Abstract
Critical posthumanism provides the overarching theoretical impulse for this book, while the practical and analytical framework is inspired primarily by Foucault in combination with social practice theories. Critical posthumanism, as described by Cudworth and also Cudworth and Hobden, addresses what some scholars perceive as a prevailing human-centrism in certain accounts of posthumanism. In this chapter, I provide a broadly contextualised explication of critical posthumanism before introducing Foucault’s work and clarifying how it aligns with this explicitly emancipatory approach. I then articulate what Foucault’s theorisations on power, knowledge, language, discipline, sexuality, and ethics contribute to a study of meat’s persistence in social practices, and how I apply these to critically explore the persistent edibility of food animals among self-identified producers and consumers of ethical and sustainable meat.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Citing Gillian Rose, Mei-Po Kwan explains, “Hybrids ‘transgress and displace boundaries between binary divisions and in so doing produce something ontologically new,’ […] hybrid geographies are geographical practices (or ‘boundary projects’) that challenge the boundary and forge creative connections between social-cultural and spatial-analytical geographies” (2004: 758). Whatmore describes “hybrid mappings” that “emphasise the multiplicity of space-times generated in/by movements and rhythms of heterogeneous association” (2002: 6).
- 2.
- 3.
The only other accounts of critical posthumanism that I have found are similarly inattentive to anything other than the human. The prefix ‘critical’ is used rather to describe a critical approach to theories and concepts of posthumanism itself, rather than society, social structures, and systems of power, as in critical theory and critical animal studies (see, for example, Herbrechter 2013a, b; Banerji and Paranjape 2016; forthcoming BRILL series titled Critical Posthumanisms: www.brill.com/products/series/critical-posthumanisms).
- 4.
- 5.
In every way imaginable, including (but not limited to) materially, biologically, physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
- 6.
In Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, Foucault notes “the long history of connection between alimentary ethics and sexual ethics” (1985: 51). These together relate to food, drink, and sex—the “three basic appetites”, as Foucault (49) calls them, or, according to Aristotle, the “three common pleasures” (51). Many scholars since have also explored this connection (e.g. Probyn 2000; Cudworth 2011; Potts and Parry 2010), and it serves as a constant source of symbolic and narrative texture for works of art and literature across a variety of media (e.g. Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969); Jim Crace’s The Devil’s Larder (2002); Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and the more recent Raw (2017) by Julie Ducournau, among others).
- 7.
The panopticon is an architectural form that Bentham proposed for the design of prisons. It comprises a central tower from which the many can be observed by the one, thereby reversing the principle of the dungeon. Instead, visibility becomes a trap (Foucault 1977: 200).
- 8.
Which is an aspect of ‘conscious’ consumerism more broadly—the increased transparency and de/re-fetishisation of production processes.
- 9.
In terms of what is regarded as edible, how it is obtained, what purpose different foods are understood to serve both physically and symbolically, and the methods and tools used to prepare food for consumption.
- 10.
In ‘The Skyscraper’, Horkheimer (1978: 66–67) paints a critical and vivid picture of the social order, at the base of which, “we encounter the actual foundation of misery on which this structure rises … Below the spaces where the coolies of the earth perish by the millions, the indescribable, unimaginable suffering of the animals, the animal hell in human society, would have to be depicted, the sweat, blood, despair of the animals … The basement of that house is a slaughterhouse, its roof a cathedral, but from the windows of the upper floors, it affords a really beautiful view of the starry heavens”.
- 11.
Meaty practices are conceived broadly as all practices that are in any way connected to the production and consumption of meat and the use of ‘food’ animals where their constitution as food is implicitly accepted. These include, for instance, any practices that involve the sourcing, buying, and eating of meat, practices relating to the breeding, purchase, feeding, rearing, trading, marketing, and general ‘production’ of meat, and other practices where ‘food’ animals might feature, for instance, as entertainment (e.g. petting zoos, rodeos), or objects of welfare efforts.
References
Acampora, R. (2016). [Provocations from the Field] Epistemology of Ignorance and Human Privilege. Animal Studies Journal, 5(2), 1–20.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2004). The Open: Man and Animal. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Alberts, P. (2011). Responsibility Towards Life in the Early Anthropocene. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 16(4), 5–17.
Alloun, E. (2015). Ecofeminism and Animal Advocacy in Australia: Productive Encounters for an Integrative Ethics and Politics. Animal Studies Journal, 4(1), 148–173.
Bai, X., van der Leeuw, A., O’Brien, K., Berkhout, F., et al. (2016). Plausible and Desirable Futures in the Anthropocene: A New Research Agenda. Global Environmental Change, 39, 351–362.
Banerji, D., & Paranjape, M. R. (2016). Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures. New Delhi: Springer (India).
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham; London: Duke University Press.
Bennett, C. E., Thomas, R., Williams, M., Zalasiewicz, J., et al. (2018). The Broiler Chicken as a Signal of a Human Reconfigured Biosphere. Royal Society Open Science, 5(12), 180325.
