A report to an academy: On carnophallogocentrism,pigs and meat-writing

Abstract

How can organisational studies theory respond to the call of nonhuman animals? This article argues there is ‘too much humanism’ in organisational studies and defines the problem as originating in language practices. The example of factory-farmed pigs is used to illustrate the argument. Derrida’s term carnophallogocentrism is used to suggest that ethical thinking about the animal be moved from face-to-face encounters through the eyes to the mouth and that by adopting methods used in literature and ‘feminist dog-writing’ ways can be found to co-constitute human and nonhuman species in academic writing practices. The term meat-writing is offered as a practice of challenging carnophallogocentrism.

Keywords

Animal ethics animal philosophy animal rights factory-farmed animals Kafka organisation of animals

Introduction

… To put it plainly …: your life as apes, gentlemen, insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me. Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike. (Kafka, speaking as an ape, in ‘A report to an academy’)

This article explores how organisational academy writers can respond to the call of the animal, whether it is the gaze of a beloved dog, the petulant meows from a cat to be fed or the squeal of fright from a pig whose short brutal life ends violently in an intensive factory pork farm to become bacon on a plate. This article responds especially to the latter call from the factory-farmed pig and, by doing so, aims to contribute to organisational studies by providing avenues for theory to respond to and incorporate the nonhuman Other.

The question that guides this article is, ‘How can the academy respond to the call of nonhuman animals?’ The factory-farmed pig is the nonhuman animal species given special attention because she is subjected to and silenced by so much ‘organisation’. However, many other animals enrich this article with their roaring, buzzing, squealing, clucking, chirping, meowing, barking and whining, neighing, supersonic pinging and huffing. Answers to the question are arrived at via a consideration of carnophallogocentrism (Derrida et al., 2009) or the ways that meat-eating, masculinity and language intertwine to silence animals. In this article, three inter-related conceptual ideas are discussed to show how organisational studies can respond to include nonhuman animals in organisational theory and challenge carnophallogocentrism: Derrida’s ethics of ‘eating well’, Kafka’s methods of writing-animal and ‘feminist dog-writing’ which is a form of academic writing with potential for organisational scholarship.

The problem as this article defines it starts with language, and the answers also lie in language. The human/animal dichotomy mingles with and is reinforced by binaries in language: culture/nature, male/female and civilised/uncivilised. These binaries are enduring pervasive aspects of how the world is conceptually organised within the ‘European thought system’ leading to the ‘master identity model’ (Plumwood, 1993). The master identity model operates through three central mechanisms in language and culture to ignore nonhuman animals: by privileging humans and radically repudiating other species of animals; by valuing nonhuman animals only as an instrumental resource that benefits the privileged (humans); and relatedly by referring to nonhumans as if they are an entire category and so omitting nonhuman diversity, variations and individual characters and failing to see other species and individual animals face-to-face in ethical encounters as valued Others. Nonhuman animals are marginalised subjects in organisational theory. The reasons for this are complex, but nevertheless it is imperative that organisational theory addresses the causes and effects of nonhuman animal marginalisation, especially considering human and nonhuman animals obviously co-exist and are co-dependent in many organisational contexts.

This article is organised into two main parts; presenting the problem and then discussing solutions. The first part focuses on the problem of ‘too much humanism’ using the factory-farming of pigs as an example. The second part provides a pathway towards nonhuman animals by discussing three inter-related ways organisational theory can include nonhuman animals. First is by building on Lévinas’ relational ethics with Derrida’s ethics of ‘eating well’ which moves the focus of ethical thinking from face-to-face encounters through the eyes to the mouth. Second is by using literary sources to provide novel ways to disrupt carnophallogocentric thought. Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ is used as an example. Third and finally, this article introduces the practice of ‘feminist dog-writing’ which models possibilities for organisational scholarly writing. In its conclusion, this article combines these three inter-related tactics, all based on using language poetically, to propose the notion of ‘meat-writing’, which means to theorise and write differently to confront carnophallogocentrism and allow other species visibility and voice in organisational theory.

Too much humanism and the factory-farmed pig

Analysis starts with the word ‘animal’: ‘The animal, what a word!’ (Derrida and Wills, 2002: 392). Derrida says the problem of human disavowal of the animal begins in human language, a gesture towards the animal which is essentially political in nature and which silences them. Nonhuman animals, like all precarious subjects, are not voiceless; they are deliberately silenced. Since the 1970s, this word—animal—has been the subject of intense attention in a range of disciplines because of a gathering certainty that it is only by thinking the human back through the animal that contemporary human experience and problems can be illuminated and alleviated.

There is intense anxiety about what it means to be human in contemporary life. Grosz (2011) says, ‘The animal surrounds the human at both ends: it is the origins and the end of humanity’ (p. 12). At one end is fear of the Anthropocene and despair over the negative impacts of humanity on ecology, including mass extinctions and loss of natural habitats for wildlife (Kolbert, 2014). At the other end is anxiety triggered by advances in science and technology as genetic, biological, chemical and technological developments challenge ideas about the bounded stable human subject. A confusing vocabulary has emerged to talk about the issues including the nonhuman subject, the inhuman, posthumanism, trans-humanism, becoming human, and post-anthropomorphism (Wolfe, 2010). The language complexity is symptomatic of the debate’s importance and of the importance of language about the animal (and nature more generally) to the debate. Much of this critical discussion is engaged in decentring the human in favour of a concern for the nonhuman animal drawing from a range of conceptual resources (including but not limited to Bohr, Darwin, Bergson, Deleuze, Foucault, Butler, Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, Derrida and Lacan).

