This paper broadens out existing challenges to the divisions between the human and the animal that keep humans distinct, and apart, from other animals. Much attention to date has focused on how the Euro-American individuation of the human subject intensifies the asymmetries inculcated by these divisions. This paper rehearses some of this literature but goes on to attend to how these divisions undercut understandings of sociality and limit social organization to interaction between persons. Drawing together debates around the human/animal relation, the paper juxtaposes different perspectives of nature-cultures to bring ‘worlds’ of relations into view. Specifically, I distinguish here between the state of ‘being alongside’ and the process of ‘being-with’. Ranging from approaches that try to settle ideas of difference through appeals to ‘ethical health’, through to work on identity that ‘unconceals’ a wealth of connection, this distinction will help to keep apart those situated moments of relations, where the constituent parts are left more provisional and contingent, from more sought-out relationships, where a sense of togetherness purposefully dominates the conjoining of activities. Contrasting hybridity as a totalizing form of ‘being-with’, with alongsideness, as a form of intermittent and partial connection, the analysis eschews the obfuscation of difference entrenched in contemporary emphasis on connectivity. Proposing instead the importance of creatures as ‘division preserving', the paper theorizes ways to sustain regard for division as well as connection as key to understanding the arts of dwelling amidst different kinds.

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Effacing the Face: On the Social Management of Moral Proximity:

Being alongside: rethinking relations amongst different kinds

Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned by nature-culture, subject-object, body-mind, individual-society polarities. The articles presented track human/non-human relations through different domains, including: humans/non-humans in history and animal welfare science (Fudge and Buller); the relationship between the way we live, the effects on our natural environment and contested knowledges about ‘nature’ (Whatmore); choreographies of everyday life and everyday science practices with non-human animals such as horses, meerkats, mice, and wolves (Latimer, Candea, Davies, Despret). Each paper also goes on to offer different perspectives on the human/non-human not just as division, or even as an asymmetrical relation, but as relations that are mutually affective, however invisible and inexpressible in the domain of science. Thus the collection contributes to new epistemologies/ontologies that undercut the usual ordering of relations and their dichotomies, particularly in that dominant domain of contemporary culture that we call science. Indeed, in their impetus to capture ‘affect’, the collection goes beyond the usual turn towards a more inclusive ontology, and contributes to the radical shift in the epistemology and philosophy of science’s terms of engagement.

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Naturecultures? Science, affect and the non-human

This article examines the particulars of extreme prejudiced discourse about ethnic minorities in a Romanian sociocultural context. It concentrates on a detailed analysis of a single case taken from a wider project aimed at comparing and contrasting the way Romanians talk about Hungarians with the way they talk about Romanies. The article examines in detail the discourse of a middle-class Romanian accounting for prejudice and discrimination towards Romanies as part of an interview on a series of controversial issues surrounding ethnic minorities. This article tries to highlight and interrogate claims that Romanies are to blame for prejudice against them. The analysis, inspired by a critical discursive approach, has a discursive and conversational analytic focus to examine switches in talk about 'us' to talk that blames 'them'. The analysis suggests that talk about Romanies is more extreme than the anti-alien, anti-immigrant prejudiced talk studied by numerous western critical researchers. It is more extreme because Romanies are not merely portrayed as being different, but also as being beyond the moral order, beyond nationhood, difference and comparison. Talk about Romanies employs a style that, at the same time, denies, but also protects extreme prejudice. This article illustrates and discusses some of the discursive, rhetorical and interpretative resources used to talk about and legitimate the blaming of Romanies. In examining the dynamics of extreme prejudice against Romanies, this article provides a critical investigation of the social and political consequences of extreme discursive patterning. Implications for the study of discursive construction and representation of difference in talk about Romanies are also discussed.

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Accounting for extreme prejudice and legitimating blame in talk about the Romanies

This paper focuses on some of the issues that arise when one treats notions such as depersonalization, delegitimization and dehumanization as social practices. It emphasizes the importance of: (a) understanding depersonalizing, delegitimizing and dehumanizing constructions as embedded in descriptions of located spatial activities and moral standings in the world and (b) invoking and building a socio-moral order linked to notions of lesser humanity or non-humanity, (spatial) transgression and abjection. These concerns are illustrated by taking talk on Romanies as a case in point from interviews with Romanian middle-class professionals. It is argued that a focus on description rather than explanation might be more effective in understanding the dynamics of ideologies of moral exclusion.

/pdf/ideologies-of-moral-exclusion-a-critical-discursive-45pm5sszrn.pdf

Ideologies of moral exclusion: a critical discursive reframing of depersonalization, delegitimization and dehumanization.

In most traditional accounts, to be a witness is to be physically present at an event and report it to those who are absent. The ontological principle that authorizes testimony is the individual's corporeal presence at the event, a presence often vouchsafed by the suffering of the witnessing body. The logical extension of this is that media audiences are not the witnesses of the events they see, but the recipients of someone else's testimony. I take issue with such an account, claiming that contemporary witnessing has become a general mode of receptivity to electronic media reports about distant others. Replacing the ontological primacy of the witness with the interpretive encounter with “witnessing texts,” I focus on these texts’ world-making properties and the imaginative demands they make of their addressees. Mass media witnessing situates this imaginative engagement with others within an impersonal framework of “indifferent” social relations, creating a ground of civil equivalence between strangers th...

Effacing the Face: On the Social Management of Moral Proximity:

Citations

Being alongside: rethinking relations amongst different kinds

Naturecultures? Science, affect and the non-human

Accounting for extreme prejudice and legitimating blame in talk about the Romanies

Ideologies of moral exclusion: a critical discursive reframing of depersonalization, delegitimization and dehumanization.

Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined Lives of Strangers

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