Event overview
This is the final seminar in a series of six, thinking animals in and through scale. Co-hosted by UCL Anthropocene and the Goldsmiths Centre for Critical Global Change.
SCALE: MULTIPLE
Dinesh Wadiwel
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney
ABSTRACT
In the opening pages of the first volume of Capital, Marx observes that capitalism appears, in its totality, as a mass accumulation of commodities. We might similarly observe that in a similar way, animals appear today as mass of living commodities, that are endlessly being multiplied. In this paper, I explore the implications of the vast scale of this multiplication of animal life which has been general tendency of capitalist agriculture. As I argue, this multiplication has served different purposes. Animals are made available as raw materials and labour to enable the overproduction of animal-based foods as a means of generating surplus. Simultaneously, the mass availability of consumption commodities as a result of this production has systematically altered food supplies and the means by which humans reproduce their own labour.
I will finally explore the material relations that sit behind this multiplication of animal life: regimes of mass forced reproduction which are a central component of the biopolitics of capitalist animal agriculture. In this context, not only does capitalism demand the over-production of animals, it by necessity demands the overproduction of animals who will perform the gestational labour of producing animal life. While much animal rights advocacy has been focused on legal ‘personhood’, I will argue that the singular right of animals to refuse this gestational labour is a key tactical goal. If animals had the right to refuse the violence of forced insemination and the gestational work of reproducing the animal labour force of capitalism, then this is the end of animal agriculture.
BIO
Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel is Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies at University of Sydney. He is author of Animals and Capital (Edinburgh UP, 2023), The War against Animals (Brill, 2015) and is co-editor, with Matthew Chrulew of Foucault and Animals (Brill 2017). He is also co-editor of Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures (Sydney UP). He is a member of the Multispecies Justice research group at the University of Sydney, and past Chair of the Australasian Animal Studies Association. In addition, Dinesh is a disability rights researcher, and has recently been part of a team of researchers who have produced two reports for the Australian Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.
ANIMAL SCALES SEMINAR SERIES
This seminar series asks after the disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, empirical, political, ethical, and legal implications of thinking animals in and through scale.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 8 Jul 2024 | 10:00am - 12:00pm |
Accessibility
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