Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education 9781350061842, 9781350061873, 9781350061859

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Series page
Title
Copyrights
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Education, Schizoanalysis, and Critical Animal Theory
1 An Abstract Machine? Education in the Animal-Industrial Complex
2 Desiring-Machines: Education and the “Human-Animal Bond”
3 Command-Machines: The Order-Words of Animal Science Pedagogies
4 Comfort-Machines: Promises of Animal Welfare and Environmental Education
5 Edutainment-Machines: Pedagogies of the Spectacle
6 Technical Machines: Didactic Technologies of Animal Control Systems
7 Killing-Machines: Animal Breeding, Shooting, and Slaughter in Education
Conclusion
8 Schizoanalysis and Micropolitics: How to Change the System from Within
Postscript
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education

Also available from Bloomsbury Animal Philosophy, Peter Atterton Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education, edited by Matthew Carlin and Jason Wallin

Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education Helena Pedersen

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Helena Pedersen, 2019 Helena Pedersen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: © spxChrome/iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6184-2 PB: 978-1-3501-7895-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6185-9 eBook: 978-1-3500-6186-6 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Rioja

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Education, Schizoanalysis, and Critical Animal Theory

viii 1

1

An Abstract Machine? Education in the Animal-Industrial Complex

17

2

Desiring-Machines: Education and the “Human-Animal Bond”

29

3

Command-Machines: The Order-Words of Animal Science Pedagogies

49

Comfort-Machines: Promises of Animal Welfare and Environmental Education

63

5

Edutainment-Machines: Pedagogies of the Spectacle

79

6

Technical Machines: Didactic Technologies of Animal Control Systems

97

Killing-Machines: Animal Breeding, Shooting, and Slaughter in Education

113

4

7

Conclusion 8

Schizoanalysis and Micropolitics: How to Change the System from Within

129

135

Postscript

153

Notes References Index

157 161 173

Acknowledgments Without the generous support from two important institutions, this book would not have been possible. I thank the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS) in Graz, Austria; especially Professor Günter Getzinger for granting me a Research Fellowship at the IAS-STS for four months in Winter 2016–17. My concentrated research period at the IAS-STS made it possible to finalize my manuscript, while enjoying collegial support from, and exchange with the other IAS-STS fellows and staff. I am also sincerely grateful to my employer, the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies (IDPP) at University of Gothenburg, for allowing my absence from the department during these months. I  owe special thanks to the former head of department, Jonas Emanuelsson. I also want to acknowledge the students, teachers, activists, and nonhuman animals whom I encountered and interacted with during fieldwork. They have all contributed to the research process in different ways, and needless to say, without them, this project would never have been realized. Many colleagues and friends have engaged with the manuscript at different phases throughout the writing process, devoting their time to read and offer expert comments. I am especially grateful to Annalisa Colombino, Ellen Foster, Reingard Spannring, and Vasile Stănescu for their friendship and support. I also want to thank Hillevi Lenz-Taguchi and Anna Palmer, as well as my colleagues in the Education for Sustainable Development research group at IDPP. Jonna Håkansson deserves a very special acknowledgment for reading and commenting on an early draft of the full manuscript during her internship period with me at IDPP in Autumn 2017. Thank you, Jonna, for your engagement with what must have been a painstaking reading and for your tireless commitment to animal liberation. It is a privilege to work with you. I am deeply indebted also to my editor at Bloomsbury Academic, Mark Richardson, and assistant editor Maria Giovanna Brauzzi, for fantastic professional advice, support, and patience, and to the three anonymous reviewers of my work. A  different kind of patience has been endured by my partner, Mikael. Thank you for being in my life.

Acknowledgments

ix

Some of the empirical material appearing in this book has been reprinted with permission from Purdue University Press and Brill. This material has originally been published in Pedersen, Helena (2010), Animals in Schools: Processes and Strategies in Human-Animal Education, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, and in Linné, Tobias and Helena Pedersen (2016), “With Care for Cows and a Love for Milk: Affect and Performance in Swedish Dairy Industry Communication Strategies,” in A. Potts (ed.), Meat Culture, 109–28, Leiden: Brill. Translated into English, some material has also been reprinted with permission from Pedagogisk Forskning i  Sverige, originally published in Pedersen, Helena (2018), “Att rädda en hotad värld: Schizoanalytisk kritik av djurens funktion i naturbruksutbildningar,” Pedagogisk Forskning i Sverige, 23 (3–4): 192–213.

Introduction: Education, Schizoanalysis, and Critical Animal Theory

The Political Problem of Animals in Education It may seem like a bad idea to embark on a project based on a notion— schizoanalysis—which its inventors, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ([1972] 2009), have long since renounced. Talking about schizoanalysis, they claim, would protect a particular type of escape (potential of revolutionary action within the capitalist system), while it is the direct political problem in and of itself that is significant, and the links that lead to this problem (Deleuze 2004). Schizoanalysis is, in this book, approached precisely as the link, or rather the multiplicity of links, leading straight to the political problem of animals in education. The problem of animals in education is political in at least two broad meanings. First, education, as a societal actor, is in itself political, affecting life conditions of both humans and animals. Second, animals in education are routinely subjected to different forms of institutionalized violence. Educational violence toward animals may be physical, visual, and discursive, and is often normalized, naturalized, and regarded as necessary for the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge. To animals, their forced presence in education (as scientific objects, dissection “specimen,” species representatives in ecosystems etc.) is part of the “animal condition” (Pedersen and Stănescu 2012)—the life situation of animals and the multiple forms of violence they are routinely exposed to under different power regimes, in spaces of teaching and learning as well as in other societal sectors. Integrated in school and university curricula and exerted in the name of science, violence toward animals is, like education as such, viewed as a common good, with ostensibly positive implications for human welfare, scientific advancement, and societal progress (cf. Pedersen 2010a). What is the actual nature of this violence, and how exactly does education work through

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interference with animal bodies? The conditions for animals in contemporary education settings are bound up with educational institutions’ openness to the animal-industrial complex (Noske 1997). Through this larger institutional aggregate and its accompanying capitalist machines and production processes, education is engaged not only in knowledge dissemination but also in a ceaseless trafficking in animals (cf. Adams 1993). In veterinary education (one area of investigation in this book), this trafficking is materialized through the intimate ties between the veterinary education program and the animal production sector. The business of animal breeding and slaughter needs educated veterinarians in order to maintain food safety standards as well as the legitimacy of the animal production industry in the eyes of the public (veterinarians are expected to safeguard appropriate animal welfare measures in the slaughter process), and the animal production sector is an important employer for graduated veterinarians. A main argument pursued in this book is that education constitutes a largely overlooked and extraordinarily significant component of the animal-industrial complex. Schizoanalysis makes animals in education visible not only as a political problem but as elements in endless production processes. With its specific machinic ontology (explained below), no longer can we talk about a universal human/animal divide—a key notion in critical animal studies—or of “man” as the king of creation, as schizoanalysis makes no distinction between humans and nature and (animal) industry; they are all joined in processes of production (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009). Nor can we talk about education as a system of differentiation or stratification designed to perpetuate social injustices and global inequalities, as in many critical education theory traditions (although these problems are still an urgent reality). Rather, what we have is a multiplicity of machines forging students and animals together in countless settings, forms, and constellations. At different levels of formal education, human and animal subjects are formed, connected, and “educated” in ways that produce desire and pleasure as well as repression and suffering; educated not so much by individual teachers but by education-machines, as they pass through various sites and phases of the education process. The purpose of this book is to begin to identify animal science educationmachines:  How do they work? What investments drive them? How do they connect and disconnect? What pedagogical events do they orchestrate? What affects do they mobilize? How do they set forces in motion, redirect flows, or block them? What effects do they produce, and what are their pedagogical, ethical, and political implications?

Introduction

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Schizoanalysis also makes animals visible as products and investments of desire in education. Desire is immanent to all production processes, connects directly to the political economy, and a central task of schizoanalysis is to identify how desiring-machines work through bodies and institutions (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009). As we will see, animal science pedagogies capture, mobilize, and organize desire-flows in multiple creative ways; sometimes to fulfill student dreams and aspirations, sometimes to repress. While animal science education, especially at higher education levels such as veterinary education, is heavily technologically mediated and relies on scientific “hard facts” about animals and biotechnology, it frequently appeals to student affect and desires in order to communicate certain expert knowledge required by the profession. These two dimensions, the symbiosis with animal agribusiness and the affective nature of veterinary education practice, are not necessarily in conflict with each other, but, as will be explored throughout the subsequent chapters, become integrated parts of the same education process.

Education Studies and Schizoanalysis Schizoanalysis is a mode of critical inquiry, a theory of the unconscious and a clinical practice with an origin in psychoanalysis (notably in its critique toward Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic traditions) as well as in Marxism. It analyzes the complex relations between power and desire as a core part of critical social theory (Sauvagnargues 2016). Schizoanalysis explores the hyperactivity, contradictions, and anxieties ceaselessly created around socialization and subjectivity formation processes, especially under conditions of capitalist expansion, making it particularly interesting for education research (see Ringrose 2011, 2013, 2015; Savat and Thompson 2015; Sellar 2015; Thompson and Cook 2015). Through schizoanalysis, education does not emerge as a coherent institution, but as a set of machines forging together students and animals with technologies and discourses in shifting constellations that have consequences for the life conditions of both. An overarching question for a schizoanalysis of education is, as Savat and Thompson (2015) put it, how the educational institution organizes itself in some particular forms rather than others:  “Why this system and this form?” We may also turn this question toward ourselves: “why and how do we assemble and arrange these particular components to construct those particular machines?” (Savat and Thompson 2015: 294, emphases in original). Rather than

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focusing on meaning-making, pedagogical development, or the “improvement agenda” of education (Moran and Kendall 2009), schizoanalysis deals with machinic processes of education; processes where desiring-production is central. Teachers, writes Webb (2015), are connected to many desiring-machines within which they work, such as Oedipal machines, identity machines, gender machines and knowledge machines, and educational desires are produced within them; desires that may be contradictory and emerge as a cacophony of voices within the teaching body. Schizoanalysis is interested in how desire is arranged and assembled in specific social or pedagogical formations (cf. Sharon 2011), and how, for instance, science proliferates from desire (Watson 2008).1 In relation to the specific problem of animals in education, contradictions and contradictory desires are omnipresent. One example, again taken from veterinary education, is the public image of the veterinary profession, often taking shape as an idea of the veterinarian as a modern incarnation of the Saint Franciskus; a benevolent healer who saves animal lives, protects animals from disease and suffering, and improves their quality of life. These are also expectations that many novice veterinary students bring to their education. They collide, however, heavily with educational reality, as students become immersed in the economy of animal production, and learn that animals are primarily production units who must be kept in a condition so as to generate optimal economic output. Society’s relationships with animals are often said to be ambivalent, and society, culture, and education need to develop strategies to handle these contradictions and make them appear as ordinary and natural parts of our everyday lives (Arluke and Sanders 1996; Pedersen 2010a). With a schizoanalytic approach, education does not try to cope with the contradictions it itself constantly produces, but rather thrives on them. As a social machine (see below), education and its institutions, according to Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 2009:  151), “make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate.” (Emphasis in original) Deleuze and Guattari’s work has been taken up quite widely in education research. Analytic interest is commonly focused on learning and “becoming” in educational processes, often with attention to the vitalist, life-affirming, and transformative potentials of their philosophy (see, e.g., Masny 2013; Walkerdine 2013). The political problem of animals in education requires a sharper and less comforting tactic:  schizoanalysis as a tool of critical inquiry into the violent, coercive, and repressive dimensions of education. It needs to address pedagogical power regimes and arrangements, as well as the little insanities and

Introduction

5

micro-fascisms embedded in everyday, mundane, and ordinary pedagogical life (cf. Foucault [1972] 2009).2

Schizoanalytic Ontology: The Concept of the Machine Schizoanalysis is neither human- nor animal-centered, nor focusing on “relations” between human/animal subjects and their material surroundings. It is, rather, “machino-centric” (Guattari [1986] 1998). The schizoanalytic machine differs from the general definition of a machine in colloquial language as an instrument or other technical device intended for human use. It also differs from the conceptualization of animals as machines or production units in the animal industries. The schizoanalytic machine can indeed take the form of (and produce, or assemble) a technical device (see Chapter 6), but is rather a functional social assemblage that connects us with everything else, in continuously ongoing production processes (Sauvagnargues 2016). The schizoanalytic machine and its production processes are not metaphoric, but real:  They are composed of connections, codes, cuts, and flows (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009). Nor is the machine in opposition to humans, or “nature”: Humans forge parts together with the machine, or forge a part together with something else (an animal, a tool, other humans), thereby composing a machine (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2016). Machines are, in brief, that what connect us; an operator-concept aiming to explain social processes in their actual particularities (Sauvagnargues 2016). As individuals, our relation to machines is not a relation of invention or imitation, but a populating relationship:  we populate the machines, work together with, and inside them. It is also a relation of multiplicity:  Machines are at work everywhere, there are an infinite number of machines, machines made up of, and working in, other machines. The machine, like the unconscious in Deleuze and Guattari, is always linked to a social field or body, and forges together humans, animals, and tools while distributing them across this social body (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2016). For instance, the education system or institution is a social machine that forges together humans, animals, and technologies and distributes them across the various spaces of this system, unevenly and in shifting assemblages with various effects. “Any society,” writes Sauvagnargues (2016), is “characterised by the ‘concrete machines’ that it invents:  thus, the school-machine or Foucault’s prison or hospital machine” (200), but also an array of technical tools and devices. Through these “concrete machines,” knowledge is connected to technologies of power, which are at play

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Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education

with certain investments of desire (Deleuze 2004). To begin to understand, and act on, the animal condition in education, we need to scrutinize precisely how the knowledge/power/desire dynamics work through pedagogical settings involving animals. Sauvagnargues (2016) defines the concept of the machine in further detail by outlining six simultaneous components that together constitute the machine (derived from Guattari’s Chaosmosis [1992]):  (1) Material and energetic components; (2)  Semiotics (plans, formulas, equations, calculations, written codes and printed marks, instructions, schedules, and instructional diagrams, figures, sketches, measurements etc.); in short, “noetic” data or information. These semiotic components refer to language and discourse but without an individual author as their source of origin. Rather, what is at work is collective assemblages of enunciation (Guattari [1986] 1998), circulating and reproducing themselves through subjects; (3) Organs and humours of the human body (and, I  would add, animal body); (4)  Order-words (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004), semiotic layers of social and commercial information emanating from all spheres of professional expertise and social situations (such as animal science education and their respective professions). They are constituted by “all of the multiform, contradictory discourses to which we are exposed and that we in turn help circulate” (Sauvagnargues 2016:  191); (5)  Desiring-machines; our investments that allow the preceding components to assume consistency, and that make individual bodies feed into and be subjectivated by a social machine (further, it is by social machines humans and animals are incorporated into technical machines; see Buchanan 2008); and (6)  Abstract machines that hold together the above five components and are set in motion by a concrete assemblage, operating as its condition of possibility (Sauvagnargues 2016). These six components will be further developed throughout the following chapters. In a machino-centric analysis—schizoanalysis—everything is production. Machines open to other machines with which they coexist, connect, produce flows, cut flows, capture and code, always to produce new combinations of machines and contexts (Spindler 2013). With students, animals, and biotechnologies, they form machinic assemblages through which energies flow, are redirected, and cut through by various forms of power (Ringrose 2013). Guattari ([1986] 1998) asks how assemblages work, through questions that schizoanalysis has to address: How does an assemblage take over the task of “managing” a particular situation from another assemblage? How does one so-called analytical assemblage hide another assemblage? How do numerous assemblages inter-connect and what

Introduction

7

are the consequences? How can one explore—in what seems to be a completely blocked context—the potential for constituting new assemblages? How can one “assist,” if the need arises, the relations of production or better yet, the relations of proliferation and the micro-politics of these new assemblages? (Guattari [1986] 1998: 435)

These are questions that will be evoked throughout the book. Neither representation, expression, interpretation, symbolism, nor any other form of meaning-making (which education studies is commonly preoccupied with) is of concern here. (Destroying representations is one of the explicit tasks of schizoanalysis; see Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009.) Other key issues for education research, such as experiences, intersubjectivity, and relations, at least on the level on or between individuals, are also largely rejected by schizoanalysis (Lorraine 2003). The question is, rather, What do machines produce? “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009:  3) Machines operate by varying modes, speeds, and intensities. They can be large molar social machines, tied to major conceptual norms or schemas, or molecular micro-machines (Deleuze 2004); they may deterritorialize (detach an element from its original system or context, to enter new territory and new relations) or reterritorialize; they may pick up speed or break down, work “in fits and starts” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009: 1). Machines operate, as will be shown in subsequent chapters, indiscriminately on all bodies (Sauvagnargues 2016): organic and inorganic; human and animal (but code them differently). But again, what do machines produce? Machines produce “the real”: real worlds, educational realities. What exactly these educational realities consist of, and how they are brought about, is the focus of investigation in this book. Such is the schizoanalytic ontology of education this project relies on. With machines as the primary unit of analysis, the focus of critical inquiry shifts from our “distance” from animals (i.e., human-animal dualism) in contemporary society as a presumed ethical problem, to our proliferating and intensifying connections with them. This shift is a distinct move away from certain strands of new materialism, posthumanism, and similar trajectories that tend to celebrate assumptions of human-animal entanglements and mutual “becomings.”3 My approach does however share certain aspects of post-anthropocentric education research, avoiding a priori analytic distinctions between entities normally perceived as having different status, or occupying different positions, in the education system. This means that even minor, or seemingly irrelevant or

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peripheral details in educational situations, may enter catalytic constellations and machinic assemblages. It also means that I  avoid making any significant analytic distinction between phenomena normally differentiated in education research, such as educational levels, programs, subject areas, or sectors. Where, then, is the human or animal subject to be located? In schizoanalysis, the subject is a product of multiple forces, internal as well as external (Buchanan 2013), and subjectivity is separated from the notion of the individual. The individual body is always the site of different heterogeneous modes of subjectivation, which converge (with more or less harmony) to produce social individuals. This makes the individual a result of social modes of production (Sauvagnargues 2016). The schizoanalytic subject is thus radically decentered and produced as an outcome (or residuum) of machinic processes, with no fixed identity, as a “terminal” for “transindividual programmes that inform it, educate it and govern it, and with which it interacts” (Sauvagnargues 2016: 149), or as an “appendix” or “spare part” adjacent to the machine, as Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 2009:  20) put it. The subject is produced alongside other outcomes, effects, and objects; emerging to consume, enjoy or suffer part of what else has been produced through machinic processes (Holland 1999). The insertion of machinic processes into capitalist production and consumption thus has effects on human and animal subjectivity; effects which should be explored (cf. Watson 2008). As part of the work undertaken in this book, I investigate how human and animal subjects are produced and “educated,” not so much by teachers but by education-machines of animal science programs, how they respond to them and to other effects produced. At the same time, subjectivity is the condition of desiring-machines, and this condition is open to transformation (Sauvagnargues 2016). Desire is central to schizoanalytic ontology, constituting the very texture of society (Guattari, in Deleuze 2004) and flows through education (and other) institutions as an impersonal force that catalyzes shifts and moves in indeterminate directions, productive as well as destructive. Crucial questions are, according to Spindler (2013: 99): “How does desire operate in our realities, how has it shaped them, what new realities can and must it give rise to from now on? . . . What machinery does a desire emanate from, and what (new machinery) is brought about?” (my translation). Capitalism, for instance, is a desiring-machine in and of itself (Deleuze 2004). Desiring-machines produce subjectivities adjacent to machinic components, but their investments also contribute to transforming subjectivity as well as to societal change (Sauvagnargues 2016): “Desire is revolutionary by nature because it builds desiring-machines which, when they are inserted into

Introduction

9

the social field, are capable of derailing something, displacing the social fabric.” (Deleuze 2004: 233) A significant part of the schizoanalytic process is to identify and envision alternative trajectories along which micro-political moves and desire-investments might transform education, something we will get back to in Chapter 8 and the Postscript.

Critical Animal Pedagogy and Theory The history of institutionalized education is a history of violence toward animals. Education has constituted animals as pedagogical and scientific objects, as carriers of a collected body of scientific knowledge about laws and functions of what we call “nature” (Pedersen 2011a), or simply as food served on a daily basis in the school canteen (Rice 2013; Rowe 2011, 2013). Being both absolutely exterior to and absolutely essential for the larger educational project of becoming-human,4 animals have been continuously parasited on by education (MacCormack 2013). Our parasitic habits toward animals in society are endless: we produce animals to produce other animals, and use other animals to sustain the animals we use (MacCormack 2012). The following chapters will show how education becomes active in these parasitic production processes. Education’s relationship to animals is a burgeoning field of practice-oriented critical inquiry (e.g., Cole and Stewart 2014; Corman and Vandrovcová 2014; Gunnarsson Dinker and Pedersen 2016; Kahn 2003; Kahn and Humes 2009; Kopnina and Cherniak 2015; MacCormack 2013; Miller 2015; Nocella et al. in press; Oakley 2011; Rice 2013; Rowe 2011; Snaza 2013; Spannring 2017; Wallin 2014). Critical animal studies and critical animal pedagogies, two areas of scholar-activist critical theory and praxis, seek to liberate animals (and humans) from any form of oppression and exploitation (e.g., Best 2009; Matsuoka and Sorenson 2018; Nibert 2017; Nocella et al. 2014; Sanbonmatsu 2011b; Sorenson 2014; Taylor and Twine 2014), and abolish the ontological status of animals as “food,” “property,” “entertainment,” “natural resources,” “research models,” or any other instrumental position and use in society; a status that makes them infinitely accessible for human use. The use of animals as “data” for scientific work (such as this book) is one of the multiple ways in which animals are made accessible to us. It could indeed be argued that “the animal” has been studied enough (Pedersen and Stănescu 2014), and that we should take an epistemological step aside and leave the animals alone, free from our knowledge-producing urges, to create a space of noninterference where

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they can flourish on their own conditions (MacCormack 2013; Pedersen and Stănescu 2014). This is an urgently relevant question also to education and is a foundational idea in critical animal pedagogies (Gunnarsson Dinker and Pedersen 2016). This book, however, fails to leave the animals alone. It does include animals, to the extent that they have been physically and discursively present in my fieldwork sites, with the purpose to scrutinize the way the education system captures them, inserts them into its machines. It investigates animal (and student) production in education-machines, in order to understand how violence toward them is enacted in these machineries, how we can begin to figure out the nature of this violence—and, most importantly, how it can be ended (Chapter 8; Postscript). It is, in brief, an exploration of “the animal condition” in education—the life situation of animals and the multiple forms of violence they are exposed to (Pedersen and Stănescu 2012) under different power regimes in spaces of teaching and learning. To this end, I  will, in subsequent chapters, go into empirical detail. Close attention to the specificities of violent conditions makes it possible to say something about this violence; whether in the form of a Foucauldian microphysics of power ([1977] 1984), or a phenomenology of torture as meticulously developed by Elaine Scarry (1985). Here, schizoanalysis is put to work for the purpose of scrutinizing violence toward animals in education. One could ask, then, what schizoanalysis contributes to other critical animal theories, such as the excellent and growing body of Foucauldian scholarship in the field (e.g., Chrulew and Wadiwel 2017; Cole 2011; Coppin 2003; Holloway 2007; Palmer 2001; Thierman 2010; Twine 2010; Wadiwel 2015; Williams 2004). These approaches, like schizoanalysis, make it possible to explore the complex symbiotic institutional relationships between formal education and the various branches of the animal-industrial complex. To schizoanalysis, however, these relations are not structural or ideological, but machinic, with quite different implications for the analysis of violence, power, science, and knowledge. To this must be added the central place allocated to desire in schizoanalysis and how it interplays with both power and knowledge production (Deleuze 2004) in shifting dynamics that have immediate effects on animals in societal institutions (such as education). Furthermore, the psychoanalytic roots of schizoanalysis (the critique of Oedipal relations) have implications for the constitution of the human/animal subject in this book, and the emergence of educational authorities. Schizoanalysis, in brief, draws on a different ontology that should not be seen as excluding, but rather as complementary to other critical theories. It does, however, make it necessary to rethink certain key concepts in critical

Introduction

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animal theory. One of these concepts is the animal-industrial complex (Noske 1997; see Chapter 1), and another is speciesism.

The Analytic Insufficiency of Speciesism A common conceptual node around which to organize inquiry in critical animal theory is speciesism; a notion which has developed and transformed along with the intensification of institutionalized animal exploitation which has, under capitalism, rapidly reached massive scales. Introduced by Richard Ryder in 1970, the term was picked up and disseminated widely through Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation (1975). Through the lens of analytic philosophy, speciesism at this point largely referred to species-coded discrimination or prejudice. In continental philosophy and cultural studies, Cary Wolfe (2003), drawing on Jacques Derrida, expanded this definition by conceptualizing speciesism as an institution relying on a discourse of species. This elaboration was an important one, since it made it possible to analyze how the symbolic system of language and meaning-making about animals (the discourse of species), and the organized material practices of animal exploitation, feed into each other, as well as into constructions of “otherness” more generally, pointing out that “speciesism” does not only target animals, but also certain categories of humans.5 Around the same time, sociologist David Nibert (2002) reworked the term speciesism from the perspective of Donald Noel’s critical social theory, defining speciesism as an ideology; a set of socially shared beliefs legitimating a certain social order, upheld by state power and vested economic interests, by which deprivileged groups (human or animal) are oppressed. A  couple of years later, speciesism once again expanded its analytic scope in the work of critical social theorist John Sanbonmatsu (2011a), who, by situating the term within a more explicitly Marxist realm, views speciesism as a mode of production in and of itself—a dynamic, flexible, and hegemonic materialist system imbricated with capitalism. This brief historical overview (although in no way exhaustive) indicates that emphasis has shifted from understanding speciesism as prejudice based on the absence of individual moral codes toward animals, to structural analyses of speciesism as part of certain social power arrangements. With Sanbonmatsu’s theorization, the systemic, material, and productive dimensions of speciesism are further accentuated. His analysis is of particular relevance to this book, and all definitions of speciesism above are significant for the development of critical animal theory; still, my schizoanalytic inquiry is not framed by

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Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education

the notion of speciesism. My inquiry does not primarily approach education as governed by speciesist ideologies, or as a setting for the socialization into speciesist regimes and mindsets through the operationalization and implementation of an oppressive animal politics materialized through educational curricula and specific teaching strategies. Also, I do not dwell on the notion of a human/animal divide or “dualism,” which has become a strong and widespread (even hegemonic) trope in critical animal studies, often assumed to be a root cause of our violence toward animals. My analyses in the following chapters furthermore do not share the idea that biotechnologies and the development of modern animal production systems in all spheres of the animal economy have contributed to a “hyperseparation” (Emel and Wolch 1998:  20) of humans and animals, assuming that we have become increasingly distanced from animal life and that this distance facilitates our sustained exploitation of them. While I would not question the relevance of these assumptions as such, my schizoanalytic inquiry follows a different trajectory; namely, that our connections with animals in contemporary biotechnological and biocapitalist society have multiplied and proliferated, producing increasingly new connections, in hyperactive ways, and that the fragmentary forms in which these connections operate serve to speed up and intensify this hyperactivity even further (cf. Franklin [2002] 2007; Pierce 2013; Shukin 2009). In this analysis, it is not our physical, discursive, and emotional distance from animals that should be our primary focus of critical inquiry, but rather the endless, profit-driven, and hyperactive connections, and the flows of desire therein, that forge us together with animals in education-machines. Following Culp (2016) and Göransson (2017), this book develops a critique of the connectivism6 that has been fetishized in much new-materialist readings of Deleuze and education, as well as in posthumanist animal studies (cf. Gunnarsson Dinker and Pedersen 2016). Particularly significant to this project is Patricia MacCormack’s (2012, 2013) posthuman abolitionist ethics, which makes a radical shift in posthumanist theorizing by asking us to leave alone, to render animals absolutely inaccessible, to undo our parasitic selves, in relation to animals, as all thought and action involving animals will ultimately be based on our experiences, our (un) consciousness, our desires, conditions and limitations, not theirs. Knowledgeproduction itself is a totalizing machine that perpetuates the human and human thought, precluding any capacity for nonspeciesist ethics. “Our discourse and communication about animals,” writes MacCormack (2012), “is a result of the ways we have exploited them and (ab)used them, parasite [sic] off them, needed

Introduction

13

them and wanted them.” According to MacCormack, we can never know how to know animals. They are self-sufficient and must be treated thus—through nonintervention and noninvolvement, through making no demands on them. The practical example of veganism is part of such an ethical position (although it may not be enough). “From an abolitionist gracious paradigm the posthuman refuses parasitic needs.” This, asserts MacCormack, humans are able to, through not—“not enslaving, not cannibalizing, not torturing.” In schizoanalytic terms— to cut the connections and flows; discontinue our trafficking in animals. I will return to this abolitionist ethics, and discuss its pedagogical implications, in the Postscript.

The Fieldwork Sites In this book, animal science education is used as an umbrella term for educational subject areas, programs, and settings where animals are physically or discursively present and incorporated in processes of knowledge production and dissemination. It includes educational levels from upper secondary schools to higher education; schools and programs with an animal-related profile and those without. In total, I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork in four upper secondary schools in Sweden, and one institute of higher education in two periods (between 2003–4 and 2009–10; a total of 102 days). During these periods I  have conducted formal interviews with sixteen students, teachers, and school leaders, engaged in informal interviews with many more, carried out participant observations in classroom and lecture settings as well as outside educational facilities, and analyzed teaching and learning materials as well as other documents. Included in the analyses is also an ethnographic study at a nonformal educational site; a so-called pasture release event in the Swedish countryside (Chapter 5). The educational programs where fieldwork has been carried out include two vocational upper secondary programs in animal caretaking, designed to prepare students for a variety of animal-handling professions in zoos and aquariums, pet shops, veterinary clinics, research laboratories, and so on. The other two schools did not have this specialization but focused on university preparatory programs in the humanities/social sciences and the natural sciences/technical studies, respectively. At the level of higher education, fieldwork was mainly targeted at the veterinary education program, but analyses also include interview materials from ethology education.

