Response to Jen's post on Human/Animal: Foucault and Berger, Week 3:

Berger reveals the inherit dualism in man’s historical and paradoxical relationship with animals. On one hand, there is this deep and fascinating history of man revering animals and placing them on a God like pedestal to be “observed”, worshipped, and its characteristics be attributed to that of humans. However, the paradox lies when the observation serves as a degradation tactic and inferiority being given an educational cover in the form of the spectacle . The animal is uprooted from his natural environment and taken into one that is artificial and constructed by man. This couldn’t ring more true in my opinion than with the concept of the Zoo or as Berger would call it “enforced marginalization”. Berger says: 'The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.' So while humans think they are gaining more knowledge by visiting the zoo and studying animals, they are in fact “caving” into its to artificiality, thus driving a deeper wedge between them and animals. This is how I interpreted Berger’s “The more we know, the further away they are”. I would even push it further and say “The more we THINK we know, the further away they are, AND THEM FROM US”.

Foucault and Berger both touch on the themes of racial inferiority and heirachy in their writings. Although Berger focuses on Human-Animal interactions, one cannot help but think that he is somehow subliminally referring to the interactions and relations humans have with each other, and what better way to understand ourselves than through animals, who have taught us all the basic needs for survival since the dawn of time. I found that reading Berger first and then moving on to Foucault actually lends itself quite well. The Foucault reading from point of view is an extension of Berger’s ideas on the hierarchy of the species, with humans being on top of the chain, no different than Foucault’s ideas on racial inferiority, biological hierarchy and “natural selection”.

The study of animals and their relationship with man is imperative and vital in the development and progression of the human species. Berger’s writings provide the foundation and basis for such a study, and Foucault extends into the human to human dynamic. In Foucault’s writing he mentions how “the most murderous states are also, of necessity, the most racist……….. How can one both make a biopower function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the function of death without becoming a racist? That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the problem”. The problem to me seems to lie in our willfully ignorant treatment of animals who are the most marginalized by us human even more so that our treatment of each other. Like the wise Mahatma Gandhi once said: “"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."