Biermann, F., Bai, X., Bondre, N., Broadgate, W., et al. (2016). Down to Earth: Contextualizing the Anthropocene. Global Environmental Change, 39, 341–350.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge; Malden: Polity Press.
Calarco, M. (2008). Facing the Other Animal: Levinas. In Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (pp. 55–78). New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press.
Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. Boston; New York: Houghten Mifflin.
Castree, N., & Nash, C. (2004). Mapping Posthumanism: An Exchange. Environment and Planning A, 36(8), 1341–1363.
Cavalieri, P. (2008). A Missed Opportunity: Humanism, Anti-humanism and the Animal Question. In J. Castricano (Ed.), Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World (pp. 97–123). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Chrulew, M. (2012). Animals in Biopolitical Theory: Between Agamben and Negri. New Formations, 76, 53–68.
Chrulew, M., & Wadiwel, D. (2016). Editors’ Introduction: Foucault and Animals. In Foucault and Animals (pp. 1–18). Brill: Leden.
Cole, M. (2011). From “Animal Machines” to “Happy Meat”? Foucault’s Ideas of Disciplinary and Pastoral Power Applied to ‘Animal-Centred’ Welfare Discourse. Animals, 1(4), 83–101.
Cole, M., & Stewart, K. (2014). Our Children and Other Animals. London; New York: Routledge.
Cudworth, E. (2005). Developing Ecofeminist Theory: The Complexity of Difference. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cudworth, E. (2008). Most Farmers Prefer Blondes: “The Dynamics of Anthroparchy in Animals” Becoming Meat. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 6(1), 32–45.
Cudworth, E. (2010). ‘The Recipe for Love’? Continuities and Changes in the Sexual Politics of Meat. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 8(4), 78–100.
Cudworth, E. (2011). Social Lives with Other Animals. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cudworth, E. (2014). Beyond Speciesism: Intersectionality, Critical Sociology and the Human Domination of Other Animals. In N. Taylor & R. Twine (Eds.), The Rise of Critical Animals Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (pp. 19–35). Taylor & Francis.
Cudworth, E., & Hobden, S. (2014a). Civilisation and the Domination of the Animal. Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 42(3), 746–766.
Cudworth, E., & Hobden, S. (2014b). Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism. Globalizations, 12(1), 134–148.
Deckha, M. (2012). Toward a Postcolonial, Posthumanist Feminist Theory: Centralizing Race and Culture in Feminist Work on Nonhuman Animals. Hypatia, 27(3), 527–545.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London; New York: Continuum.
Derrida, J. (2008). The Animal that Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press.
Derrida, J., & Roudinesco, E. (2004). Violence Against Animals. In For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue (pp. 62–76). Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, M. (1973). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (R. D. Laing, Ed.). London and New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1985). The Use of Pleasure. New York: Random House.
Foucault, M. (1989). The Order of Things. London; New York: Routledge.
Freeman, C. P., & Tulloch, S. (2013). Was Blind but Now I See: Animal Liberation Documentaries’ Deconstruction of Barriers to Witnessing Injustice. In A. Pick & G. Narraway (Eds.), Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (pp. 110–126). New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Gaard, G. (2013). Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies. American Quarterly, 65(3), 595–618.
Giraud, E. (2013). ‘Beasts of Burden’: Productive Tensions between Haraway and Radical Animal Rights Activism. Culture, Theory and Critique, 54(1), 102–120.
Gunderson, R. (2014). The First-generation Frankfurt School on the Animal Question. Sociological Perspectives, 57(3), 285–300.
Halkier, B., Katz-Gerro, T., & Martens, L. (2011). Applying Practice Theory to the Study of Consumption: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. Journal of Consumer Culture, 11(1), 3–13.
Haraway, D. (1990). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; London: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Combined Academic Publishers.
Herbrechter, S. (2013a). Posthumanism – A Critical Analysis. London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.
Herbrechter, S. (2013b, April). Rosi Braidotti (2013) The Posthuman. Culture Machine: Reviews, 1–13.
Hickmann, T., Partzsch, L., Pattberg, P., & Weiland, A. (2018). The Anthropocene Debate and Political Science. Abingdon: Routledge.
Horkheimer, M. (1978). Der Wolkenkratzer. Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, New York 1978, S. 66.
Hornborg, A. (2017). Dithering While the Planet Burns: Anthropologists’ Approaches to the Anthropocene. Reviews in Anthropology, 46(2–3), 61–77.
Johnson, L. (2012). Power, Knowledge, Animals. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kwan, M. (2004). Beyond Difference: From Canonical Geography to Hybrid Geographies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(4), 756–763.
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press.
Lövbrand, E., Beck, S., Chilvers, J., Forsyth, T., et al. (2015). Who Speaks for the Future of Earth? How Critical Social Science Can Extend the Conversation on the Anthropocene. Global Environmental Change, 32, 211–218.
Machin, D., & Mayr, A. (2012). How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis. London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Merchant, C. (1990). The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: HarperCollins.
