Shame is a particularly fruitful resource for a 'politics of sight'. Shame pierces the indifference and shamelessness of speciesistic habits and clichés that enable us to tolerate the intolerable. While sadness can be an adequate response to the perceived suffering of animals (you can be sad about this suffering even if you are not responsible for it), shame inherently points toward our responsibility for or complicity with it. As such, shame restores our capacity to be affected by the plight of animals, it also has a political affect. It may not only contribute to changes at the individual level (e.g., consumer behavior) but also enable structural change through a critique of the sociopolitical conditions.
THOMAS KAINBERGER: The animal crisis is characterized by indifference. This is partly because everybody knows that farm animals may be used in ways that pets cannot. We farm and consume pigs but not dogs. In this context, shame’s function as an affect makes the ashamed person aware of their responsibility for or complicity with the causes of the farm animals’ plight. Shame pierces the indifference and shamelessness of speciesistic habits and clichés that enable us to tolerate the intolerable. As such, shame restores our capacity to be affected by the plight of animals, inviting critique of the sociopolitical and economic structures that make us apathetic and blind to (certain) animals…
Shame — in contrast to other emotions — is a particularly fruitful resource for a politics of sight. For example, while sadness can be an adequate response to the perceived suffering of animals, you can be sad about this suffering even if you are not responsible for it. In contrast, shame inherently points toward our responsibility for or complicity with it. As shame relates to the causes of suffering, which for farm animals encompass sociopolitical structures and mechanisms (e.g., laws, language, advertisements, etc.), it also is a political affect. Thus, it may not only contribute to changes at the individual level (e.g., consumer behavior) but also — through a critique of the sociopolitical conditions — enable structural change…
For example, in the case of “humane-washing,” industrial farms do not simply hide the reality of their animals’ lives; rather, they “mislead” and “distract”. While these strategies make it more difficult to develop an adequate idea of animals’ lives, they do not simply hide suffering but also disavow it. Humane-washing and other misleading strategies must be seen as part of the collective mechanisms of denial — many of which are widely known but systematically disavowed… This disavowal enables us to cope with the reality of animal exploitation by permitting us to act in spite of our knowledge of it.
We highlighted strategies of downplaying or denying violence against animals in our discussion of the ventilation shutdown; for example, by portraying the event as an unavoidable economic necessity. In addition, the company’s rhetoric about “euthanizing” the animals sought to portray the pigs’ deaths as more harmless than they factually were. Furthermore, those responsible shifted the focus from the animals by depicting themselves as the victims of an allegedly unjustified attack by the whistleblower and other critics.
Disavowal of the animal crisis is also enabled by norms of attention that structure our perceptions. These include our perceptions and our emotions, which are regulated through norms that delineate what we should feel in a given situation. These dominant norms can conjunctively determine an impersonal worldview that in the context of human–animal relations (implicitly) discriminates between unjustified and justified uses of animals. Thus, as our discussion of the ventilation shutdown suggests, certain practices are generally perceived—based on the prevalent norms—as inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals. Therefore, they are more readily condemned than practices involving the use of animals for human consumption because they are seen as sufficiently justified…
Disavowal enables us to act in ways that contradict our knowledge. Crary and Gruen reflect this when noting that it is not what is done to animals that “prompt[s] people to intervene to stop the cruelty and violence”. They argue that something else is required “that would include an appropriate sensitivity to a range of circumstances and attention to the relevant political structures and relations of domination”. The concept of shame is useful here because it disables the pretense of the “as if” that characterizes denial of the animal crisis… The eruption of shame to a hitherto known but denied shameful reality marks the point that the “as if” can no longer be upheld. For the animal crisis, the breakdown of denial may also follow the exposure of a scandalous and shameful reality… that is widely known but denied. SOURCE…
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