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Putting schizoanalytic inquiry to work through materials produced within “conventional” human-centered modes of qualitative research (ethnography and interviews), involves certain challenges. In education research, the analytic preoccupation with students, teachers, children (and their interaction) has been more or less taken for granted but disturbed rather recently through posthumanist and post-qualitative approaches (e.g., Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010; Lather and St. Pierre 2013; Pedersen and Pini 2017; Snaza and Weaver 2015; Taylor and Hughes 2016). In schizoanalysis, interpretation or representation of human (inter)subjectivity is not what is at stake; rather, this is precisely what should be destroyed as part of the schizoanalytic task (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009). A  schizoanalytic project relying largely on individual subjects’ utterances and actions therefore appears problematic (cf. Thompson and Cook 2015). It is, however, a significant part of scrutinizing the specificities of violence in pedagogical processes. This said, it is not personal relations or experiences of education in themselves that are of analytic interest, but rather the machines they populate, speak through, and assist in materializing. Among the machines and machinic assemblages addressed here, some have subjective components; others do not (cf. Guattari [1986] 1998). Schizoanalytic research ethics may be conceptualized through this status of the subject as decoupled from the individual. The schizoanalytic education research project is not about evaluating or critiquing individual teachers’ work or pedagogical approaches, and statements emerging for instance through an interview are not viewed as expressions of a personal position or meaningmaking. Rather, we are all part of statement-(re)producing machinic assemblages, which we also assist in various ways, and to investigate how statements take shape is part of the schizoanalytic task (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004; Sauvagnargues 2016; see Chapter  3). As a researcher, I  was frequently caught up in the same machines I purported to study; oscillating seemingly randomly between positions I  was neither expecting nor qualified for nor feeling comfortable with. In a hunter education class, sitting among the students, I was interrogated by the teacher about a homework task, and was struck by a sudden fear of delivering the wrong answer. In an animal caretaker class I was targeted by one of the students as a cooperation partner and assistant teacher; in another class I was assigned the task by the head teacher of taking a group of visitors from a Norwegian partner school to a nearby zoo. I  was also given the task of monitoring students during the writing of an exam (although I  was never involved in the actual grading process). These unexpected occurrences during fieldwork are, of course, commonplace, and frequently regarded as a valuable

Introduction

15

part of the ethnographic research process (Arluke and Sanders 1996). In retrospect, however, I see them as something else than only providing additional insight into the specific “culture” or community I intended to study. They also show how we have entered a specific machine, such as a teaching-machine, and the unavoidability of working inside it, of becoming a component, of forging connections with its parts, wheels, and motors. As a researcher, “You have boarded” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2016: 522, my translation), and cannot rely on an outsider position, because there is no such position to occupy. This “boarding” also effectively obliterates the fantasy of “representing” a certain community of (educational) practice. Again, Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 2009) stress that schizoanalysis is purely functional, only interested in what is produced as effects of machines and machinic assemblages. As Seem (2009) points out, however, this is not all: Extending thought to the point of madness and action to the point of revolution, theirs is indeed a politics of experience. The experience, however, is no longer that of man, but of what is nonhuman in man, his desires and his forces. (Seem 2009: xix)

Seem’s words form an image of thought (Deleuze [1968] 2004) that has guided this book, although my project is far more modest in its scope and claims.

Overview of the Book This book develops a provisional machinic “taxonomy” of animal science education, analyzing how certain machines come into being in educational settings with animals. Chapters  1–7 identify and attempt to describe the operations of particular education-machines, their details, and connections to other machines, with attention to how they work through animal and student bodies and behaviors. Abstract machines (Chapter  1), Desiring-machines (Chapter  2) and Order-words (Chapter  3) refer, according to Sauvagnargues (2016), to modes of subjectivation, of transforming the individual into a subject. The first three chapters focus on these three machinic components, respectively, and should be viewed as fundamental to the arguments pursued throughout the book. Chapter  1 discusses education as an overlooked “missing link” in research on the animal-industrial complex (Noske 1997; Twine 2012); an institutional aggregate that may be conceptualized as an abstract machine organizing life

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conditions for animals in human society at large. Chapter 2 reworks the notion of the “human-animal bond,” prevalent in scholarship on children and animals, into a desiring-machine working as a force through educational processes. Chapter 3 explores order-words in animal science education that issue commands and (re)install order, as well as work through more subtle codes and signs of both linguistic and nonlinguistic character in pedagogical practices. Chapter 4 pursues the comfort-machines delivering didactic promises of animal welfare, care, and harmonious interspecies coexistence to students, consumers, families, and other citizens, as well as to animals themselves. Chapter 5 follows the cheerful (but never innocent) moves, twists, and turns of edutainment-machines capturing teachers, students, and animals alike. Chapter  6 maps technologies of animal management and control systems, for instance at dairy production sites and in zoos, as they take on pedagogical functions. Chapter 7 addresses how animal science education becomes incorporated in the machinery of animal breeding and slaughter, for instance through compulsory study visits to slaughterhouses in veterinary education, but also through various activities in upper secondary school. The Conclusion sketches a schematic overview of education-machines and their connections identified in Chapters  1–7, and addresses their effects. Chapter  8 looks ahead toward possibilities for transformation. This chapter brings together research carried out with four activist-students who engage with animal liberation “micropolitics” to catalyze epistemological, political, and educational change. Drawing on Manning’s (2016) notion of “the minor gesture,” the chapter explores how such micropolitics may operate in practice. The Postscript discusses concrete implications of these two notions for critical animal pedagogies and opens up further terrain for rethinking education and its parasitic relationship to animals.

1

An Abstract Machine? Education in the Animal-Industrial Complex

This chapter explores two major and intersecting axes cutting across animal science education:  Animal capital and the animal-industrial complex. Two lines of inquiry are pursued: first, the chapter identifies and brings to the fore a “missing link” of education research in scholarship on animal capital and the animal-industrial complex. Second, the chapter asks what becomes of the animal-industrial complex in a schizoanalytic approach to education? I  will propose that the animal-industrial complex is an abstract machine (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004), but that this concept needs modification to account for the multifaceted function of education therein. Animal capital and the animal-industrial complex are not distinctly separate notions, but are overlapping and mutually reinforcing in their educational forms. I  will focus primarily on the animal-industrial complex as an analytic tool for education research, while keeping in mind its symbiosis with its overlapping concept, animal capital. Both notions have been theorized in detail elsewhere (see Noske 1997; Shukin 2009; Twine 2012), and I  will not offer a comprehensive analysis of them here. What interests me is their educational implications, and how they may help us situate animal science education in its wider biocommercial and biotechnological terrain.

Animal Capital and Knowledge Production Animal exploitation is to a large extent organized by profit-driven and instrumental rationales; rationales that have shown themselves to be remarkably resilient against ethical arguments, social justice, and environmental concerns (see Nibert 2002; 2017; Sanbonmatsu 2011b). Sanbonmatsu (2017) notes that capitalism has removed the last of the cultural and technical barriers to animal

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exploitation. The emergence of new capitalist relations—the monopolization of corporate industry, the creation of mass consumer markets, and state intervention in subsidizing animal industries—has made possible the proliferation in animal products in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Capitalism, argues Sanbonmatsu, is inimical to animal life because it reduces living beings to the status of commodities; because it cannibalizes the ecological order, destroying the conditions necessary to the survival and flourishing of life itself; because it engenders a “machinic” civilization, a technologized system of production, in which vulnerable beings— including human beings—are viewed as mere matter to be disposed of at will by capital; because it corrupts democracy and makes use of the state as a weapon against the powerless; because it aggrandizes and extends the reach of corporate power and influence over human life throughout society; because it alienates human beings from one another and from the other beings; because it conflates or blurs the distinction between subjects and objects, persons and things; because it creates a “second,” artifactual nature that alienates us from other natural beings and leads us to mistake cultural and historical constructions for immutable, self-evident facts; because it “interpellates” or molds us, psychologically and behaviorally, into self-interested, isolated consumers, thus thwarting the emergence of new, alternate forms of culture and development, ones perhaps more compatible with an image of ourselves as free beings capable of compassion, moral deliberation, and public reason. (Sanbonmatsu 2017: 26)

While a schizoanalytic approach would frame Sanbonmatsu’s message differently (drawing on a different ontology and a different view on the subject; see introduction), the gist of his argument—the critique of capitalism and its institutions and how they mold (“interpellate”) us, as well as animals, into capitalism’s own mirror image (cf. Dickens 2003)—remains. The roles of animal production in global capital accumulation processes have also been analyzed by Emel and Wolch (1998), who have identified a particular economic sphere, the “animal economy,” where animal bodies, labor, and reproductive capacities are incorporated into globalized commodity chains. The animal economy, according to Emel and Wolch, has increased rapidly both in terms of geographical expansion (e.g., to countries in the developing world) and in the intensification of its practices, making it possible to squeeze more profit out of each animal life in shorter time. In animal production processes, the animal body is commonly turned against the animal’s own interest, incorporating her in a production system designed to elicit optimal commodity value from her mere biological existence (Noske 1997). The animal economy comprises animal

An Abstract Machine?

19

agribusiness; ecological cleansing in the intensification of land use; hunting and fishing; the capturing, trading, and breeding of wild animals for circuses, laboratories, pets, trophies, sport, and other purposes; and biotechnology (Emel and Wolch 1998). To this general account, Boyd (2001), Franklin ([2002] 2007) and Shukin (2009) have contributed more detailed insights of how all elements of the animal body, its anatomical parts, substances and fluids, as well as its productive and reproductive capacities (such as its labor power), have merged with the commodity form in biotechnological and biocommercial processes to generate profitable forms of animal capital heavily reliant on scientific knowledge development. Animal capital accommodates, to draw on Franklin’s ([2002] 2007: 355) formulations, an intensification and an enterprising-up of relations between animal life, biocommerce, and expert knowledge, with the effect that the myriad connections between them have reached an almost infinite number of possibilities (Pedersen 2012a). One site of biotechnological product development and biocapital accumulation where these developments of the commoditization of animal life have intensified is the “poultry” industry, with its mutual interdependence and increasingly blurred boundaries between corporate interests, animal science, and husbandry. Investments into research and knowledge development of avian biology feed into poultry management improvement strategies and technologies as a productive force (Boyd 2001; Watts 2000). (As will be shown in Chapter 7, advancements in the poultry industry have direct effects on education, particularly veterinary education.) In a similar vein, but focusing specifically on animal genomics and so-called livestock genetics corporations, Twine (2010: 112) notes that “biotechnology represents a new capitalist accumulation project as part of a broader knowledge economy.” The permeable boundaries between academia and the corporate sphere open space for multiple blurrings and overlaps between them, such as animal biotechnology scientists holding faculty positions while being involved in, and bound up by, the commercial interests of agribusiness. Schizoanalysis does not separate out human and industrial processes from “nature,” and these are not viewed as two opposite terms confronting each other. They are, rather, “one and the same essential reality, the producer-product” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009: 5), a process that produces one within the other and couples the machines together (2). The incorporation processes of animals in an industrialized system of production are complex, and the roles and functions of education in the production system add to the complexity. Animal production and killing is embedded in, and fed back into, expert

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knowledge, which makes convergences between the animal industries and scientific knowledge production essential places to begin to map the functions of education in processes of exploitation and commoditization of animal life. Pierce (2013) makes the merge of biocapitalism and education policy and reform his central object of analysis when he argues that educational institutions form a terrain where life and its mechanisms are targeted by a range of production and control regimes. Education, according to Pierce, has become part of the biopolitical and biocapitalist landscape where the dissolution of restrictive barriers to the commodification of life takes place. However, rather than beginning to rethink education from the standpoint of “biopolitical reason,” as Pierce (drawing on Hardt and Negri) suggests (23), this book rethinks education and its counterstrategies through schizoanalytic unreason. Attention is focused not only on the larger machineries of education institutions as part of an exploitative and profit-driven system, but, as mentioned in the introductory chapter, also on the little insanities embedded in the everyday, most mundane and ordinary pedagogical practices.

The Animal-Industrial Complex and Education The industrial machine is built on a scientific machine with a cognitive output. This scientific machine capitalizes on the cognitive factor from elementary school to the university, according to complex networks (arborescences) of teaching, research, laboratories, institutes and companies, as well as circuits of finance, research funds, foundations, economic investment in education, research, production and commercialisation. These elements not only make the fabrication of artifacts possible, but even more, they make them profitable by producing humans capable of using them and especially of purchasing them. (Sauvagnargues 2016: 188)

If the first major axis cutting across animal science education is animal capital, the second is what has been referred to by Barbara Noske (1997) as “the animal industrial complex,” denoting the embeddedness and interconnections of animalbased industries in a capitalist fabric, or, drawing on Sauvagnargues’ (2016) account above, an “industrial machine . . . built on a scientific machine with a cognitive output.” Noske (1997) points to an ever-increasing interpenetration of agriculture, advanced technology, banking interests, and government institutions as big (multinational) processing industries are working to take control over the various stages of animal production by, for instance, contract farming. According

An Abstract Machine?

21

to Noske, farming systems are not developed in response to public demand, but rather as a result of research carried out by agricultural scientists with private or governmental funding. Building further on Noske’s work, Twine (2010, 2012) offers a detailed and insightful sociological mapping of the development and operations of modern biotechnologies through an increasing exploitation of animals, with significant focus on genomics and the so-called molecular turn in animal science, noting that genomics in this context is serving to intensify connections in service of a knowledge-based bio-economy. The education sector, however, is not developed as a connection in Twine’s account, although the quote from Sauvagnargues (2016) above indicates its centrality:  teaching, from elementary school to university, together with economic (and, I  would add, affective; see Chapter 2 and subsequent chapters) investments1 in education at all levels, constitute a condition for industrial production processes. They contribute to forming human subjects capable of using, purchasing, and assisting in the production of animal commodities. The animal production sector, for instance, is an important employer for graduated veterinarians, and the pharmaceutical industry hires animal technicians to handle animals acquired for experimental procedures and assist researchers in their laboratories, a place where many graduates from vocational animal caretaker education end up. How this human subjectivity formation, as Sauvagnargues (2016) points to above, unfolds in animal science education, is a focus of investigation in this book, and is viewed as side effects of multiple machinic processes (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009). With a focus on rhizomes of animal production and consumption, Göransson (2017) acknowledges schools as significant nodes in a global “carno-political machinery.” The centrality of education in the animal-industrial complex is also briefly addressed by Noske (1997:  23) by mentioning that companies in agribusiness “sometimes run their own courses in university departments, which in turn actively conduct and give impetus to rationalization measures that are being implemented in agriculture and animal husbandry.” This speaks clearly to the multiple couplings between the formal education system and the animal production apparatus, composed of not only the food production system, but the pharmaceutical industry, the horseracing industry, even fur farming (as a source of animal carcasses for dissection in veterinary education). Universities are not the only educational arenas of exchange for the animal-industrial complex. The animal industries also heavily target compulsory schools through materials such as films, books, farm visits with free food samples (see Chapter  5), products in the school cafeteria, advertising, vending machines, sponsorships, and even

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through offering complete pedagogical plans tailored to fit with the school curriculum and fulfill learning objectives (Cole and Stewart 2014; Göransson 2017; Linné and Pedersen 2016; Rowe 2013; see also Trachsel 2017). To this could be added animal dissection exercises, included in the biology syllabi of many schools (see Chapter 2), with animal “specimen” which may be sourced from, for instance, the slaughter industry. In the next chapter, investments of desire in student-animal relations are addressed. I  will, following Buchanan (2013), argue that processes of desiring-production only become visible through the machines they form. Anticipating my discussion of desiring-machines, I  suggest that the animalindustrial complex becomes most visible through the machines it works with in particularly university-level animal science education. When I  interviewed a veterinary student and animal rights activist “Erica,” the veterinary education program unfolded as a complex, schizoid educational machine, ceaselessly producing (and thriving on) contradictions. A  pharmakon-machine—both medicine and poison—working to alleviate and cure animal diseases and to exploit animals; lecture-machines displaying euphemistic images of pigs playing around in straw and happy cows on pasture while the content of education always emphasizes animal instrumentality; a smooth machine designed to quality-control the animal production system while having this same system as a basis of its own sustenance, effectively blocking possibilities for system critique and change. A  normalizing and norm-producing machine rendering certain human-induced medical problems in animals common and normal to the point that they become more of a norm than animal health. A hierarchical machine producing institutional superegos (cf. Wallin 2013) based on teacher authority as well as on a strong human leadership over animals that students in turn are expected to reproduce in relation to their animal patients (by dominating them into obedience). A deceptive machine in profound need of ill animals and poor animal husbandry in order to sustain itself. A beautiful machine perfectly calibrated to maximize profit through a carefully calculated balancing, rather than curing of animal disease, by attempting to move the boundary of disease. The following example is the veterinary student Erica’s account of a practical exercise with cows at her university’s own farm: I wouldn’t say that the teacher was brutal or, it was, it really was not the case, but more like this attitude that now it’s me, now it’s we who decide and will do this examination. It wasn’t a cow that was ill so it wasn’t about an examination that was necessary to do, and it was not on the map to try, in some way ask for

An Abstract Machine?

23

permission or, it was merely to approach the cow and do what you are supposed to do. While we, for instance, saw, there was a cow lying with an enormous udder and gasping, lying in the manure slot, “shouldn’t you take a look at this?” I think there were several of us who asked the teacher then. “Yes but no, it, it, it’s not what we are here to do now, and it, no it’s probably quite normal, yes, I could have a chat with the farmer,” but no real intention to intervene. (Interview transcript)

Erica repeatedly calls the system she is part of “sick” and “insane” (sinnesrubbad)— an insanity accommodating both illness and madness. The veterinary profession is in almost total symbiosis with agribusiness at all levels, with intimate links to the meat, dairy, and fodder industries, and with veterinarians upholding board positions in many of these companies (cf. Twine 2010). In Erica’s words, “a totally corrupt profession.” These links extend to the veterinary education program, creating permeable boundaries between education and the corporate sphere. Corporate sponsorships (during the interview, Erica shows me her jacket with the company logo of the dog food producer Royal Canin) and invitations to several dinners with pharmaceutical companies presenting their products to the veterinary students seem almost impossible to avoid even for critically inclined students: Hills (a pet food company) offered a lecture on dog and cat nutrition, a topic really missing in our education, and they said that everybody who shows up will receive an anatomy atlas and a stethoscope. A stethoscope is quite expensive. Everybody needed a stethoscope for the next course, so everybody in my class was there. (Interview transcript)

As Twine (2012) remarks, many leading pharmaceutical companies have vested interests in producing drugs for animals under the rubric “animal health,” but in the agricultural or sporting context, health and welfare are often proxys for animal productivity. This resonates with my interview with Erica, when she explains to me that a certain type of antibiotics is administered to broiler chickens to protect them from parasites; a praxis which, at the same time, also makes it possible to keep the animals in intensive production systems. The animal-industrial complex connects animal agribusiness, livestock genetics corporations (whose business idea is to develop and distribute new genetic lines of farmed animal species), pharmaceutical companies, science, and, I would add, education, to the circuits of global capital. Twine (2012: 21–2) describes the animal-industrial complex as a material-semiotic network of relations, actors, technologies, and identities, and points out that the word

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Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education

“complex” has three different (and, in this context, interrelated) uses: complicated and “difficult to understand”; a conglomerate or system; and “a psychological problem” (in terms of, for instance, involving affective processes at a societal level such as denial of the systemic violence inflicted on animals) (Twine 2012). All three dimensions begin to emerge through my interview with Erica. The animal-industrial complex operates as a transnational institutional aggregate at the network level of education-machines, and also permeates educational relations in their microscopic detail (as will be shown throughout this book). The animal-industrial complex, however, is neither a form of infrastructure, an ideological superstructure, nor a deterministic omnipotent phenomenon. As it has no form or substance of its own, and operates by matter and function without distinction between the artificial and the natural (cf. Twine 2010), I suggest that a fourth understanding of the animal-industrial complex would be as an abstract machine (see Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004), although this definition needs both explanation and modification: An abstract machine, according to Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 2004), is a diagram operating by function and matter. As such, it plays a piloting role, constructing a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. According to Sauvagnargues (2016), abstract machines work cohesively in relation to a given machinic assemblage, offering it a provisional consistency (although not unifying) by holding together its different components and carrying them along in a functional arrangement. Abstract machines are created at the moment they are set in motion by concrete assemblages. They function as virtual, unstable, informal maps of relations in machinic assemblages of humans, materials, techniques, and institutions (and, I would add, animals), and occur coextensively with them as their condition of possibility. The abstract machine is thus not a structure; it is a diagram of an assemblage that is neither given nor teleological, any more than the assemblage itself is. “The abstract machine,” writes Sauvagnargues (202), “is not explanatory.” It is, however, empirical, emerging from, as Sauvagnargues puts it, “the ‘coadaptation’ of a given form of power with a given form of practice” (Sauvagnargues 2016), and furthermore, “it is necessary to explain what sets the abstract machine in motion” (231). How can we do this? As the abstract machine operates through empirical encounters, “in a semi-aleatory mode” (231), we must first establish the empirical existence of a concrete assemblage and proceed with our analyses from there. This is part of the work pursued in this book. The animal-industrial complex, as defined above, coincides with the abstract machine in multiple ways, but the notion of “complex” is not sufficient to account

An Abstract Machine?

25

for its educational functions. To reiterate Deleuze and Guattari’s words above, “it plays a piloting role . . ., constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality” ([1980] 2004: 157, emphasis added). This dimension is a key function in the abstract machine’s operations through education. Education, by engaging with the present, also creates new realities in the virtual realm, by working with undeveloped potentials in students—potentials supposed to be developed in certain directions and not others. In a Foucauldian analysis, this would be understood as education’s disciplining, subject-forming, and regulating powers. For a Marxist, it would be conceptualized as an ideological superstructure of an exploitative capitalist system. However, as I have argued elsewhere (see Pedersen 2012a), animal science education has not only a regulatory function, but also a highly vitalizing one. Education may surely be coercive in both implicit and explicit ways (e.g., Giroux 1981; McLaren 1998; Morrow and Torres 1995) but is also in a certain sense friendly toward those it aims to educate. It communicates and connects. It does require conformity, but also supports and encourages. It recommends appropriate behavior, attitudes, and allies. Vocational education in particular may bestow feelings of knowledgeability, pride, and privileged affiliation with specific professional communities onto the students (Pedersen 2010a; cf. Smith and Kleinman 1989). Animal science education, in both theory and practice, also has an inclination toward relieving tensions embedded in controversial animal-related issues (or “dilemmas,” as they are frequently called by educators) such as animal experimentation or meat-eating. It offers students liberation from feelings of guilt toward animals when engaging in, or simply accepting, harm inflicted onto them as part of their education (cf. Arluke and Hafferty 1996), thus navigating and balancing potential ethical conflicts among students arising from the contradictions produced within their education (Pedersen 2010a). As we shall see in subsequent chapters, education may even work by “enchantment”—a mood of lively and intense engagement with the world (Bennett 2001), pointing to a new type of reality. Such is the piloting role of the abstract machine—the diagram—of the animal-industrial complex and its pedagogical work in the formal science education system. The animal-industrial complex works as a myriad of abstract machines (diagrams) through animal science education; one for each machinic assemblage. As an example, one animal caretaker school housed an authentic rodent lab on its premises; a little world of its own, a miniature replica of “real” animal laboratories, which was physically located in a separate designated area of the school building and presented in written information as being used for studies of genetics, for “providing food for predators,” also kept at this school,

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and for learning “how to take care of a lab in a proper way” (Pedersen 2008: 136). Although, according to one teacher, no animal experiments are carried out in the lab, this learning of “how to take care of ” includes, as a necessary component, familiarity with the two large carbon dioxide containers placed on the floor, through which the little school lab apparatus hooks up with the animal breeding and killing machine (Chapter 7). Like a “real” animal research lab, this one also was closed to the public. During the school’s open house event, when the public was invited to visit the school and learn about its activities, all possible measures were taken to prevent visitors from entering the room (a huge flower pot was placed in the middle of the staircase leading to the room, and a handwritten sign on the door explained that “the animals need calm and quiet”) (Pedersen 2008: 137). Through this school lab (along with internship periods at animal research laboratories that were compulsory for all animal caretaker students at this school), animal science education is directly connected with the pharmaceutical branch of the animal-industrial complex. The school lab plays a piloting role for students in the animal caretaker program as it points forward to the pharmaceutical industry as a significant future employer for them. The school’s rodent lab is however not an abstract machine in itself, rather, the abstract machine—the animal-industrial diagram—is the lab’s condition of possibility: a map that brings together the different components of the lab (rats and mice, cages placed in a certain way, carbon dioxide containers, instruction manuals, etc.) in a manner that makes it recognizable as a lab and as a machinic assemblage producing learning of specific kinds of knowledge and skills (and not others), as well as coding of animals (rodents) for specific kinds of relations (and not others). Another example of how the abstract machine operates through specific assemblages in animal caretaker education can be gleaned from zoo management classes, when students were given an assignment to write a report on an imagined zoo of their own design. This assignment evokes an abstract zoo machine (referred to in Chapter 5 as the “spectacle”) guiding the students’ work and holding together its various components as a functional zoo assemblage. The abstract zoo machine is a virtual map that includes panopticon-like details—in itself an abstract machine (Sauvagnargues 2016)—of how to create unobstructed views of animals from as many angles as possible (see Pedersen 2010a). This zoo diagram assembles humans, animals, power relations, technologies, and artifacts that connect students to a new kind of educational reality, while at the same time being recognizable as a zoo.

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The notion of the animal-industrial complex needs modification to account for the multifaceted, dynamic, and productive function of education therein. Through the schizoanalytic concept of the abstract machine, the animalindustrial complex will, in this book, be provisionally (re)configured as the animal-industrial diagram (implicitly to be understood in plural form, diagrams, as it will become uniquely actualized through each concrete education-machine it works coextensively with). As part of the schizoanalytic task, the “diagrammatic components” of each machine will be investigated, each with their singular quality and affective force (Powell 2008). As we will see, the animal-industrial diagram organizes life conditions for animals (and students) in education by playing a piloting role, constructing a real that is yet to come and a new type of reality. This provisional modification of the animal-industrial complex for educational analysis does not invalidate or render redundant Twine’s (2012: 21) account of the three definitions of the notion of “complex” referred to above (i.e., complicated and “difficult to understand”; a conglomerate or system; and “a psychological problem”). On the contrary, these dimensions are complementary and significant to education as a “missing link” in analyses of the animalindustrial complex. They are also, to varying extent, embedded in my analyses of education as part of a machinic assemblage of animal production, and it is to these education-machines I shall now turn.

2

Desiring-Machines: Education and the “Human-Animal Bond”

Holding a bird that has strayed into a house, stroking the neck of a donkey at the edge of a meadow, petting a cat on the street or at home, even picking up a grasshopper and feeling it move—these are certainly not exceptional or deviant experiences. All of us, children and adults alike, have had them, repeatedly. But as soon as we stop to consider them, as soon as we set aside their presumed familiarity, the narrative is sure to begin again, new every time—the infinite surprise that there is a being there and that it has this particular form, so small or so large, this form that is also a tension and a warmth, a rhythm and a grasping:  some life has been caught and condensed, has ended up finding a place in a corner of space-time: the reservoir of existence that connects us to creatures also passes through this universal condition of breathing and fever. (Bailly 2011: 41–2) Remarkable how the nursery caught the telepathic emanations of the children’s minds and created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought zebras, and there were zebras. Sun–sun. Giraffes–giraffes. Death and death. (Bradbury [1948] 2012: 14) The idea of a human-animal “bond,” a presumed innate attachment with animals, poetically articulated above by Jean-Christophe Bailly (2011), also goes under the label of the biophilia hypothesis (Kellert and Wilson 1993). It denotes a supposedly innate, evolutionary, and natural predisposition in humans to attune to animals (surfacing in young children’s concern and love for animals). The biophilia hypothesis has been explicitly or implicitly picked up by a body of education and psychology-oriented literature focusing on child–animal relations. With its sociobiological roots and its tendencies toward romanticizing conceptualizations of childhood, the

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biophilia hypothesis has been heavily contested but also, in recent education scholarship, developed (Dolby 2012) or “queered” (Taylor 2013). Perhaps the primary role of the idea of the biophilia hypothesis today is its susceptibility to being capitalized on by marketing strategies of vested interests in the animal industry, in the promotion of consumer products targeted specifically at children and families. This chapter argues that affective attachment with animals is neither a universal human feature, as suggested by Bailly (2011) above, nor an innate predisposition of human “nature.” In the educational settings this book explores, the human-animal “bond” works as a desiring-machine (Pedersen 2018), which produces educational realities; produces the student/teacher/animal subject as a residuum (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009) in these production processes, and hooks up with education’s other social and technical machines along the way. A desiring-machine is, according to Deleuze (2004), a nonorganic system of the body. The primary process of desiring-production is a process of producing associations, connections and links between thoughts, feelings, and ideas, but these production processes only become visible in and through the machines they form (Buchanan 2013: 180). In contrast to abstract machines (Chapter  1), the educational realities that desiring-machines produce are not part of a piloting function, pointing forward to realities that are yet to come; rather, they generate realities as teachable moments (cf. Hyun and Marshall 2003) in the here and now. These educational realities are inherently social, economic, and political (cf. Spindler 2013), and work on student, teacher, and animal bodies and minds in manifold ways. Desiring-machines are defined by their ability to make endless connections in all directions, traversing and dominating multiple different structures simultaneously (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2016), and with multiple effects: they might produce repression as much as revolution; freedom as much as fascism and slavery (Spindler 2013). How the complex relations between these different modalities and effects play out in animal science education settings, will emerge throughout the subsequent chapters. For the purpose of this book, it is also important to stress that desire does not operate at the private, personal, or individual level—it does not emanate from individual students seeking the presence of animals as their “objects” of desire, as desire in schizoanalysis does not have a given object that presumably would fulfill some kind of lack in the desiring subject. Rather, desire traverses subjects and collectives at an impersonal level, as a force of

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production and a machine that cuts, codes, generates and redirects flows, always open to an entire social field. While desire is not private or personal, desiring-machines make it possible for any individual human body to feed into and be subjectivated by a social machine (Sauvagnargues 2016), which this chapter will begin to explore. Desiring-machines (and other machines) produce intensive and affective states; in fact machines only have affective states (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2016; emphasis added). For instance, Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 2009) note that Ray Bradbury ([1948] 2012; quoted above) describes the nursery as a place where desiring-production occurs, but they pay no particular attention to the fact that what preoccupies the children Wendy and Peter to the brink of obsession in Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt”—where the walls of the nursery in a high-tech, futuristic family home-machine transform into hyperrealistic fantasy worlds produced by the mere thoughts and desires of the children—is animals: Animals and death. In “The Veldt,” virtual predatory animals constitute death threats to Wendy’s and Peter’s parents. In education, as the following chapters will show, death is mostly human-inflicted and takes on many forms, assembled through desiring-machines. For animals in education, their own premature physical death is always present; in seminar rooms and other educational settings, animal death, real or imagined, also becomes a boosting element of a pedagogical unconscious (cf. Lebedev 2018). In this chapter, the centrality of animals in educational desiring-production is in focus. The human-animal “bond,” especially as it emerges through educational settings, is reworked as a machine (or many machines) making certain forms of desire and their associations visible. It creates conditions for students (individually and collectively) to be captured and subjectivated by a multiplicity of education-machines populating animal science education classrooms. In this analysis, the “bond” is not a natural expression of empathy with animals that emerges and operates in separation from, or in opposition to, the political economy of animal production. It is, rather, a component of this social, technoscientific, and economical system but may also make connections beyond it. As in Bradbury’s story “The Veldt” (but through different modalities, organizations, and effects, indeed, through different abstract machines), animal attachment-desiring-machines are hooked up with killing-machines (Chapter 7) through multiple complex connections and routes in education. The present chapter will begin to delineate these various connections, as they occur in and through education.