It seems incredible in light of the importance of the nonhuman debate to the development of the humanities that so little attention has been given over to the nonhuman animal in organisational studies. To be fair, there are connections and points at which organisational studies scholars have destabilised taken-for-granted boundaries of the human subject and/or engaged with critical posthumanist scholars. Eco-feminism is one important new trajectory (Phillips, 2014). Interest in monstrosity recognises the hybridity and liminality of the human subject (e.g. Thanem, 2006). Desmond (2010) has introduced Derrida’s animal ethics of ‘eating well’ to the business studies academy. ten Bos (2005a, 2005b) has engaged with Agamben’s (2004) ‘The Open: Man and the Animal’ to open up organisational theory to the nonhuman. The critical posthumanism of Braidotti and Barad is being engaged with by organisational scholars, but so far to discuss issues of human, not nonhuman, animal precariousness (e.g. gender and/or disability in Dale and Latham, 2015; Harding et al., 2013; Knights, 2015).

Generally speaking, nonhuman animal voices are not heard in organisational studies journals. Organisational studies as a discipline is much embedded in humanism; it is almost solely concerned with humans and their organisations. However, humanism itself, despite its invaluable contributions, is part of the problem when it comes to engaging with nonhuman species. Humanism is, according to Braidotti (2006), ‘all too human’ (p. 197). Humanism emphasises the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and valorises human exceptionalism and qualities like rationalism. Human exceptionalism is generally taken for granted in organisational studies. Allowing nonhuman animals agency in theory requires dismantling or at least being willing to question the stability of the intellectual scaffolding propping up human belief in exceptionalism. Human exceptionalism was thoroughly debunked by Darwin who irrevocably showed that the difference between human and nonhuman is a matter of degree and not of kind: humans are animals with kinship ties to other species, and merely one part of the infinitude and possibilities in nature, not separate from it or any more special than any other part (Grosz, 2011). Much of the basis for human exceptionalism, like assuming humans are the only species to have language, social memory and culture, is open to debate (e.g. for greater apes, elephants and cetaceans as discussed in Laland and Galef, 2009). The ethical and political concerns of critical posthumanists concerned with geo-political, ecological and ethical themes tend to focus not on what makes human animals different, individual and exceptional from animals but on what humans share with nonhumans always in a state of interdependent embodied becoming: being born, becoming co-constituted in ecologies, capable of pleasure, pain, suffering and dying.

The illustrative nonhuman species used in this article is pigs, and the form of organisation is the modern factory-farm. Pigs’ allocation in Western cultures as commodity and meat-animal rather than pet is a fact of language and culture, not nature (Serpell, 1986). In many cultures, pigs are considered unclean, a belief that probably originated in observations of pigs eating things humans find unpalatable. Pigs are actually intelligent, curious and clean animals, with similar social characteristics to dogs; they can be affectionate companion-animals. Also, and unfortunately for pigs, they are extremely efficient at converting organic material into meat and are genetically similar to humans. Consequently, they have become a valued meat-animal in many cultures, and their body parts are used to make an astonishing variety of nonfood products including insulin, heart valves, skin to treat severe burn victims, drugs and chemicals (Essig, 2015).

Pigs are genetically diverse, and still exist in the wild, as well as being domesticated and intensively farmed. Archaeological evidence suggests domestication of the pig occurred in Neolithic villages as early as 10,000 BC (Essig, 2015). Pigs have lived with or near human habitats until only a few generations ago when the pig moved from being practically a member of family (albeit one that is eaten) who lived in the same or nearby dwellings (notwithstanding that many communities still live with pigs this way) to being radically decoupled from all human senses in space and time by having their entire life cycle managed in factory-farms (Essig, 2015; Malcolmson and Mastoris, 2001). In the language of critical posthumanism, pigs and their humans have always been ontologically interdependent and co-constituted subjects through their relational becomings with one another (which includes the sacrificial rituals around their being eaten). But the factory-farmed pig is now an edible bio-subject with a particular co-constituted history with human animals as a commodity in capitalism. The factory-farmed pig is a subject bred specifically for consumption (Chen et al., 2007; Rothschild and Ruvinsky, 2011). And now, as Essig (2015) eruditely illustrates in his pig history, the interspecies relationship between pig and human is dangerously and worryingly askew.

