R. opens her eyes, props herself up on her right arm and sits up. She drags herself into a corner and, still heady from the fall, looks around. Left—and right. Left—and right. White wall tiles, the floor covered with grey, worn linoleum with stains that had proven impossible to remove—that nobody had ever bothered to try to remove. The ceiling is earthen, made out of pressed dirt, in some places concrete, rough, unfinished; the cellar is thus always wet and dusty, and dust fragments are pierced by the neon light emitted by fluorescent lamps enclosed in naked, squarish metal frames. There’s blood everywhere; being sprayed on the white tiles and drying there, giving the tiles an appearance of lacerated skin on which new, fresh wounds open every day, while new/old scabs dry at the same time; on some of the tiles, the dried blood noticeably flakes off the surface, creating a rough, relief-like appearance; the brownish stains on the linoleum and on the metal frame (the “lamp”) are blood as well; especially on the floor, this is either old, dried, or fresh, running … pouring constantly … the blood in this cellar reeks of panic, of fear, of mortal horror.
***
R. now slowly gets up, leaning on the wall and moving carefully through the room that seems endlessly long while being claustrophobically narrow; dirty, restrictive cages with iron bars that had been … gnawed on by somebody in horror, in a ceaseless state of anxiety, fear, panic; here the excrement-strewn concrete floor, there the pounded soil piled with rotting hay. There’s no light. R. relies on a headlamp—and here and there, dead eyes glimmer at her from the dark. This is a dark, dirty underground world that is fundamentally marked by the presence of death. This is a place where man “creates” so that he could slaughter, “creates” so that he could take life: how is this relationship affected by his attitude towards his own impermanence? This is a world within a world that’s generated exclusively by man; without his creative force, this world wouldn’t have existed … it’s a space where humanity (i.e. that which is characteristic of humans) is voided of every signifier that clings to the word; away flow “empathy”, “sympathy”, “altruism” … all that remains of humanity is the core of man’s definition, that which defines him in a place where he can be creative without any limitations whatsoever; man’s creative force is essential here; is this the same force that results in literature, music, art, architecture, philosophy …? The creativity I speak of transcends the necessary partiality of individual works of art, or even oeuvres—it harkens back to the original “creative process”, inscribed within mythologies as “creation”—in this sense, man’s creative force is the source, and the object of his creation is a world within our world. The world we’ve created is a world of eternal darkness. And the creatures we’ve created—not in our own image but of our own will—thus don’t enter a hospitable habitat; they’re forced to live in an underworld, which—in yet another twist—exists on the surface.
***
The cellar is stuffy, humid, the air carries a sickly-sweet stench of decomposing bacteria, stale body fluids and iron; the reek of mutilated corpses. R.’s head spins from the smell. Slowly she walks forward, only now realizing she’s found herself in some kind of a corridor—with new rooms constantly appearing to the left and right. R. turns her head to the left—and to the right, to the left—and to the right. This cell is empty, in this one there’s a wire that runs along a wall, hung with skinned corpses, bloody, veiny, fatty; the white of the bodies shines through the dead musculature and holes gape in the skulls; empty eye sockets. In the following niche (let’s remember: these are no longer pictures, no longer illustrations, this is the /collective/ memory made out of a different substance), there are bodies; many bloodied, exhausted bodies, stacked in piles that rise towards the ceiling; dust settles on the bloodied limbs, a thin layer of grey covers brown fur, the pink skin that’s so similar to human (this, also, is still warm, still pliable, this is just after death …), or red plumage. R. gathers her wits, getting used to the images that surround her, her head no longer spins; she still feels a tugging sensation in her arm, but she goes on without stopping. On her left, clouds of dust that constantly rise (and fall) like the roll of a stifling sea, interfering, blurring the view; but what she sees aren’t shadows; these are bodies of exhausted creatures whose fur is wet, cold; drops of sweat gathering on snouts, tiny droplets of saline underneath the eyes; tears that roll down the hairy cheeks of cows whose huge, sore, wide-open eyes glare at the darkness, at the blood-stained walls, at the rivulets of blood, at the cadavers on iron hooks; this is the invisible nightmare of a past-less everyday.
