Animals Erased: Discourse, Ecology, and Reconnection with the Natural World

1. Destructive Discourses: Animals within a Symbolic World

19 1 Destructive Discourses Animals within a Symbolic World Fairclough (1992b: 2) describes the “linguistic turn” in social theory, where toward the end of the twentieth century language began to be “accorded a more central role within social phenomena.” The role of language in structuring power relations, in particular, has come under close scrutiny (van Dijk 1997, Fairclough 1989, Hodge and Kress 1993, Fowler 1991). Most of this work on language and power focuses on the role of discourse in oppression and exploitation. For example, the journal Discourse and Society is dedicated to “power, dominance and inequality, and to the role of discourse in their legitimisation and reproduction in society, for instance in the domains of gender, race, ethnicity, class or world religion” (van Dijk 2000). However, with rare exceptions, the role of discourse in the domination by humans of other species has been almost entirely neglected in the field of critical discourse analysis. Power is talked about as if it is a relation between people only; for example, Fairclough (1992b: 64) describes the way that “language contributes to the domination of some people by others” (emphasis added). One of the main reasons that animals tend to be excluded from discussions of language and power is that they cannot use language to resist how they have been discursively constructed. Because of the neo-Marxist roots of critical discourse analysis, analysis focuses on hegemony, where oppression of a group is carried out ideologically rather than coercively, through the manufacture of consent (Fairclough 1992b: 92). In the case of animals, the power is coercive, carried out by a small number of people involved in organizations that farm 20 animals erased and use animals. The animals do not consent to their treatment because of an uncritical acceptance of the ideology of the oppressor, and they cannot be empowered to resist the discourses that oppress them. However, the coercive power used to oppress animals depends on the consent of the majority of the human population, who explicitly or implicitly agree to the way animals are treated every time they buy animal products. This consent can be withdrawn, as has been demonstrated through boycotts of veal, battery farm eggs, cosmetics tested on animals, and, by some, all animal products . It is in the manufacturing of consent within the human population for the oppression and exploitation of animals that language plays a role. Shotter (1993) uses the term “rhetorical-responsive” to describe the way that social constructions exist not in the minds of individual people but within the constant interaction and exchange of information in a society. There is what Kopperud (1993: 20) calls “a pitched battle for the hearts and minds of . . . consumers ” taking place between the meat industry and animal rights activists, a struggle that occurs primarily through language and the media. Jones (1997: 73), for example, found that “public opposition to both the use of animals in scientific research and the killing of animals for fur increased significantly following the high level of media coverage given.” The way that animals are socially constructed influences how they are treated by human society: as Lawrence (1994: 182) puts it, “cultural constructs determine the fate of animals.” These “cultural constructs” are intimately bound up with language and discourse. According to Fairclough (1992b: 64), discourse “is a practice not just of representing the world, but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning.” Van Dijk (1997) considers the link between discourse and society to be through ideology and social cognition. One of the classic senses of ideology is a mode of thought and practice “developed by dominant groups in order to reproduce and legitimate their domination” (25). The primary way that this is accomplished is to present domination as “God-given, natural, benign [or] inevitable (25). Rather than explicitly encouraging oppression and exploitation, ideology manifests itself more effectively by being implicit. This is achieved by destructive discourses 21 basing discourse on assumptions that are treated as if they were common sense, but which are, in fact, “common sense assumptions in the service of sustaining unequal relations of power” (Fairclough 1989: 84). Ideologies, embedded and disseminated through discourse, influence the individual mental representations of members of a society, which in turn influence their actions. These mental representations are part of what Van Dijk (1997: 27) calls “social cognition,” since they are shared among members of a society through participation in and exposure to...