Over the past few days I have been having discussions on the animality of language. If you think about it, we are unable to plainly describe animals without using terms doused in racism, sexism and other systems of oppression. Yet all the while the medium through which we look at these things – the medium through which we describe animals, the English language -- is inherently speciesist, because we assume to it be most intellectual form of communication. Though humans do have faculties of reason that other animals do not, there is no reason that we necessarily understand what true reality or perception or intellect is. Other species undoubtedly perceive the world in ways that we will never be able to and , and have a radically different understanding of the world, of relationships, of life. To assume that humans are the superior being is to wed oneself to modernity, to necessarily split oneself from potentially fruitful exploration of postmodernist thought.
As a race, humans are largely unhappy beings, I would argue, and although we have acquired the skills to procure our own food with both efficiency and speed, we have grown further and further from being able to cope with life as a whole. By divorcing ourselves from our immediate connection to the earth, to the natural resources into which we have been thrown, we gain nothing over other species in terms of emotional intelligence. Suicide rates are higher than ever, and is it surprising? As we pack ourselves away into our little cubicles with our iPods and MacBooks and cellphones and STUFF, we try to drown ourselves out, we become more and more detached from our animality, and entrench ourselves into a cold economic system whose goal has little to do with the wellbeing over
I find it interesting to analyze the ways in which humans fight their own animality on a daily basis. For centuries animality has been used to emphasize the inferiority of various oppressed groups such as slaves and women. Not only terms of oppression, but largely derogatory. We see the ways in which the derisiveness of the animal term lessens when we enter the realm of domesticated pets, especially cats and dogs.
- cattle : slaves
- cow : overweight woman, also calls forth the notion of female objectivity
- ass: rudeness, obnoxiousness
- pig: gluttony,
- dog: sexually 'successful,' humorously mischevious, or misbehaving in a way that is largely socially acceptable
- puppy: (as in 'puppy dog eyes' or 'puppy face' or 'puppy love')
- fox: deceiving. sexy
- sheep sheepish, shy, does not think for self
- Snake deceptive, woman, garden of eden
- Turtle slowness, inefficiency
- vulture ruthlessness
Why do we see other species only by these kinds of traits? How would another animal describe humans? What kind of characteristics would we become stereotypes for? [And I wonder how terminology of animality varies from culture to culture.... (Mmmm I smell a research project!)] Every day we try to cover up the fact that we, too, are animals. We clothe our bodies in an effort to forget about them, but in doing so we actually create our own vulnerability. The beings we are so quick to label as 'animals' wear no clothes, thus are technically naked all the time. However, because they never cover up their bodies, they are always simultaneously clothed and not clothed.
We drown out our body odors with perfumes and deodorants. Female-identifying humans often conceal their blemishes, and make themselves up as a piece of art. Menstruation, flatulence, sexual intercourse are all taboo. Though a daily occurence, we all pretend we do not defecate. We turn on the vents, and make our best efforts not to be heard as we pop one out. Perhaps I am speaking from a largely female-oriented-culture-behavior. (Perhaps someone can comment on that, and the ways in which male-oriented behavior around taboo subjects diverges from that of female. -- Judith Butler and her spectrum of gender will be creeping in later, don't you worry anti-gender-binary folks.) Though humans do not technically have control over their physical bodies (lack of control over mental bodies will be addressed later), we seem to treat one another as if we must each take personal responsibility for the blemishes and illnesses that befall us. Just as we keep our 'animals' in cages, so we keep our own animality behind bars.
But just as we lock up our own animality, so we also reproduce these images again and again and again in our every day culture -- as if we are yearning to unlock our full selves, but are bound under lock and key by "reason" and "logic." But because we isolate our own animality -- well, i suppose we can never really separate our animality from our humanity because we humans are animals. Alright so then, we construct this fictional notion of 'animality' and what that should mean for humans. We know that we possess the 'instinctual' qualities of all other species, yet we try with amazing effort to squelch these. To distance ourselves even further from our truth, we use other species to define the qualities which we know lay buried deep within us. Advertisements call upon images of wild and domesticated animals to evoke certain raw emotions and themes. However, like other species, we must recognize that all species cannot be reduced down to one trait. To think of doing this for humankind sounds outrageous. Why not then for other species? No animal within a given species is identical to another. But for the sake of constructing an air of 'intelligence' with the human race, we necessarily associate all non-cognitive aspects of human life with the most basic of basic behaviors and characteristics of other species.