The scale of slaughter of pigs in factory-farms is mind-boggling. Animal rights groups like The Humane Society of the US (2015) and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) estimate that over 1 billion pigs are killed for consumption annually, or 23 million pigs per week, mainly in China, Europe and the United States. The meat industry operates on a global scale which escalates killing to gain economies of scale (Coppin, 2003). The National Pork Board in the United States summarises the advantage large-scale pork-processing factories have over smaller ones:

Economies of size and technology have allowed fewer people to care for more hogs at a lower average cost … Farms with cost advantages can make adequate profits at prices that may not provide sufficient profits to higher-cost producers. As the higher-cost farms exit the industry, their market share is captured by existing producers or newcomers to the industry. The net effect is for fewer, larger pork farms. (PorkCheckoff, 2011: 12)

Facilitating this mass slaughter is the language of industrial agriculture (Coppin, 2003). Derrida and Wills (2002) places a time-frame of the past 200 years as leading to the unprecedented and undeniable subjugation of animals like pigs through the development of agricultural production methods and its associated language, for instance, by referring to pigs as hogs and their body parts as cuts of meat. Pigs are made through this language an instrumental resource or an inert material from which all value is extracted and pig’s powerlessness in this system is reinforced by zoological, biological, genetic and other forms of knowledge about them.

There is literature on factory-farms in both popular and academic modes challenging it from ethical standpoints: animal welfare (Masson, 2009; Safran Foer, 2009; Steeves, 1999), employment when workers are disenfranchised through the profit-growth strategies of global food producers (Leonard, 2014) and worker health and safety issues (Fitzgerald, 2010), and research on risk (of disease) associated with global food chains and human consumption patterns relating to cheap fast food (Lymbery, 2014; The Economist, 2014). The ethics of factory-farming and the semantics of meat vocabulary and imagery are critically discussed in research literature in many disciplines, for example, agribusiness journals (Williams, 2006), marketing communication (Glenn, 2004), animal ethics (Pelluchon, 2015) and sociology (Cudworth, 2015).

The morality of factory-farming is a passionately debated topic centred on the suffering of factory-farmed animals and the capacity for human animals to empathise with that suffering (McMahan, 2008). Bentham’s (1907 [1789]) position is influential: the question should not be, can animals reason, or talk but, can they suffer? In ethical decisions made about animals used in scientific research, their suffering is weighed up against human suffering. The question asked is, ‘Is it morally permissible to make an animal suffer if through the act of doing so suffering overall is diminished, for humans as well as animals?’ In the case of animals consumed to assuage the hunger of humans, similar moral questions about suffering to those used in animal research ethics can be weighed up (McMahan, 2008). Animal rights advocates often argue no animal suffering in factory-farms is acceptable. Activism has coalesced around the factory-farm and is a form of influential collective resistance which radically challenges existing capitalist models of production (e.g. Singer, 2006; Torres, 2007). Activists often advocate vegetarianism as a form of resistance (Safran Foer, 2009). Beyond animal activism, both animal welfare and food chains evoke intense social anxiety. Intensive farming in crates and inhumane killing practices are just two of a myriad of problems. Modern factory-farming is part of the modern global capitalist industrial complex which requires also the growing of feed for the escalating number of meat-animals which has a negative impact on the environment, especially in developing economies where agricultural land is cheapest (McMichael, 2006).

Interspecies empathy is central in thinking about the nonhuman Other. The human ability to imagine what it is like to be a pig flounders on the pig’s social and cultural place in pig-eating societies and the problem of trying to imagine and empathise what it must be like to live in an intensive factory environment and then be killed and eaten. Philosophers thinking with the nonhuman animal usually choose companion species like dogs and cats or familiar wild animals to write with (e.g. Derrida’s (2002) cat, Haraway’s (2008) dogs, Bateson’s (1972) cat and dogs, Irigaray’s (2004) rabbit and birds). These relatable animals are a Trojan horse to bring the reader to animals because reader compassion is already engaged through familiar affection. However, the further one moves from a relatable animal the harder it is for the human imagination to engage with alterity. This problem is well demonstrated by Nagel when he tries to explain the phenomenological issues involved in trying to think through what it would be like to be a bat, a mammal who uses the unfamiliar perceptual tool of sonar (Nagel, 1974).

Confronting lack of willingness to engage in meat-animal alterity is challenging. The symbolic and actual violence towards meat-animals is perpetuated in morally neutral tones and involves an almost incomprehensible level of disavowal which is a recognised phenomenon of systematically knowing about mass sentient animal slaughter and yet ignoring it. The term disavowal comes from Freud’s 1938 ‘Splitting of the ego as a process of defence’ (Lewkowicz and Bokanowski, 2009), is used by Derrida and can be restated as ‘I know well, but do it anyway’. In order to accommodate traumatic and dangerous reality, the ego undergoes a ‘defensive splitting’: in reaction a threat is both acknowledged and systematically turned away from at the same time. Through this ‘radical repudiation’, ‘artful’ solutions are created, for instance, substitute products like chicken-bacon, which can be seen as fetishes or ‘constituted symptoms’. Sullivan (2013) argues that the symptom is sustained ‘precisely through deepening the rift between acknowledged danger and the substituted solutions that mask this danger’ (p. 1). Attention is distracted from the underlying problems, and dangerous yet satisfying behaviours are facilitated rather than resolved. The symptom is ‘artful’ yet potentially pathological. The psychoanalytic term ‘fetishised disavowal’ enables appreciation of how violence against the meat-animal is recognised, even enjoyed and ultimately reconstructed in favour of carnophallogocentrism.