Merchant, C. (2005). Radical Ecology: The Search for a Liveable World. London; New York: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception. London; New York: Routledge.
Pachirat, T. (2011). Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven; London: Yale Agrarian Studies Series.
Palmer, C. (2001). ‘Taming the Wild Profusion of Existing Things’? A Study of Foucault, Power, and Human/Animal Relationships. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 23, 339–358.
Pederson, H. (2011). Release the Moths: Critical Animal Studies and the Posthumanist Impulse. Culture, Theory and Critique, 52(1), 65–81.
Peggs, K. (2012). Animals and Sociology. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pick, A. (2012). Turning to Animals Between Love and Law. New Formations, 76, 68–86.
Plumwood, V. (1994). Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London; New York: Routledge.
Plumwood, V. (2002). Decolonising Relationships with Nature. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, 2, 7–30.
Plumwood, V. (2004). Gender, Eco-Feminism and the Environment. In R. White (Ed.), Controversies in Environmental Sociology (pp. 43–60). Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Plumwood, V. (2013a). The Eye of the Crocodile. Canberra: ANU E Press.
Plumwood, V. (2013b). Animals and Ecology: Towards a Better Integration. In L. Shannon (Ed.), The Eye of the Crocodile (pp. 77–90). ANU E Press.
Potts, A., & Parry, J. (2010). Vegan Sexuality: Challenging Heteronormative Masculinity through Meat-free Sex. Feminism & Psychology, 20(1), 53–72.
Probyn, E. (2000). Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London; New York: Routledge.
Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–263.
Rickards, L. (2015). Metaphor and the Anthropocene: Presenting Humans as a Geological Force. Geographical Research, 53(3), 280–287.
Russell, B. (1986). The Forms of Power. In S. Lukes (Ed.), Power (pp. 19–27). New York: New York University Press.
Schatzki, T. R. (2005). Peripheral Vision: The Sites of Organizations. Organization Studies, 26(3), 465–484.
Schatzki, T. R. (2006). On Organizations as They Happen. Organization Studies, 27(12), 1863–1873.
Schatzki, T. (2013). The Edge of Change: On the Emergence, Persistence, and Dissolution of Practices. In E. Shove & N. Spurling (Eds.), Sustainable Practices: Social Theory and Climate Change (pp. 79–110). London; New York: Routledge.
Schatzki, T. R. (2016). Practices, Governance, and Sustainability. In Y. Strengers & C. Maller (Eds.), Social Practices, Intervention and Sustainability: Beyond Behaviour Change (pp. 15–30). London; New York: Routledge.
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham; London: Duke University Press.
Shove, E. (2012). Habits and Their Creatures. In A. Warde & D. Southerton (Eds.), The Habits of Consumption (Collegium - Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences) (pp. 100–112). University of Helsinki.
Sorenson, J. (2014). Thinking the Unthinkable. In J. Sorenson (Ed.), Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable (pp. xi–xxxiv). Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc.
Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007). The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? Ambio, 36(8), 614–621.
Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L. (2009). Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Swyngedouw, E. (2013). The Non-political Politics of Climate Change. ACME: An International E-journal for Critical Geographies, 12(1), 1–8.
Swyngedouw, E. (2015). Depoliticized Environments and the Promises of the Anthropocene. In R. L. Bryant (Ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Taylor, C. (2010). Foucault and the Ethics of Eating. Foucault Studies, (9), 71–88.
Taylor, C. (2013). Foucault and Critical Animal Studies: Genealogies of Agricultural Power. Philosophy Compass, 8(6), 539–551.
Twine, R. (2010a). Animals as Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability and Critical Animal Studies. London; Washington, DC: Earthscan.
Twine, R. (2010b). Intersectional Disgust? Animals and (Eco)Feminism. Feminism & Psychology, 20(3), 397–406.
Wadiwel, D. J. (2002). Cows and Sovereignty: Biopower and Animal Life. Borderlands e-Journal, 1(2), 1–8.
Wadiwel, D. J. (2015). The War Against Animals. Leiden; Boston: Brill Rodopi.
Walker, G. (2013). Inequality, Sustainability and Capability: Locating Justice in Social Practice. In E. Shove & N. Spurling (Eds.), Sustainable Practices: Social Theory and Climate Change (pp. 181–196). London; New York: Routledge.
Warren, K. (1997). Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Warren, K. (2000). Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Lanham; Boulder; New York; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Watson, M. (2016). Placing Power in Practice Theory. In A. Hui, E. Shove, & T. Schatzki (Eds.), The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (pp. 169–182). London; New York: Routledge.
Weisberg, Z. (2009). The Broken Promises of Monsters: Haraway, Animals and the Humanist Legacy. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 7(2), 22–62.
Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Whatmore, S. (2013). Dissecting the Autonomous Self: Hybrid Cartographies for a Relational Ethics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15, 37–53.
Wolfe, C. (2010). What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Arcari, P. (2020). Theoretical Framework: Advancing and Enacting a Critical Posthumanism. In: Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9585-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-9584-0
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-9585-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)