions of animal use.
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Notes
- 1.
Recent EU, US, and Australian data showing overall increases in per capita meat consumption, primarily from chickens, supports my contention that the overall edibility of animals has not been significantly challenged by such campaigns and interventions that are more prevalent in Westernised countries (Ritchie and Roser 2017; Ritchie 2019; Taylor and Butt 2017).
- 2.
Although most of these things have been or are still done to human ‘others’ they are mostly, except for the last three, considered illegal.
- 3.
To restate, Foucault’s heterotopia set up “unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurate ‘objects’ which challenge the way we think, especially the way our thinking is ordered” (Hetherington 1997: 42). Heterotopia are thus “sites of all things displaced, marginal, novel or rejected, or ambivalent”, and where “meaning is dislocated through a series of deferrals that are established between a signifier and a signified” (ibid.: 46; 43, emphasis added).
- 4.
In Zen Buddhism, instant enlightenment can be achieved via satori. Suzuki describes satori as “the sudden flashing into consciousness of a new truth hitherto undreamed of. […] intellectually, it is the acquiring of a new viewpoint. The world now appears as if dressed in a new garment, which seems to cover up all the unsightliness of dualism” (1964: 65).
- 5.
This trend, which Bridgeman (2016) refers to as “cultural narcissism”, has seen the death of dolphins, sharks, peacocks, snakes, and probably many other animals, and fuels a profitable tourist trade in exotic animals, notably lions and tigers, who are taken from the wild and later killed when they grow too big or aggressive to be used as photo props for tourists (Holloway 2016; Dearden 2014). Christina Best (2015) describes the selfie as a purposeful and, importantly, witnessed, extension of the self into the world, invited or not—one that provides the ‘self’ new ways “to explore and define his or her own self identify” (61).
- 6.
Vint is referring specifically to what she perceives as a miss-fire in the posthumanism of Braidotti, Haraway, and some others.
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Arcari, P. (2020). Undoing Cartographies of Meat. In: Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_10
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