Animal rights activists use a variety of communication techniques to protest unacceptable factory-farming practices (Freeman, 2014). One tactic is to confront consumers with images of suffering pigs in factories. One problem with this tactic is that this confrontation with the real may have an unintended consequence of precipitating polarisation and crisis, deepening the pathology of the initial problem. In Lacanian terms, this is because the real, the undeniable pain and death of pigs, is always ‘beyond language’ and so the confrontation of the real with its fetishised disavowal is unable to be systemically accommodated and instead can contribute to further fracture and crisis. In the case of eating factory-farmed pork and bacon, as people become aware of their role in the food chain engineered ‘solutions’ deepen the rift. Capitalism innovates solutions like substitute products, but using Lacan (Braunstein, 2003), these are merely further symptoms of the original pathology that mask the danger of the food practices so that the satisfying yet danger-producing behaviours can be sustained, justified and developed. Solutions sidestepped include reducing unnecessary meat consumption by human animals so that fewer animals are killed and finding alternatives to global factory-farms.

The first part of this article has outlined a seemingly intransigent problem that confronts organisational theory: how to use language to understand a problem caused in a large part by language itself. The second part of this article presents three conceptual paths through the problems outlined above, all involving the use of language.

Responses to the call of nonhuman Others

Derrida’s ethics of eating well

Animal rights activists often draw parallels between factory-farms and the World War II (WWII) Holocaust as the similarities between modes of transport of animals to facilities for slaughter and the geographies and architectures of modern slaughterhouses are too obvious to remain unremarked (e.g. Patterson, 2002). The Holocaust indelibly connected and smudged the line between human and animal in the factory system (Arendt, 1951), reverberated through post-war human rights philosophy (Lévinas, 1985) and invigorated the literature on animal ethics (Deleuze et al., 1983; Derrida and Wills, 2002). Derrida’s writings on the animal provide a point of entry for organisational studies into the animal; he built on Lévinas’ ethical insights about face-to-face encounters with Others which is often used when discussing organisational ethics. Lévinas was a camp survivor, and in his writing he describes a series of encounters with a dog, Bobby, during his internment. He relates how Bobby recognises Lévinas’ group of prisoners as human even as their guards do not (Lévinas, 2004). This incident is often alluded to in puzzled writing by animal philosophers about why Lévinas did not include the animal in his notion of the face-to-face encounter with Others (Atterton, 2004; Hantel, 2013). Derrida has extended Lévinas’ notion of face-to-face relations of the Other to include animal Others (Atterton, 2011).

Derrida makes several insightful conceptual moves in his writing about the animal. One of his more conceptually challenging but relevant points to this article is that actually and symbolically eating the nonhuman Other and processes of languaging through reading/writing are intertwined (Derrida, 1991; Derrida et al., 2009; Derrida and Wills, 2002). To Derrida, it starts with thinking and pity; the moment of thinking starts when the animal looks at us, and we are naked before them, stripped of our clothes, our language, our power, illusions and our processes of disavowal (he famously uses his cat eyeing him as he exits the shower to make this point) (Derrida and Wills, 2002: 372). He says,

Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this non-power … the anguish of this vulnerability and the vulnerability of this anguish. (p. 396)

The human is fixed by the look of the animal as in other face-to-face relations, but Derrida makes an important conceptual manoeuvre when he recasts the mouth in the place of the face and eyes as the ethical frontier. This makes the sensual, lingual, verbal, carnal, haptic and olfactory appetites and aversions the terms for the ethical encounter with Otherness (Roy, 2010). The ethical questions metamorphosise to ones about incorporation of the Other or ‘Eating the Other’ and invoke concepts like appetite, taste, disgust, ingestion and digestion, sacrifice and cannibalism (Still, 2010). Derrida points out that all cultures are organised around the notion of sacrifice as this allows society to clear up ‘an area that allows noncriminal putting to death’ (Pagés, 2011: 226). He was very concerned, like Heidegger, with the ‘problem’ of death in philosophy, especially the distinction between human ‘dying’ and animal ‘perishing’ which he saw was related to the wall of language between humans and other animals. Derrida also recognised the relationship between silencing, ‘putting to death’ and sacrificial rites, with the deeply rooted misogyny (and ethnocentrism) in the edifices of Western thought wound through discourses of animality and bestiality.

Derrida’s methods of radical criticism start with faithful reading and are centrally concerned with acts of both writing and reading. Derrida felt writing is important to criticism but not sufficient on its own because although writing liberates meaning from its ‘present existence for a real subject’, it also opens up the possibility of ‘passivity, forgetfulness and the phenomena of the crisis’ (Baring, 2014: 291). Derrida worried that writing contributes to the disappearance of truth unless meaning is intentionally and continuously reanimated. Regarding reading, Derrida argued the very notion of comprehending is a kind of cannibalistic incorporation which is related to both memory and the interiorisation of history. Commenting on Hegel he said, ‘Spirit incorporates history by assimilating, by remembering its own past. This assimilation acts as a kind of sublimated eating … everything shall be incorporated into the great digestive system’ (Derrida et al., 2009). Derrida insists, ‘our culture rests on the structure of sacrifice. We are all mixed up in an eating of flesh—real or symbolic … We are all—vegetarians as well—carnivores in the symbolic sense’ (Derrida et al., 2009). In response to a question that if all understanding is a kind of eating, what is to become of reading text, his answer is to respect that which cannot be eaten with a similar logic that he uses with regard to what is indeterminate or untranslatable in reading/writing.

