TALKING LIONS TALKING LION: RHETORIC, RIGHTS, AND THE TYRANNY OF TAXONOMY

Rhys
Southan’s provocative editorial on non-human animal rights (“The Enigma of
Animal Suffering” NYTimes) demands rhetorical understanding. Southan suggests, “For
human analogies to animal farming to have force, the experience of being a
farmed animal should be equivalent to the human experience in superficially
similar circumstances.” Southan’s logic is deeply rooted in well-worn classificatory
schemes. When, for example, Wittgenstein declares that “If a lion could talk,
we could not understand him,” his reasoning is itself an Aristotelian language-game
that makes interspecies experience unbridgeable, a tyranny of taxonomy.
Wittgenstein goes into the problem already biased by biological-behaviorist
definitional categories: a speaking lion’s speech acts are intricately woven
into—as—a lion’s experience (what it is to be a lion) to which
humans have no access, i.e., no access to the form of life that is the speaking
lion’s speech acts, to the shared behavior that would constitute “the system of
reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (P.I.), whether
or not a Cartesian lion sufficient for “BAT-itude” and so on (Hofstadter et
al.). Yet experientialist demarcation rooted in preconceived taxonomic notions of
human and lion collapses if on some level or to some degree (physically,
experientially) a human’s scream and a lion’s roar share some pragmatic function or family
resemblance. Otherwise it would seem that Wittgenstein contradicts himself,
especially given his Beetle in a Box thought experiment that rejects private
language and makes inner workings irrelevant. Furthermore, the old taxonomy doesn’t
differentiate between information, meaning, and understanding, a difference that would suggest that the
all-or-nothing “only humans have language” falls short as an experientialist
category or hard descriptor. If information is passed from lion to
human then a human can have understanding without meaning made between
them, i.e., without normativity. Per Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegelian normativity, reciprocal recognition and inference are not necessary for unidirectional
interspecies understanding. Likewise one ostensibly
understands a computer’s message without knowing what it’s like to be a computer, whether or not a
computer is conscious or has BATitude (Dennett et al.). The commonalities and the
message are only clearer if the lion speaks.  

The new memes reminding us that the police serve to protect people and that Obama should be more outspoken about the recent shootings of police officers are no doubt in response to the strong resentment and growing hostility aimed at police. But this latter resentment is not really about any one police action, e.g., an instance of police brutality, whether racially motivated or not. The resentment is due to the fact that the police, a repressive state apparatus, protect the socioeconomic system categorically. It makes no difference if the system and its laws are hurtful, unfair, and so on, including the ostensible means to bring about positive social change that are already built into the system, e.g., voting. The police are “just doing their job.” And they are.

One here should recall the genius in Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes and the way the text defamiliarizes the relation between subject and state apparatus, citizen and police. Boulle’s gorillas (military-police) help reproduce the orangutan-chimp State (economics, science, and ethos) without ever a moment of reflection or doubt. The gorillas have their guns and horses, and they enforce the law. That’s it.

Now none of this is to suggest that a police officer is a gorilla, or that there is no such thing as a kind cop. Rather, as an institutional, material body, the police are a force that prevents social change unconditionally by protecting and reproducing class relations spontaneously. Like Boulle’s gorillas, the police act on behalf of the State (which, by the way, has itself been defamiliarized as a functionary for the capitalist class, i.e., to legislate on behalf of monopoly and our robber barons as Marx suggested so long ago).

This state apparatus–the police–is indeed a powerful one and certainly in some instances violent and racist. Yet the recent deaths and brutalities (Eric Garner, Sarah Bland, Michael Brown and the events of Ferguson, MO) merely lay bare the larger relation between subject, apparatus, and State. Police racism is absolutely inexcusable and intolerable, but it’s also beside the point. Until one recognizes that larger structural reality, the change one really wants won’t come.