***
Ignoring the images that rapidly alternate as R. runs at an ever-swifter pace through the rooms of the cellar, she arrives to the end, a wall, sees that she can’t go anywhere, dashes around the room realizing she’s trapped … in spite of these changes, of this carrousel of images, the perspective remains fixed; it’s a view from beneath (which isn’t “physically beneath”), from an angle, a genuine first-person perspective. This is my inner perspective. This is me looking from a frog’s perspective. R. is the externalization of my perspective, an avatar through which I play over internally established images; R. “sees” what I myself see; the fall from the tunnel experienced by R. is a fall from the standard anthropocentric scheme, an acknowledgement of a fundamental social apparatus and a turning-away from this apparatus, and the (in)sight into what’s generally kept hidden in our society generates feelings of powerlessness and captivity. R. is a captive of the cellar.
***
R. stops mid-corridor, her chest rapidly rising and falling, she’s looking nervously to her left—and right, to her left—and right. All around her bloodied walls, again with the white, blood-stained tiles, she remains in the cellar, in the nightmare of yesterday. In this central section, the corridor expands, giving the appearance of a central room, a reception, while all around, along the walls, there are new corridors that lead towards individual cells and arrow loops … R. looks up and only now notices that there’s a kind of slit in the ceiling above her, an aperture in the floor above, which seems to repeat itself at the same spot in each floor; from beneath, R. can see a number of floors above her; they’re overlain, like slides, but she can still make out a foot stepping over glass, the contours of furniture, a piece of paper somebody had let fall to the floor … from above, you can’t see down through the glass; it’s dark, and you can’t see down from above. If you put your face to the floor, shade your eyes with palms to your temples, and look carefully, you might make out a floor or two downwards … but never the cellar. R. moves and looks down … nothing. Compressed soil peeking through torn-up linoleum. There’s nothing below the cellar. And nobody can see into the cellar.
***
A crucial step to entering this nightmare, which I interpret as a derivative of the standard, general reality (as well as its hidden, concealed channel), which, in fact, is in itself stuck on the threshold between the real and the imaginary, as it’s always mediated by manipulation and denial of unwanted channels, unwanted (social) spaces of this same reality because of which it is, after all, even mediated, was a change of perspective. Through this change of perspective, the general reality, what we consider the “reality or realities of our everyday”, is necessarily exposed as a fragmented, distorted picture of the whole, a mere (intentionally) distorted, unfinished mosaic, which is missing just enough pieces (calculated?) to prevent it from becoming a whole—a global perspective. It’s just white plaster with individual pieces of glass sticking out (fragments of something previously broken)
***
Her squatting in the cellar that’s being reflected in my mind’s landscape doesn’t cast R. as the Other, who, in this case, is necessarily an animal (and—again, in this case—necessarily not herself); the animal is who actually shudders in this cellar, this barn, these chains, in this slaughterhouse, staring at men with sightless eyes, reduced, though still alive, to an automaton, the animal whose body is always, without beginning or end, a (self)preserving corpse, which, however, is not taboo anymore; never understood as holy or untouchable and neither as grotesque or morbid—it’s a product as well as a mechanism that provides the product. R. moves back to the cell with the pile of corpses—initially, it seems this is simply a heap, that bodies had been thrown over each other without sense or reason; but then R. sees that they form a barricade of sorts, a wall, almost; these unburied bodies—the bodies of redundant calves, the bodies of chicks hatched in egg factories, the bodies of piglets that died from exhaustion—signify a dividing line, a difference, a distance from something; what? R. takes a step forward, again with this animated, dead step of hers, and buries her hands in the wall of blood; one hand here, the other there, this corpse goes here, this one goes there … if she wants to see what it is that lies on the other side (where does this cell extend to?), R. must move body after body; her arms are bloody up to the elbows, her hands filthy with sweat and mud that stick to the skins of the dead. She moves slowly, the bodies are heavy, and R. is working alone. Gradually, an opening appears among the corpses, R. moves closer, drawing her face up to the tiny mutilated bodies, and looks through the aperture amid the bodies; there are graves behind this wall. Gravestones. Solid (eternal) stone monuments with dates of birth and death; marked graves of people. The animals are robbed of memory—the dividing line is preserved until death … and beyond. The animals whose bodies make up the wall are merely a side product; those that aren’t have even their bodies taken from them in death; cut up in the process of fragmentation, of separation into pieces, the body ceases to be a body, ceases to be a whole. In a way it could be said that this is the point at which the role that had been played by the animal is complete; the slaughterhouse receives living animals and gives out meat. Cut up corpses, which, however, aren’t corpses, because a corpse implies a deceased, implies a dead subject, while animals have their deaths taken away from them. Only those animals that die from exhaustion, those that are killed as refuse—those unfit for consumption, which become waste, only they win back their own deaths; when such an animal dies, its body is sometimes thrown away as garbage; in the decomposition of its body, the animal shakes off the shackles of culture that had been forced upon it—it is expelled from the system and suddenly again becomes a being in itself. The tyrant retreats—and in its death, the animal exists free of its relationship with him.