Derrida says there is always a remainder that cannot be read and that remains alien; this translates to meaning we can never fully comprehend or assimilate the animal. What is left-over must constantly be remade and re-written to keep it alive and present in culture. From this insight arises a politics of ‘eating well’ because eating, like language, requires responsibility. Food ethicists derive from Derrida that eating well thus means eating with goodness which requires vigilance, so it does not become an automatic habit (Oliver, 2014) as for Derrida the ethical question relating to eating is not whether or not one should eat (animals) but how to eat well (Derrida, 1991). Eating well, however, is not where the thinking stops as the problem is essentially one of symbolic ingestion of the Other through languaging practices.

The way animals are talked about and written about and the eating of their flesh is inextricably and perhaps unexpectedly philosophically intertwined. Derrida’s ethics in a sense is the ‘ethics of cannibalism’ as ‘one must eat’ (Guyer, 1997: 66). Derrida sees the issue as being of the ‘remainder’ which cannot and is not assimilated in the act of incorporation or eating. In the act of eating animals, the body of another fills one’s own; one becomes plural. The act of eating through reading problematises the notion of the stable subject and introduces the idea of ‘incorporation’ but also a remainder that cannot be understood/digested. The introduction of the foreign may lead to a ‘vomiting to the inside’, a boundary response of disgust to incorporation (Guyer, 1997). Derrida’s ethics of ‘eating well’ involves recognition of interdependence with the Other and involves a radical break from the humanistic notion of the self as it involves ingesting the Other. Life is always open (Agamben, 2004), but language and reason reifies and totalises, whether the word is spoken or written. This leads to a reduction or indifference to ontological experience and thus closes meaning. Kafka’s ‘A report to an academy’, discussed next, is a salutary lesson in writing-animal in a way that keeps meaning alive for readers and writers and the subject open to animal Others.

Kafka’s ‘A report to an academy’

In the previous section, Derrida’s ethics of ‘eating well’ is discussed to draw attention to the relationship between ingestion of language and ingestion of Others. In this section, Kafka’s ‘A report to an academy’ is presented as an example of how literature can open up language to the animal. Kafka’s (1971) oeuvre has been used previously to develop organisational theory with regard to ethics: for instances to talk about the dehumanising processes of bureaucracy and violence in organisations (Huber and Munro, 2014; Munro and Huber, 2012) and to discuss the ethics of hospitality and alterity as well as other purposes (see for a recent review of this literature Rhodes and Westwood, 2014). Kafka wanted to use literature ‘like an axe for the frozen sea inside us’ (in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollack, 27 January 1904), and he often used animals to achieve this aim.

The Report is an address or a lecture to an audience of ‘fellow learned gentlemen’ by Red Peter, an educated ape, on his ‘former life as an ape’. In his speech, Red Peter relates how he was captured from the Ivory Coast ‘separated from his family troupe of fellow apes’ and shot twice. One shot leaves a red scar at his mouth, hence his naming based on a previous performing ape called Peter. The other shot scars ‘below his hip’ implying he is castrated. Red Peter describes his suffering as he transitions to Europe on the trade ship Hagenbeck. He learns how to speak human language, a choice he has to make because ‘I had to stop being an ape’ because ‘I had to find a way out or die’. Red Peter’s first human gesture is a handshake and its hypocrisy disgusts him. He learns to pretend to enjoy Schnapps, which revolts him; even the smell makes him retch uncontrollably. Finally, after a literally torturous journey, he arrives in Europe able to ape being human and is given a choice between the circus and zoo. He chooses the circus as he recognises, by this point, that the zoo is a gilded cage and the choice a deception (Gerhardt, 2006). At least in a circus he will have the illusion of freedom. Once his choice is made, Red Peter is then ‘properly’ educated—in the circus. Humour permeates the script, of the pointed savage type:

My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away, so that my first teacher was almost himself turned into an ape by it, had soon to give up teaching and was taken away to a mental hospital. Fortunately he was soon let out again.

Red Peter literally and figuratively makes impossible leaps between teachers in rooms (disciplines) as he devours all that a modern education can offer him. His transition apes evolution: it takes him only 5 years to go from natural ape to ‘the cultural level of an average European’. At the end of the Report Red Peter sits in a rocking chair in his study, with his hand in his trouser pockets, a bottle of wine on the table, behaving himself (he has desisted from pulling down his trousers to show his scar to visitors), contemplating his success while his companion female chimpanzee waits in his anteroom.

Kafka’s Report is a sophisticated Menippean satire as it deliberately and joyously aims to disrupt set patterns of audience reception (Bakhtin, 1984). Kafka’s Report, like his other animal parables, destabilises the reading patterns and thought processes of the reader. As he does this he brings the reader to the animal through ontology of the body; his humour is an anatomical method of satire which draws self-reflexive attention to diseases of the human intellect—ignorance, hubris and hypocrisy (Frye, 1971 [1957]).