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Student–Animal Attachment as Pedagogical Force The desiring-machine of animal attachment is one powerful force driving young people into animal science education programs and careers (although other rationales also exist). It operates along two main routes: moments of physical and emotional intimacy with animals, and action to change the life conditions for animals in human society. Environmental education research analyzes the ethical responses to, subjectivity-formation impact of, and learning outcomes of students’ affective encounters with (primarily wild) animals.1 For instance, Sandell and Öhman (2010) have described primary-school children’s interaction with a salamander in a Swedish outdoor education setting. In a more posthumanist-oriented approach, Gannon (2017) outlines in an Australian participatory action research study of “place based wetlands education,” named “Love your Lagoons” project, how a group of secondary school students gets caught up in unexpected encounters with an injured swamphen, a dead eel, and a dead turtle. These encounters led some of Gannon’s students to create a rap song about their swamphen rescue, to stage a dance performance expressing their shock over the human-induced death of the turtle, and to initiate community activism for (wild) animals and the environment by writing letters to local authorities. In Gannon’s posthumanist analyses, these educational events are framed as “common world entanglements” (Taylor 2013), “becomings” between bodies, and “interspecies etiquette” (Warkentin 2010). A schizoanalytic approach however would, rather than placing analytic focus on inter- or intrasubjective relationalities and experiences, map how the desiring-machines connecting these students with these particular animals in these specific settings produce a register of material and immaterial effects that hook up with artistic as well as social machines of potential change beyond the pedagogical contexts and objectives of the project design. In animal science education, desire producing promises for intimacy with animals flows freely through various educational modalities and also across formal and nonformal educational sites. It emerges already in promotion materials attempting to recruit applicants to animal caretaker programs, or to attract visitors to zoos (which some of these schools collaborate with): The [animal caretaker] education gives you a possibility to access professions where you can feel on a daily basis the happiness of the company of dogs . . .

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During your trainee weeks at a big zoo your close encounters with wild animals will give you knowledge and memories for life . . . [Name of school] makes it possible to realize your dreams of working with animals. (Quoted from school information booklet; my translation) Caress a spider, pat a snake or tickle a ray. Mingle with the lemurs or stroll among all the animals of the rainforest. [Name of zoo] brings you into close contact with animals and nature. But no cuddling with crocodiles and cobras of course. (Quoted from zoo information leaflet; my translation) At the “Farm” you get close to animals, [their] smell and sounds . . . You can also jump in the hay, crawl close to the pigs and pat rabbits. (Quoted from zoo information leaflet; my translation) (Pedersen 2010a: 36)

What is at stake here, if education in general can be said as operating through desire (Webb 2015)? In these specific promotional desiring-machines, not only an education pure and simple is offered, but an education that knows everything about your inner thoughts and wishes, almost like Bradbury’s dark fantasy of the nursery in “The Veldt”; an education that promises to fulfill your intimate dreams—in short, what is at stake is a whole world (Pedersen 2018; cf. Spindler 2013). In the words of one animal caretaker student, “We get so much for free by studying here. Of dreams and such that really can come true” (interview transcript). This dream world needs, however, to be administered, and as in most other formal education settings, this is done through the curriculum. Once enrolled in the program, animal caretaker students navigate a curriculum of both theoretical and practical assignments. Desiring-machines propel these assignments in any direction, and open student bodies to affective forces that shatter them from within (Pedersen 2018; cf. Bergen 2010). One animal caretaker class was given the task of writing a report on an animal species of their own choice, and in the introduction to her written report on dolphins, a student explains her choice as follows: I want to talk about a wonderful animal, the dolphin. I chose dolphins partly because I think they are so fascinating. I have always been interested in them, but when I was on Bali I had an opportunity to pat them in the wild and that was the most awesome [experience] that ever happened to me. It was as if something burst [inside me] and everything became clear! I love dolphins. As soon as I  see them on TV or on film I  feel ready to cry. They really are the most WONDERFUL animal[s] [in the world]. (Excerpt from student report, my translation; see Pedersen 2010a: 24–5)

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This student is caught up in a powerful dolphin-desiring-machine, described as producing spiritual, almost divine, emotions with physical effects. During a zoo study visit, desire-flows intensify in the dolphin performance. Desmond (1999) has offered a sharp analysis of how affective forces mobilize and traverse the corporate-owned SeaWorld San Diego theme park, to reach their climax in the meticulously choreographed orca show, which functions as the theme park’s trademark profile activity. The Swedish dolphin performance attended by a group of animal caretaker students, although a performance more modest in scale, works through the same machineries that effectively shore up emotion, while the corporation that nowadays owns the zoo (as well as four other zoos, theme parks, and amusement parks in Sweden) keeps axiomatizing these flows of emotion into overabundant commodity forms, such as cuddly animal toys and other souvenirs endlessly for sale in the zoo shops, or sponsor commercials (Pedersen 2018; cf. Willis 1999): First, we are shown a promotion film about the sponsors of the zoo (among others, Coca Cola and GB Glace) on a screen above the dolphin pool. The film goes on for quite a while. Thereafter a picture is projected onto the same screen showing free dolphins in the sea. Then the dolphin trainers enter and introduce the dolphins by their personal names. The trainers describe them as social and intelligent animals, each of them having their own unique personality. During the show, the dolphins are made to perform different tasks while background music is playing. “Dolphins are cuddly animals and it is important for them, just as it is for us, with closeness and tenderness. So the best moments we have are down in the water,” explains one trainer. She “dances” with the dolphins, kisses them and rides across the pool standing upright on a dolphin’s back. We are told that the basic premises for good cooperation between human and animal is respect, trust, and having fun together. After the show, some of the students approach their teacher and ask him to help them so that they can pat the dolphins or get a job in the show. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 66–7)

The dolphin-desiring-machine produces not only momentary intensities, but also life-changing impulses: The dream job for many animal caretaker students, as graduated professionals or as trainees during internship periods, is as dolphin trainers. The promise delivered by the dolphin show, the possibility to work and play in intimate cross-species symbiosis with a “wild,” charismatic, and exotic animal, exerts a powerful force on these students, although for most of them, the prospect of getting such a job is close to zero and remains an unachievable dream (Pedersen 2010a, 2018).

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Most of the time in animal caretaker classes, however, is spent on a regular basis in the schools’ somewhat less spectacular in-house animal facilities (although in one case, this space was ambitiously constructed to mimic a tropical rainforest). At one animal caretaker school, the students were asked to cooperatively write a diary during their practice-based animal handling classes, specifying which animals they had been working with during the lesson. Diary entries not only included statements about the animals’ conditions, but occasionally students had also added comments on whether they had cuddled the animals (Pedersen 2018). The following observations were made during animal handling classes at two different animal caretaker schools: Today, several students picked up and carried animals around (guinea pigs, gerbils, rats) more or less continuously during the entire lesson. The students talk “baby talk” to them and call them “cute.” Sometimes they focus on details of the animals’ bodies:  “Cute nostrils” (a budgerigar), “cute belly” (a frog). A student who fails to catch and pick up a gerbil says with disappointment, “No gerbils like me today,” and after a few moments, “No animals like me today.” Some of her classmates hold guinea pigs close to their bodies during almost the entire lesson. They comment on one of the guinea pigs:  “She is more social [than the other],” and “Then you feel more appreciated.” Another student exclaims that it is boring to be in the bird room. When I ask her why, she replies that you can’t cuddle birds; they are not social. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 34) During break, two students stay for a while with the ferrets. One of the students picks up one of the ferrets, and then her classmate picks up the other. They hold the ferrets in their arms, caress them and repeat several times how cute they are. “Cute little legs,” says one of them and caresses the ferret’s legs. (Field notes)

Student–animal interaction in both situations above resonates with Bailly’s (2011:  42) idea of an interspecies and intersubjective connection passing through a “universal condition of breathing and fever.” In schizoanalytic terms however, the subjects do not precede the connection, but emerge through it as a machinic process. Furthermore, the desiring-machine of cross-species intimacy (“cuddling”) and the formal scientific knowledge configurations (professional notes on the animals’ physical condition) are flattened out and intertwined in the students’ diary entries. Desire-flows move through written notes on intimacy with animals but also through nonverbal modalities (Pedersen 2018).

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Below, a first-year student (“Jens”) is introduced to the parrots and cockatoos kept at his school: Jens picks up the birds’ feeding bowls and tries to make them eat from them. Then he opens the door to the cockatoo cage and touches one of the birds carefully with his finger. He touches the bird’s leg, beak, and wing. Then he moves on to the smaller parrots, trying to make one of them eat from his hand. Thereafter he goes back to the cockatoo and touches her again. He touches her beak and caresses her feet and claws. From a box full of feathers he picks up a long, red feather and touches it for a while, then returns to the cockatoo and scratches her head, with full attention directed towards the bird. When she starts climbing on his body Jens gets a little bit scared, and the supervisor intervenes by letting the cockatoo climb over to his own body and then onto a thick rope in the bird’s cage. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 35)

Drawing on developmental psychology, Myers (1996) has identified children’s responsiveness toward bodily shapes and features of animals as one major parameter organizing child-animal interactions in his ethnographic study of preschoolers. With a schizoanalytic approach to the above examples, bodily details of animals work as a desiring-machine—bellies, nostrils, legs, beaks, wings, and claws assemble into animal form; an animal with whom, if you are lucky, perhaps at least momentary feelings of relationship can be created—but each belly, nostril, leg, beak, wing, and claw also forms a little desiring-machine on their own, exerting an irresistible force on students, connecting them to the animals also in situations where hands-on activities with animals are not necessary or relevant (Pedersen 2018). Even tiny faces of guppy fish appear to have this effect: “They are damn cute, ‘cause they have really cute faces, those!” (field notes). As a vocational education program, a significant part of animal caretaker education is practice based and takes place in direct physical contact with animals, but the curriculum also includes theoretical lectures on animal science. Teaching-machines in basic zoology lecture formats produce order-words (see Chapter 3)—(“[Our pupils] are required to know all the 90 species kept at the school by heart”; interview transcript)—and rhythmic flows of “scientific” or taxonomic utterances in series of connective syntheses (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009):  “Arthropoda,” “Uniramia,” “Myriapoda,” “Chilopoda,” “Diplopoda,” “Pauropoda,” and “Symphyla”; “ara, A-R-A”—“tamarin, TA-MARIN”—“a galago, GA-LA-GO.” Amid flows of molar zoological science components, molecular desiring-machines subtly materialize in the classroom,

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such as the word “PANDA” written in capital letters inside a heart-shaped drawing on a student’s notebook (Pedersen 2018). Desiring-machines break through most forcefully, however, in practice-based learning situations when students connect directly with (captive) animals, as in the following field note excerpt from a zoo study visit: Standing by the cheetah enclosure, students are commenting on the animals’ legs, tails, shoulders: “Awesome.” One of them tells the story of someone who had taken care of a baby leopard, trying to teach it its natural behavior. They had been out on the savannah together. The leopard had kept its “wildness” while at the same time letting its caretaker interact with it. The student tells this story with a voice replete with longing and fascination. As one of the cheetahs passes by behind the glass enclosure where we are standing, another student smiles warmly while her eyes follow the animal’s movements. (Field notes)

Moments of noninvasive interspecies intimacy exert a strong affective force on animal science students, often distracting them from their formal learning assignments on housing systems, disease control, and production yield. Physical, verbal, and visual contact-seeking, smiling, soft talk, touching, caressing, feeding, and photographing animals, whenever such opportunities emerge in between the ordinary duties assigned by the lesson plan, reoccurs among students on different levels of animal science education programs (Pedersen 2018). Examples from upper secondary school are outlined above, but also a veterinary student during a farm visit organized by her university turned toward a calf, gently asking, “Hi, hello, do you want to follow me home?” (field notes, see Pedersen 2015: 53). Desiring-machines of animal attachment work largely irrespective of species but not entirely so. In animal caretaker education, desiring-machines organize group subjectivities around certain categories of animals; Now when I get in contact with animal caretaker classes, there are always one or two boys, often punks or [those who tend toward] that direction, who interact with snakes or lizards. It is almost compulsory in each class that there are one or two [students] like that, who interact with snakes, lizards, reptiles. And then some other persons who have their little niche within animal [worlds]. Someone who is completely obsessed with something or will become dolphin trainer, someone who will become . . . but the majority of a class is probably exactly these dog-, dog, horse, girls primarily. (Transcript from interview with a former animal caretaker student)

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Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education Rather quickly from the beginning of the program, [students] divide themselves quite clearly within different cultures: Those who are interested in dogs, those who are interested in reptiles, those who are for or against animal experiments, those who are good at theory or practice, respectively, and so on. Groups are formed also in respect to emotional aspects, for instance one’s position on euthanizing [animals] etc. The groups are clear, and culture clashes may occur between them . . . Gradually however we started to network across group boundaries. (Transcript from interview with another former animal caretaker student)

“We are all little dogs, we need circuits, and we need to be taken for walks” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009: 315). In animal caretaker education, we are all little dogs, horses, snakes, lizards, and dolphins, who need circuits in our respective niches of the animal economy. Desiring-machines of animal attachment and intimacy are indifferent to student age, (largely) indifferent to animal species, and to relevance. They are also indifferent to meaning. They don’t produce affirmation potential. In schools, zoos, and other sites of animal incarceration, as John Berger (1980) has remarked, the animals’ disinterest in the human spectator is profound. The desiring-machines that attract children and teenagers to animal caretaker education programs and zoos don’t produce enhanced social, emotional, or cognitive abilities. As long as they remain tied to the molar formation of education, they mobilize and circulate human alienation, in all its complex manifestations. While animal science education programs, such as the animal caretaker program, may capture and organize the desire-flows of promised human–animal intimacy in their promotion materials (as shown in the beginning of this chapter), they also work hard to redirect these flows into striated analytic schemes. This redirection happens, for instance, when desireflows circulating among novice animal caretaker students get hooked up with the technical machine of animal “inspection”:  close physical contact with the animals, however guided not by pleasure, but by a specific technical purpose and rationale, namely, health control (Pedersen 2018): We are watching a film from a zoo. The film shows a close-up of an animal caretaker with his face close to the face of a camel. It almost looks as if his own face is touching the camel’s. The teacher remarks that “to the uninitiated” it looks as if it is really cozy when the animal caretaker kisses the camel, but “to you as professionals it is inspection,” not cozy. You are checking the animal’s health. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 37)

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As the animal attachment-desiring-machine connects to the inspectiontechnical machine, this particular machinic assemblage forms an effective didactic device:  It produces self-disciplining student subjectivities learning how to control their emotions and avoid overinvesting in intimate relationseeking with animals to become acknowledged as professionals, that is, enter a professional community of animal caretakers. In a promotion film for this animal caretaker program where students participate and speak about their experiences in the program, they emphasize their scientific interest in animals and the hard work involved in their education, explicitly distancing themselves from “cuddling” and “petting” the animals (see also Chapter 5). The following note from a lecture with the same teacher as in the field note excerpt above (again, the class is watching a zoo film) makes it clear how desire-flows are managed and organized, raising collective student awareness of the forces acting upon them; forces of an assembled desiring-machine of animal bodily detail (Pedersen 2018): “And also we humans are exposed to [key stimuli] all the time, but we don’t realize it,” says the teacher . . . We think that little Bambi is infinitely cuter with his flat face and domed forehead. Disney uses diagrams to measure proportions that evoke feelings of cuteness. A student asks: “Why are we humans so obsessed with physical appearances . . .?” “It is a drive within us . . .” replies the teacher, and adds:  “And now you are beginning to think the way that real animal caretakers and professionals should think.” He turns on the video again. “Look at the upper parts of the nose and forehead.” The film shows an adult and a baby baboon. “And the laughter comes completely naturally,” the teacher comments on the reactions of his students watching the baby baboon. I agree with you, he says. There is no doubt that we find one cuter than the other. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 38–9)

An explanation model derived from the ethological sciences, which also has psychoanalytic connotations—it is a drive within us—is here put to didactic work to organize and territorialize desire, but at another level these statements evoke the diagrammatic typical of abstract machines (Chapter 1), with a piloting function that constructs, for these students, a new type of reality (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004):  And now you are beginning to think the way that real animal caretakers and professionals should think (Pedersen 2018). The abstract machine is the animal-industrial complex, and its diagrams are smoothly distributed between quite disparate events in animal science education—from

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zoos to dairy production—as will be explored further through the technical machines of animal control systems in Chapter 6. Since there is a shortage of zoology-related textbook materials in Swedish suitable for upper secondary school students, animal science teachers often use their own compiled film archives, many in the genre of wildlife documentaries (Pedersen 2010a; for a critique of this genre, see Bousé 2000). Each film is a little machine in the classroom that codes animals, makes connections, starts and disrupts flows, and produces intensive affective states. One film used in an ethology class, entitled “The Humanimal Bond,” was not a wildlife documentary, but addressed the complex emotional lives of animals:  A desiring-machine reinforcing student–animal attachment by inscribing animal emotions in human-coded schemas (“loyalty,” “compassion,” “grief,” “soul”). When the animal attachment-desiring-machine connects to animal science education, it threatens to interrupt or destabilize the latter’s symbiotic relation with the animal production system, as it may stir up undesirable critical debate in the classroom on the ethics of using and confining animals to a life behind bars (cf. Chapter 4). In the animal caretaker education classroom, practices of meat consumption and animal experimentation emerged as issues particularly haunted by guilt and anxiety (in veterinary and ethology education, compulsory slaughterhouse study visits had similar effects). The occasional, unfortunate vegetarian student could be met with repression, sometimes even as a preventive measure before any outright conflict about the ethics of keeping animals in captivity has arisen, as in this excerpt from an interview with a teacher in an animal caretaker program, overflowing with order-words (Chapter 3): “Are you going to kill all these baby mice?” (the teacher imitates a sobbing student) “. . . What do you think happens in nature? The snake takes a few, the buzzard takes a few, the fox takes a few. What do you think? (inaudible) are you stupid . . .?” (teacher describing his student’s response): She [the student] was resigned. She replied, “Yes, of course, if you think about it. But isn’t it a little bit sad?” “I don’t know if I think that it is sad,” I (teacher) said. “We are born on a planet and as long as we can’t leave this planet and some creator . . . or some system, has seen to it that we should live in this manner, it is actually the way we live. And in principle, you are a vegetarian. Do you really think it is fair to cut off plants by the roots, you might cut off a life.” [The student] had never thought about that at all. “What makes you think that a lettuce thinks it is fun to get cut off by its roots?” Complete silence. “I suggest that we don’t talk about this anymore, let’s move on.” She graduated with very high marks, very high marks. (Interview transcript; see Pedersen 2010a: 106)

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In the arena of animal science education, vegetarianism may work as a deterritorializing force, threatening, if only minimally, to challenge the position of education in the animal-industrial complex. In response, a killing-machine (see Chapter 7) strikes with full power through the authoritative teacher–student relation (cf. Ringrose 2015) until order is reinstalled, lines of escape effectively cut off, and conformity rewarded (“she graduated with very high marks; very high marks”). The connection of animal attachment-desiring-machines to animal science education does not however automatically produce interruptions, breaches, or repression. The effect may just as well—perhaps even more likely—be a smooth and seamless transition of one into the other. A particular event through which desiring-machines operate is animal dissection exercises in school biology labs. The nature of these desiring-machines and how they work may not be immediately obvious: they appear to be of a different kind than the affective forces of animal attachment outlined above. Also, ascribing desire to invasive animal-handling practices may come across as counterintuitive or unethical to critical animal studies scholars and activists. While mindful of this problem, the three excerpts below, drawn from first-grade animal caretaker students’ dissection lab reports, do indicate that students taking part in these dissection exercises are traversed by multiple incoherent and boundary-shifting forces. Solot and Arluke (1997) have analyzed these events in vivid ethnographical detail, and my schizoanalytic approach points in a similar direction. Clearly, there are investments taking place here, investments of energies, effort, exploratory urges, and, indeed the productive force of desire, that insert these students into an analytic scheme of science relying on invasive animal use and domination (cf. Pedersen 2008: 135. All translations below are my own): Lab report 1 Dissection of crayfish Method: We started with checking out the crayfish a little, its sex and muscular constitution. How the shell looked like, granulated in the front and smooth at the back. Then we opened the crayfish and looked at all the inner organs, heart, intestinal system, gills and ovaries are some examples. We mashed an eye which we then looked at in a microscope. Checked what sex the crayfish was. Result: We concluded that the crayfish we got was a female . . . Our experiment went well. But our crayfish was filled with “butter” which made it all a little bit more difficult. But the little heart looked the way it was described, almost

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Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education colorless and with little cracks through which the blood pumps in and out of the body. Discussion: We discussed why crayfish turn red when they are boiled and we concluded that it is because the color of the shell is made from red, yellow, brown and blue pigment. The green, yellow and blue is susceptible to heat. So after boiling only the red and yellow remain. Therefore, the crayfish turns into a tasty red color. Lina (the student’s dissection partner) would have liked [to dissect] a living crayfish, which would have made it all the more exciting. But I don’t know if I agree with that. But we had a fun discussion. Dissection of squid

Introduction:  The purpose with the lab report was that we should learn about how a squid looks like inside. We wanted to check out whether the suckers work even when it is dead . . . Discussion: We saw the ink thing, which was fun because we had seen on TV when the octopus spurts out ink. But in this particular squid, there was not that much ink. We thought it was fun, we discussed how the dots can cause a red-brown color and that it can be due to the number of dots and the light. The suckers were out of order when they were dead which was regrettable since it would have been fun to have felt how they work. We think that everything went well and we were satisfied with what we achieved. The only [problem] was that we managed to mash both eyes when we were going to study them so we had to borrow an eye from our neighbor.

Lab report 2 (dissection of crayfish): Discussion: It was sort of fun to look at the crayfish, but it smelled disgusting. I felt ill a long time afterwards. The shell was hard and it was difficult to open it. The antennas were long and a little sharp, so I didn’t want to touch them. All its muscles were white, that is what I saw. The intestines were dark and are not so good if you eat [them] . . . When I looked where the heart was supposed to be I saw something strange, it was the genitals. In a male crayfish the testicles lie in front of the heart and in a female crayfish the ovary lies underneath the heart. The two green bladders were the secretion organs. They were a pretty green color. I cut apart the stomach and there was a lot of goo. I am sure it was food.

Lab report 3 (dissection of squid) Introduction/hypothesis:  I will dissect a kalmar squid. I  think the squid is greyish and very soft and sloppy, softer than jelly. Then I think it is rather fragile and breaks easily. I will examine the squid and find all organs. When I have

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followed the instructions and found everything that is written on the paper, I will cut and tear apart all the organs. Maybe I will find something unexpected? Discussion/conclusion: The dissection succeeded! Nothing went wrong, it was fun and interesting. I don’t quite understand how you could tell the difference between all the inner organs? Everything was almost the same color and texture. Everything was connected and looked like one big mess. Kidney, heart and pancreas (various inner organs) were impossible to tell the difference between.

In the animal dissection lab, animal body parts work through student subjectivities as little desiring-machines, not by assembling into animal form, but by disassembling into a multiplicity of tiny fragments (cf. Solot and Arluke 1997). Color (red, yellow, brown, blue, white, green, greyish, dark, colorless), texture (hard, sharp, soft, sloppy), surface, shape, flows of ink and blood and organs and goo and “butter,” even the anticipated sucking force of a dead squid’s suckers, all are, in the lab, little machines invested with desire, functioning by cutting (bodies and organs) and coding (“ovaries,” “female”), connecting (“one big mess”) and breaking down (“out of order”) (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009), thereby producing their own pedagogical realities that physically connect students and animals through invasive and violent acts. These pedagogical realities however are not necessarily of a scientific order:  When desire is incorporated into dissection schemes that force open the animal interior to the outside, its body—first decoded into a series of analytic fragments—may be recoded into categories and contexts of killed animals to which the students are more familiar (i.e., as food: “The intestines were dark and are not so good if you eat [them].”). At this point, desire may also hook up with a dissection-edutainmentmachine (cf. Chapter 5), deterritorializing the whole science exercise into play, as outlined in detail by Solot and Arluke (1997). Thus, desiring-machines work through the shifts and moves generated by the opening of the previously hidden animal interior to a register of invasive exploration, and the open animal body invites new sorts of fantasies of cross-species bodily contact. As remarked in Chapter  1, animal dissection exercises accompany animal science students up to university level. In an interview with an ethology student, “Emma,” an unexpected event occurring during a dissection class in the ethology program is described to me. Among other animal species, a hen from a production facility was used in this class as a dissection specimen. When cutting open the hen’s body, an egg yolk and egg white became exposed to the students’ gaze. (No egg shell, as the shell develops later.) As Emma described this event, “a dead body that you cut open and right there inside, you find something that you are used to seeing on your breakfast table” (Interview transcript). This

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reterritorializing event that brought the egg back to the hen’s body (“Who put the egg into this cadaver?”) appears to have triggered a variety of affect-flows such as abjection, fascination, and, among some of the students, possibly a sort of “awakening” (as Emma describes it). The animal body is infinitely open, an origami puzzle with multiple entrance and exit points connecting it to numerous other machines. It can be rendered into car seats (Pedersen 2012a; cf. Shukin 2009) or be reterritorialized to subjecthood. What affective forces the animal body will produce, and what routes and directions these will take through the students, is well beyond lesson-plans and didactic anticipation.

Affective Cross-Species Assemblages: Three Cases of Deterritorialization All I have to say is, let the little animals live. Let the fennec foxes sweep through the desert winds. Let them eat lizards and mice until they get stained with blood. Let them rule in subterranean passages. Let them live and die a natural death. (Excerpt from animal caretaker student report, my translation)

When the two main routes through which the animal attachment-desiringmachine operates in education—moments of physical and emotional intimacy with animals, and action to change the life conditions for animals in human society—intersect, they form assemblages of desire and of thought (Bergen 2010). The affective energies of these assemblages (their combined production forces) become strong enough to generate numerous breaches and confrontations within schools and educational institutions. Their combined effects also generate a possibility of deterritorializing from the formal curriculum. During my research for this book, I  worked with three young animal rights activists who, during their education, entered different temporary assemblages through which certain remarkable processes and events started to unfold. I call these activists “Emma,” “Erica,” and “Adrian.” At the time I  met them, Emma was about to write her BSc thesis in an ethology education program, Erica was a second-grade student in veterinary education, and Adrian had graduated from a vocational upper secondary animal caretaker program. As the animal production system relies on a continuous inflow of students who will uphold and reproduce this system (see Chapter  1), it feeds on the desire-flows through which young people are constituted as prospective professional animal scientists through education. What is the nature of these desire-flows? Emma, Erica, and Adrian share the two combined elements of

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the animal attachment-desiring-machine mentioned above—moments of physical and emotional intimacy with animals, and the possibility to change their life conditions—but their affective and political investments have shifting orientations and outlets. As part of her BSc thesis work, Emma sought to create a cross-species assemblage with pigs in a commercial slaughter swine facility, but as this plan was blocked by her faculty that didn’t give her permission to carry out her plans, she reoriented her project to instead become immersed with thirty-three former battery hens, in a more scientifically acceptable format of ethological research. Although redirected into conforming with the conventions of ethological science, her “cognitive bias” hen project (see Pedersen 2011b) was never even for a moment fully contained by these conventions, but continuously found new ways over, around and across the various institutional and other barriers along the way. These processes will be outlined in further detail in Chapter 8. Erica, in contrast, became overwhelmed by a technocratic animal science machinic assemblage from her very first day in the veterinary program. An imploding, schizoid student subjectivity unfolds, literally at war with her education. Her desiring-machines, that had driven her into the veterinary education program in the first place, were now, after entering her much-wanted and longed-for program, rapidly put to work in mobilizing defense forces against her education to avoid becoming completely absorbed by it. Her desiringmachines also mobilized potentially subversive forces within her education, by creating networks of like-minded peers and infrastructures for information flows and circulation of ideas. Traversed by hatred against everything in her education (triggered the very first day on campus as she caught a glimpse of the lab beagle dogs at her university in their enclosed outdoor facilities), the happiness of being accepted into the program soon mixed with tears, anxieties, guilt, abjection, and feelings of resignation against the compulsory and normalized practices of animal exploitation required by her education. When enrolling in the program, Erica entered an education-machine threatening to tear her apart, throwing her between different intensive states of tears and anguish and tension even physically affecting her heart rate during lectures (interview transcript). She was caught up in a deep crisis already during the introductory days, when she and the other first graders were all of a sudden presented with a rat to dissect as a meaningless PBL (problem-based learning) exercise: I remember that I, after a week, took hold of my teacher, I really had prepared myself a lot, and then [saying to myself] “I won’t cry!,” and (laughter) “Can

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Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education I  speak with you please?,” “I (sobbing), I–can–not–participate–in–this!” (Interview transcript)

(Following this initial rat dissection event, the pedagogical killing-machine picked up speed. After 260 hours of dissection, the first-grade veterinary students were finally introduced to a living animal.) In the case of Adrian, desiring-machinic assemblages of animal attachment and advocacy worked more consistently. A  committed animal rights activist, at the age of sixteen he made the life-long investment to enroll into the animal caretaker program, for the purpose of resisting structures of animal oppression reproduced by formal education as well as in the rest of society. This he would do through undercover work, and a degree from the vocational animal caretaker education program would give him the “entrance ticket”; the formal credentials, needed for getting access to employment in animal research labs (Pedersen 2012b). Adrian’s education thus prepared him for an undercover “career,” putting into operation a machine of a radically different sort, with its own orientations, drives, couplings, and functions, within the apparatus of animal science education. Its deterritorializing effects will be further addressed in Chapter  8 (together with the other two cases introduced above). The undercover-machine works through production of numerous schizzes and conditions of paranoia, discomfort, nausea, guilt, and grief. It threw Adrian into momentary and shifting affective assemblages with lab animals, haunted by ambivalences, sometimes following him even into dream state (Pedersen 2012b): I am in debt to a lot of animals. Especially a rabbit named Lotta. The day they came to use her in an experiment was terrifying. They wanted my help to hold her during the procedure. She just screamed and screamed . . . After the experiment I tenderly took her back to her cage and she just laid there, shivering. I left the room to go and get a piece of apple from my box lunch that I smuggled in to her. When I re-entered the room, she looked at me with terror-stricken eyes, probably terrified of what would happen. She probably didn’t understand why she at first had been tortured, and then offered a treat. The day I left the lab I went in and whispered a promise to her. She looked at me with her agonized gaze and I want to believe that she understood. I promised to see to it that there will be an end to the animal experiments and that she would soon come to a rabbit heaven, where she will feel how it is like to hop around freely and where she can eat apples and carrots the whole days. Even if this happened several years ago, I have dreamt of her sometimes. She comes flying like an angel from the sky, saying that she forgives me. It feels good. (Quoted in Rolke 2005: 92; my translation)

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While Chapter  8 will address the educational micropolitics embodied by Emma, Erica, and Adrian, this chapter has suggested that the notion of the “human-animal bond” is not an innate or universal human emotional predisposition toward animals. Rather, it works through educational processes as a desiring-machine, or, more correctly, a set of little desiring-machines; sometimes taking on animal form, sometimes disassembling animals, circulating through theoretical as well as practice-based settings. These desiring-machines produce educational realities that insert students and animals in particular ways into animal science education and the animal-industrial complex. The next chapter will look at how desiring-machines hook up with command-machines to produce order-words in animal science education.