***
R. moves away from the opening in the wall of corpses, takes a step backwards. At her feet lies a torn-off head of a barely hatched chick, its eyes cloudy with cataracts. As they become subject to culture, as we perceive (and use) them as mechanisms, (farm) animals are necessarily reified; sight is taken away from them (they don’t watch, but are watched), which also means that the animal (seen from the perspective of all who live in these floors; bright ones as well as pastel ones and black and white ones, which further means “seen from the general human perspective, irrespective of social categories, regardless of what they’re based on”) ceases to exist as a subject, however, being an organism, in cannot wholly become a mechanism; it is stuck on the border between the living and the non-living. There are thus two levels, two perspectives that determine the mode of existence of (farm) animals: on the one hand, there’s the subjective, individual perspective of the animal itself; at this level, the animal exists as a feeling being that expresses its interests, exists as a subject, and on the other hand, there’s the human perspective, which gives farm animals the status of property. By construing the farm animal as such a “mechanism”, man robs it of the possibility of having a perspective—and consequently of cognition, of sensing a given situation, position, experience, its own participation, it own interests. This results in the animal being excluded from the moral community, while its quasi-experience is related through the perspective of the tyrant—and this quasi-perspective is the commonly accepted “perspective”.
***
R. steps backwards out of the cell, takes two steps forward along the corridor—seeing already the stone wall that terminates the corridor—when her attention is grabbed by the room on her left; another cell … there’s nothing inside, the walls are blackened, stone, the floor is cold, solid, concrete, but undamaged. In the centre of the room, there’s a single chair. R. enters—this is another one of those moments when the game starts playing itself, like a movie—and the door behind her suddenly closes. R. sees the crossbar move as if tugged by an invisible force—she leaps to the door, but it’s locked and doesn’t budge. For a moment, the room fills with total silence and impenetrable darkness. Then the walls begin gradually filling with white, neon light: the white creeps across the blackness, it looks like water slowly running through rapids … it’s becoming brighter and brighter; emptiness—whiteness—is invading the room, and R. is suddenly plunged into it, seemingly disappearing herself; her limbs are turning pale, almost transparent: a silent witness from the beyond. In the moment when it seems that the whiteness-emptiness (a black hole?) has swallowed the world, at the peak of brilliance, white turns into black—and then things start becoming clear; the room is becoming—anew. The walls are covered by white tiles separated (or—conversely—bound) by tan grout. Slowly, an iron structure begins resolving itself within the room, a conveyor belt lined with workstations, individual rusting machines that each perform their functions. Steel cables are stretched along the walls, beneath them a water-filled moat, in the background gas chambers surrounded by more steel cables. The cell is becoming a collage of different rooms; here the walls are covered with tiles, there they’re unfinished, spattered with blood, somewhere else there’s nothing, no traces … R. floats under the ceiling like a ghost (her body resting motionless on a chair), observing the room from a bird’s-eye view, noting that it’s gradually beginning to fill up, with the machines creaking into motion. R. floats down, descends to the centre of the room above the wide black conveyor belt crowded by bright-yellow chicks chirping with terror; the black conveyor belt (which is the same one used at supermarket registers) keeps steadily rolling on and on and on … at its end, the chicks fall into a funnel-like iron pail; in the pail, rusted iron blades: the chicks that fall onto them are alive, just barely hatched, a day old, perhaps two, three at most. These chicks are waste, the refuse of the egg industry; thrown out after their death—the death in which, free of their relationship with the tyrant, they may shake off the shackles of culture (the state of being less than an object, being waste) and revert back to nature. R. moves, floats into the gas chambers; within them there are screaming pigs (their screams so … human), scratching at the walls (gas chamber walls are always all scratched) wanting to escape; the gas is burning them from the inside out, the first to feel it are their hearts and brains: this is followed by epileptic-like spasms, their bodies convulse, their breaths become deeper; their lungs trying desperately to draw in air … until they give in. They seem to slip into a state of deep unconsciousness … R. slips with them as they continue their journey along a rusted conveyor belt; they’re hanging in the air by their legs; their throats have been cut … R. turns, spins around … behind her an iron screw thread with enclosures radiating out from it like cold, metallic