Kafka uses a number of writerly techniques to fracture the modern reader’s habits. The Report is layered with elliptical doubled talk which undermines itself in both mode and content. The Report is a lecture in Red Peter’s ‘voice’ through Kafka’s writing. It is written as the spoken word. It is told as a true autobiographical personal narrative but is a fiction. It is a mongrel mixture of several writing modes each with their own established stylistic norms: a formal lecture, a fictionalised semi-autobiography and an adult animal parable. The reader is thus confused about how to ‘consume’ his written words. His choices during his ‘development’ to the level of the average Western subject are made surreally impossible and illogical by placing them in impossibly paradoxical and illogical scenarios of space and time (Stine, 1981), in the education system and in his impossibly tiny cage on the ship. The bodily suffering he experiences as he becomes human is always at the front of the story, reinforced through constant references to the needs of his pain-racked, scarred and ever-present suffering precarious body with its sexual, scatological and other urges. The body is an inescapable reality in Kafka’s animal stories. Kafka implies the academy he addresses is a grotesque thinking brain perched precariously on top of a suffering animal body that has lost its awareness of itself. Kafka enables the reader to literally remember their body in knowledge.

Kafka’s Report deals explicitly with the implications of Darwinism and a scholarly academy’s refusal of it. His words destabilise the process of forgetting which is essential to sealing and forgetting humanities’ animal origins which still play ‘like a puff of wind’ against their heels. The Report very clearly deals with Kafka’s views on writing and speaking as implicated in the limitations of modernity and the problem of too much humanism which it wrought (Norris, 1980). In all Kafka’s work, he aimed to bring to the reader an immediate and concrete understanding of an experience of something, and his animal parables especially are examples of this (Stine, 1981). He exemplifies imaginative engagement with science and philosophy in a poetic way to literally and figuratively ‘move’ the reader towards the animal. The call of the animal to the human requires an imaginative, poetic and open response since the necessary break with habits of thought is so profound.

The Report has a deliberately constructed ontological effect on readers as it aims to shock the readers out of their established patterns of reading to literally feel language in their body (Danta, 2007). Kafka thus models the potential in writing differently. Kafka’s elliptical open ironic style means meaning is never entirely assimilated and thus destroyed. He is sometimes described as a ‘writing machine’ because what he wrote is unassimilable and so others constantly reanimate his work (Gray et al., 2005) for instance Coetzee (1997).

Red Peter is marked by modernity—the two shots that take him from the wild to civilisation—at his mouth and his groin. The primary site of Red Peter’s discomfort and paradox is his mouth: whenever he speaks in human language, he vomits words back up again literally and then figuratively because they torture him. He literally cannot digest language although he does learn to speak it; language is never assimilated entirely by Red Peter. It is at the very moment of ingesting human mannerisms that Red Peter has such difficulty with his assimilation of human culture. He retches with disgust at the academy’s ignorance, hypocrisy and hubris—the whole Report is Kafka disgorging a large fur-ball (Gray et al., 2005).

As well as rejecting ideology, Kafka’s ape has problems with his masculinity. He is symbolically castrated by the second shot from modernity, but also cut off from women, which he reinforces in the Report’s last impossible conceptual move:

When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. By day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it.

Kafka used other animals, especially dogs, in his writing as a way to bring readers bodies into the reading experience, something he thought was necessary to ‘get through’ to readers and to merge himself and the reader onto the page as one. Kafka (1971) wrote in ‘Investigations of a dog’,

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realise this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves! (p. 159)

He was a ‘dog-writer’, a mode of expression discussed next. In the next section, feminist dog-writing is explored in more depth as a tactic to write differently in organisational studies in order to develop and extend theory to encompass animal Others.

Feminist dog-writing

There is already in organisational studies a legacy of challenging marginalisation of subjects by writing back into the centre by destabilising language and knowledge–power structures. For instance, phallogocentrism in organisational theory, which relates to the generic ‘masculine’ and European-originating bounded human subject, is being critiqued from gendered perspectives. Feminist organisational scholars, often beholden to Lacan, Derrida, Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva, have drawn attention to the importance of gendering organisational writing in a variety of ways (Fotaki and Harding, 2013; Fotaki et al., 2014; Harding et al., 2013; Knights, 2015; Phillips et al., 2014). Both gendered writing and écriture féminine unsettle textual and genre normalcy and disrupt gendered structures in writing systems. Post-colonial writers often use similar strategies (Calás, 2007; Frenkel and Shenhav, 2006; Prasad, 2012). These writers regard writing as a politicised practice and overtly use writing practice to reverse or address the silencing of precarious and non-Western people. Style of writing is important to these writers. Both gendered and post-colonial criticism use playful ironic models of writing with doubled voices. The point of this writing is always to open up meaning to create more possibilities, not close off meaning around tired, conventional and irrelevant gender and ethnic stereotypes that merely reinforce precariousness. Often this type of writing is labelled ‘difficult’ and ‘opaque’ because it playfully undermines conventions to unsettle reader expectations.