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Command-Machines: The Order-Words of Animal Science Pedagogies

The education-machine, for Deleuze and Guattari, is not a machine for communicating information, but for remitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words:  statements that constitute commands as well as create order. Statements are power-markers; expressions of obedience, assertions, and negations (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004). A teacher at an animal caretaker school announced during an interview, in response to my question of how he and his colleagues address ethics in their teaching, “Let it be written that [Det står skrivet så här]: Whatever you have done to one of your smallest organisms, you have, in the long run, done to the whole ecosystem itself ” (interview transcript). “Let it be written that . . . ” signals a command-function without subject of enunciation (Holland 2013). Here, its effect is to impose a certain, teacher-sanctioned, position on students regarding animal ethics (always followed by death sentences, as we shall see). The order-word gains force by repetition (2013): Whatever you have done (interview transcript) recurs several times in the interview with the same teacher, signaling a similar imposition of a certain stance regarding controversial and conscientious issues. The religious resources this particular order-word feeds upon were explicitly recognized not only by this teacher (“This is, like, almost what is written in the Bible”), but religion was sweepingly evoked also by teachers and school leaders at other schools (e.g., animals’ place in “the Creation”) when I asked them in interviews about their views on animal ethics in education–usually embedded in a remark that the interviewed teacher himself is not a believer. Religious discourse appeared, however, to be reserved exclusively for animal ethics and was absent from questions of, for instance, human rights and other state-sanctioned valuebased issues. Some order-words seem more than others to require the authority and assistance of a divine higher power to safeguard their pedagogical efficacy. Perhaps even more so considering that, as Deleuze and Guattari ([1980]

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2004: 84) put it, “the indifference to any kind of credibility exhibited by these announcements often verges on provocation.” This, I would say, is part of their machinic nature. Also part of their machinic nature is that order-words are not to be thought of as individuals’ “own” speech or verbal expressions. They are, rather, “collective assemblages of enunciation” (Guattari [1986] 1998) and emanate from every sphere of local or professional expertise or social situation. On this plane of enunciation, we, as subjects, are only “terminals” for language that circulate through us, with our assistance; a language that is contradictory, constantly set into variation, set adrift by various usages (Sauvagnargues 2016). To discover how utterances are produced is the task of schizoanalysis: begin with someone’s personal utterances and discover their genuine production, which is never a subject but always machinic assemblages of desire, collective assemblages of utterance that traverse the subject and circulate within it. If they are blocked in one location, they are tunneling in another. They always take the form of multiplicities, packs, mobs, masses of elements of very different orders, haunting the subject and populating it . . . There is no expressing subject. There are only utterance-producing assemblages. (Deleuze 2006: 84–85)

Thus, our utterances emanate from statement-producing machinic assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004), which we all are caught up in and whose statements we (re)produce. Sauvagnargues (2016:  191) calls this language a “cacophony of discourses.” Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 2004: 40) call it bizarre statements, “truly, the talk of lunatics.” Order-words denote the relation of every word or statement to implicit presuppositions or “social obligations.” As such, every order-word carries a little death sentence, however softened, symbolic, or temporary: “Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere.” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004: 118). In upper secondary education, I have previously located a whole set of order-words pertaining to human-animal relations, including “common sense” (in a Gramscian meaning) statements such as “Humans are predators,” “Animals are bred for the sake of human beings, otherwise they wouldn’t exist,” and “Provided an animal has been treated well, it is OK to kill it” (Pedersen 2010a: 120). Although appearing and circulating seemingly randomly and in fragmented and often incoherent teaching and learning contexts, these statements connect to a particular social order, typically an order of meat, dairy and egg consumption, all with their accompanying death

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sentences regarding animals. Here I will explore how animal science education, as a producer and transmitter of order-words that both issues commands and creates order concerning human-animal relationships, bestows death sentences onto its subjects, what shape these death sentences take, and to what machines they connect.

Meat-Machines and Milk-Machines: A Thousand Commands In animal science education, there is one machinic assemblage that excels in the production of order-words: The social machine of meat. In a rhizomatic study of meat-machines in Swedish society, Göransson (2017) shows how school classes get connected with meat in multiple ways, how these connections proliferate through multimodal venues (farm visits; lessons in home economics and creative drawing classes; through language, imagery and memory), choreographed by the carnist machineries (86) of the animal production sector, and presented in terms of learning and pedagogy. Göransson describes the levelling out of scientific versus commonsense knowledge forms in schools when it comes to normalizing meat consumption (see Pedersen 2010a):  “Children learn to read, count and draw, they learn about biology and chemistry and they learn that humans eat animals.” (Göransson 2017: 92, my translation). In a similar vein, but through a slightly different terminology, Phelps (2015) has remarked that the hegemonic position of meat is upheld by all societal institutions, private and public, through promotion of consumption of animal products in a fashion resembling the kind of political indoctrination typical of dictatorships: Totalitarian political states are characterized by bright, heroic-looking images (such as those of Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, or Kim Jong-un) that assail the senses and the mind everywhere one turns. Our totalitarian commercial state is characterized by bright, appetizing images–on television, in magazines, on our favorite websites–of delicious-looking buckets of fried chicken and super-sized cheeseburgers. (Phelps 2015: 4–5)

Meat, dairy, and egg propaganda is here configured as a form of totalitarianism mobilizing and capturing the desire of the masses, thus becoming ingrained in our behaviors, bodies, and subjectivities (cf. Foucault [1972] 2009). The obligation of meat consumption is best viewed as an order-word of its own, echoing throughout all societal sectors. Schools and universities are no exception. The social machine of meat thrives in schools by blocking

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the circulation of plant-based foods, although in a slightly softer and more sophisticated manner of operation. One teacher, for instance, offered cooking advice of chicken meat during a lecture in the veterinary program, apparently assuming that there were no vegans or vegetarians among the students (a large majority of who were young women in their 20s). When vegetarians are explicitly present in education, such as during field study trips when the meat-machine perhaps becomes most visible, misunderstandings or confusion in planning or preordering of plant-based meals is rule rather than exception. During one trip with upper secondary school, vegetarians 1 had to wait for their meals or faced limited supply or lack of plant-based foods, and vegetarian students were asked to cater for their own food purchases while the purchase of meat was collectively organized by responsible teachers. And then there was the quite simple and seemingly incidental inclusion of a recipe for a meat dish in an information leaflet distributed to students during the visit to an exhibit of Swedish predator animals (Pedersen 2010a). And then there were likewise seemingly incidental references to the eating of one or the other animal species, cutting through almost any animal science teaching situation, quite irrespective of their scientific connection to the subject matter being taught:  “Beavers use roadbanks and dig holes in them, which is a problem when they collapse .  . . Can we eat them? Yes. Beaver tail, a delicacy” (field notes from wildlife management class). Teacher in another class writing on the whiteboard (my translation): “WHAT ARE LABORATORY ANIMALS USED FOR? . . .APPLIED RESEARCH – TO FIND A DIAGNOSIS AND THERAPIES FOR VARIOUS DISEASES AND INJURIES” [Student asking:] If people only buy [eggs] from free-ranging [hens], can we then put an end to [animal] research? (field notes from animal protection class). The ontologization of animals as food is a ubiquitous process, indifferent to context. It always captures attention, is never rejected as irrelevant. The two classrooms above become, in themselves, statement-producing machinic assemblages that consolidate this ontologization in the daily lives of students. The last intervention also sparked a comfort-machine (Chapter 4) in the classroom, encouraging everybody to exercise their “consumer power” by buying organically produced milk and eggs, before returning to the actual topic of the day (animal experimentation). The order-words emanating from the sociality and subtleity of the meatmachine carry strong enough operating force to keep producing meat subjectivities also when something else threatens to break through. The following situation took place at lunchtime during a field study trip with an animal caretaker class:

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Elin and her classmate Maria sit down beside myself, Bengt and Kerstin (school staff ). Kerstin (the staff member assigned responsibility for the overall meal planning during the excursion) appears proud over the food she planned for dinner, which she refers to not in terms of “the food,” but “the meat.” Elin remarks disapprovingly that it could be broiler chickens and says with an obstinate voice: “If it is broiler chickens, we’ll call Gunilla!” (Gunilla, who didn’t join the school trip, teaches an animal protection course.) Elin gets no response from Bengt or Kerstin. The discussion is discontinued. On our way back, Kerstin says to me that it would have been nice with some red wine with the tasty meat. She does not mention Elin’s earlier comments. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 104)

The meat-machine works in all possible directions, and may randomly break through other flows, without any obvious purpose, as in the following note when a supervising staff member presents the animals kept at her school during the introduction week for new animal caretaker students. Despite—or maybe because of—the fact that this school did not have an agricultural profile,2 her presentation of the school’s “Gotland rabbits” and rural chicken breeds connected directly to the meat-machine, with a flow of meat utterances almost taking on neurotic qualities, mixed up with the sensual pleasure of the living animal body: At one rabbit cage, Mia (supervising staff member) tells the student group: “In here we have a Gotland rabbit. Some people eat Gotland rabbits, but we don’t eat them.” Other rabbits are introduced in a similar manner:  “These are also meat rabbits, they are very big, you get a lot of meat from them.” When we reach the henhouse, Mia enters the building and reappears with a hen in her arms. It is a traditional rural breed. Mia explains that this breed has been part of Swedish agriculture for several hundred years, and that it is used in meat production:  “There is quite a lot of meat on them,” she says as she carefully removes a loose feather from the hen’s body. She explains how to hold the hen and says that now we will carry out a health check. “Hi there, now I’ll mess with you a little,” she says softly to the hen as she shows us different parts of the hen’s body and tells us how to check whether she feels well. Mia lets us touch the body of the hen. “Quite a lot of meat on her. From what I have heard, they are supposed to taste great. I’m afraid I have not tried them and will probably not do so either,” she remarks. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 105–6)

A meat-machine is at work, shot through and overflowing with desire; not with desire for meat, but replete with the life-force of a desiring-machine capturing animals and students, connecting them and affecting both. In veterinary education, a study visit at a sheep farm was organized and was, like the other study visits for this student group, framed by the regime of animal

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production. Death sentences hanging over each lamb (with one exception) were traversed with intensities of attachment: When our group approaches the lambs (“slaughter lambs,” weighed once a week according to the farmer), they flock together, one lamb walks toward us, looks at us, some put their heads through the enclosure and eat. We stand in one group, the lambs in another, a few of them approach us, making the students laugh. (Student: You don’t eat sheep, but lamb, do you? Farmer: Sheep tastes of wool.) A sheep comes forward, sniffs on the enclosure. A student addresses the sheep with “Hello.” (The rams are slaughtered at 20–22 kilogram.) A  student asks about a ram standing behind us, alone in a separate enclosure in a corner. The students turn around to look at him, laughing. Now, several lambs put their heads through the fence and sniff on the boots of those students who stand close. The girl who said “Hello” looks down at the lamb, smiling. As one lamb approaches the farmer, she (the farmer) scratches it and greets it: “Hello, how are you doing?,” while telling the students how much she earns on her business: “[Sheep] are nice animals”—easy to handle. A sheep can distinguish between 3,000 individuals. A  lamb routs in the hay, coughing repeatedly, immediately capturing amused attention of both farmer and students. Photos are taken. “That animal was born with huge ears,” reveals the farmer, pointing in the direction of another lamb. Students laugh with delight. “You always get favorites”—that one over there climbs onto my lap when it is out foraging, I can’t send it to slaughter. Student: “Hide it in the backyard.” (Field notes)

During a subsequent pig farm visit, a very similar pattern emerges: We arrive at the farm and enter a spacious pig pen. A  group of lively piglets come running through the hay toward us. “How curious they are!” “Look at him, look at his eyes!” “How social they are!” “Cute” “Really large ears” “Looks like a dog really” “Hello!” “We are talking about you over there!” “God how clean they are, how well-behaved they are” “They are so sweet . . . everybody should [live] like this, all pigs.” “No, don’t bite . . .” “Hello” (one student makes a chucking sound, as if she was calling out to a dog.) We enter another building where piglets are kept. Pig farmer: “If we would enter and sit down among the pigs, all of them would soon come forward and chew on our feet.” The piglets crowd around us. One of them tries to put her snout through a small opening in the fence. Students comment on the piglets’ eyes. One student enthusiastically gives me her view on pigs: they are different from, for instance, calves and sheep, she thinks they have another social behavior—they like to pick a fight, play around, display themselves, almost as if they have an intention (uppsåt). We exit the pig building, take off our protective overall outfit and enter our bus. Our guide asks if we have questions . . . The pigs are between 5–6 years when they

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are weaned. Then they live for around 10 weeks, before they go to slaughter. 100–110 kilogram living weight. Preferably the [pig facility] should always be fully occupied with pigs, in order for the economy to be going as smoothly as possible. (Field notes)

At the sheep and pig farms, meat-machines and desiring-machines are continuously short-circuiting each other, while working all the more effectively. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “The more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way” ([1972] 2009:  151); an important aspect of a system of cruelty. To revisit the introduction of this book:  education does not try to cope with the contradictions it constantly produces, but rather feeds on them, the anxieties they engender and the infernal operations they regenerate. This is what drives schizo-education, thriving indiscriminately through death sentences as well as through affect; not as separate events, but as parts of the same machine. There is another product of the animal-industrial complex that connects to education through order-words: The milk-machine, working within nationalist political territory, produces commands of a more explicitly militant, even blatantly racist, kind. Jönsson (2005: 41) draws our attention to a drawing from 1934, depicting a black boy standing beside a white girl. The caption reads; “You, Negro boy, keep your coffee! And you, Swedish girl, drink the nice, white milk!” (my translation). The picture was drawn by a child reported to have become inspired by a medical doctor’s lectures on the radio and in schools. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Swedish milk-machine was aptly named “Mjölkpropagandan” (“The Milk Propaganda”); a state apparatus supported by all political parties (Jönsson 2005). (According to DuPuis [2002], a similar organization existed in the United States.) Working through national authorities and connecting dairy companies to schools, special milk lessons were organized with the aim of increasing milk consumption among schoolchildren. Supported by the national milk lobby as well as the Europian Union (EU) state apparatus through the subsidized school milk scheme, the milk-machine has managed to keep hold on the Swedish school system until present times although its order-words have been adapted to the zeitgeist of contemporary society. Canavan (2017) analyzes how the cow in Swedish dairy promotion strategies is a romanticized bovine version of “Mother Svea,” the female personification of Sweden, through her generous nurturing of the Swedish citizens with endless flows of milk, employment opportunities, and a prosperous agricultural sector; all core values of the Swedish “welfare state” and Swedish national identity. In schools, health and nation-building commands are now subtly embedded in

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(coercive) lifestyle messages, as in the following examples from a school canteen and other meeting places in the school building, typically accompanied by posters depicting grazing cows: smarter, more alert, more fun! The energy drink from arla I am not only a cow, I am organic as well A greeting from Sweden’s most beloved cow . . . Milk gives you real horse power . . . (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 91)

As Göransson (2017) notes, these messages are taken to another level through the dairy company Arla’s partnership with the Swedish Olympic Committee. Through this partnership, events are arranged that promote cow’s milk as “nature’s own sports drink,” targeting children and youth as the new generation of “Swedish Olympic Games heroes” (77–8). In Göransson’s (2017) and Jönsson’s (2005) works, the milk-machine appears as a totalizing assemblage of modernity, health, purity, progress, and order. As a complex desiring-machine, it produces anticipations of sensual pleasure, nationalist nostalgia, and ideals of child caretaking and nutrition. According to Holland (2015), Deleuze considers institutions as the key site where “institutional need” gets mapped onto objects. Schools and educational institutions, school canteens and their extended forms of ritualized collective eating during study visits and field trips, promise nourishment, pleasure, and gratification—“however attenuated, sublimated, varied or perverse” (6). The milk-machine, as a key agent of the Swedish school system’s promises of collective nourishment, shores up desire-flows with perverse qualities (as the mother’s breast, well beyond infancy, is sought out and substituted by the enforced production of cow’s milk), while feeding into a giant promotional apparatus of the animal capital of dairy business. This business oedipalizes us all (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009). It is an extraordinarily hyperactive sector of the animal-industrial complex that has direct channels of communication to schools, families, and other societal institutions through popular public edutainmentmachines such as pasture releases and open farm events (analyzed in Chapter 5).

Death Sentences on Everyone The death sentences of animal science education are always literal, tied to the socially required act of killing animals (cf. The Animal Studies Group 2006).

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To reiterate the quote from Deleuze and Guattari above, “Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere.” ([1980] 2004: 118). In animal science education, these clauses must be linked by and rather than “or.” Thus, “Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order, and potential death if they do not obey, and a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere.” An animal rights activist, “Adrian,” told me in an interview that students in his class wishing to opt out from animal dissection exercises were exposed to persuasion attempts from teachers arguing that the animals are “already dead,” and therefore it would be “silly” not to participate in dissection (interview transcript; cf. Arluke and Hafferty 1996). Thus, particularly for students advocating for animal rights, the order to dissect an animal is a death sentence brought onto themselves as well as the animal, and so is noncompliance with the order, as it puts you in an insecure and precarious situation in relation to those issuing the death sentences (the teachers) on whom you ultimately rely for receiving your grades. Educational death sentences communicate that we already know who you will become, before education is finished, and, arguably, even long before education is entered: Sometimes the teacher could begin the class with “We’ll talk about this, and you, [Adrian], will think this and this.” Or it was put explicitly, “You won’t like this,” rather than asking, or awaiting my reaction, it was made very clear from the start that this is, there will be protests here . . . Instead of, regardless if it was I  or somebody else, let young people develop their own ideas and listen to them. I had my opinions, but others might be influenced by this, if you are ascribed those opinions all the time, maybe you easily become that person. But I guess I had been [that person] in any case. (Interview transcript; see Pedersen 2012b: 371)

That education “knows” who you will become is an assumption deeply embedded in the way animal science education order-words work, and the educationmachine guides students through the process of appropriate “becoming.” Order-words in animal science education do not necessarily take the form of a command; they may also perform productive and vitalizing, rather than repressive functions. They require conformity, but also support and encourage (assisted by items such as candy bags [see Chapter 5], high grades, and other markers of teacher appreciation). As mentioned in Chapter  1, education recommends appropriate behavior, attitudes, and allies, and may also bestow

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feelings of knowledgeability, pride, and privileged affiliation with a community of professionals onto the students (Pedersen 2010a; Smith and Kleinman 1989). However, animal science education also works in less subtle and more unabashed manners by turning order-words into outright codes; that is, forms easy to grasp, easy to remember, that stick to students’ minds and may also open new modes of thinking about animals. In a hunter education course, an elective course offered at a social sciences-profiled upper secondary school, the exchange value of hunting was articulated by the teacher “Martin” as follows: Martin asks his students what they think is the term for a certain animal [deer] “in the prime of his life.” Martin gives the answer: “He is called Capital,” he says, writing on the whiteboard: “Capital – return 12 points” (referring to number of points of antlers as a marker of “capital”) About the opposite of the term “capital,” Martin explains: “He goes in return” (referring to reversed development of body/antlers). The students laugh. One student asks: “Do they all become ‘capital’?” When Martin replies that they don’t, the student continues asking: “It is not something that all of them achieve?” One of his classmates adds to the question: “How many points will it be for the moose then?” Martin explains further, adding that in Norrland (the northern part of Sweden) they have bigger trophies. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 94–5)

The order-word in this classroom is abstracted into two key words (“capital” and “return”), effectively incorporating the hunted animals in a capitalist-machine. In a similarly concise vein, “Adrian” remarks about his experience from zoos that the zoo maxim “90 percent to the cage, 10 percent to the animals”3 guides novice zoo workers into an uneven distribution of their labor time so that less time is devoted to interaction with the animals than to the visual appearance of their enclosed living conditions in the eyes of the zoo visitors (Pedersen 2012b). This is order-word abstracted into code, and like the wild animals in the example from the hunter education classroom above, the captive zoo animals (and the labor power of their caretakers) are axiomatized by animal capital. In the veterinary education lecture hall, students are showered with orderwords daily, each carrying their own little death sentence. In a lecture on animal slaughter transport giving an overview of the animal’s day of slaughter, we learn that pigs are prone to travel-sickness, and therefore they are not fed prior to transport, since the feed may contaminate the carcass. We are also informed that a large truck can take as much as three hundred animals, and that empty spaces

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in the slaughter transport vehicles are costly. A sow at a pig farm who doesn’t get pregnant has a death sentence hanging over her head: “If it [sic] doesn’t get pregnant now we send her to slaughter, we won’t keep her” (field notes). Other moments permeating the veterinary education program deliver order-words molding a veterinary student subjectivity as consumer of; indeed desiring animal meat, rather than as a professional: Teacher (remark during a lecture on broiler chicken and turkeys):  The larger [chickens] are supposed to be cut up and sold as fillets. You, who also are consumers, want chicken parts. (Field notes)

In the veterinary program, the boundary between education and agribusiness is porous since many teachers and researchers are affiliated with the animal production and food industries. During study visits to animal production sites, farmers explicitly take on the teacher role: Pig farmer (introducing our group to his farm): Have you seen anything? Students (in chorus): Yes! Pig farmer: Are they [the pigs] cute? Students: Yes! Pig farmer: What are they more? – Delicious, yes! (Field notes)

Thus, order-words may come into being, if not as outright “talk of lunatics” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004:  41), then surely as an unassorted, unstructured, and incoherent cascade of utterances; yet they make absolute claims about not merely the “appropriate,” but the only possible way of relating to animals, not only demanding compliance and action, but also mobilizing desire. Compare with the following fieldnote excerpt from animal caretaker education in upper secondary school, when the teacher in charge delivers an interactive short lecture to the first-year students on their orientation day: During his lecture, the teacher approaches a student in the group. He asks her name. Then he creates a scenario when her future child has lost his fingers in a harvesting machine and says that the surgeon at the hospital where she takes her child informs her that he practised [his micro-surgical technique] on mice during his training. The teacher asks the student what she will tell the surgeon to do: “Suture” or “Not suture”? “Suture!,” the student replies. The teacher faces the rest of the student group: “Is there anyone among you girls, future mothers, who would say something different?” Then he tells the group how the training

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Or consider the below excerpt from an interview with the same teacher: If you can’t see that you must euthanize rabbits so that the ravens can get food, or that you must kill rats for the snakes to survive, as the snakes have a tremendously important niche out in the tropical rainforest, then you are not suited to take this education program. Then you should take some more time to mature. (Interview transcript; see Pedersen 2010a: 25)

These assemblages of enunciation (Guattari [1986] 1998) heavily stratify ethical problems in animal caretaker education. They constitute commands, create order, and throw out death sentences onto students and animals. Moreover, they do not only emit death sentences, but signal that the only position available to the students is to issue death sentences themselves.

Pass-words: Seeking Space for Critique The order-word is a death sentence, write Deleuze and Guattari, but it is also something else: “it is like a warning cry or a message to flee” ([1980] 2004: 118). Flight is included in the order-word, as its other component in a complex assemblage ([1980] 2004, emphasis added). The pressing problem is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, not to elude the order-word, but how to elude the death sentence it envelops, how to develop its power of escape, and how to draw out the revolutionary potentiality of the order-word. Beneath order-words, there are pass-words—“words that pass, words that are components of passage” (122), and it is necessary to transform the compositions of order into components of passage (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004) (I will get back to this in Chapter 8). Death sentences flourish not only in animal production settings and contexts, but also, or perhaps particularly, in animal welfare-oriented classes where certain killing practices are explicitly condemned. After watching a film on British fox hunting, where a hunting dog considered too slow is disposed of by a gun shot, the animal caretaker teacher invites the views of her class. One student, in an attempt to bring out a component of passage from the dog execution she and her class have witnessed, responds that the shooting of the hunting dog is like shooting a pupil because she doesn’t read as fast as the others. The death sentence on the dog falls anyway, although by other means, and this time not by the British fox hunters, but

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by the animal protection teacher: “We don’t live in the nineteenth century,” she remarks; “we have veterinarians and euthanization liquid” (field notes). Order in the classroom is reinstalled as life is firmly denied to this dog. When students resist the order-words of their education and try to reduce the impact of their death sentences, they seek to transform them into passwords; into passages. In a lecture on ethology taking place during our study visit to a sheep farm, one veterinary student asks about the boycott of sheep products in 2004 after the painful practice of mulesing4 was made known. The teacher, immediately blocking her student’s attempt to create a passage for critique and extract a “revolutionary potentiality” from the order-word of sheep exploitation, replies briefly that it was a media drive—it is forgotten after a while (field notes). The war between order-words and pass-words often takes place quite implicitly, without making much of a noise; however, there are moments of explicit conflict in the lecture hall,5 and order-word mobilized through the teacher at once becomes clear to everyone. The following discussion between students and teacher took place during a follow-up lecture of the sheep farm visit: Student (1): It was a very positive visit compared to broiler and pig. Much cleaner and healthier. I was positively surprised. Teacher: They [the sheep] were out grazing. Actually you should come here in April so you will see more animals indoors. Student (2): Now we got to see a spacious damn tent with two thirds of it removed. It would be interesting to see when more [animals] are there. Teacher: Sure it can be cramped with all of them in there, but it’s during a shorter time, maybe it can be OK then. They have good ventilation and light. Student (3): No production-related diseases? The ram’s legs looked strange. (There is a sudden buzz going through the large student group in the lecture hall. The discussion has now taken a different, more critical turn.) Teacher: We discuss the size of the bales. The more animals you have, the better you can make the economy work out. There are a whole lot of expenses on a farm. Student (4): That there are no bales of the right size sounds like a very strange problem. Why can’t they make bales of the right size? Teacher: Some sheep owners don’t think [things] through in advance. Student (5): Yesterday the message was that if we don’t have a whole lot of sheep, we can’t take care of them.

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Teacher: It is not so black and white maybe. Some regrettably buy themselves animals although they shouldn’t have animals, these are the deviations we see, but you have to think about that it’s not like this on all farms. It goes for small animals as well. (The discussion is abruptly cut off as the teacher is interrupted by a loud signal from her own cell phone.) (Field notes)

In this reconstructed conversation in the veterinary education lecture hall, collective student affect is gradually accumulating and circulated as the teacher tries to navigate between veterinary concerns for the situation of the sheep, and the economic imperatives of farming. The order-word taking shape in this space is however increasingly threatened by her students, adding one component of passage after the other for critique to come to the fore. In the end, all these deterritorializing routes will ultimately be blocked. Just as the “Judas sheep” (Chapter 6) deceivingly creates a sort of pseudo-password in the slaughterhouse through a fundamentally unsafe terrain for the sheep destined for slaughter, education can be said to do the same for the students: [The medical school professor] can be a Judas goat, leading the pack towards its own emotional and intellectual destruction in a closed system of medical education, escaping himself at the last moment to repeat the exercise again and again at each final MB. (Marinker 1978: 206)

According to Marinker (1978), education not only delivers death sentences, but is itself a form of death sentence, deceptively leading “the pack” toward its own emotional destruction. However, this does not take place in education as a “closed system” (as Marinker suggests above), but in a complex assemblage of education and the other machines into which it is plugged.

4

Comfort-Machines: Promises of Animal Welfare and Environmental Education

Comfort-machines function as a buffer between students, their education, animals, and the reality in which they find themselves. A  central component of this buffer function is a certain kind of promises. Writing from the expanding sector of genomics, Twine (2010) describes animal biotechnologies as “promising” practices in the sense that genetic scientists make efforts to popularize an attractive construction of their project to create and maintain support. Promissory discourses, which may take shape within broader narratives of scientific “progress,” are analyzed by Twine as “the maintenance, reproduction and performance of particular future-oriented narratives for multiple professional and policy groups” (118). Likewise, Pierce (2013) draws attention to the promissory, “messianic” visions and “salvationary” ethic of biocapitalist and biotechnological progress, which take hold of education with future-oriented claims. Human and nonhuman vitality, writes Pierce, has itself become a promissory site and an investible future in an extractive model of schooling aiming to derive “biovalue” (30) from educational life and its subjects. This promissory value framework, argues Pierce, is partly a product of a co-constructive relationship between neoliberalism as a developmental strategy and the life sciences. This chapter explores how promissory practices and discourses are actively working through animal science education with a strong inclination toward the phenomenon of “animal welfare”—a comforting and reassuring concept (cf. Wadiwel 2015) that, as we shall see, may take on multiple dimensions and chameleon-like guises. Twine (2010) has found that the promises of animal science may be contested and challenged by animal welfare subdisciplines, and Cole’s (2011) Foucauldian analysis of recent developments in “animal-centred” welfare science makes a distinction between “animal machine” discourses and “animal friendly” welfare discourses in the production system. The present

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chapter does not make this separation but configures animal welfare as a (promissory) machine working, like other education-machines, by making connections and producing realities. In animal science education, the comfortmachine of animal welfare is tightly plugged in to, and driven by, the desiringmachine of animal attachment—the “human-animal bond,” operating through moments of physical and emotional intimacy with animals and action to change the life conditions for animals in human society (Chapter 2). Following these two routes of desire, and following the two meanings of the general notion of “comfort”—well-being and consolation, respectively—the comfort-machines identified in this chapter have two different and overlapping functions:  (1) A  technical device offering physical and sensory pleasure (to animals) and (2) A social and pedagogical machine that comforts and reassures students and other citizen groups about the appropriateness and ethicality of animal handling practices, often within a framework of ecological concerns and biodiversity conservation. This chapter will address how both these functions are played out in education, the promises and desires they assemble, and the effects they bring about.