sunrays—left and right. Left and right. Cows in the enclosures. Men in suits start pouring in from all sides … approaching them, inserting fists into their vaginas, fists in which they hold the seed of bulls—bulls that had recently been sexually pleasured by other suited men (in a different building similar to this one, in a different part of the anti-ecosystem); the men rubbed the bulls’ penises with their hands, catching their sperm in plastic buckers … R. spins around; the cows are now calving … calf heads starting to make their way from out of their vaginas; black and white calves, wrapped in their mothers’ mucus and blood … as soon as they hit the ground, they’re swaddled by their mother’s tongue that starts washing them—but never completes its task; the suited men approach, tearing the barely born calves from their mothers, carrying them away in wheelbarrows … R. turns around again, and the cows are screaming (screaming is an inarticulate sound; screaming is universal), their udders caught in the sucking cups of pumps while the milk runs along reddish tubes into a large collection container—the cows are part of a mechanism; their screams mingle with the creaking of unoiled hinges. The images suddenly fuse, alternate, pulse … the cell reeks of death. Chickens hanging by their feet and with their heads submersed in water vibrate with electrical current that flows through them, there’s a cat with iron bars in anus and mouth being burned by electricity from the inside as well, a rabbit with an open wound through which tissue can be seen, a monkey with its skull opened, with brain plainly visible … then the calves again: hanging from a steel cable with blood flowing from their cut throats; one of them opens its eyes, the forehead shot hadn’t put it out … it’s woken up during the bleeding-out process. Its eyes take in the whole room … full of mortal terror … silently asking why. (For what?) A pound of flesh. And not a droplet of blood. Until then it should hang … The crossbar on the door moves. R. winces in the chair. Wakes up.
[…]
R., who had woken up with a scream, tries to catch her breath, looking around, left—and right. Left—and right. Nothing. An empty room; the same blackened stone walls, concrete floor … only a shattered lock lying on the floor by the door … She gets up and walks to the doorway with her knees shaking, bends down and puts the lock in her sack. She then exits the cell, goes back into the corridor, back to the antechamber that seems to be a starting point for all other rooms—a hub of sorts; this is where the cut should be made … R. sits on the floor, against the wall, leans on the/a metal table. Suddenly a hacked-off bovine head appears in front of her—the animal is using its long tongue to lick around its muzzle, reaching towards its cheekbones … its eye sockets are empty. The Other that lives in the cellar is a second-order Other; entering its perspective is doubly impossible because it is an Other without (human) language, as this makes the dominant side’s position even stronger; man generates speech as an incredibly dominating mechanism; language is what precedes every concept, every apparatus—through language, society establishes itself as a complex, abstract system that’s accessible only back through itself. From an anthropocentric viewpoint, existence at the conceptual, abstract level is only possible through language … similarly, conscious thoughts form through the relationships between signifiers and the signified; and through the interpretation of these relationships. In this sense, man denies animals the status of thinking, feeling beings with interests because animals don’t use human speech. But of course, in doing so, man ignores, even nullifies, all other forms of speech. However, vocal communication is not (necessarily) verbal; an individual voice that may serve as the language of communication, the means of establishing a channel, a bridge between the Self and the Other, can be found in a scream, as well as in communication that’s not auditory at all; e.g. touch, facial expression, body language, smell … can all be a means of communication. However, by focusing on the differences in this context, we relegate the Other to a status where they can under no circumstances develop a (social) voice, as although there are contexts (e.g. when dealing with babies) where we pay heed to these languages (that are capable of communication!), we reject the possibility of them having any value in the context of dealing with animals—particularly farm animals. The animal is thus constituted as the Other whose perspective we inevitably deny and whose voice we inevitably suppress. It is necessary—should we want to overturn this relationship and create a new one—to try and look the Other eye-to-eye, to decrease the distance, to decipher and give voice to other (non-verbal) languages and then lend our own voice to the Other; even if we ourselves thus become captives of the cellar, which in this sense means accepting a certain structural role within society, from which it is possible to speak—but impossible to be heard, as any voice, any language that establishes itself in this role is relegated to social non-existence.