Feminist dog-writing can be seen as a type of écriture féminine; its aims are also political and material as it aims to create new ways of co-constructing reality with other animal species, and it uses writing as a major vehicle for this objective. Dog-writing is largely beholden to feminist scholars who have combined respect for science with post-structuralist ways of thinking about language and performativity to create theory that is more nuanced in its ability to encompass the nonhuman. Haraway’s (2003, 2008) more recent writing is foundational to dog-writing although it is possible to trace it prior (e.g. the aforementioned Franz Kafka). Haraway’s post-anthropomorphism has been influential to the development of critical posthumanism, although Haraway (1991) herself has distanced herself from the labels trans- and posthumanist as these writers have sometimes mistaken her cyborg manifesto as an affirmation of human enhancement. Instead, Haraway like Braidotti (2006) builds on gestural relations (Bateson, 1972) to generate a version of an ontologically and ethically invigorated philosophy of science through the notion of relational aggregated entanglements. Entanglements with animals are crucial to this approach to research and writing. Haraway describes how she and her dogs co-create and co-construct each-others’ experience right down to the cellular level. Haraway argues everything we do with and to animals has an impact on the way we know about, live and act in this world, in our entangled becomings with nonhuman Others. She writes with passion and joy about her experiences in competitive dog agility events and writes systems which respect action as a co-creation involving interspecies communication and intersubjectivity.

Feminist dog-writing involves playful relational co-constitution with nonhuman Others through acts of writing (McHugh, 2012). McHugh, herself a dog-writer, has provided a useful overview of this way of writing. Dog-writing embraces and works through in practice the notion that human and nonhuman species and individuals co-create and co-constitute their systems of organising. Dog-writers are self-declared human-authors in the text engaging in an alternative ‘onto-epistemology’ in order to express the world as a co-relational becoming with animals. Dog-writing is a type of queering of structures of authority (Butler, 1993), including that of academic writing that silences bodies that are constructed differently from the norm, to reframe human–nonhuman politics as intra-active and trans-species, from the experience of living with animals, up towards the conceptual apparatus that constantly tries to wrest control from these co-constituted relations. McHugh (2012) writes, ‘stories of canine-human intimacy enable the kinds of critical assessment and creative dismantling of the interlocking structures of oppression required to enact the kind of overthrow envisioned by Braidotti’ (p. 617).

Haraway and McHugh have thought deeply about their dog encounters and written eruditely about them including possibilities, criticisms and theoretical implications. Smuts (2001) has also worked with dogs (and baboons) and used her experiences to discuss the possibilities for enriched experiences and approaches when humans become open to animals more generally. Being with animals starts according to Smuts (2001) with approaching them with sensitivity and humility, sitting still and quietly observing one’s surroundings and ‘by announcing benign intentions in a gentle voice and through facial expressions, gestures and posture’ (p. 301). Deep intersubjectivity requires empathy, close observation and embodied self-reflection so that gestures do not frighten. Smuts itemises seven levels in a hierarchy of relations which show how and why thinking about the animal needs to move beyond seeing animals as merely instinctive or ‘blank slates’. Levels 1–5 involve instinct, threat assessment, recognition of an individual, recognition that a person is social so communication begins and the beginnings of mutually beneficial relationships. The sixth level happens when mutually beneficial relationships are maintained by parties for its own sake, for instance through play, grooming or effective joint action like hunting. This mutuality can occur within or between species and participants move to develop a new language and culture that transcends the particulars of other animals’ individual or species-specific repertoire. The seventh level of interaction (which may not be the highest form of interaction) is when ‘individuals experience such a profound degree of intimacy that their subjective identities seem to merge into a single being or a single awareness (at least part of the time)’ (Smuts, 2001: 307). The sixth and seventh levels involve a commitment to relationship which is deeply rewarding. This always requires encountering animal consciousness with caring and creative intersubjectivity, and in doing so humans become more fully human and awake to ourselves. This is the benefit of what Braidotti (2002) points to as ‘the effort to imagine the activity of thinking differently’ (p. 70). It is in this seventh level that feminist dog-writers dwell in their writing, often with companion species, but increasingly with other species (for instance with hawks in Macdonald, 2014). Feminist dog-writing holds potential for developing organisational theory in relation to nonhuman Others: it is a particular political and personal writing practice which acknowledges the writer’s own intersubjectivity and co-constitution with nonhuman Others.

Meat-writing as food for thought

This article argues the tendency of organisational studies to make humans the exclusive focus is an Achilles’ heel holding it back. Let me put it plainly: human self-aggrandisement is a vast problem for nonhumans, but also ultimately for humans and their organisations because by not addressing and incorporating nonhumans, organisational theory limits its potential to engage with contemporary problems.

This article has challenged organisational scholars to find ways to encompass the nonhuman in theorising and given some answers to the question as to how to respond to nonhuman animals. First and foremost, organisational studies needs to move beyond the human subject as the only foundational theorising subject of focus and recognise too much humanism weakens potential for theorising; the taken-for-granted human subject at the base of organisational theory leads down a theoretical cul-de-sac of anthropocentrism. There are very important connections being made between politics, ontology, science, ethics and the nonhuman, and organisational theory needs to get amid these theoretical developments and include nonhuman animals somehow. Three inter-related strands have been suggested in this article which could be developed more, but there is an infinite variety of other ways theory could go, if only the call of animals is responded to. Just three other areas for further research are identified next.