The Ritornello In an interview with a teacher in a leading position at an upper secondary animal caretaker program during which he describes his school’s facilities and achievements, the school itself is assembled as a desiring-machine making life forces, dreams, and visions become realized; a pedagogical greenhouse and ecosystem of its own in the midst of a profoundly unsustainable world: Teacher: So this is our total concept. And the department, apart from animal keeping, has its own veterinary clinic . . . We have in addition our own quarantine, where animals are isolated before they can come out, our own freshwater preparation, hot water, which can manage 6000 litres of water per day, decalcification, teaching facilities, changing rooms, staff room. Then we have on the top floor a computer climate facility, or a computer-managed climate facility I should say, for 3,5 million [SEK], which manages the climate in different places here, which makes you experience the rainforest as it is, at the same time as you are sitting in this air, and if you think about it, it is very pleasant to breathe. Because it is our rainforest air that is cleansed 40 times.

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Helena: OK Teacher: And re-humiditized and re-cleansed. And makes it so pleasant and oxygen-rich to breathe. Before it goes out. We save 80 percent of the heat energy in this way and therefore we talk about energy. And therefore we have built an energy platform outside. Because I took my colleagues with me to Orlando in Florida, and went to something called Science Center Helena: Mm Teacher: Into Epcot Center, at Disney World’s large climate- and science department, and there we learned everything about suncells, wind turbines and recycling of solar energy . . . Built a little ecogreenhouse, so now everything that comes from our tropical house is taken from here and is collected every day in a plastic box. It is weighed and then goes out to a house where we compost up to 250 kg a week. In a big compost grinder and decomposition grinder it is grinded down to mold, which then is carried into the ecological greenhouse. And after this you can actually go out and then you can get to eat straight from the vines, freshly reaped grapes, which we pick, with tomatoes, pepper, aubergine and even a fig plant that grows. (Interview transcript)

The “total concept,” the sophisticated ecosystem-machine put to work at this school, connects with certain teaching approaches of “messianic” visions and “salvationary” ethics, however framed not by biocapitalist and biotechnological progress as in Pierce’s (2013) analysis of education, but rather by Biblical connections: Teacher: We have to teach, now I almost become religious but I am not, we have to teach disciples who go out into the world and preach. And I usually say to my pupils: Do you think it’s a coincidence that 2000 years ago a book was written about a totally mad man, who, he act-, he took in two rhinoceros, two giraffes, two lions. And then he went off. Became stranded somewhere, maybe Norrköping, on some mountain in Kolmården, and there he released them and then he had [animal] babies. Have you heard that what I am telling about, is really the WWF’s or zoos’ research projects for the preservation of this planet. Is it the case that this disaster describes the disaster we humans are approaching, and that you, dear youngsters, under my leadership, are everything in the world, that is, those who will save a threatened world.

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And you should see how silence falls in the classroom when they suddenly realize. (Interview transcript)

“Saving a threatened world” assembles this school as a didactic model of a miniature Noah’s Ark, driven by an eschatological vision (our last days are coming)1 that accommodates both anxiety and promise. The promise—the possibility of saving the world through education and research—is not however unconditional, but requires conformity (Pedersen 2018). It starts exercising order-word repression as soon as an uninvited element—typically a vegetarian or in other ways dissenting student—interrupts the flow: Teacher: And I usually say like this when pupils come, because there are some of course, vegetarians and vegans, “Very unfair.” “Come here!,” I say, “You can work the whole weekend. You get this boa constrictor. Teach it to become a vegetarian! The evolution has succeeded in around, failed, in 125 million years. There you go! Go for it! But if you fail—then you get IG [a fail grade]!” “Why will I get an IG?” “Because you have failed with a project you strongly believed in. You haven’t been able to prove that it is correct. You have a thesis that is entirely misguided, despite the fact that the evolution and the rest of us know the contrary is true, and you oppose it all. Then you can’t get approved! If you get an assignment and a job, and then fail with that job, should you get a salary anyway? If you consciously do wrong?” “No, that’s a different thing . . . ” “No, it’s not,” I say. They respect. (Interview transcript)

WE PRESERVE ONLY WHAT WE LOVE WE LOVE ONLY WHAT WE UNDERSTAND WE UNDERSTAND ONLY WHAT WE LEARNT My ethnographic field notes from this animal caretaker school begin with these lines (my translation). Written within a frame on the whiteboard and accompanied by a note saying they should not be deleted, these words, allegedly a Jane Goodall quote, work as an overarching code for everything that goes on in this school. They also work as a ritornello (refrain)—a rhythmic game of reassurance that creates a center of uncertain consolidation of the self (Sauvagnargues 2016), such as a lullaby, factory siren, church bell, cow bell, or the song a child sings to herself in the dark so as to conjure away her fear of darkness, regain control and equilibrium (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004; Sauvagnargues 2016). How exactly is this ritornello of “saving a threatened world” supposed to work through the animal caretaker

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students? What is the labor of the ritornello? According to the teacher’s introduction speech to the new first graders, the world will be saved by a transformation of the students throughout their education; a transformation that will deterritorialize them to pumpkins at midnight, as in the fairytale of Cinderella. This transformation is, at the same time, a territorialization into a specific kind of scientific thinking and knowing. The “professional” ritornello is stabilizing and social:  it carves out and marks a territory and organizes a space to install promises (such as the possibility presented to students to become volunteers at the Jane Goodall Institute “in the future”). At the same time as it installs promises, the ritornello performs another, equally significant function: It blocks and wards off any critique against contentious issues such as the killing of animals and/or keeping them incarcerated for breeding, entertainment, meat production, or animal experimentation. Such critique could potentially lead to chaos, upheaval, or at least destabilize the order that defines animals’ place in the world—an order on which animal caretaker education ultimately relies (Pedersen 2018).2 In the introductory zoo management lecture in an animal caretaker program, shortly after the future possibility for students to become volunteers at the Jane Goodall Institute was presented, the teacher establishes (by writing on the whiteboard) “The task of the zoo” as a threefold rationale that the students must learn by heart (i.e., “Preservation,” “Education and research,” and “Recreation, entertainment, leisure. pleasure!!”). The first task, “Preserving [endangered species] for future generations (eftervärlden),” is introduced by an acknowledgment that “keeping animals in captivity is, sadly, always wrong, but there are occasions when we have to do it [as in the case of endangered animal breeding]” (Pedersen 2018). This introductory absolution is followed by a dramatic future scenario delivering a promise of how this particular student group will, after graduation, ultimately, be able to save a threatened world— providing that they do what the teacher says: Those who have chosen to learn about cell phones, the maritime sector and things like that, will call from their cell phone to South America when the oxygen in the air is running out, asking if they have some [oxygen] left down there [in South America], which they haven’t. In that situation, those [other] students will have no use for their knowledge, but, in contrast, [the animal caretaker] students will. Therefore the students should feel that they are significant, and (jokingly) that they should demand respect from others. Everything they learn, they must remember. When the teacher himself is not around anymore, they must remember everything he said, every word. (Field notes)

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The ritornello is this educational milieu’s preventive response to the risks of critique and upheaval of the animals’ unquestionable place behind bars (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004). The ritornello cares minimally about the logic of association between the different elements it brings together and works by capturing affect. The rhythmic chant of Jane Goodall’s words functions to achieve consistency, to hold the student body and their education together according to a set of assumptions about what animals are, what students are, what the animal caretaker occupation is, and what education is. Like the pumpkin analogy in the Cinderella fairy tale, the ritornello is an assemblage converter (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004; emphasis in original) and a component of passage between the world before and the world after (Querrien and Goffey 2018). Through the ritornello, students become channels for a specific body of scientific knowledge to be passed on to the next generation. Moreover, it produces a “we” that does not invite any critique or dissent. The ritornello is a mechanism of association, bringing together forces, ideas and powers (Buchanan 2013) that can be mobilized to achieve a variety of ends. It works in synchronicity with animal attachment-desiring-machines (Chapter 2), hooking up with both edutainment-machines (reassuring that zoos are safe havens that rescue animals threatened by extinction; Chapter  5) and other comfort-machines (as will be identified in this chapter), to produce the optimal conditions for killing animals. Working by force of repetition, lessons may begin or end with a reiteration of the ritornello, it is carefully explained to the students, who are asked to learn it by heart: It requires their transformation, not a haphazard or open-ended transformation, but a specific one (the pumpkin analogy). It invades them (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004). But it is not impossible to assume that students also desire it. A number of weeks later, I see Jane Goodall’s words reproduced—verbatim—all over the front of one student’s binder (Pedersen 2018). The comfort-machines of saving a threatened world do not, however, always hold the student collective together to form a coherent narrative producing certain effects. In another animal caretaker school, the message strayed away and dissipated into loosely associated fragments; an uneven mixture of the rational and the outlandish: Group 6 (2 students) present their work in an “Endangered species” class. “The Antarctic region is here . . . ” (Showing on map) ‘There are some different species there . . . ” (Listing the species). Typical biotopes are “Ice, some more ice, and some water.” And mountains. Teacher asks:  “How do the animals there feed

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themselves, then?” Fish, or [on] the other animals living there, respond the students. “Er, some endemic species . . . ” (Listing the endemic species). “Some adaptations . . . ” (explains). “Threatened, threatened by extinction” (mentions the humpback whale). Climate:  cold. Teacher asks:  “What about polar bears then?,” following up with an episode of a mad Norwegian who released 20 penguins [somewhere]. They were eaten by the locals who believed they were some kind of phantoms coming around. Let’s hope some were eaten by polar bears too, remarks the teacher. (Field notes)

Zoo Promises Zoos, as cooperation partner institutions for animal caretaker schools, as subject matter to learn about, as a “dream world” (field notes), as a potential future employer for graduated animal caretaker students, and as blueprints, models, and abstract machines (Chapter 1) for some animal caretaker programs, may be seen as an oedipalizing institution par excellence. Zoos typically target families with children as a main visitor group,3 market themselves as “family parks,” and draw crowds with messages such as “let your kids come and play with our kids.” As will be suggested in Chapter  5, they oedipalize also their captive animals through a certain kind of heteronormative familialism (Desmond 1999)—a familialism that so-called wildlife documentary films (frequently used as teaching and learning materials in animal caretaker schools) are particularly infamous for producing (Bousé 2000; Ganetz 2004):  “Of course this [giraffe] family is like all others: Some don’t want to go to bed until the play is all over” (field notes). Another film shown in an animal caretaker class, about the bush meat problem, ended with footage of an orphaned baby chimpanzee, whose mother has been killed, being comforted in the arms of a journalist. This little cinematic comfort-machine delivered the hope of a supposedly safe home for the baby chimpanzee, as well as reassured the audience that the animal is cared for in the best possible way. In the classroom, however, it was interrupted by the ironic student comment, “Won’t they sing a lullaby, too?” What this interruption actually does is asking, “Won’t they invoke a ritornello?”; a ritornello that reassures us that this baby monkey’s safety and well-being is (and will continue to be) attended to. At the same time the interruption initiates a process that in itself works as a ritornello by regaining a territory where the animal caretaker class may constitute itself as future scientists and a critical collective against over-coded, unscientific sentimentality.

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Zoos produce comfort-machines as part of their business concept and even work as a mega-comfort-machine in themselves, reassuring us that animals are safe, happy, and healthy under their management (Desmond 1999; Laidlaw 2017). Informative displays of their conservation projects abound, and zoo visitors may be asked to contribute by donating money to NGOs to support campaigns such as the fight against bush meat (field notes). SAVE A  LION TAMARIN! This “tiny, beautiful, shy and quick monkey” was on the brink of extinction (field notes), but we can feel assured that the zoo works to preserve the species. (That tamarins are used as animal “models” in biomedical research is not explained here but mentioned in a lecture on animal protection the subsequent semester.) With “saving a threatened world” as a ritornello, a promise and a motor, the school-zoo pedagogical machine becomes totalizing, its territories multiplied and enlarged: there seems to be few oppressive practices that saving an endangered species does not justify. Breeding animals in order to kill them as food for (more precious) others and to slaughter “surplus” animals is part of the zoo economy, we are told by an animal caretaker teacher (Pedersen 2018).

Comfort Brushes, Slaughter Design, and Other Pleasure Devices Animal production is a social machine ingeniously capable of adjusting to its environment and morphing into new shapes and registers as needed. “Animal welfare” is an increasingly important component of this social machine, at the same time as it is itself composed of a number of different components ranging from calculation of consumer behavior, marketing strategies, and international research projects, down to minor technical details in the moment of slaughter. The comfort-machine of animal welfare is designed to absorb potential critique toward animal agribusiness through the claim that animal subjectivity and interests matter, and present animal production as an altruistic, benevolent, and “ethical” societal actor. A  little animal welfare comfort-machine of the first function—a technical device offering physical and sensory pleasure to animals—is the “comfort brush,” a brush installed in the ceiling of a cattle facility to the service of the cows, generously inviting them to take care of their own personal hygiene, at their convenience, by grooming themselves. “Cow comfort” is a related phenomenon, presented to students in the veterinary program as a promissory discourse, referring not only to the fact that cows have a preference for a soft, dry, and warm resting place, and that floors should be stable, smooth,

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clean, dry, and not slippery, but also that they are somehow entitled to this and, moreover, we can be assured that this preference is fulfilled by the industry. Cows should be able to move well and lay comfortably, at least 10–12 times/day (field notes). As one cow farmer put it during our study visit, “Our cows rest on soft mattresses” (field notes). For poultry, there is the “comfort cage” (which is, remarks one veterinary teacher, rational and simple to keep clean, but actually quite small). The comfort-machines are distributed across the animal production system as buffer zones against any form of criticism (how is it possible to critique a system which kindly affords the animals soft mattresses?) and as sociomaterial extensions of the animal’s own sensory capacities, magically metamorphosing any experience of suffering in the industrial production system to a source of pleasure (Pedersen 2012a, cf. Kiaer 2005). Even the act of slaughter presents itself as a component of the comfort-machine with a promise to produce if not outright pleasure, at least a minimization of animal pain and agony. Burt (2006) argues that all the networks of modernity; transport, labor, refrigeration technology, electrical stunning devices, and scientific advancements come together and merge with discourses of food safety, efficiency, and cleanliness in the process of slaughter to reflect a proper degree of “civilization” in the final animal product, while at the same time making mass slaughter of animals for increasing human consumption both a technical and ethical possibility (cf. Pachirat 2011; Vialles [1987] 1994). Such an organization offers the promise of a perfect ideal of quick, clean, unseen, and unheard slaughter presumably removed from animal pain and distress: In other words, “slaughter without quite the horror the word ‘slaughter’ should connote” (Burt 2006: 131). In an ethology lecture given to the veterinary students, the ability of cows used for meat production to give birth to a calf is, in the “breed index” system, partly formulated as “the calf ’s own ability to be born” (Chapter  7). I  suggest that “humane slaughter” is, in an analogous manner, a blend of parameters, measurement processes, animal behavior assessments, juridical regulations, and technologies driven by a desiring-machine of civilization and liberation from guilt, that in a concerted fashion points to the animal’s own ability to be killed in an optimal manner as part of the larger organization of slaughter (cf. Göransson 2017). The promise of a slaughter situation where technology and animal “cooperate” to produce the oxymoronic “humane” (or “civilized”) slaughter is presented to the veterinary students as different forms of practical “solutions” in slaughterhouse interior design (such as “Judas sheep,” feed and other slaughter baits, and regulation of light and curvatures in the raceways), fixating devices, and weapons (see Chapter  6). In one particular slaughterhouse mentioned to

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the students as a good example, the animals walk through the slaughterhouse building also when they are not yet scheduled for slaughter, to get used to the environment there. The elimination of animal resistance, screams and struggle in the slaughter process is a marker of success in the development and refinement of this machinery (cf. Wadiwel 2015). When responding to a student question on how the animal’s head is immobilized in the stun box, the teacher employs a little machine to demonstrate a certain technical device, called “chin lift,” by pressing the upper part of his hand against his own chin from beneath, thereby causing his head to move slowly in an upward direction, mimicking an animal being immobilized for slaughter. To avoid “negative effects,” the teacher explains, the chin lift device should have adjustable height. This decreases the animal’s time in the stun box, and we don’t have to stand there waiting while the animal turns its head in all directions. The “best solution” that will ensure an outcome of animal welfare is sought (field notes; see Pedersen 2015: 54), and students are reassured that the animal is cared for, although never safe, at the moment of slaughter.

Welfare Animals Welfare programs for animals in agriculture are developed (and evaluated) by the industry itself, and “welfare-friendly systems” refer, for instance, to smooth and silent slaughter procedures where baits are used to lure the animals to walk themselves into the slaughterhouse (cf. Williams 2004). The code “welfare quality” is attached to these processes, a code that oscillates between the animal as living, feeling subject, and the animal as dead meat. This is a code inscribing onto animal bodies the death sentence (Chapter  3) and killing-machine (Chapter 7) accompanying each animal in animal science education: “this piece of meat has had a good life, therefore we sell it for this particular price.” (field notes; cf. Pedersen 2012a:  426). Appearing in a booklet on “good examples” of implemented animal welfare measures at slaughter (Algers et  al. 2009) that was disseminated to the veterinary students during a lecture, “Welfare Quality®” (comprising “good feeding,” “good housing,” “good health,” and “appropriate behaviour”) (Blokhuis et  al. 2008, quoted in Velarde 2009:  31) further axiomatizes the comfort-machine of animal welfare to capitalist modes of commoditization and property relations. In his Foucauldian analysis of the “Welfare Quality®” (WQ®) project, a European Union-funded research project on animal welfare assessment and monitoring involving forty-four partners in

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thirteen European and four Latin American countries, Cole (2011) describes the project’s attempts to reconcile public and scientific discourses on farmed animal welfare. WQ®—a machinic assemblage of animal science, commodity capitalist and meat-machines—incorporates individual animals as coproducers of knowledge about themselves, in quasi-therapeutic style, by “asking” them about their “preferences” and subjective emotional states vis-à-vis certain conditions in which they are kept (Cole 2011). This is also a point made to students in the veterinary program. In a lecture on applied ethology, “preference testing” was used on dairy cows in relation to the kind of housing the cows prefer. “Let animals vote with their feet!,” announced cheerfully one PowerPoint slide in the lecture, plugging into a little pseudo-democracy-machine which communicated that observations of animal behavior can be used to gain understanding of what is important to the animal and to identify welfare problems (field notes). Of course, as Cole (2011) remarks, this “voting” can only take place within the parameters already set by the production system, and animals’ desire to continue living and evade slaughter is not part of the consideration. Thus, the animals themselves are incorporated as “coproducers” of the knowledge necessary to secure a continued demand for animal products by consumers presumably sensitized to the “humane” handling of animals and to the conditions under which they are kept. In this way, animal welfare as such works as an ingenious trademark-machine designed to sell animal products by a pedagogical maneuver in the form of a rechanneling of attention away from the exploitative processes necessary to produce them. The animal welfare-trademark-machine enters the public sphere via marketing strategies and evaluations of consumer behavior. It also enters veterinary education through its dissemination of the ethological knowledge considered necessary to navigate a terrain in which the market of animal products requires continuous expansion. The comfort-machine of animal welfare produces a specific kind of animal subject, named the “welfare animal” by Armstrong (2007). According to Armstrong, the welfare animal is a species of its own, a hybrid creature created from a series of quality-control processes, management strategies, and corporate values in the animal industries. Adding to Armstrong’s analysis, I  suggest that this hybrid species is an offspring of a comfort-machinic assemblage that is deceptively caring and cooperative. It coordinates animal and human subjectivities with an array of organic and inorganic components such as comfort brushes, comfort cages, and slaughter baits. A product of desire invested in the market for animal meat, milk, and eggs, the welfare animal accommodates a pedagogical disposition and a promiscuous openness to proliferate in public

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discourse and capture any group of prospective consumers, novice practitioners, and students. Comfort-machines interrupt and get interrupted. They interrupt and cut off potential lines of flight to animal liberation movements by assuring that animals are comfortable in their present situation of confinement and use and that other machines are at work to guarantee this (i.e., the law; the animal ethics committees; supervisory authorities). The animal-industrial complex has specialized in distributing comfort-machines to schools and the public through a repertoire of promotion materials, and in animal caretaker schools they may redirect desire-flows in various directions. One animal rights advocate I  interviewed changed his mind during his education and could, in order to create a possibility for himself of working with animals, accept working in a “good” zoo, where animals were at least a little better off than in other zoos, and better off than in other sectors of animal exploitation, although even this alternative had been unthinkable for him prior to embarking on his animal caretaker career. During his education he thus entered a comfort-machine that made animals in captivity an acceptable reality (although after graduation this student changed his mind back again). Another graduate from the animal caretaker program gave the following account of her internship at an animal research laboratory during an interview; The animal research internship was a great source of conflict between teachers and students at first. But the school prepared the students for the experience. Older students were assigned to give information to the younger ones, and study visits were carried out prior to the internship period. Alternative methods were dealt with and it was possible for the students to some extent to influence the orientation of the internship. Afterwards, everybody thought that the internship period was good. The students did not end up in places where “they stick needles into the animals.” I did my internship at the university. All the rabbits there had names and hopped around in the corridor. They were not only white but looked like different types of rabbits. Operations were performed on mice only. Only blood samples were taken from the other animals. Some students have a hard time dealing with rats with big cancer tumors. A girl who had rats at home and was very interested in rats and was a member of a rat organization, had cried prior to her internship period and wanted to refuse. She ended up staying at her workplace, as she thought she had an opportunity to learn a lot and be able to influence the rats’ situation there. Also the discussion on ethics in relation to animal experimentation changed after the internship periods. All the students had a positive attitude and thought that it was a profession that would be OK to have. (Interview transcript; see Pedersen 2008: 138)

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The student mentioned above, with animal welfare concerns and commitments, cried and refused to do her internship period in an animal research laboratory but ended up staying there, forming a little comfort-machine with the rats around possibilities of being able to improve the situation of the animals in the lab. Comfort-machines work, however, by a logic of illusion: In a workplace with perhaps twenty thousand rats and mice and four hundred cages to clean each morning, the time for giving extra attention to the individual animals’ needs is minimal, if not nonexistent (interview transcript; see Pedersen 2012b).

Lies, Lies, Lies Comfort-machines redirect and interrupt desire-flows as well as lines of flight to potential liberatory action. They may also themselves be interrupted when desiring-machines of molecular kinds suddenly break through; intensive and affective states that produce—if only for a moment—a different classroom reality and a different reality for animals: Teacher: Many [employees] in [animal research laboratories] want to do as much good as possible for the animals. Do you think they can influence a lot? Student X: You can show the animal love in another way. Just as it may be important to talk with a patient in a hospital for a few minutes, you can pet the rabbit in a laboratory. Student Y: In some way you become part of the research team anyway, you become a part of it all actually, therefore you facilitate hurting [the animal], too, even if you give it love right now. And that, I think, is fucking outrageous, then all you do is suck up to an animal. If you get emotionally attached to the animal, what the hell will you do then? Student X: Better to show the animals love [even if] only for a short moment, than to let them lie there and rot away. Student Y: They will lie there and rot away later on anyway (throwing away with a furious gesture the magazine she has been reading during the classroom discussion). (Field notes; see Pedersen 2008: 143–4)

The animal caretaker teacher interferes in support of student Y above by sharing her own experiences as a trainee at an animal research laboratory, saying that the employees there were entirely desensitized: when they were about to earmark

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guinea pigs, they put their hand in the cages, tore out the animals, threw them into boxes, giving her a horrifying insight into how it all worked in reality. Then, an effective little comfort-machine installs itself in the classroom to do its necessary interrupting and reterritorializing job: Teacher: I hope the animals are better off today. In another lab [name of laboratory] things were different. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2008: 144)

Comfort-machines interrupt and get interrupted and may also break down. Veterinary students are told that if they come across cases of animal mistreatment during farm study visits they must keep in mind that they are there as guests, not called upon to check the animals’ condition. In a follow-up discussion of a study visit to a pig farm, when students criticized health problems they had noticed among the pigs such as tail-biting, wounds, stress symptoms, and severe scoliosis, the teacher emphasized that they can’t take any action on behalf of the animals during the visit, but they can discuss with their teacher back home and work for incremental change after graduation. This is however not accepted by the students: “Naturally healthy pigs” is pure lie—is it OK that Scan [meat producing company] writes in this way? Isn’t it to mislead consumers? Teacher:  My image of it is that consumer awareness has gradually increased. The industry is not against it, but changes slowly. Many people have never seen an animal being slaughtered. When people get to know how animals live, they get upset and this leads to a divergence between consumer and producer. “But I agree, it is lies, it is lies.”—A comfort-machine momentarily breaking down, it seems, by its own force. The two overlapping functions of the comfort-machines delineated in this chapter—a technical device offering physical and sensory pleasure to animals; and a social and pedagogical machine (sometimes in the form of a ritornello) that comforts and reassures students and other citizen groups about the appropriateness and ethics of animal handling practices in the production system—converge and operate in synchronicity in certain pedagogical settings. They converge in lectures on “organic” animal production, where the assumed comfort of, for instance, laying hens in enriched cages comforts students in their professional role as veterinarians, as well as in their role as consumers of the egg industry’s products. They also converge during study visits to zoos, when animal caretaker students are given the task of evaluating the keeping conditions, identifying potential animal welfare problems in the enclosures

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(such as stereotypical behaviors), and suggesting improvement (“enrichment”) measures. Thinking about concrete enrichment measures—in terms of introducing grass, trees or toys in enclosures, or hiding foods in containers that requires the animals to “work” for their food—is in itself a reassuring act. It delivers promises that the animals can be comfortable (and “happy”) in a zoo, despite the occasional remark from teachers that make not-so-subtle analogies between zoos and prisons. One teacher spoke about zoo animals as “lifetime prisoners,” another lectured in detail about how to construct the enclosures so as to prevent animal escapes, with reference to a well-known Swedish prison (field notes). One zoo, visited by an animal caretaker class, even announced with capital letters, RELEASE THE PRISONERS! as part of its efforts to reintroduce captivity-bred lion tamarins to their natural rainforest habitat.

5

Edutainment-Machines: Pedagogies of the Spectacle

Edutainment typically involves an entertaining method of educational delivery in that it can hold the attention of an audience, very often with an emotional response among audience members, and can potentially draw in people who may have otherwise been “turned-off ” by the notion of participating in education as a recreational activity. (Moss 2009: 248) Info | tainment rmation enter “It is knowledge and showbusiness together” (Field notes from zoo management lecture, upper secondary school) Edutainment, generally defined, denotes some form of entertainment designed to promote knowledge and learning (Moss 2009). This chapter introduces edutainment-machines as playful jokers and as specific techniques of capture in animal science education. If comfort-machines (Chapter  4) function as a protective shield or buffer between students and the social and educational reality of animal suffering and killing, edutainment-machines are effective lubricants of the larger machinic assemblage of which they are a part. Injecting a welcome element of leisure into otherwise quite formalized and demanding daily work schemes, edutainment-machines seem to offer, at least momentarily, some relief from the monotonous routines of fact-based learning—and the death sentences (Chapter 3)—proliferating throughout the daily teaching and learning activities in the animal science classroom. Edutainment-machines work through different modalities and registers. Individual teachers with an inclination toward edutainment may infuse performative dimensions into their teaching repertoires:  as recurring parts of the daily classroom activities, or as part of one particular lecture whose setup is allowed to go astray and deterritorialize from the conventional

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format of presenting “facts.” As an example of the latter approach, one animal caretaker teacher devoted one lesson to showing slides and telling stories from his experiences of shark research in the Bahamas; a lesson replete with dramatic episodes, personal details of his life in the Caribbean, and overflown by extraordinarily strong, affective forces of the promised possibility to enter intimate cross-species assemblages with a charismatic, exotic, and potentially dangerous, animal: “I have another shark here that you must see. Here comes one of the most dangerous sharks in the world.” The teacher explains how the shark is handled when marked with a data chip by one person holding the shark’s head and another holding its tail. He emphasizes again how careful you must be during the procedure and that only the most experienced [researchers] are allowed to hold the shark’s head, not just anybody. “So you have to do it quite quickly, because sharks get rather stressed,” the teacher says. At the end of the lesson, students sitting beside me comment to each other that they also want to do this. (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 41)

As “an entertaining method of educational delivery” that can “hold the attention of an audience, very often with an emotional response among audience members” (Moss 2009:  248), the above performance certainly took hold of the students in this class. In the schizoanalytic approach of this chapter, an edutainmentmachine is put to work which mobilizes and circulates desire in the classroom; desiring-production through which students and (exotic, wild, dangerous) animals are captured and forged together. Exotic, wild, and dangerous animals (such as sharks) are not necessary components of edutainment-machines in animal science education. Much like desiring-machines may work largely irrespective of animal species, edutainmentmachines don’t need a “charismatic” animal to do their job. Edutainmentmachines are context-dependent, and a particularly generative context is field study trips that are organized as part of the formal curriculum, at both upper secondary animal caretaker education and veterinary education. These collective trips, carried out in buses rented for the purpose, offer occasions when not only an element of leisure and relaxation interrupt the daily school routines, but also the otherwise hierarchical teacher–student relation is somewhat transformed, and ostensibly more spontaneous interaction facilitated. A  teacher in charge may, for instance, happily take on a tour guide role, or ironically fake this role. On a field study trip with veterinary students, one of the teachers cheerfully announced in the microphone “Cows straight ahead . . . Cows!,” alerting us to

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the alien sight of grazing cows outside the bus window on our way to the next site of interest on our study visit tour through what could most appropriately be described as an animal production zoo. One of the students even suggested that the teacher should carry a tourist group flag (Pedersen 2013: 720). This chapter addresses edutainment-machines, their components, their products, and their capturing forces in animal science education.