***
In the case of speciesism (which is, as has already been said, intolerance towards other species), I, as a human, almost (except in cases of self-discrimination, i.e. species-based intolerance perpetuated by Homo sapiens sapiens against Homo sapiens sapiens), cannot be the Other (man is never discriminated against because of his species), which is why my position is so borderline; both distant and close, not the tyrant’s and not the victim’s; speciesism is discrimination wherein the hierarchic relationship between the superior and the inferior is, more obviously than anywhere else, in any other case, encroached on by a third position, let’s call it a position of mediation, of agency. Furthermore, this type of Otherness is special in another way; it’s the Otherness all other types of Otherness are calibrated against—when e.g. the woman is constituted (and has been constituted) as the Other, she is always compared to an animal; she is irrational like an animal, untamed/wild like an animal, close to nature like an animal, unable to make decisions and judgements like an animal, etc. In this respect it might also be useful to note that the animal is often represented as “one with nature or the environment” and thus denied the experience of a monad and the subjectivity of its experience. And similarly, the (social) attitude towards women: the woman has a profound connection with nature, is one with nature … her experiences less subjective than man’s—the woman is a personification of nature, personification of the environment, while the man is a subject, plucked out of nature and thus a monad in the true sense of the word. The situation is similar in the case of xenophobia and racism; the Other is always related to the animalic; the animal is the Other through which the fundamental aspects of the relationship between “nature” and “culture” are established; the animal is the creature that lives in tune with “nature”, with its “instincts”, its “wild nature”, the creature that is “irrational”, “mindless”, “not conscious” … the cultured creature distances itself from nature, and the uncultured is pushed towards it. The duality of the “male” and “female” principles can be understood in this sense as well; in this case, the woman is constrained by nature, unable to break free of it (because limited by her own “womanhood”); the one moving away from nature is “man” (man as a social construct, as an idea); and that which fundamentally determines the dividing line between nature and culture, between the ability to break free and the inevitability of being part of “nature”, is the animal. Without the animal there’s no line; it cannot be relegated to non-living nature, as the distance between human existence and the existence of e.g. a stone is simply too great. The animal must in this sense be kept as the Other, and should we allow it to break free from this definition, all other categories of Otherness would fall as well, as they’d lose the fundamental benchmark against which they’re established.