First, studies could build on recent work on embodiment and ethics (Dale and Latham, 2015; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015) which although only currently connected to human embodied subjectivity could enfold other forms of embodied subjectivity or co-constructed embodied subjectivity in organisations where nonhumans are obviously important, for example, therapy animals or tourism like whale watching. The notion of the zoopolis (Pelluchon, 2015) could be useful here: zoopolis takes into account ways the different experiences, senses and needs of different species lead to forms and structures of organisation. Second, post-colonial and indigenous studies already provide alternatives to the violent conceptual apparatus bequeathed through colonisation by Western powers. Connections between animal rights, nature and/or eco-systems are discussed with sensitivity by post-colonial and indigenous writers (e.g. Smith, 2012 [1999]) including in organisational studies (Banerjee, 2003; Islam, 2012). These perspectives need to be explored more in relation to nonhuman life and in relation to the developing stream of scholarship in organisational studies on eco-feminism.

A third area for further research involves investigating intersectional issues around human and nonhuman animal labour (e.g. Novek, 2005). Marxists and labour process theory have historically spoken for the precarious, especially in industrial settings, but the nonhuman is neglected because Marx did not consider that animals labour. Some work on animal labour has been conducted in animal–human anthropology (Ingold, 1983; Serpell, 1986; Tapper, 1994 [1988]) and at the edges of labour process theory (e.g. Hribal, 2003, 2007, 2012). Noske (2008), for instance, has argued that human and nonhumans are treated in a very similar fashion in industrial factories: for nonhuman animals, there is mechanisation and rationalisation of production methods which proscribe the division of their reproductive labour, there is a radical deskilling of animal capacities and there is a subdivision of animal skills and bodies to control them better according to principles of industrial engineering. Ingold confronts the main reason Marx ignored nonhumans: his belief that animals do not engage in productive creative labour. Ingold (1983) considers the bee and the badger and argues that instinct and productive labour are on a continuum; it is not one or the other. Moreover, nonhuman animals clearly do have agency, and this is expressed in both misbehaviour and resistance. Animals have little capacity to resist, but they do resist, individually and collectively; they escape; they complain, struggle; and they become disciplined in their subjectivities through management routines (e.g. self-service milking). There is an entanglement of conflicting and common interests between human and nonhuman animals and these need to be untangled (see Coulter, 2015).

In conclusion, meat-writing is offered as a transgressive practice to unsettle carnophallogocentrism in culture. Poetic writing is a main writing strategy used in philosophy to respond to the animal (e.g. as illustrated in Irigaray’s ‘Animal compassion’, Cixous’ ‘Birds, women and writing’, Heidegger’s ‘The animal is poor in world’ and Nietzsche’s ‘O my animals’ (all included in Calarco and Atterton, 2004)). ‘Meat-writing’ is meant as a playful and transgressive way of thinking and writing about organisational theory to disrupt patterns of carnophallogocentric thought. However, we proceed animals need to be incorporated with respect for what cannot be assimilated and understood so that a genuinely co-constructed organisational studies can emerge which incorporates the voices of nonhuman Others. What is needed is a management and organisational language that is supple, less assertive and has new words that respect animals in all their species and individual diversity. Empathy is the first step in engaging with other species’ consciousness. By just listening quietly without any sudden threatening moves, engaging with post-anthropomorphism and/or writing about the nonhumans precariously perched in or on organisations, a start is being made. Being graced by an animal’s presence, even dead on a plate, forces us to abut up against the inherent violence of thinking about animals as merely commodity (Krell, 2013). Animals are present everywhere in human organisations and scholars need to take a gentle look at nonhuman animals and a long hard look at ourselves.

The problem as this article has outlined is one of symbolic violence at the level of culture which organisational studies unwittingly perpetuates through disavowal, which is embedded in its implicit humanism and languaging tendencies. The fetishised disavowal of pigs is an example of the silencing of all animals and provides a case example of the implications for animals of a vacuum at the epicentre of organisational ethics. ‘Meat-writing’ is proffered as disruptive of unconscious corrosive habits of thought to invigorate ethical and political platform for organisational theorising and practice. Derrida’s writing about ‘eating well’ is ultimately not on eating as such but the ingestion of both words and flesh in face-to-face encounters with the Other through the mouth, and so his work leads to a whole new terrain for thinking through human–nonhuman encounters in organisations. Kafka’s essay ‘A report to the academy’ provides an illustrative example of how literature can bring animals into thought. Kafka’s essay is used to entitle this article because it has inspired its contents and illustrates how writing can literally move readers to break out of their complacencies. Feminist dog-writing revels in the uncontained joy that can accompany ‘becoming human’ when humans truly decentre their subjectivity to unleash new co-constituted understandings of interspecies becomings. The way forward is so clear for organisational studies if it would but take an ape-like leap of faith towards the nonhuman Other.

Footnotes

Author biography

Janet Grace Sayers is an associate professor in the School of Management at Massey University (Auckland) in New Zealand. She has recently published in ‘Gender, Work and Organisation’ and ‘New Technology, Work and Employment’ on narrative, social media and employment issues. She has written extensively on diversity and service work and has a particular interest in comedy as a form of management critique.

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