“The Game”: Leisure as Ritual The edutainment-machine is hardly a novel invention, especially not in nonformal pedagogical settings of the animal industry. As Shukin (2009:  95) describes, popular guided tours of Chicago’s stockyards (“slaughterhouse tourism”) with their continuous flow of animal bodies through vertical abattoirs date back to the late nineteenth century and may be viewed as a designed showoff of “the efficiency with which American culture managed its material nature.” A  more contemporary example is the Swedish dairy companies’ promotional events of the annual so-called pasture releases (betessläpp), attracting crowds of visitors each spring with families and schoolchildren as a major target group, who are given an opportunity to watch as the cows are being released from the barns to summer grazing (outlined in more detail below). The edutainment-machine in formal education programs shares elements of leisurely excitement with the nonformal events of pasture releases, but the presence of a teacher adds a stratifying dimension to the occasions. This stratifying dimension can take the form of a ritualized activity—such as (compulsory) collective games with detailed rules as well as competitive moments. On the field study trip with an animal caretaker class, a birdwatching excursion was carried out. A list of all wild and domestic bird species was distributed among the students. The idea of the activity was that the students, divided into small groups, would try to spot as many bird species as possible and tick them off on the list accordingly. Students are equipped with classical birdwatching devices, binoculars, and bird guidebooks, and the teachers carry additional equipment. They inform about the rules—what is considered as cheating—and announce that the group finding the largest number of species will be rewarded with a prize. The edutainment aspect was further accentuated by the written learning material compiled by the teachers prior to the birdwatching excursion, which stated that “Looking at birds is first and foremost amusing, but it is also easy to be impressed and amazed!” (field notes; Pedersen 2010a). Designed as an edutainment event,

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in a standardized format, the birdwatching activity produced micro-resistances among students, momentarily moving them away from the normative strata (the expectation to become birdwatchers, if only for one day) (cf. Ringrose 2013). As we embark on the adventure, the class and the teachers are soon dispersed in smaller groups. Some students engage seriously, some walk ahead of the others, and some keep lagging behind. Group formations take shape that stop walking altogether, simply sit down on the path and chat away instead of looking for birds. One student I talk with finds the birdwatching exercise uninteresting as you can’t really see anything; just a tiny dot that is flying. The presence of domesticated animals deterritorialize the exercise: some students stop at a cow enclosure we pass by on our way, remarking with empathy that flies are gathering on the back on one of the cows. A teacher jokingly comments on the fact that his students are watching cows instead of birds, asking one girl if she can find any cows in the bird guidebook she is holding in her hand. These molecular attempts to find exit points, or passwords (Chapter 3), out of an edutaining yet remarkably dull group activity, are, however, soon reterritorialized by the molar lines of quantification and competition along which the birdwatching excursion is organized. On the bus home, all the student groups are asked to report to the whole class how many bird species they have been able to tick off on the list. The winning students, who have seen far more than fifty species, are rewarded with a bag of candy as the first prize (field notes). There seems to be a certain register of didactic formats that are at work in teaching subject-specific matter in animal science education. Some take the form of a ritornello or refrain (Chapter  4). Some take the form of utterances repeated machinically, as if there were a prior agreement between educators about exactly what to say in interaction with students. In veterinary education, for instance, discussions of animal welfare problems may be managed with the recurring message that there is a discrepancy between public knowledge and industry practices (or, as one teacher put it, between “dream” and “reality”) and that veterinarians have a duty to contribute to decreasing this gap (see example in Chapter 7). And some simply take the format of a particular societal practice or discourse applied to the teaching situation (e.g., hunting classes [Chapter 7] or the birdwatching exercise above). From a schizoanalytic perspective these didactic registers cannot be assumed to be results of educational development work, nor to be preceded by pedagogical discussions on how best to fulfill national curriculum objectives, nor to be derived from local school policy documents, not even can they be assumed to be designed to give students a contact with “the outside” (a point frequently stressed as significant in numerous

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teacher interviews). Rather, they are machinic:  Products of an educational unconscious that makes associations and connections, start and break flows rather haphazardly, not necessarily with a higher purpose or given final end goal, nor with a larger narrative in which they fit. In interviews with teachers and school leaders, school policy documents were commonly regarded as “paper products” that, although acknowledged as necessary and important, are too numerous to follow literally in everyday teaching. Such local policies, for instance, equality plans, anti-bullying plans, or action plans, may be assembled by statements borrowed from other schools’ documents or may be overlooked altogether and replaced by the teacher’s own teaching philosophy. One animal caretaker teacher responded as follows when asked what she thinks of the absence in the national curriculum of their school’s profile area, human–animal relations: Teacher: I feel this way, you will get a much better reply by our Principal, who is knowledgeable about this, I feel badly acquainted, when you say “the curriculum,” “the first statement in the curriculum is about shared values (värdegrunden)” I would have needed to see it in front of me almost. Helena: OK. Yes, right. OK. Teacher: I feel this way, I haven’t read that in a year, I sort of, I feel somewhat far away. Helena: No but that’s entirely all right. Yes, I understand that. Right. Teacher: Sort of. It, it’s not what I do very often. (Interview transcript)

However when I  asked her boss, the school’s principal, what responsibility the school in general has for issues of animal ethics, he responds jokingly as follows, “Yes we have a rather large responsibility in this, this educational program, I think so. And drilling our students so that they all think like I do, when they graduate” (interview transcript). Although some activist-students see their education as implementing and disseminating an official animal ideology as part of the animal-industrial complex (Chapter 1), they also acknowledged the diverse and somewhat arbitrary effects this may have in actual pedagogical situations. One ethology student put it this way:  “And it was very clear with different teachers what view they had on animals and what view on animals they taught, it is inevitable, and it is very personal and . . . like, charged. So . . . it became very different. Teaching gets personal” (interview transcript). In machinic terms, students are taught to supposedly produce the same kinds of

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associations, flows and breaks as the teacher. Such as identifying, classifying, counting wild bird species—a coding ritual with a long tradition that students are expected to reproduce in a prescribed manner. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that students exposed to the birdwatching exercise and similar didactic machines are haunted by boredom rather than desire. An event in the veterinary program that corresponded to the birdwatching excursion in animal caretaker school was a walking quiz competition on the premises of a dairy farm. This exercise was arranged by the teachers and viewed as a form of “problem-based learning.” The organization of this activity must have required a great deal of detailed advance preparation by the faculty and comes across as considerably more sophisticated than the birdwatching exercise described above. The veterinary students were divided into fourteen groups that were to move between seven quiz stations. One student in each group was assigned the role of group leader, and she received from the teachers a sheet of paper with questions. The teachers were positioned at the different “stations” in and around the cattle building. The idea was that we should spend approximately fifteen minutes at each station. The sheet of paper with questions that the leader of “my” group was given included a sketch over the farm buildings with a “flow chart” of how we were supposed to move between quiz stations (Pedersen 2013:  720). Clearly organized to produce a teachable moment during physical and affective immersion in industrial dairy production, the walking quiz exercise emerged as a little edutainment-machine within the dairy production-machine. The leisurely mood in which this exercise was carried out was accentuated by the veterinary teachers: we were told that it is not necessary for everybody to observe everything that is going on at each station, since we may have different interests. As one of the teachers vividly put it, it’s just fine if the activity goes astray after a while and slides out with the other sludge (field notes). Although students were given the impression that there is no strict order to which they have to adhere and they are free to move around in any direction that attracts their interest, the event had its own stratifying logic with the “problems” of the problem-based learning activity restricted to molar dairy production discourses—an order-word (Chapter 3) masquerading as edutainment, with predefined correct responses:  Question #1:  “Is it more important with a well-designed compartment for sick cows when the cows are kept in loose housing systems, than when they are tied up?” Question #2: “What drawbacks can there be with keeping young calves in outdoor huts?” Question #3: “How long should calves be with their mothers before they are separated?” Question #4: “What significance does it have if the

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floor . . . is sloping?” Question #5: “How can a heifer be made to be accustomed to milking, so it works smoothly when she has a calf?” (field notes). While students dutifully discussed possible answers to all these questions, they were at the same time captured by the cows and calves, approaching them gently, seeking physical, verbal, and visual contact with them through the fence, addressing them softly, touching them, looking at them, photographing them, smiling at them—thus moving in similar deterritorializing directions as the animal caretaker students on their birdwatching excursion. In both cases, cow presences drive a desiring-machine that shifts the edutainment-machine (“the game”), however slightly, toward a line of flight. In the follow-up seminar of the dairy farm study visit on the next day, one of the teachers leads the collective discussion on the students’ proposed answers to the quiz questions. As the discussion develops, it turns out that many of the problems related to cow husbandry are not straightforwardly easy to answer. Rather, they are articulated in a muddy space between animal welfare and practical constraints; a trade-off between the fantasy of the “ideal” system, which seems to be a forever elusive and unattainable promise in animal management and what is economically and rationally feasible. The discussion around question #3, for instance, unfolded as follows: Teacher (reading question #3 aloud): How long should the calf be with its mother before it is separated? Student: As long as it wants, maybe? Teacher: As long as who wants? Student: As long as the cow wants, but the calf may want to suckle longer. Teacher: Conflict of interest, it will be a question of adjusting (avvägning). Student: Do we only talk about 1 day or 3–4 days, is there no talk about that they can go [with their mothers] until weaning? Teacher: There is less talk about that, but it is possible that there will be [a discussion] in the longer term. There are experiments going on. (A discussion starts among the students about cows reacting on separation also after 6 months.) Teacher: There are possibilities to find solutions in the future that we haven’t seen yet. (Field notes)

The aggregated order-word of the quiz questions seems to assign animals and students to a void of eternal imperfection where the imperatives and conventions of production make animal welfare an issue that can never be fully achieved.

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Yet still, the student group that “won” the competition by delivering the highest number of “correct” answers (Group #13, which was not my group), is (like the upper secondary birdwatching students) rewarded with the announced prize—a bag of candy.

Orphan Desire: Pleasures of the Dairy Industry An edutainment-machine of a different nature plugged itself into the study visit to the dairy production site where the walking quiz competition took place. At one point on our walk through the facilities, our group of veterinary students gets a close-range demonstration of the automatic milking process. We gather in front of the milking area, which is organized in two long, parallel rows of cows standing very still, side by side, one row on our left side and one on our right. The cows are packed together with their rears toward us, with tubes attached to their udders, connected to a device extracting milk from their bodies, an organ-machine connected to a technical sucking-machine, together forming an industrial milking-machine through which milk flows run and are measured by displays above the tubes. (The white body fluid running through the tube attached to the nearest cow is clearly visible to us.) “How cute [the cows] are,” comments a student. Our teacher demonstrates how the device works. He invites one of the students to insert her finger in the suction cup at the end of the tube, to feel the sucking force of the device, while the teacher “pumps” (Pedersen 2015). While the milking-machine is momentarily interrupted by a little didactic edutainment-machine (no milk flows from the student’s finger to feed the machine), the edutainment-machine picks up speed through desire: an intense sensual milking lesson is produced. For a few moments, the whole student group is caught up by its forces. As the student takes the cow’s place in the machine with her right index finger, she becomes a conduit not for milk flows, but for investments of desire in a social field of animal production. These investments of desire take the form of an orphan libido (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009; cf. Ringrose 2015) of a twofold character, mobilized by the dairy industry as a force of production: At the dairy production site, on the one hand, desire opens to myriad relations (with cows, their bodily products, the production conditions, and their machines) outside the familial bounds of the human nuclear family constellation, and on the other hand, desire is made possible by the orphans that the animal-industrial complex systematically produces as one of its primary outputs. (In this case, the orphans are calves,

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either as “byproducts” of the production process, or as the conditions for reproducing these processes, depending on the sector).1 Considering the first dimension; what are the nonhuman sexes (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009) of this student, of this student forged together with the milking-machine, of this group, of this edutainment-machine, and what do they do? It is meaningless to ask how useful or useless, how possible or impossible the desiring-machines are . . . You discuss possibility and utility, but you already are in the machine, you are parts of it, you have put your finger, eye, anus and liver in it (a contemporary version of “You have boarded . . . ”). (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2016: 522, my translation)

You have inserted your finger into the machine. You are on board. The teacher talks to us, stretches out his hand, touching the udder of the nearest cow. His movements are followed by a few of the students, smiling. Afterward, as we have left the dairy production site, the sensual pleasure of milking remains. One of the students trembles with fascination and enthusiasm over the milking process. She tells me in detail about how it works. During milking, you have to massage the udder of the cow to make her “let down” her milk, because this does not happen by itself. The cows can start “leaking” milk when they hear the sound of the milking machine, and then, she explains, they want to be milked right away (field notes). Face shining, the student’s body imitates the working of the machine, her love-object, the sound of the machine, a sound she loves. Becoming the milking machine, physically captured and affected by the vital forces of milking entering through every pore of her being, hypersensitized to their pure sensual pleasure, she speaks quickly and uses her body and gestures to demonstrate particular details of the milking process. A desiring-machine hooked up with a technical milking-machine to become a didactic mode incorporated in a larger educational machinic assemblage of the animal-industrial complex. The didactic mode is assembled not primarily by a structured curriculum and lesson plan, but by the flows and convergence of energies between dynamic entities traversing the learning process: teacher, students, cows, milking device, hand, arm, udder, index finger, suction cup. This “open equilibrium of moving parts” (Massumi 1987:  xiv) connects in a fabric of vibrating and intensive states, forming a teachable moment that secures the sustained smooth functioning of the dairy production process (see Pedersen 2015). The ways that edutainment-machines of the dairy production branch of the animal-industrial complex connect with particular desiring-machines, extend beyond the formal animal science curriculum. The Swedish dairy industry

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arranges promotional “pasture releases” (betessläpp) and open-farm events annually at springtime, when the dairy production sites open their gates to the public to watch as the cows are let out on pasture after eight to ten months of incarceration: Just like us, the cows are yearning for the sun, the scents and the green grass. And they know when it is time to be let out. So when the dairy farmer opens the cowshed door, they take off. The cows jump and dance of happiness. Some rush with speed all the way out to the green pastures. It is a fantastic spectacle. Come and visit one of our pasture releases. We guarantee that you will feel the spring in the air. (Skånemejerier 2013; see Linné and Pedersen 2016: 118)

With families and school classes as their main target audience, in spring 2013, the dairy company Arla’s farms alone attracted approximately 140,000 visitors to their pasture-release events (Linné and Pedersen 2016). Although undesired interruptions may occur, these events form a carefully choreographed, yet carnivalesque, edutainment-machine producing affectively functional bovine subjectivities, to help consolidate the market for dairy product consumption: It is Saturday morning and the apple trees bloom. Three thousand people are standing in a field. The children cling to the fence. The elderly with Zimmer frames and the persons with wheelchairs have been allotted their own section at the front, separated from the rest of the area with plastic ribbon. Photographers jostle over each others’ shoulders. At eleven o’clock the doors are opened and the cows peep out. Farmers in fleece sweaters with Arla logos urge them: Run now! Some cows run, others hesitate. A few try to turn back, frightened by the crowd. One cow breaks through the enclosure in her attempt to get back into the barn. It disturbs the concept of joy and spring: The Arla farmers beat her hind legs with sticks and drag her out in the pasture. (Flyrén 2011; my translation)

The pasture-release events are sophisticated machinic assemblages. Working through desiring-machines of childishness (relating to both human and bovine children), playfulness, and a collective sense of joy, they also hook up with technical machines of animal control (Chapter 6), and comfort-machines ceaselessly delivering promises of the welfare of “happy” dairy cows (Chapter 4). During the events, the cows are explicitly referred to as “milk machines” when presented to children (Linné and Pedersen 2016), and the age-old, commoditizing trope of domesticated animals as production factories reproduced itself through an interview with a dairy farmer,

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They are like a living biologic factory, it is like you put something in one end, grass, and out comes this fantastic product, that is both cheap and nutritious, one of the best things you can drink . . . And I think that our cows, when you have them on pasture like this, the animal lasts longer too, and then you get a much better economic result than if you had sent them to slaughter prematurely. (Linné and Pedersen 2016: 115)

while the comfort-machine of animal welfare delivers its own logic via a dairy industry representative: I think the reason is that link back to nature, we need to have animals surrounding us, we need to have something like this to balance our stressed everyday life that gets more and more stressful all the time . . . we have to start breathing and we have to start caring more about the food we eat and the animals . . . so I think we can relate to this, that the cows need to go on pasture these months, just like we need a vacation sometimes, just like we need the sun. (Linné and Pedersen 2016: 120)

Pasture-release events overflow with desiring production. Pleasure, joy, care, nostalgia; or, as in the example below, even spirituality—these events are over coded with affect, which, at any moment, may be converted into a death sentence (see Chapter 3): Cows are special animals, if you have ever looked into the eyes of a cow, you know, it is like, they have a special wisdom . . . And this is part of that, taking care of nature, having animals around you . . . for sure, it is also about spirituality, we have no religion any more so that’s why I think nature is becoming more and more important as a way for people to heal, so it is contemplative, it is like yoga. (Linné and Pedersen 2016: 120)

However it is not primarily a yoga lesson that the edutainment-machine of the pasture-release events offers: We want it to be an occasion where children can learn about nature, to care for nature and to feel responsibility for nature and for the animals. And together with LRF [The Federation of Swedish Farmers] we invite all the schools in the region to the farms, and then we have a schedule so that when the schools arrive we show them around according to this schedule. And we have a very good learning material about “Life in the countryside.” It tells about what you eat and what’s the difference between a heifer and a cow . . . and food has become an important topic, what we eat, that milk is nutritious, and some teachers say that they need to learn more about this, and so they come here, and when they do,

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Thus, “getting educated” will happen through immersion with a carnivalesque assemblage mobilized at the pasture-release events, composed of live music, quiz walks, petting zoos, bovine “catwalks,” free food samples, and hybridized animals such as a human dressed up as a fake bipedal calf named Kalvin (the company mascot of Skånemejerier) and a mechanical bull offering children a ride (see Linné and Pedersen 2016). These friendly commodities present themselves as inviting, benevolent, and affective agents actively promoting egalitarian values (cf. Kiaer 2005):  an assemblage of expedient, interactive, ostensibly “ethical” participants in the making of not only a market, but a social field; indeed, the world as such (cf. Pedersen 2012a). The shared love-object of all these agents is, of course, the milk–milk flows assembling desiringmachines through a dairy industry that oedipalizes us all (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009): When we get closer to the confinement where some calves have been placed there is a tree with a sign on it telling children to “Leave your dummies here for our animal babies.” We hear one parent talking to his child about the animal babies saying “they need their dummies just like you do” and “they drink their milk just like human babies.” He goes on to talk about the milk and how the cows give their milk to us so that we can drink it. (Linné and Pedersen 2016: 123)

Orphan desire, again, of the twofold dimension employed by the dairy industry:  desire flows opened to the nonfamilial (a nonhuman species), and desire shored up around those who are rendered orphans (the calves) by the same industry (see endnote 1, Chapter 5 for the third dimension of desire produced through the enforced separation of cow and calf in dairy production processes). Both dimensions merge as they are mobilized and organized as a productive force in the service of animal capital.

The Anal and the Delirious: Immersed in Zoo Spectacles In contrast to the national–local character of pasture-release and open-farm events, which assemble desiring-machines of the domestic, the rural nostalgic, and the sensual pleasure evoked by the everyday routine of a glass of milk, zoos work through a different kind of apparatus. Its business concept is to plug itself into the desiring-machine of intimacy with particularly “exotic” animals (see

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Chapter 2). Although also farmed animals may indeed be “exoticized,” the zoo is a space where desires circulate in an enclosed fantasy world inviting play, dreams, and free learning in a microcosm offering “scientific” knowledge of biodiversity and wild animals. The zoo also functions as coordinating node for a number of other machines. Traversed by bioeconomical and biopolitical forces, the zoo is connected to the machineries of animal control (Chapter 6) and axiomatized by a commodity capitalism that organizes animal captivity in a format resembling a shopping mall. Biodiversity—the sheer number of species and animal individuals exposed in a zoo—guarantees the opportunity of visual hyper consumption, as captive animals on display are offered for window-shopping (Malamud 2012), feeding into the erotics of the visitor’s zoological gaze (cf. Szczygielska 2013) in a manner akin to elements of pornography (Acampora 2005). Rather than constituting the visual consumption of zoo animals through the human gaze as a “disembodied eye” however, we might extend Pisters’ (2008) schizoanalytic study of cinema and the cinema spectator and consider the zoo visitor as an embodied brain (defined by perceptions—even illusory ones—, selections— even random ones—, memories—even fake ones—, imaginations, suggestions and above all emotions as pure affect). (Pisters 2008: 114)

Pisters’ analysis implies a shift from the spectator in front of a spectacle (cinema screen or zoo enclosure), to a spectator immersed in a multisensory environment in which animals, props, fences, human spectators and animal handlers, landscape design, information devices, as well as restaurants, souvenir shops, people in animal costumes, and roller coasters are all “chasing and questioning each other” (Pisters 2008)—although “chasing and questioning” is not evenly or equally distributed among different zoo entities. On the contrary, those expected to be the primary pleasure-producers—the animals—are likely to be the most passive “participants” in the zoo spectacle (see Berger 1980). Rather than conceptualizing zoo animals as theatre props (as Berger does), a schizoanalytic approach would view them as products of a zoo factory (i.e., the zoo as a bodiesproducing machine; see Göransson 2017), or, perhaps more appropriately, in Szczygielska’s (2013) words, a zoo laboratory (Chapter 6). The zoo does not only connect to technical machines of animal control. Killing-machines are part of the economy of every zoo, as “surplus” animals are routinely disposed of, and some animals are killed as food for others, or for other reasons. Also comfort-machines do their affective work in the zoo as an extension of the ritornello “saving a threatened world” (Chapter 4), reassuring school students and other visitors that zoos are a safe haven for animals; an

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institution that rescues animals who would otherwise have become extinct. Enclosed in a totalizing, hyperactive edutainment-machine, the zoo helpfully guides visitors in navigating all these events and affective states that they pass through. During one zoo visit with an animal caretaker class, the remembrance of selected profile animals (rhinoceros) that have died in the park are honored as if they were heroes, with enameled plaques on the wall. Each plaque has an image of the baby rhinoceros engraved together with the birth date of the animal. Further away in the house is a huge giraffe skeleton positioned with an information sign covering a bewildering amount of details of his name, birth date, birth place (Aalborg Zoo), arrival date to this zoo, date of euthanization, body weight at the time of euthanization, even the weight of the animal’s skin (presumably separated from the body), appearance of skeleton injury and how high the tip of the horns reached above the ground. Below, written in slightly smaller text, are listed details on how, and by whom, the skeleton has been boiled and mounted. When entering the toilets, the visitor finds information on how much excrement giraffes produce, and there is an artificial heap of (presumably) giraffe poo intended to be compared to the visitor’s own. The zoo is about entertainment, but above all about flow management: flows of animals, visitors, visual consumption, movement patterns, food substances, bodily fluids, excrement of all sorts. Flows of desire, disease, and death, all captured by, and transformed into, the spectacle. During the visit, one teacher informs me that after an outbreak of tuberculosis, all rhinoceros in this park died, and now they have acquired new ones. The spectacle exists in a concentrated or a diffuse form depending on the necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies and supports. In both cases, the spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery. (Debord [1967] 2000 §63; emphasis in original)

Debord ([1967] 2000) indicates that the spectacle, in the particular forms it takes here as pasture-release events and zoos, has territorializing forces that capture desire and pleasure and feed them through a currency of animal misery. As in Pisters’ (2008) analysis, the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing. It is machinic; produces relations and connections, ruptures and flows among a multitude of disparate objects—live music, artificial and real animals, body fluids and feces, scientific and commercial discourse, visitors, roller coasters, and mechanical bulls. The spectacle, writes Debord ([1967] 2000), is its own product, works for an ever-expanding market but aims at nothing other than itself. As

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“the other side of money,” it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities, an equivalence for what society can be and can do (Debord ([1967] 2000 §49). These piloting qualities, I suggest, make the spectacle, in its particular didactic edutainment-formations of, for instance, pasture-release events and zoos, into a diagram, an abstract machine (see Chapter 1). As abstract machine, the spectacle works cohesively in relation to specific edutainment assemblages, gives them a provisional consistency, and occurs coextensively with them as their condition of possibility (cf. Sauvagnargues 2016). Rather than being a place for nonformal learning about animal species and biodiversity, the zoo is a particular didactic formation of the animal-industrial complex that works through certain forms of desire, over coded by Oedipal references, which abound in the park (cf. Desmond 1999), that appears to exert a particularly powerful force on families and school classes. Animal caretaker schools bring student groups to zoos on leisurely visits that gain educational legitimacy by giving the students certain assignments to work on in the park. These assignments may be directed toward basic ethological studies of animal behavior, or learning zoo design (including components of its commoditization apparatus, such as working with sponsors and marketing “zoovenirs”) to be able to reproduce it as professional zoo workers. Or (in one case), to give the students an exercise in critical thinking by taking them to a zoo providing exceptionally poor conditions for its captive animals (Pedersen 2010a). During their education, animal caretaker students are expected to develop a scientific rather than emotional relation to animals (see Chapter  2)—in the words of one teacher, “get to know your animal’s anus”—and in a promotion film for one of the animal caretaker programs, students demonstrate that they have learnt their lesson: One boy declares in the film that his interest in animals is not about petting them; it is more of a scientific interest. Another student emphasizes that the animal caretaker education is not only about cuddling the animals, but it is also a lot of hard manual work (mycket slit och släp). But in zoo management lectures, this seriousness is shot through with hyperactive happenings that open animal science education to capitalist spectacle. Students are showered with commercial order-words of maximizing the zoo’s profile animals’ entertainment and economic exchange value through souvenirs, photographing, face painting, costumes. Try to use modern technology. Think ahead! Ahead, ahead, ahead! No stagnation! A panda costs a quarter million crowns per year. How will we work this out? With sponsors—the experience industry, adventures. You must think big and think new! A zoo film zooms in on the restaurant on the premises, where zoo visitors are enjoying a meal, and a costume-clad waiter comes out with a

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tray, decorated with vegetables and wine glasses, to the elephants who pick up items from the tray with their trunks, all while background trumpet music is playing. Recreation events (whiteboard writing), come up with fun stunts. From anus-inspection to dada-style delirium in a few moments. Hooked up with animal breeding machines (Chapter 7), the zoo-machine not only controls and displays, but produces animals. This connection to machinic production operates in accordance with its own rhythms, picking up speed by the time the zoo opens it gates for the spring and summer season as it shores up drives of public sentiment through the happy display of newborn animal babies. Reaching its full intensity through the desiring-machine of the human–animal bond (Chapter 2), which, in the territory of the zoo takes on specific Oedipal dimensions, the zoo production machine works through animal caretaker education to sustain its own practices: “It is important to make sure you have [animal] babies when the zoo opens,” one teacher remarked, as there is nothing [else] that attracts so much. The timing is important: “When should I put the animals together so that their babies will be born by April 1?” (field notes, see Pedersen 2010a:  85). Also these animals have a death sentence hanging over their heads from the moment they are born, as killing of “surplus” animals is part of the zoo economy. In this way, zoos align with other production sites in the animal-industrial complex. Edutainment-machines of animal science education thrive on the mundane as well as on the extraordinary, and may plug themselves into domesticated sectors such as industrialized dairy production, as above, or into more adventurous events where (enforced) assemblages of humans and wild animals are formed. Threats by wild animals posed to animal caretakers in their profession were frequently evoked by teachers, although never raised as an advice to students to reconsider their career choice, but rather to tie them more strongly to it, by employing a certain playful jargon circulating through animal caretaker education. One example (a teacher presentation of in situ shark research) was mentioned in the introductory part of this chapter. Another teacher repeated at least twice the story about a zoo wolf named Kari who crushed the knee of a caretaker as she tried to prevent the wolf from harming visiting children at the zoo, giving the caretaker a “punch card” because of her frequent visits to the hospital for her animal bites (field notes; see Pedersen 2010a). Being exposed to animal attacks thus functions as a little edutainment-machine of its own, in an extended field of pedagogy of the spectacle in the zoo space. One teacher described to his animal caretaker students in detail how he once was bitten by a large python when he was guiding visitors, but made a pedagogical point of the attack by showing

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the visitors the marks of the snake’s teeth on his hand (field notes). Rather than directing the incident toward critically questioning the societal structures that keep animals in confinement,2 the python attack was transformed into a little edutainment-machine performing a double pedagogical function: By showing the students how the teacher himself has worked “pedagogically” with the visitors he was guiding at the moment of the attack, a pedagogical point was presented as available to being picked up by students in their future didactic role as zoo guides. The pedagogical work of edutainment-machines is multiple and complex. It goes far beyond, as indicated by the quote introducing this chapter, holding the attention of an audience presumably lacking educational motivation (Moss 2009). Edutainment-machines are indeed machines of capture, but their effects are not only, or perhaps not even primarily, didactic. They distribute us all, together with animals and a jostling repertoire of odd objects and comradely paraphernalia, across the social machine of animal production. In animal science education and beyond, they work as a lubricant transforming animal exploitation to pleasant and enjoyable events.

6

Technical Machines: Didactic Technologies of Animal Control Systems

Technical machines in animal science education resemble what is usually thought of as a “machine” in its ordinary, colloquial meaning:  a technical object, simple or sophisticated, to be utilized for specific purposes, perhaps a device that can be turned on and off, and that requires some kind of acquired knowledge or technical skill from its users. In their schizoanalytic workings, however, technical machines, regardless of their degree of complexity, are never simple instruments or objects. They resemble organic bodies with numerous entrance and exit points, with endless possibilities of forging connections beyond themselves, thus forming machinic assemblages with humans, animals, and other machines. Technical assemblages connect signs, devices, technical mechanisms, and relations of power. They are never self-contained but always made possible by a social arrangement (Sauvagnargues 2016) and open to a larger social field (including animal science education, or the animal production system as a whole). In Gerald Raunig’s (2010) Marxian analysis, the machine is a means of optimizing the exploitation of workers, and in his analysis of Guattari’s works, the machine also resembles a Foucauldian conceptualization of a range of control mechanisms under the regime of capitalism: the exercise of power itself becomes a technology that traverses every kind of institution, connects them, and makes them converge (Sauvagnargues 2016). Technical machines in animal production systems operate under similar conditions and often require specialized knowledge or skills; knowledge incorporated in teaching and learning processes of animal science education. This chapter explores how students and animals come into being alongside technical machines in education.