***
As the hologram disappears, glass walls start going up all around R.; before she can move, she’s already imprisoned in a glass cube; she pushes against the glass with her hands, but it’s too solid for her; she’ll never shatter it merely using the force of her hands. Her cage is too small for her to be able to get up, and all she can do is bend forward, pushing her knees towards her chest, hugging them and leaning her head on them; if she makes herself small, the space around her seems bigger. Suddenly the images she’d seen before start alternating again around her cage … the cellar is filling up and emptying; further and further scenes of slaughter, blood, suffocation, mud, sooty skins, chopped-off heads (where do all these heads go? what about all the brains?). In her position, R. is invisible (stuck in a kind of existent non-existence), can’t reach those who fill up the cellar or those who fill up the floors of the skyscraper, part of which are these cellars. She’s stuck down here, with dust-covered, wounded cadavers, with masses of muscle, veins and fat hanging on hooks with gaping holes in their skulls, whose ontological status, from the perspective of those who inhabit the upper floors (bright, pastel, grey and brown, black and white …), is no different from the status of those (still living) dairy cows, those barely born calves; part of a mechanism, not an organism. If we connect the previously stated, i.e. that the animal is the Other that serves as a measure for determining all other types of Otherness, with this total mechanization of the animal, we can say that the animal is also the aspect through which we can penetrate deepest into nature (and penetration, even invasion, is the inherent part of the general mode, of the general apparatus); in a sense, the animal is that aspect of nature that man can claim ownership of, that man can own, change and cultivate, because animals change from one generation to the next—strengthening human society, which represents a growing part of natural processes.
***
Insofar as we want to overturn this relationship, or resolve it, we must overturn our own (anthropocentric, intra-social) perspective. Such a shift of perspective implies attempting to come closer to the space, the position of the Other that I/we cannot be. To come closer to the Other, in relation to whom we always, through social determination, play the role of superior, of the tyrant—irrespective of our personal position; just as “Male” feminists cannot see through the eyes of the “Woman” (in this case, when I speak of the “Woman”, I understand her as the social construct of the “Female”, with the same going for “Men”), but can only ever come closer to it and thus take the position in which they can intra-socially—i.e. “in society’s eyes”—never completely disburden themselves of their own privilege (as this are also a thing forced upon them by society and stemming from the toxically masculine underlying social structure), so man can never truly take the position of the animal; we can only ever come closer. And such progress always stigmatizes the individual, relegates them to a certain second-order Otherness—they’re stigmatized because they’re violating their own privilege, thereby—again from a very intra-social perspective—denying it from others and thus endangering the existing social apparatus. At the same time, the position—again—functions sort of like a shield; insofar as the individual who has been relegated to this second-order Otherness starts focusing on themselves, they move away from the original Other and the starting relationship, again not opposing this relationship. However, by changing our perspective, we can nevertheless arrive (at least) to an awareness of the previously stated insights (and modify our behaviour accordingly). We can acknowledge that anthropocentrism and speciesism deny non-human animals a perspective and language, as well as (even consequently) the capacity to feel, think, be (self-)aware, etc. We can also realize that a denial of the perspective (or language) implemented by the tyrant from his (necessarily subjective) position never (not even in the case of speciesism) implies any kind of “real” state of things (should something like that even exist) and that such denial does not constitute an actual absence of a characteristic nor a correct or accurate, precise … assessment of the relationship between the absence of the given characteristic and the implications drawn from this by the tyrant; the relationship is always determined subjectively, from the position of the one with the (social) power to generate mechanisms and apparatuses according to which the relationship should function; this also means that such relationships—as well as ideologies that stem from them—cannot be relied upon; insofar as the personal freedom of one of the participants in the relationship is infringed upon, insofar as the relationship is one of ownership, this is necessarily a relationship that’s determined subjectively, and from one perspective only. It’s also a relationship that is established in advance. Only afterwards does the tyrant generate an ideology that provides the relationship with definitions, positions it and establishes it as valid: ideology is thus necessarily established in such a way that it labels anything that perpetuates the master-slave relationship and serves the tyrant’s interests as acceptable, even “necessary”, “inevitable”. In the case of racism, the difference is based on skin colour, from which all other qualitative signifiers follow, which, however, are not causally linked to the isolated fact of a different skin tone (and other physiological characteristics); similarly, we can say that man bases his attitude towards animals on his own perceived superiority; this superiority is again (as in all other oppressive relationships) determined from the tyrant’s position, it is a human construct—with this I mean that the superiority (established by attaching value judgments to value-neutral differences) is an intra-social category, an element of carnism, and the very idea, the very conception of superiority showcases this fundamental rule that it’s used to try and safeguard; that is, at the heart of the concept of superiority is the premise that “superiority” (e.g. superior intelligence) justifies oppression. This is, of course, a problematic idea; the presence or absence of an arbitrary characteristic cannot be the measure by which to determine whom it should be (un)acceptable to oppress. (And yet we keep doing it—precisely because of the oppressive nature of the relationships we create.)
