The Dreaded Comparison

A persyn in Toronto recently has brought a form of indiscrimination to the attention of the humyn rights tribunal here in Toronto. Allegedly, her academic superiors refused recommendation to other schools for PhD programs because she believes that humyns and animals demand, presumably, the same moral obligation. This persyn seems to be doing the wrong work in the wrong program. Why the hell would one carry out a discussion concerning animal rights in a faculty of humynists that find the most radical forms to be state-sanctioned disability studies? Of course the expansion of inclusion is important; but give me a break! The reason why social justice is a pile of malarkey is precisely that it is grounded more fundamentally by a call from animals, the wild; no humynist is willing to accept that point. Instead, the line between “reasonable research” and “off-limits research” is reified, and 'wild et. al' is dismissed arbitrarily. Of course, once the social sciences are updated with French Post-Structuralism, say Deleuze or Derrida, AR will be a natural outcome.—In good time. As it stands Anti-Oppression can only (rhetorically) be a matter of humyn privilege.

            Anyways, this persyn has decided to kick up a stink. While it isn’t clear that she has finished her MA and that she is off to carry out a PhD, it seems clear that her desire to study Animal rights (in sociology) has been met with derision. But she has also been referred to as a racist for comparing some humyns to animals. Evidently there is a disagreement over terminology here; but it is curious. It obviously trades on meaning and use. I want to consider her entire claim and also some of her arguments before I turn to this last point and its soundness.

According to her claim, she is being discriminated against because she is vegan and because she believes that the moral imperative to help a humyn is the same call that obliges us to help an animal. Thus, animal rights and humyn rights are on the same foot. It was this ‘religious creed’—her words, certainly not mine—that purportedly got her into trouble; and because vegans follow a certain set of principles and rules, she thinks that she ought to be protected from discrimination, and that in particular, her reputation should not be destroyed because of her beliefs concerning moral obligation. The trouble is that her opinions are racist.

She objects! She identifies as a person of color; so it is impossible for her to be racist. The trouble is that her words have nothing to do with her at all. The form of her words is necessarily racist because it compares the animal to some humyns thereby, essentially, calling them animals. To say that the suffering of animals is anything like the suffering of any humyns is to refer to those humyns as less than humyn. The trouble of course is that the form of words (say, “the ongoing animal holocaust”) cannot escape this kind of racist-trace because the term ‘animal’ is always going to be sorted onto the complement or, outside. Remember that every humyn victory in the social justice world has been a matter of forcing the privileged class (the humyns) to see that “the oppressed” are not animals. To say that animals are anything like some subset of humyns is to necessarily relate some humyns in a direction that they would not desire, indeed, in the direction that “Oppressors” have always sorted them. So, it doesn’t matter that this persyn is Racialized. The function (animal holocaust, say) sorts some set of humyns (presumably not herself) onto the outside of humynity.

Of course there is a difference in use that is present. Some of us see that all the assigned terms and predicates are totally bullshit. But so long as we use the same terms to extend the line of persyn, the traces that precede us will always produce contrary conclusions to those that we desire.

Consider another example that was brought to my attention a while back. Deep Ecologists have always fetishized the idea of Nature as Woman—as caretaker, as Mother, and sometimes, when it suits them, as Wild and uncontrollable fury. To say that rekindling one’s uncontrollable fire is what is really important—in opposition to Stoic Patriarchy—overlooks the fact that this space (the wild) has traditionally been assigned as a lack. So there is a certain sense that even though Deep Ecologists meant the term in a different way, the semantic meaning of the term preceded its use and made it difficult, or even impossible, for deep Ecologists to make their point. This privileging of Mother Nature in the form of desired re-wilding, presupposes that the function of Patriarchy is legitimate in some sense. Deep Ecology supposes that what Patriarchy assigns to Womyn is what should be assigned to all of us. The trouble is that many persyns fought really hard to escape from the lack that they were assigned, and a reassignment is fucked up. 

The dreaded comparison between humyns and animals always reassigns this lack in a racist way, no matter how racialized one is; for even if one is assigning oneself the category of animal (and that is all that one can do) , there is every reason to suppose that one voice is not sufficient to speak for every right to an identity. In other words, just because you identify as an X doesn't mean that you can speak for all others that identify with X or that all X's would agree with your anti-hierarchical claim, and so, your reduction of X-hood to Y-hood by comparison.

The only real group that stands outside in the margins when it comes to similarity with the animal plight is the persyn that has been denied civic status in such and such a state. These persyns are treated "inhumanely" because they have no rights (or, what's the same, because they have animal rights). In order for there to be a positive value, there has to be a negative oppositional place, a place that is denied value so that every other place has value. Paradoxically, even if animals had rights, there would still have to be a place occupied by the reality of being-an-animal and so, being-treated "like an animal".