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The Technical Machine of Ethology In animal science education, human and animal movements, behaviors, and interactions are calibrated and organized by all sorts of technical devices. In veterinary education, technologies are framed as safeguards of animal welfare that make it possible to apply a general level of care to “production” animals without having to decrease the number of animals kept (the size of the herd), a measure presented to students as “unrealistic” (field notes). In upper secondary animal caretaker education, technologies may be presented as assistants in saving a threatened world (Chapter 4). These, however, are only two functions of technical machines in animal science education. The animals inhabiting these educational programs are always already machinic through the way they are produced by conventional ethological science (udder in mouth, milk in mouth, lactose in milk, stimuli to sucking reflexes in calves, animals are little preprogrammed computers). Animal behavior is explained by different models, for instance, a “homeostatic model,” according to which animals have a reference level in their brains of optimal behavior, and if a deviance occurs from this level, the animal’s motivation system is triggered to adjust the level. Or, the “psycho-hydraulic” model where animal motivation may trigger a behavioral program that is said to function like “an old toilet”—interestingly, a model of fluids and flows. This model can explain abnormal behaviors in animals (field notes). Ethology thus hooks up with animal science education in all kinds of ways to produce didactic technologies of animal control through scientific jargon. Crist (2000) uses the term mechanomorphism, relying on Cartesian conceptualizations of animals as machines, to analyze classic ethological science’s use of a technical vocabulary that objectifies animals, as in the below photocopied learning material used in one animal caretaker program: Fixed patterns of movement and composite behaviors of which fixed movement patterns are part are in general triggered by very simple stimuli. The trigger mechanism is thereby programmed in such a way so that it reacts to some or a few typical characteristics of the object that triggers a behavior. Such simple stimuli are called key stimuli, since they are thought of as “unlocking and triggering” behaviors, where each key fits only its own specific lock. (Quoted from study material in ethology; my translation; see Pedersen 2010a: 26)

In informal educational situations, outside the animal science classroom, mechanomorphism could manifest itself as in the below lecture by a guide at a

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bird observatory during a field study visit to a nature reserve, when he explains how the birds are caught: The birds should neither be shocked nor injured, our guide informs us, but adds that they can’t get shocked and have no thoughts about the future. He exemplifies this by watching TV and other human activities that birds are not able to perform. The students laugh. “The crow, of course, has no thoughts at all,” the guide continues, and shows with the help of a toy bird how it flies into the net . . . Our guide informs us that the birds are fantastic individuals who can convert fat to energy, “quite simply a flying chemistry lab. They change from glutton to aircraft in two, three days . . . everything is programmed.” (Field notes; see Pedersen 2010a: 26–7)

In this chapter, the “mechanomorphic” vocabulary is viewed not as a Cartesian reductionist, epistemological (mis)representation of animals, but as a technical machine in itself, traversing education by directing and disseminating knowledge flows of a particular modality and character, capturing not only animals, but students as well. Technical machines of ethology may however be interrupted by desiring-machines of animal attachment, and when this happens, ethological order-words (see Chapter 3) are employed to reinstall the necessary measures of animal control, as in the below field note excerpts from animal caretaker education and veterinary education, respectively: The teacher tells her students about experiments aiming to find out whether animals can feel empathy. “Can they?,” she asks. “Yes,” is heard in unison from the class. One student gives the example of a mother dog who will go to pick up her puppy if it is lying on its own. The teacher starts speaking about hormones causing mothering behavior. (Field notes; emphasis added; see Pedersen 2010a: 28)

Student: I have heard that sheep are much more psychologically sensitive than cows, is that so? Teacher: It may be so in a situation when you are about to handle them. They are not used to regular handling [by humans]. Student: Should one be much more careful, calm and gentle? Teacher: You should choose the right occasion for woolcutting. (Field notes; emphasis added)

Technical machines in animal science education are material and immaterial, high tech and low tech, proliferate wildly and fit (more or less) with other

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machines, sometimes forcibly. An ethology lecture in veterinary education explained that at the time when milking was still carried out manually and a specific cow could be difficult to milk, her calf was tied to the cow’s front leg— thus, by connecting a farmer and a cow, a rope and a calf, a little milking-machine is produced, designed to trigger the cow-machine to “let down” her milk to humans, through the enforced physical closeness of her calf. (Milking-machines assembled by other entities and desires are addressed in Chapter 5). In a similar but more contemporary example, when the ovine breeding-machine is out of synch and lambs are to be “adopted” to ewes other than their biological mothers, “adoption” has to be carried out timely, before the adopting ewes themselves give birth to and start licking their own lambs. At that point, it is too late to make them accept adoptive lambs, since the ewes will only accept their own. However, the process of lamb adoption and acceptance can be made smoother by applying amniotic fluid on the unfamiliar lamb’s body; redirecting flows of maternal instinct and affect to the new lamb, rather than the ewe’s own (field notes). When ovine and bovine production-machines become dysfunctional— and they will—, they make all the necessary connections, disconnections and reconnections to modulate and reorganize flows of affect, instinct, milk, and amniotic fluid.

Registration, Coding, and Data Accumulation Machines The urge to register animal behavior makes use of its own repertoire of devices:  protocols, tape recorders, camera, photo cells, activity-gauging devices attached to animals’ feet, GPS devices, computer-based image analysis software through which duration, frequency, latency, intensity, and sequences are recorded. Other machines are more coercive and pain-inducing (electric prods and simple spades to speed up or redirect animal movement) and lethal (bolt guns). Technical machines, like all machines, have codes built into them (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009), but they are also codes themselves or produce codes; a plethora of codes of analog or digital nature, circulating through animal science via multiple routes and hyperactively sticking to animal bodies, assigning them into systems and categories.1 Information flows—data— elicited from animal movements and actions are produced, in accordance with predefined schemes, and fed into other schemes. How many cows are physically present in two cow-lengths from a cow? Abundant flows of data that, according to an ethology teacher, one doesn’t know how to use (field notes).

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Animal behavior has its own coding schemes; animal bodies have others. A lesson on sheep inspection for a group of veterinary students on a study visit to a sheep farm reveals a body evaluation-machine classifying and recording sheep into different classes, with labels such as O+ and R−.  The evaluation is itself composed of different parts. Body fat is classified into a set of categories, such as 1+ or 2+, by manually touching the side of the sheep’s bodies with your own hands. Wool is inspected by counting the number of frizzles on a skin area of 3 cm, hair length is measured, wool distribution on the sheep’s body, wool luster, and density is checked. Body shape is evaluated by a scale and classified into a “form class.” The fat content of the carcass is evaluated by another scale and coded as “fat group.” Pelt evaluation is performed by summing up the wool qualities. Lamb index is calculated by comparing across the flock the lamb’s body weight and the weight of its siblings, the lamb’s pelt score sum and the pelt score sum of its siblings, and the mother’s litter size the last two years (field notes from farm visit and lectures). Together these components of inspection form part of the so-called Sheep recording scheme (fårkontrollen), a machinic assemblage working on animal bodies to monitor breed development and optimize their productivity. It is a stratifying system of sheep typology that codes and axiomatizes each sheep body and each sheep anatomic detail in accordance with a regime of profit maximization (Pedersen 2012a: 420). Little pieces of information, each speaking its own language, assemble into open-ended, polyvocal formations that function at all levels and enter any and every sort of connection (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009: 38), making the animal body an information-processing entity. Data collection goes on all way down to the gene. “Animal genomics,” writes Twine (2010:  90), “is in important ways an information science.” According to Twine, the materiality of animal bodies has, in modern animal biotechnologies, been abstracted and generalized to information; that is, to data, creating hybrid forms between the two. He remarks that animal scientists do very little lab-based work and more work with database molecular information derived from animal bodies. Veterinary students get their share of this knowledge. Biological databases are designed, according to one teacher, to manage an overflowing amount of information produced by other machines. Veterinary students, expected to become familiar with these during their education, are presented with a repertoire of acronyms:  OMIM, EMBL (contains “everything, also all crap” according to the teacher), SWISSPROT, SRS, ENSEMBL; a lot of them dedicated to one single purpose (field notes). They are used to structure, handle, retrieve, present, cross-reference, and organize information on genetic material and

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diseases. They trigger hyperactivity (in 1987 there were 182 billion nucleids in EMBL, on May 10, 2010 there were 285 billion. “The increase is enormous”; field notes). Through genome databases, “it goes amazingly fast, a bacteria genome can be sequenced in one day. We are not far from sequencing a mammal in a week or so,” according to the teacher and “we register everything, both on the animal and the human side.” Biological databases capture and become circuits of anxieties about animal disease, generating demands for ever-expanding genetic testing (Is there a mutation associated with a particular disease? How common is it in the population?), simultaneous testing of hundreds of genes (future scenario); demands to screen potential disease carriers in breeding—all haunted by the “improvement”-fixation and desire for breed purity and quality. In education, biological databases arrange and present fragments of knowledge (“data”) abstracted from their history of knowledge production as well as from their origins in individual animals. Knowledge production and processing not only gets caught up by technical machines, but also become these machines, set in place and installed in detachment from power relations and critique, which remain hidden. They create conditions for, and aid, the recomposition of the animal as commodity (Pedersen 2012a). Ethological science in the veterinary program and animal caretaker education communicates that animals themselves are “small computers,” preprogrammed to perform certain behaviors and respond to stimuli. In modern farming practices, these organic animal “computers” and production units constantly interact and merge with other forms of (inorganic) technology, forming myriad hybrid machinic assemblages ancillary to the animal production apparatus. In industrialized animal production processes, these machines optimize intensity and efficiency in regulation of biological processes such as birth-giving, growth, and lactation in minute detail. Circulating through these machines are repertoires of professional knowledge and techniques of “improvement,” ranging from selective breeding by various reproduction technologies (such as artificial insemination and embryo transfer) and genetic engineering to the precise calibration of feed, light, air humidity, and temperature in the physical environment of animal management (Pedersen 2012a; cf. Twine 2010). (Some of these technologies will be outlined in further detail in the next section.) Animal bodies, behaviors, and subjectivities are, in this way, enclosed in, acted on, and monitored by a technological control system that makes them collectively conform to predefined species and breed-specific normative standards designed to mainstream, streamline, and incorporate animals smoothly into agricultural economic processes (Holloway 2007).

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Like other computers, slaves, and property, farmed and wild animals are marked: The essence of the recording, inscribing socius, insofar as it lays claim to the productive forces and distributes the agents of production, resides in these operations:  tattooing, excising, incising, carving, scarifying, mutilating, encircling, and initiating. (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009: 144)

Deleuze and Guattari (1972] 2009) describe a primitive territorial machine that codes flows, invests organs, and marks bodies. They could as well be referring to the modern animal production system, or, rather, the way that animals live and die in, at the same time, a technologically sophisticated system of production, and a primitive machine claiming and coding animal flows through bodily inscriptions:  tattooing, eartagging, toecutting, microchipping, freezemarking, burning. These are techniques presented to both upper secondary animal caretaker students and veterinary students. For instance in veterinary education during a visit at a sheep farm, veterinary students learn that pregnant ewes, according to the sheep farmer, are marked in a steady flow, 160–170 ewes in thirty minutes.

To Each Animal Her Machines “Production” animals’ incorporation with farming technologies follows them throughout their short lives. During this time, they are immersed in, and coerced to interact with, a bewildering repertoire of technological paraphernalia operating through external and internal regulation of the animal body (cf. Palmer 2001; Wadiwel 2015). Some of these inventions that the veterinary students encounter during lectures include: Sensors installed at the end of feed containers that measure the feed level in the containers; electronic transponders attached to the animals’ bodies regulating the appropriate amount of feed for each animal; platforms calculating the individual weight of animals and how much they have drunk or eaten, presented in a neat growth curve; alarms supervising humidity, feed, and water; light programs manipulating and extending animals’ birthgiving periods; automatic egg-gathering conveyor belts; automatic loaders for “broiler harvest” at slaughter transport (or, as an alternative, recruiting the local football team to do the job if they need extra money); flexible interior design in slaughter transport vehicles adjustable to fit different species; electric stunning devices at slaughter; and so forth (field notes from lectures).

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Farmed animals are literally born (or hatched) into a production machine of exact calculations and quantitative measurement of their bodily features, and veterinary students get an insight into a number of these calculations during their education. At a study visit to a chicken farm, we learn that the output is around 60 SEK/m² (a fairly good profitability, according to the owner). Each individual chicken is supposed to reach a body weight exactly according with the permitted occupation density of 36  kg/m², and when the chicken has reached 2,325 grams, she is slaughtered. (For laying hens, the calculation is less sophisticated: They are sent to slaughter at the point when they eat more than they produce.) Also disease and defect risks have been quantified according to score schemes and scales. To measure feet injuries, a sample of 100 chicken feet per flock is examined and evaluated, where a score between 0 and 10 is considered normal. Leg defects are measured according to another classification scale running from 1 to 5, where 5 denotes that the chicken is unable to move (Pedersen 2012a; cf. Boyd 2001). Another lecture in veterinary education, on “the milk production cycle,” illustrates the remarkable investments made into the elaborate and detailed machinic processes of animal management, where the cow is largely seen as an appendage to her own lactations, and her life time is measured in lactation cycles (after 2½ lactations, in average, we learn that the cow is disposed of). The stalling system—a cow container-machine—consists of a typology of different stall variants, each presented by the teacher on PowerPoint slides: there are “long stalls” (with lockable gate), “short stalls” (with separate milking compartment), “combi-stalls” (combined eating and resting area), and “lay-stalls” (supposed to govern the cow so that she lies down correctly in the appropriate place). These constructions all have their own particular technical solutions to correct the cow’s bodily movement, when and how she feeds and how she defecates, to synchronize handling with the animal’s behavior. There are adjustable bows to regulate stall length to individual cows, a technique that steers eating behavior as it pushes the cow away from the feed after her allotted eating time; appliances that prevent the cow from stepping onto the feed area; and fixating chains or pipes that prevent her from jumping into her neighbor’s stall or push her head through the enclosure into her neighbor’s area. (There are also alternative solutions without individual stalls; an open area where cows can lay down where they want, but the teacher informs us that it is difficult to keep clean and requires special competence of farmers.) Floor types, feed types, milking systems (see Holloway 2007) and even cow manure, have their own machinic organizations, coupled with specific legal regulations and typologies; manure, for instance, is

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divided into solid and compostable, fluid and pumpable, and “sticky” (semifluid) manure variants (field notes). Cow traffic, milk flows, feed flows, and shit flows; all with their own technical codes, categories, and regulation technologies. Veterinary students must learn to become flow managers.

Mismatches “What happens when mechanization encounters organic substance?” asked Siegfried Giedion (1948). With this question, Giedion, although from within a different ontological register in a different period of time, echoes Deleuze and Guattari when pointing to the complex of “man’s relation today to those organic forces that act upon and within him . . . Our contact with the organic forces within us and outside of us has been interrupted—a paralyzed, torn, chaotic condition” (6). Giedion remarks that the encounter between mechanization and complex organic substance produces a “clash”: “How are the unpredictable contingencies that nature produces to be overcome by mechanical devices?” (Giedion 1948:  232). Mechanisms must be adapted to the irregularities of organically formed bodies. According to one US patent regarding a “hogcleaning machine” (designed to remove the hair from the pig body subsequent to slaughter) in 1864, “the apparatus consists, essentially, in the employment of substances of the requisite elasticity to yield to the irregularities of the body, while adhering thereto with the force necessary to remove the hair.” (quoted in Giedion 1948: 234 figure 118). The idea of the hog-cleaning machine was to put the whole pig carcass through a machine that would shave off hair and bristles, with “firm pressure” and “yielding adaptation” as its two main identified criteria for success. Toward the end of the 1870s, even further approximation was made to the form of the animal body, with machines self-adjusting to the varying sizes and outlines of the carcasses passing through. Despite all these efforts, Giedion remarks that “no mechanical instrument gave entire satisfaction” (1948: 240). Contemporary veterinary students learn a similar lesson when modern farming technologies meet real animals in a production system that paradoxically makes no clear distinction between them: there are mismatches. The series of PowerPoint slides the teacher presents to us during a milk production lecture shows cows as alien, organic, bulky bodies in interaction with, and fundamentally at odds with, the array of technical details sprinkled all over the interior microgeography of the stalls. The efforts invested into keeping cows in their appropriate place are endless and fascinating. Technical and corporeal imperfection and dissonance

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generate constant processes of adjustment, coercion, negotiations, and trade-offs between economic efficiency, human labor, production yield, hygiene, disease control, legal regulations, bovine physical needs, and sociality. Plugging in to the promissory comfort-machine of animal welfare (see Chapter  4), teacher and students agree that “the optimal” solution for the cow should be aimed at and researched on, while at the same time they acknowledge that there are delimitations within the realm of what is practically possible. One slide shows a motion picture of an individual cow’s repeated pattern of bodily movement from a position of lying to standing. The picture is covered by a transparent screen with measures of body length divided into head space, lying length, and total length. The picture is reminiscent of the structure of an engineer sketch: the diagram of the abstract machine of the animal-industrial complex functioning directly in a matter (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004). It illustrates that the interior design of the stall is supposed to steer the microphysics of cow movement as she rises from lying to standing position. The size of the cow body is important and must be synchronized with stall size. If the stall is too broad, the cow tends to lie down with her body in diagonal position, which should be prevented. Three bodily zones need space: head, front legs, and rear part of the body. Now, a new PowerPoint slide shows these zones marked upon the cow body, and on the next slide the zones are transformed into a stall sketch seen from above. Calves and cows need to “learn” how to use the lying stalls (field notes), and veterinary students need to learn how to manage and navigate the space in-between the cow’s body and the technical and economic imperatives of animal management. If dairy production technology is designed to keep cows in their appropriate place, slaughterhouse mechanics are arranged to effectively regulate animal “traffic” and move animals as smoothly as possible from the entrance of the slaughter building to the kill floor. Mismatches become particularly obvious at slaughter. Despite the fact that animals are bred for optimal adjustment to the production industry, their bulky bodies still do not seem to be designed for the slaughter process. Body parts protrude and get in the way in a number of impractical ways. When laying hens are collected for slaughter it is tricky to get them out of the cages without having their wings getting stuck somewhere. The specific physical characteristics of Highland Cattle produce similar problems at slaughter, as, according to the person responsible for animal welfare at a slaughterhouse visited by the veterinary program, “the raceways are not constructed for the large horns pointing in all directions” (field notes). According to a teacher, Highland Cattle are hated in the slaughter business. Their long horns get stuck everywhere, and the animals are, in addition,

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difficult to handle. In the slaughter process, the organic becomes an obstacle to be overcome.

A Danse Macabre with Slaughter Instruments The veterinary education curriculum needs to include lectures on how to minimize these mismatches and overcome the obstacles posed by organic bodies. One lecture, giving an overview of the animal’s day of slaughter, focuses on the transportation of cattle, sheep, and pigs. It begins with basic introductory facts on slaughter transport regulations and routines. A  large truck can take as much as three hundred animals destined for slaughter, and the transport vehicles are equipped with “flexible interiors” that can be adjusted to different animal species (field notes). The student audience (there are around eighty-five students in the auditorium) sits silently listening and taking notes. The animals, explains the teacher, are driven in a certain direction, and animal vision is a central issue in this process. Now she asks us to stand up, extend our arms to the sides, close one eye at a time and slowly move first one outstretched arm, then the other, in front of us until we can see our own arm over our nose. The purpose of the exercise is to give us an idea of the animals’ field of vision. We do as we are asked, and the energy level in the lecture hall intensifies as the whole auditorium stands up from their note pads as one synchronized assembled body, stretches out its 170 arms and begins to move them slowly. The collective student body now metamorphoses into a giant, softly vibrating machine. There is not much space between the seats in the auditorium, so we have to, in a more or less coordinated fashion, turn our bodies carefully in different directions so as to avoid hitting each other. The collective energy of our assembled bodymachine, with 170 outstretched arms slowly moving horizontally back and forth, that fills the auditorium is soft, silent, machinic: It deterritorializes us as we try to imagine another animal’s field of vision across species boundaries for a few magic moments, only to plug us into the very wheels and motor of the slaughter-machine (cf. Pedersen 2015). We might have thought at first that we were forging affective attachments with another species, but we were already in an irreversible position as their executioners.2 This pedagogical demonstration of the difference between the field of vision of a human and a cow produces a veterinary student eminently calibrated to the visual perception of animals and thereby better equipped to handle the inherent mismatches between animals and slaughter, and to aid and speed up the transportation of animals to their

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slaughter smoothly and effectively. The mismatches may be caused not only by the physical constitution of animal bodies, but also by animal hesitation or fear, their refusal to move forward, which interrupts the “animal traffic” (interruptions which may have economic consequences for the slaughter business) (field notes, cf. Williams 2004). An astonishing repertoire of infernal machines—what Giedion (1948: 715) calls “mechanized barbarism”—is constructed by the industry to organize mass slaughter and ensure a smooth and rapid animal flow all the way to the kill floor and beyond; a repertoire of which Giedion (1948) and Williams (2004) have eloquently analyzed several inventive examples. In the pig slaughter industry in nineteenth-century United States, there were rotary hog-hoisting devices, decoy pigs, hog traps and suspension devices, conveyor belts, “endless chains” imposing uniform speed of the processes, hog-scraping and hog-cleaning machines, and spine-cleaving machines. Giedion notes that “efforts were made to develop machines for almost every one of the time-consuming operations” and that many patents in this business resemble, in their early stages, “medieval instruments of torture rather than highly developed machines” (1948: 232); a “murder machinery” that “strike[s] us as a danse macabre of our time.” (240) The veterinary education program introduces its students to slightly more modern versions of some of these murder machineries, such as specific alterations in the interior design of the slaughterhouse, or a mobile wall forcibly pushing the animals into the gas chamber (field notes). The machine that primarily captures the veterinary students’ attention is yet another highly specialized device:  the Judas sheep. The Judas sheep is an invention produced by the economy of the slaughter apparatus, which relies on a smooth flow of animals through the different passages in the slaughterhouse. An interruption or disturbance that breaks the flow, means a decrease in production yield. During sheep slaughter these risks emerge as sheep have a well-developed olfactory sense and are cautious to novel objects, hesitating in front of unfamiliar things on their way such as water puddles and shadows. There are numerous obstacles of this kind that may interfere with and disturb the desired sheep flow before they reach the kill floor. To control the flow, the flock mentality of the sheep is captured. The teacher explains that there used to be a sheep trained to lead the other sheep into the slaughterhouse, but now the live sheep has been replaced by a sheep model: a cart with a sheepskin draped over it, “a Judas-, a dummy. It works really well” (field notes; see Pedersen 2013: 721). The Judas sheep is a decoy animal (Williams 2004), a sheep-machine and a biosocial component of the slaughter machinery that plugs itself in to the

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killing-machine and channels a potentially hesitant and unruly sheep-flow in the direction to the kill floor. It is a little death-machine on its own, betraying the other sheep to comply with their own slaughter—not merely by entering the slaughterhouse in a smooth, docile fashion, but by incorporating them as seamless biocomponents of the slaughter apparatus itself (Pedersen 2013). Decoy animals (mechanical or living; their effects are the same), a sophistication of disciplinary technique, are positioned right at the nexus of convergence between the technical, economic, and scientific machines of the slaughter apparatus. Transforming fear to confidence and trust, they form sinister, life-denying assemblages with their species-kin (the animals destined for slaughter), driven by detailed ethological knowledge about animals’ sentient engagement with, and their responses to species kin and the environment (Williams 2004). Williams has made an extensive analysis of this phenomenon and its recruitment of animal sentience to assist in the process of production. Noting that physical coercion may cause stress and bruises that risk lowering the retail value of the carcass, Williams remarks that “animal docility is an extremely valuable commodity” (49) in meat production, giving the industry a strong economic incentive to elicit compliance from animals. She gives several historical as well as contemporary examples of species-specific biotechnical disciplinary strategies used for the purpose to achieve a smooth flow of animals necessary to ensure production efficiency. These strategies include blinding particularly obstreperous animal individuals by stitching shut their eyelids to make their behavior more easily manageable; adjusting space and the interior slaughterhouse design (an innovation named “stairway to heaven”) to block out distracting sights and sounds while exploiting animals’ speciesspecific behavioral characteristics (such as their tendency to circle) to make them effectively walk themselves into the plant, and the use of decoy animals. In contrast to Williams’ Foucauldian analysis of how animal subjectivities are co-opted by these technologies and used against the animals’ own interest, in the schizoanalytic approach of this book, animal subjectivities are not so much appropriated by the industry as they are produced alongside other subjectivities as side effects of the slaughter apparatus. A modulation of sheep affect is at work, and as outcomes of these processes, multiple subjectivities are produced:  The subjectivity of the animals, the subjectivity of the public sensitized to the idea of “humane” slaughter,3 and the subjectivity of veterinary students, who are taught the technique, its economic imperatives, as well as the ethology science necessary to assist the implementation of these strategies (Pedersen 2013).

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Less sophisticated technical devices for taking the life of animals proliferate in veterinary education, bringing us (and them) closer to what Giedion (1948: 232) has called “medieval instruments of torture.” In Wadiwel’s (2015: 2) words, “The technologies of death are simple, yet diabolical.” Decapitations (very small chickens can be decapitated by tearing off their vertebral column), boltguns (animals with a sturdy forehead need more force to be stunned, according to a veterinary teacher), carbon dioxide (very uncomfortable to breathe in—has anyone tried? asks the teacher), gas (works well with driving the animals), nitrogen (inexpensive), electricity (the intention is to catalyze an epileptic seizure. There is an overheating induced in the brain that gives a typical spasm pattern. Comparatively short time with electricity—20 seconds . . . If electricity fails, the animals have to be boltgunned). Student:  If humans are euthanized, electricity is used, if necessary. Why not more than 20 seconds? Do they get fried at that point, or? We are shown film sequences showing boltgunning of cow, and caged pigs who, gasping and jerking, are immersed in carbon dioxide. The teacher comments that the gasping can continue even after the heart stopped beating. As seems to be routine practice in this class, students applaud the teacher’s performance when the lecture has ended—a danse macabre of our time (Giedion 1948: 240).

Technical Machines in the Zoo and Beyond Slaughterhouses and animal farms are not the only sites where technical machines proliferate. “Try to use modern technology,” urges a teacher in an animal caretaker class on zoo management and design. “Think ahead! Ahead, ahead, ahead!” With a transbiologist eye on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as a trope for the zoo, Szczygielska (2013) argues that the contemporary zoo is closer to a high-tech laboratory than a prison, and that the zoo edutainment spectacle (Chapter 5) is driven by a different technological spectacle behind the scenes: What kinds of technologies are employed in a contemporary zoo? The landscape immersion revolution that Rothfelds [sic] talks about requires modern equipment to produce “jungle sounds” from camouflaged speakers, fake mountains with computer systems hidden inside to manage the temperature, air humidity and light intensity. Some plants are not real, some branches are made out of epoxy, steel and urethane, some trees are just replicas; the waterfall is controlled by a computer program and can be easily shut down. Recently visitors have also been encouraged to look up information and watch short presentations on LCD

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touchscreens situated near the cages with nonhuman animals on display, or to pick up cards with a QR barcode that after being scanned by a smartphone will lead you to do a better job of re-constructing and mimicking nature. (Szczygielska 2013: 106)

To this zoo account—resembling Ray Bradbury’s ([1948] 2012) high-tech, futuristic nursery walls in “The Veldt,” controlled by thoughts and desires (see Chapter 2)—can be added medical technologies. These include technologically boosted animal acclimatization to unnatural habitats, but the biggest zoos, writes Szczygielska, also have modern laboratories as part of their institutional arrangements, where production and remodeling of animals takes place as part of recreation of worlds in miniature, concentrated form. This is a technical machine that is all about reproduction and sexuality:  There are sophisticated breeding plans, IVF (in vitro fertilization) technologies, genetic engineering. Computer analyses used to pair genetically suitable animal couples, as well as genetic tests and international databases for pedigree tracing, are elements of the breeding plans (Szczygielska 2013). They make the zoo collapse into a breedingmachine (Chapter  7) that technically coincides with the animal agribusiness. While Szczygielska notices these overlaps but remarks that “their institutional setting and scientific-epistemic practices to which they are subjected to are different” (101 n 1), my point is that they are essentially driven by the same technical machines, both in terms of regulation of the animals’ environment and living conditions, and in terms of micro-control of animal bodies, sexualities, and genetic setup (what Palmer [2001] has referred to as external and constitutive practices of power over animals, respectively). In both settings, animals— although of different species—are incorporated as entities of the animal control technologies, forming biotechnical machines together with them. Looking at the educational context, the animals, the teachers, the veterinary students who learn the breeding techniques in the animal production system, and the animal caretaker students who get immersed in zoo edutainment (Chapter  5) while learning basic ethological facts, inhabit the same world. They are forged together as parts of essentially the same machinery. What do all these technical machines produce? Each one has its own designated area of use, and each has its own output:  docility, fear, scientific knowledge (accompanied by possibilities to control), offspring, meat, milk, eggs, wool, pelts, death, profit, affect, connections to other machines. Machines that control, intensify, improve. Technical machines may, as appropriate, work indiscriminately on all animals, or be eminently adjusted to each animal species, or even each animal individual. The first instance is pure function, pure

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rationality; the latter accommodates the mundane little micro-fascism embedded in the everyday normality of animal production and slaughter, where “pure racial lines” are primary and never-ending multiplicities of animals are processed, but each and everyone needs to be produced and killed as a singularity. As educational effects of these technical machines, students and animals forge new machines that become distributed across the full social body (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2016) of the animal-industrial complex. The students become handymen—bioeconomic handymen (cf. Twine 2010: 92)—each with her own animal-machines (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009), learning to put the technical devices to work, to enhance, decrease, redirect, regulate, cut, and dispose of an abundance of flows (of animal bodies, feed, excrement, semen, blood, milk, eggs, carbon dioxide) that threaten to overflow in all directions.