***
What’s particularly problematic at the global level is that the position of power, or rather, the hierarchically superior position, never takes on the perspective of the victim; exploitation based on denying others the right of having their interests taken into account is thus evident in other intolerances as well, in those perpetuated by one social group against another, all within the human species. As interests are always tied to rights, taking on such a perspective or viewpoint is always tied to the accumulation of rights, based on one hand solely on ideology (in itself established as an unequal relationship) and on the denial of rights on the other. In this sense, we cannot speak of (un)acceptable actions, we cannot speak of (im)moral actions, as nothing is truly (un)acceptable or (im)moral; these terms are used based on what an individual, social group or political player may do. They are used for actions that either tear down (these are immoral, unacceptable) or uphold (these are moral and acceptable) the existing social order. It’s irrelevant to ask whether a certain action is morally (un)acceptable, as that is always determined by the social context in which it is taken. Rather, it’s crucial to ask what are the consequences of this action and what’s the mode of action according to which the given action is taken: we can always act in such a way as to limit the “moral community”, excluding from it as many individuals or social groups as possible (in accordance with their specific physiological or psychological characteristics, which we always evaluate according to our ideology), however, we may also act in such a way as to expand the “moral community”: meaning that we include as many individuals and social groups (and try to maintain a non-ideological attitude towards their specific characteristics). The first case inevitably results in oppressive relationships and their monstrous derivatives, while in the second case, relationships have to be established without oppression and interests of all involved must be taken into account. This is a change affecting our fundamental behavioural mode; a rejection of the exclusivity of personal freedoms, of privilege, established based on arbitrary signifiers, from a position of power, a rejection of master-slave relationships, etc.
***
R. is still imprisoned in the glass cube; she’s excluded, isolated. Unable to establish a relationship with anybody—not with these down here nor with those up there. Still—as evident—it’s the nature of the relationship that determines the apparatus, the mode of interaction, the (structural) roles assumed by individual players, etc. In this regard, it should also be useful to note that all our relationships are such that they fundamentally deny the underlying nature, the underlying definitions of “relationship” on one hand and “relation” on the other; a relationship is created through communication, in the relation between one element, one player, with another, with a new category arising from their interaction; a relation, on the other hand, is so fundamental that we may not even consider it very often—but it would be impossible to exist in isolation, without a relation to one’s environment (without e.g. the organism adapting to its habitat); in a relation, both players are always invested; in an oppressive relationship, however, the will of one of the players is dominant at the expense of the other player—in this sense, it’s all about the excessive implementation of one aspect through the nullification of the other; the oppressive relationship not only generates a new entity; it tears down an existing one that’s involved in the relation. In this sense, man, through his (global) activity, shows his tendency towards total tyranny; however, because man cannot exist without relation, as relations are what bind him to his life, this fundamental mode of activity is not merely destructive, but also self-destructive; man is destroying his own habitat. Destruction is fundamental to the concept of humanity.
***
The crucial thing revealed to the frog’s viewpoint, looking out from the glass cage in which R. is crouched, is the obviousness of pain (bodily and physical, mental; often withheld, denied, or ignored as unessential, unimportant, even necessary) that forces the one crouching to give a voice to languages formed without regard to speech; to the language of facial expression, the language of inarticulate screams of panic, fear, pain, that are no different from human screams, the language of gesture, the language expressed through posture and through one’s eyes. Accepting these languages, these codes of communication, necessarily points beyond our differences to the similarities between humans and non-human animals—but it’s not about seeking sameness, it’s about tolerating difference; insofar as we don’t tolerate it, we again find ourselves in the position outlined above; trying to tear ourselves away from what keeps us alive; in a sense, the fundamental gist of the enforcement of culture is denying our instinct of self-preservation; we simply don’t act in a self-preserving way—and that’s the mode of operation supported by the collective consciousness.
Fragments translated by: Jernej Županič