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Killing-Machines: Animal Breeding, Shooting, and Slaughter in Education

For even death, punishment, and torture are desired, and are instances of production . . . It makes men [sic] or their organs into the parts and wheels of the social machine. (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009: 145) In schizoanalysis, death is a form of production, omnipresent in animal science education as well as in society at large (cf. The Animal Studies Group 2006). Bezan (2012) remarks, in her “thanatological” approach to animal studies, that the human–animal relationship is structured by a history of death. Taje (2016) analyzes the present school system as necrophilic in its relation to animals—a necrophilia MacCormack (2008) would describe as a love compelled by capitalism; a necrophilic love not for the animal-objects but for the machine they inhabit; a machine that dismembers them into fluid states. Tissue, body parts, intestines, excrement, blood, semen, carbon dioxide, and euthanization liquid flow abundantly through animal science education. As one graduated animal caretaker student put it, during internship periods when the students are allocated to different workplaces for a designated period of time, all students become more confident in killing. Killing skills are expected from animal caretaker students still in their teenage years. This student spent her internship period at a 4-H farm, where they slaughtered sheep. When one of the teachers came by for a visit he commented ironically, “Vegetarian, arms soaked in blood!” The work at the 4-H farm was directed toward the child–animal relation. To block desire-flows from working against the killing-machine, children are not allowed to give names to the animals who are to be slaughtered, and physical contact with these animals is restricted. After the internship period, the school principal brought all students to his home to participate in sheep slaughter (interview transcript)—despite, or perhaps because of, his ambition to “protect” particularly “sensitive” students from “the raw brutal reality” outside school

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where animals (“living material”) may be slaughtered in horrifying ways (interview transcript). A didactic killing-machine is here connected to a set of comfort-machines (Chapter 4), with their comforting effects reinforced by the killing taking place in the principal’s own home. When the “little real reality” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009:  334) of internship workplaces disconnect killing-machines from their comfort-machine appendices, so that there is nothing that reassures students that killing an animal is unproblematic, students may either conform or resist (see Chapter 8). This disconnection is part of the veterinary program from the very beginning, with the effect that students may create their own comfort-machines, as these are not delivered by their education. The veterinary student Erica’s way of holding herself together in an education-machine threatening to tear her apart (see Chapter 1), as she realizes that, as a student, changing the system from within is impossible, is to envision all the things she will be able to do for animals after graduation, all the animals she will save. This is what she is told by friends and graduated vets, and this is what she tells herself. Haunted by anxieties about never being able to do enough to resist the system, seeing herself as part of the machine becomes both a source of fear of losing herself in it, and also helps to alleviate her concerns by relieving her from focusing on her own limited space for action (interview transcript; cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009). Death in schizoanalysis is production, and as Colombino and Giaccaria (2016:  1046) put it, animal death is also a process, not “a neat caesura in the flow of life” that distinguishes liveness and deadness into two distinct realms (cf. Lebedev 2018). Rather, death enters an animal’s life even before it is born (cf. Adams [1990] 2002) and functions as an organizing rationale that optimizes the animal’s liveness—equal to its productivity and profitability—until slaughter (Colombino and Giaccaria 2016). In geographical terms, Colombino and Giaccaria suggest we start thinking of (animal) death spatially, as a borderland, rather than as a border (2016, emphasis in original), with animal breeding and controlled reproduction as an inseparable and intimately entangled part of killing:  a Foucauldian analysis of biopower as a life-generating and deathinflicting apparatus. This approach makes it possible to situate the mass production of animal death within a register of biocapitalism (Colombino and Giaccaria 2016). In the present chapter, this analysis is oriented toward configuring animal breeding and killing as two indispensable parts of the same machine, both mechanic and machinic; an intricate and hellish series of connections and flows and intensive states that precede, select, and put to work the technical tools of killing, including the human subjects who (together

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with the animals) inhabit and are distributed across the killing-machine. What happens, then, as the machinic processes of breeding and killing enter the curriculum?

The Educational Vitality of Killing Veterinary education overflows with dissection animals: “minks and foxes and hens and cats and dogs and a horse and goats and pigs,” 260 hours of dissection in one semester (interview transcript). Killing-machines may have performative elements of spectatorship built into them (Pedersen 2010b), as each culturally contingent human–animal practice has its own actors and audience (Chaudhuri 2007, 2009). Students who resist animal dissection (even if the animals are “already dead”) and animal killing, may, at least at lower educational levels, be excused from active participation but encouraged to be present and watch the act (interview transcripts); a didactic strategy of normalization that may subsequently transform into a source of enjoyment or pleasure (cf. Chapter 2; Solot and Arluke 1997). In veterinary education, teachers may joke about how the dissection animals died, and some students publish photographs of themselves posing with animal carcasses in the veterinary students’ magazine (interview transcript). Killing-machines organize animal science education, including upper secondary animal caretaker education, to the extent that it is difficult to find any animal-related subject matter entirely free from them. Addressing the production of “surplus” animals in zoos, an animal caretaker teacher raises a rhetoric question in the classroom: Why do zoos let bear cubs be born, when they have to kill them later on anyway? The critical responses this question risks opening up are however immediately blocked by an absurd little comfortmachine (cf. Chapter 4), put to work by the teacher before any critique is even given a chance to arise: “Why shouldn’t we allow a female bear the happiness of raising her young, this is the right of every animal.” (Field notes) (The “right” of the bear to enjoy the happiness of giving birth to cubs, but not to enjoy life itself, was not discussed during this lecture; cf. Cole 2011.) Also more loosely structured classroom discussions, when students are supposed to practice argumentation, listen to their peers, position themselves, and motivate these positions around a range of issues related to animals in society, sometimes with minimal teacher intervention, are driven by killing-machines. It is the issue of animal killing that largely preoccupies these discussions:  in a group work on

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human–animal relations in an upper secondary education philosophy class, one student group argued, If we can develop something that benefits people, it’s a good thing. We are humans, and we want a comfortable life. It’s good if we can breed a hen that can live in the desert, so that people in developing countries can hunt it and get food (the student mimicks the cackling sound of a hen, lifting his arms as if aiming with a rifle, and imitates rifle shots). (Field notes)

Teaching thrives on killing animals. In a different context, a student in a veterinary class asks whether home slaughter is permitted and gets the response that slaughtering for one’s own consumption is OK, as well as to invite one’s neighbor to a meal on home-slaughtered sheep. This is followed by another student question whether it is permitted to kill an animal in any manner, if I am a hunter, can I take my weapon and shoot my cow? (field notes). Killingmachines are remarkably vital in education:  They excite classroom dynamics, energize discussions, and shore up desire. As Buchanan (2013) notes, desiring-production is a process of producing associations, connections and links between thoughts, feelings, and ideas, but these production processes only become visible in and through the machines they form. Hunter education (an elective course for students in one upper secondary school I visited) is a space where each student forms a little killingmachine together with the course content. These are killing-machines that do not actually perform the task of killing per se but rather become circuits of desiring-production; desire that circulates in the hunter education classroom and captures and mobilizes students as novice hunters. Desiring-production produces the real (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009), and there is a certain joyfulness emerging in this class, where the imagined power of using firearms to kill becomes a reality within reach. Shooting birds is fun—this was a comment between two students evoked by a film showing a pigeon, injured by a hunter’s shot, laying on the ground with flapping wings. “Popping” a big moose is even more exciting (students ask their teacher about his own track record of shooting as he is going through basic biological facts about the moose). Fallow deer that have become too numerous—“Out and pop ‘em.” An excited laughter from a student who realizes that as a hunter, there is an actual number of real animals that he, all by himself, is permitted by the authorities to shoot during a designated period of time: A new killing-machine is formed as this student enters into the irresistible, promissory machinic pleasures of hunting.

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At the vocational upper secondary educational settings researched in this book, killing animals is still a question haunted by at least some degree of anxiety, doubt, or concern, and may, at least implicitly, still be associated with killing humans, or, in the occasional ethics discussion, be addressed in the same context. As the hunter education teacher explained in a telephone interview with me, his classes are interspersed with video films, since “it is problematic to wave firearms around in a classroom” (interview transcript). At higher education levels, killing becomes more of a routine practice; an unquestionable regime built into the agribusiness sector and contained by a set of technical machines (Chapter  6) to the extent that thinking about animals outside of this regime becomes impossible.

Coding, Decoding, Recoding Just as a death sentence hangs over the head of every animal, wild and domestic, in animal science education (Chapter 3), a killing-machine accompanies them too, but codes them differently according to their economic value (in veterinary education) and/or their categorization as either “endangered species” or disposable (in animal caretaker education). Veterinary education codes animal bodies and organs through a kind of scheme, “this concerns pigs, this concerns dogs, this concerns cats” (interview transcript), and coding has direct effects on animal bodies. Animals in the food production system will receive care up to a certain point. A veterinarian who encounters a pig with a broken leg will not treat the animal, but will cost-effectively euthanize him or her, while dogs in small animal clinics may receive advanced specialist care (interview transcript). Not uncommonly, in animal caretaker classes, the two parameters of the animal species’ economic value and its status as endangered (or not) may also converge, as students are informed that an endangered species of charismatic megafauna attracts crowds and money to the zoo, as is the case with the giant panda (see Szczygielska 2014 for an analysis of pandas as a special form of currency in the global flow of animal capital). In animal caretaker education profiled toward the zoo business, issues of food animal production were also addressed (see Chapter 3), and students were taught that “zoo animals” and “agricultural animals” have different needs, they were kept in different locations of the school’s animal facilities, and were handled according to different registers (in the words of one former student, “there were two different booklets”), partly because zoos are open to public view1 in a way

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that animal factories in the food production system are not. As these businesses are differently positioned in the animal-industrial complex, they code the animals according to different diagrams of this abstract machine (Chapter 1). In ethological science, as explained by one student, it is possible to trace an informal, species-coded status hierarchy manifesting itself as a contempt for domestic animals. Wolves are coded as “cooler” research objects than cows, who are, in turn, “cooler” than hens (interview transcript). Killing-machines code not only animal bodies, but also student behavior and their ethical positions. An ethology education program started with a computerbased “test” where students were asked to position themselves in relation to three different animal ethics philosophies. Subsequently during the program, this turned out to be a stratifying exercise as only one of these positions was actually sanctioned by the education (interview transcript). Coding of student behavior largely follows the coding of animals: Veterinary students are expected to demonstrate professional self-assurance in relation to pet animals in animal clinics, but should refrain from expressing criticism in relation to production animals at farms, to avoid conflicts with farmers. The animal-industrial complex’ coding and axiomatizing of animal categories in accordance with the sectors, rationales, and territories of the animal economy may however be momentarily decoupled, as in the following account from an animal research laboratory by a former animal caretaker student: In all labs I’ve worked in . . . the staff have their favorite animals. It is very absurd. Usually they are not used in experiments. At [name of university] there was a rabbit in an experiment. But they get like, really nice. They build special cages, big like this, which they buy in pet shops, huge cages, which like stand in there and in the middle of all the lab cages there is a huge cage with a little mouse in it. And everybody passes by and talks with this little “Kalle” and they build little houses and bring their lunch leftovers and . . . it gets so tremendously absurd when there are so many others. They just totally close their eyes to their suffering, and then there is this little mouse that they call by name . . . I always get fascinated each time when you see this . . . it gets so absurd when you enter a room, and then nothing but cages along the walls, then but what is that over there? And then little name signs and they walk around feeding little cucumber pieces and apple pieces and all . . . people sit down and talk to this little mouse and cuddle it. It can happen even at [name of university], they had done it with a hamster they had there. And then we entered the next room, the mouse room, they had a mouse that had escaped, and then they didn’t know from which cage. And then it must be euthanized. Er, so right away, just stamp your clog, mashed

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the mouse (demonstrates with gestures), and one minute before [this happened] they had been sitting with little hamster like this, oh little darling and . . . it gets so tremendously . . . clear . . . It was like, it was the mascot and the pet. (Interview transcript)

Short-circuiting the otherwise strictly policed division between the categories of “pets” and “lab animals” by singling out certain individuals as “favorites” or “mascots” who are also afforded special treatment or “privileges” unavailable to the other animals in the laboratory—a practice that perplexed the former animal caretaker student above—is a well-known informal laboratory practice (Birke, Arluke and Michael 2007). Rather than seeing it as instances of laboratory cultures or identity work however, it is an effect of social killing-machines working by scrambling the codes; killing-machines working by breaking down (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009). The pet animal in the midst of a laboratory setting could possibly also function as a comfort-machine (Chapter 4) but can never be viewed as a deterritorialization of certain lab animals into the (supposedly) more privileged pet category. On the contrary, it is a form of laboratory microfascism working all the more effectively by an uneven, arbitrary distribution of benevolence. As care and attachment becomes concentrated around one or two animal individuals, violence toward others is suddenly shored up, targeted, and intensified as required. The social machine’s limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions. The dysfunctions are an essential element of its very ability to function, which is not the least important aspect of the system of cruelty. The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009: 151, emphasis in original)

Breeding: Production of Production We have sheep because we want to produce something. (Teacher comment during a lecture on breeding in the veterinary education program)

Killing is production, and breeding is production of production, or, as a veterinary education teacher puts it, production for growth. Twine’s (2010: 87)

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Foucauldian analysis of animal biotechnologies draws attention to the whole array of animal science subdisciplines that work to discipline and optimize animal bodies for production, such as “meat science, behavioral science and reproductive science, with a focus on feed efficiency, physiology, development, nutritional quality, immunity and disease, biometrics, health, welfare, environmental impact, and methods of slaughter.” Many of these subdisciplines are introduced in veterinary education. “Production” animals are bred for high fertility, sperm quality, and “good maternal characteristics.” In a lecture on sheep breeding in veterinary education, a PowerPoint slide defined breeding objectives in the Sheep recording scheme2 as follows: A ewe with high fertility, good maternal characteristics, good resistance against diseases and good wool yield. The ewe should produce vital, functional and fastgrowing lambs with good feed utilization and good quality of carcass and wool and pelt, respectively. (Field notes, my translation)

“Production” animals are bred for body shape (in sheep and dairy cows, a square body shape, assessed by a “form class” scale, is desired as this provides more valuable meat parts), “eating quality” (genetic testing of beef tenderness and juiciness is an important technology in cattle production), disease resistance, resource efficiency, good production yield and quality, and overall functionality. Animals are also bred for docility (i.e., their easy handling by humans. Twine [2010] notes that “disruptive” animals tend to be selected out), for minimizing sensitivity to unprofitable health-related problems caused by intensive production systems and for eugenic reasons (field notes). The animals, who are at the center of the breeding process, are at the same time curiously marginalized (cf. Franklin [2002] 2007; Twine 2010): In sheep breeding, the teacher explains, the lamb is the product, but it is the ewe and the lamb together who produce. In milk production, calves are produced, and the calves are slaughtered. The cow’s life is axiomatized by her lactation cycle and she is disposed of at the average age of 2½ lactation (cf. Chapter 6). In meat production, breeding ability is not only a characteristic in cows (measured through breed index) but in calves as well: “The calf ’s own ability to be born” (field notes). The breeding-machine produces animals almost incidentally, it seems; as appendices to their own productive and reproductive functions, while the real driving force is production of production, which may take on hyperactive rates. Breeding typically picks up speed in intensive agricultural production systems, but also in other sectors such as dog breeding, where there has previously been a development one teacher called “marathon

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breeding” when some dogs were made to produce hundreds of offspring (field notes). This breeding hyperactivity reaches another level when animal semen, as Colombino and Giaccaria (2016) have pointed out, is turned into a global commodity through the diffusion of artificial insemination technologies. One individual bull of the Piedmontese breed is shown to have produced 514 calves located in 239 farms (“and there is still semen available for sale” [1054].) This is still a modest number compared to Giedion’s (1948) historical figures from a different part of the world and a different animal species: In the Soviet Union in 1936 over 15,000 ewes were fertilized from one ram; average conception:  96.6 per cent. In one district all the ewes—45,000—were fertilized by the semen of eight rams. In that year 6 million cows and ewes of the Soviet Union were mechanically impregnated—a parallel to the introduction of hybrid corn in America. (Giedion 1948: 253)

Production intensity speeds up also in the broiler chicken business. Broiler chicken production has been described by Watts (2000) and Boyd (2001) as a merge between R&D investments and avian biology, and poultry management improvement strategies and technologies. Boyd (2001) outlines how the mutual interdependence and increasingly blurred boundaries between corporate interests, animal science, and husbandry have shaped the modern poultry production system where animal biology has become an area of scientific intervention and R&D that feeds back into industrial animal improvement processes, making the animals themselves a force of production. These are processes of accumulation and intensification of both biological productivity and technological efficiency (Boyd 2001). The chickens, which have an enormous growth potential, are bred to develop maximum muscle mass for a minimum amount of feed. Broiler chicken breeding is fully axiomatized to corporate capitalism. In veterinary education, the two types of broiler chicken (Ross and Cobb), controlled by multinational corporations (cf. Twine 2010), are presented as different “lines,” and in the words of one teacher, much like Volvo launches a new car model each year, the new broiler models are results of breed improvements (field notes; cf. Twine 2010 on similar “animal lines” in the pig industry). In broiler production, the breeding (hatching)-machine and the technical machine of avian biotechnology collapse into the same machine, designed to support and improve production. Not only are the chicken bodies through the material effects of production transformed into a cyborgian merge of biology and

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technology (cf. Best 2006; Pedersen 2012a), but also the breeding and technical machines that produce them become inseparable and indistinguishable. At slaughter, a machine enters that picks up the chickens, which are replaced by new chickens within ten days. Small birds cause the farmer an economic loss, as the slaughterhouse will not accept them, and reduces its payment to the farmer (field notes from study visit). One animal caretaker school operated in a more locally situated and low-tech setting with chickens and had its own hatchery machines to demonstrate to the students the ethological process of imprinting. The didactic tool of imprinting could be, for instance, the teacher’s hand, a partial object (see Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009; Holland 1999) connecting to the chicken’s eye and body as well as students’ eyes and minds, forming a little imprinting-pedagogical-machine that shores up flows of didactic energy through these connections. The chickens were then euthanized at a few weeks of age, with new chickens taking their place.

Fucking-Killing-Teaching-Machines In both the globalized, corporately controlled broiler industry and in the didactic event of chicken imprinting at a local upper secondary school described above, the hatching-machine produces orphan chickens in a regular flow, a flow cut off by a killing-machine without which the hatching-machine couldn’t do its job. (Early inventions in chicken incubator technology were tellingly called “artificial mothers,” according to Giedion [1948]). The two machines become coextensive; inseparable parts of one and the same teaching-machine, as they “enter into the parts, wheels and motors” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009: 381) of it, and of each other. Likewise, 4-H farms often function as pedagogical killing-machines with a cyclic inflow of young animals whose development process follows the school year so that they are killed by the end of the semester after children have seen them growing up. The animals then disappear and are replaced by new animals the following semester (interview transcript):  an economy of animal currency at the microlevel of childcare in nonformal education. Animal breeding is in public debate, animal welfare discourse, and some utilitarian strands of moral philosophy, commonly thought of as a largely harmless and benevolent process through which “production” animals are generously “given” life by humans. Already in 1914, Henry Salt refuted this argument as genuinely flawed. This chapter does not attempt to join this philosophical discussion, but takes a different position by dealing with animal

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breeding as a necessary component of the killing-machines of the animal production system, feeding raw material in the form of living animal bodies into the mechanical and machinic process of slaughter. Animal breeding is also a systematic, institutionalized form of controlling animals’ reproductive capacities. Whether performed with sophisticated techniques such as artificial insemination (see Colombino and Giaccaria 2016) or embryo transfer, or simply carried out by someone sitting on the back of a sow manually inserting semen into her body (as shown in a PowerPoint picture in a veterinary education class), it is literally a machine fucking the animals. Early experiments with artificial fertilization were carried out on toads, frogs, newts, even with silkworms, until the same technique succeeded with fertilizing a female dog: “I had taken care to give the syringe the degree of heat which man and dogs are found to possess . . . The bitch brought forth three lively whelps, two male and one female” (quoted in Giedion 1948: 252). As Giedion notes, “In the time of full mechanization, what had formerly been laboratory experiments became tools of mass production” (253). The apparatus of artificial insemination—dummies with artificial vaginas and syringes for semen injection—was at hand, ready and adapted to a range of animal species, such as cows, sheep, goats, dogs, foxes, rabbits, poultry. Contemporary selective breeding is a repertoire of techniques for controlling the animal’s reproduction process and maximizing her utility and economic yield as a production unit. Colombino and Giaccaria argue that artificial insemination (AI) techniques rely on an appropriation of animal desire: AI practices are centred on the deception of bull’s desire, as his whole reproductive life pivots around the absence of the cow and her substitution with a dummy, a true fetish turning the bull’s libido into the mechanical and alienated production of ‘live stock’, i.e. semen, the commodity internationally sold as incorporating the features of the capital that produced it. (2016: 1050)

In this chapter, desiring-production is at work that exceeds the individual animal, modulating and calibrating him in a process that organizes his desireflows and feeds them into the production system. Technical machines of controlling animal bodies and behaviors (as described in Chapter  6) gain particular force in the never-ending production cycle of breeding and slaughter, with which they work in symbiosis. However, breeding is an imperfect, not fully controllable form of bioengineering. One lecturer in the veterinary education program explained that there are an almost infinite number of cross-breeding systems, as it is difficult to find a way to converge all desirable characteristics in one single animal material in meat production. Although

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conventional breeding is an inexact and occasionally unreliable enterprise, new opportunities of animal reproduction control emerge with the development of biotechnological innovations. Breeding biotechnologies are increasingly targeted to the gene level as a way of enhancing animal material by improving and commodifying their genealogy (Franklin [2002] 2007; Twine 2010). As an organized material sphere for the distribution, composition, concentration, and intensification of selected characteristics and behaviors, the breeding-machine works by multiplication and amplification, extending the “animal material” beyond its own embodied singularity not only physically across an animal population, but also discursively across regulatory bodies and records such as control systems, breed values, and breed indexes (cf. Boyd 2001; Grasseni 2005; Holloway 2005; Holloway et  al. 2009; Pedersen 2012a; Ufkes 1998). All these bodies and records work in themselves as machines, and in the veterinary education lecture hall, the apparatus of breeding control presented to the students is traversed also by another set of machines; speciesspecific subsystems developed for animals such as horses, cows, pigs, and sheep, respectively. PigWin is a company that compiles data from many different pig producers, and “Elite Lamb” (ElitLamm) is a registration system for sheep (field notes). The previously mentioned “Sheep recording scheme” is another example, which veterinary students get a detailed explanation of during a visit to a sheep farm (see Chapter 6). As Twine (2010) notes: Amazing investments are made to control particularly qualitatively and cost-efficiently standardized meat, milk, or fiber products; investments that veterinary students become part of through their education. The outlet of breeding is, of course, the slaughter process. Veterinary students are introduced to a close-range familiarization with this process through study visits to slaughterhouses, an important part of the veterinary education curriculum. The slaughterhouse is a death-producing perpetuum mobile,3 whose raw material is a steady inflow of living animals:  when one animal transport vehicle has been emptied of its content, the next will soon be waiting by the slaughterhouse entrance in a never-ending cycle. In the company presentation we are offered in the office facilities of the privately owned slaughterhouse that introduces our visit, we are informed that 24,000 livestock, 220,000 pigs, 1200 sheep, 100 calves, and 300 horses are slaughtered here annually. Slaughter capacity is 20 cattle per hour. The slaughterhouse has its own modern, yellow animal vehicles. “Where do all the animals come from?,” asks a student, and gets the reply that they come from southern Sweden. We are also told, in a comfort-machinic style, that the animal protection aspect is a priority, and all

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slaughterhouse employees who handle animals receive training, organized by an educational consortium named “Meny,” consisting of a number of universities that work for the food industry. When the company presentation session is over, we are given white disposable overalls and blue boot covers. We put them on, exit the office facilities, and approach a cattle truck parked near the animal entrance of the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse premises evoke veterinary students’ affect and tears, already before the slaughter building is entered. “This is so *** sick!” Comfort is offered to the most upset students, but no friendly hugs or paper napkins or other magic in the world can alleviate what is ahead of us. A slaughterhouse employee approaches us with a cheerful greeting; “Future vets, all of you?” The slaughter transport drives off, emptied of its content, and another carriage takes its place. We walk in line through an entrance that parallels the animal passage (Pedersen 2013: 723). The slaughterhouse is the warm, pounding, bleeding heart of the killingmachine. When plugging in to the veterinary curriculum, it opens education to both the exterior and interior simultaneously. The exterior is the social body of a market-driven consumer machine with demands for endless flows of meat. The interior is the organs, blood, and tissue of the animal bodies violently forced open, distributed across the social machine. Our group proceeds slowly through the narrow passageway side by side with the cows, almost in a synchronized fashion, with only a low fence separating us. The slaughterhouse is a machinic assemblage with one single purpose: designed to destroy, to produce death. As such, it is smooth, sustained by flows of animals, flows that are ushered forward and regulated by the interior mechanics of the slaughterhouse, mechanically maneuvered walls that can be hoisted up and down, and whistling slaughterhouse handymen equipped with spades and electric prods, making the process work in fits and starts, as necessary for the functionality of the slaughter-machine. Animal bodies look obscenely dissonant within the mechanized, barren slaughterhouse interior. When they are taken to slaughter, they scream and resist. Animal flows are breached but not stopped by the boltgun, which merely marks a point of transformation; a passage from life to death, from intact bodies to violently opened ones, from flows of life to flows of intestines, legs, tails, noses, blood, saliva, and muscle cut down to convenient pieces—an assemblage-converter in a claustrophobic machinic hellhole swallowing continuous flows of bodies as if there were no end. There is no end, only mismatches: This is what happens when technology meets organic matter; “a paralyzed, torn, chaotic condition” (Giedion 1948: 6; see Chapter 6). Cows become objects out of place and out of shape. Cows interrupt the flow as they suddenly see our group behind the wall

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as the raceway makes a sharp turn to the right and they refuse to move forward. Dressed in white overalls designed to prevent the spreading of disease, we also become objects out of place and out of shape, but only for a brief moment: we are asked to duck behind the wall to make ourselves invisible to the cows to make them pass by, thereby speeding up their proceeding to the kill floor. We follow orders. As we squat silently behind the wall, a subjugated group (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009) immersed in the slaughter-machine, a lost component is put back in its proper place (Pedersen 2013: 724). There are cows: Cows with shit smeared on their bodies. Cows whose big, bulky bodies don’t really seem to fit into the barren compartments that enclose them tightly. Cows moving too fast and getting hit by a mechanic wall suddenly coming down, cows moving too slowly, cows refusing to move, cows looking at us while trying to back away from the stun area when facing the bolt gun, cows shivering with convulsions as the boltgun shot hits their head, saliva spurting from the mouth, body falling heavily to the hard floor, mouth half open. Suspended lifeless bodies on the other side of the door (where bleeding takes place), fluids running through their open mouths. And then there are pigs: Pigs screaming as they are shoved to their death. “Pigs have an inherent curiosity to move ahead and check things out, this is something that should be taken advantage of,” says the teacher.4 A pig body is cut open with intestines falling out, while the still living pig in the stable beside us is grunting. In a futile attempt to disconnect from the slaughter machine, a student holds her hands over her ears, then covers her face with her hands as if attempting to shut off all her senses at once: “Stop it! Open the pens, release all cows! THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE!” Words demanding to be shouted out loud, to be heard, to be acted on, but not coming out. (The words came out after the visit, when the student tells me how she really wanted to act inside the slaughterhouse.) There is a fundamental mismatch between the animals and their slaughter, impossible for this student, any student, to intervene in. The wrought-open animal body produces multiple entrance and exit points as it is emptied of its physical contents. The animal in the process of slaughter becomes a circuit and a nexus of convergence for all sorts of technical, social, and desiring-machines, while blocking all action for change. Lebedev’s (2018) analysis of death in Deleuze’s philosophy works also, perhaps particularly, in the slaughterhouse: Disassembling an organism has never meant a self-inflicted death but opening the body to connections supposing a complex arrangement, circuits, conjunctions,

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separations and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, territories and deterritorializations measured like a land-surveyor or a cartographer would. (Lebedev 2018: 158)

To put it differently, a killing-machine is in operation; a pedagogical killingmachine hooking up with an absurd little comfort-machine (Chapter 4) as the student group is informed by their teacher during the slaughterhouse study visit about a drawing competition for children on the theme “animal welfare” arranged by the EU, with an award ceremony held by a “celebrity.” The whole arrangement is part of a EU decision that all EU citizens will be educated in animal welfare in order to correct the problem that the image of slaughter held by the public differs from the image held by the industry (field notes; cf. Cole 2011)—thus, another mismatch to be adjusted, this time at the level of the larger sociopolitical body of the EU and the abstract machine of the animalindustrial complex. We may take from Debord ([1967] 2000) that the key figure of a celebrity surely does its work connecting the slaughter business to the spectacle and to edutainment-machines, as a contemporary version of Chicago’s nineteenth-century slaughterhouse tourism (Chapter  5):  “This celebrity is master of non-consumption, and the heroic image which gives an acceptable meaning to the absolute exploitation that primitive accumulation accelerated by terror really is.” (Debord [1967] 2000 §64). The absolute terror of death made absolutely unremarkable (cf. Giedion 1948; Malamud 2003) through connecting with technical, social, and edutainment-machines. When veterinary students learn to become handymen in the killing-machine (“Do we have to learn to use a boltgun as veterinarians?” “Yes, I think you must be able to do it when no other measure is available”), they enter under the skin of the animals. The word “intimacy” emerges in a discussion among some of the students as we are sharing an evening meal after the slaughterhouse visit: The intimacy of being with a cow in her last moment of life, an obscene and uninvited intimacy, works as a desiring-machine in itself, as the force of life is never felt more strongly than after having faced death. At the dinner table, one student asks herself how the shift actually happened from the slaughterhouse experience to the present moment, as she is sitting here drinking wine and feeling quite well. You have inserted your finger into the machine. You are on board.

Conclusion

In the previous chapters I  have started to identify some of the machines that animal science education assembles and operates through:  their couplings, components and interruptions, as well as their little insanities and dysfunctions. A  schizoanalytic project centers on desire, and in this book, the centrality of animals in educational desiring-production is fundamental. Desiring-machines in animal science education produce specific realities that connect students and animals through both violence and care, and insert both students and animals into machineries of science and the larger field of animal capital (Shukin 2009) of which scientific knowledge production is an indispensable part. This makes attachment between students and animals a component of the animal-industrial complex (Noske 1997), rather than a “natural” expression of empathy somehow working “outside” of, or in opposition to, the animal production system. Animal science pedagogies work by capturing, mobilizing, and organizing desire-flows in multiple creative ways, sometimes to fulfill student dreams (which they know all about), sometimes to repress. Through these processes, students are traversed by incoherent and boundary-shifting forces. What affective forces the animal body will produce, and what routes these forces will take through students, is, however, ultimately beyond the realm of didactic control. Education is a producer and transmitter of order-words (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004). In animal science education, these order-words, however random, unstructured or fragmented, issue commands and install specific orders concerning human–animal relationships, as well as define the place of both students and animals in education. These educational order-words are not necessarily driven by scientific concerns, but seem to pick up speed in particular through social machines of meat. Whether scientifically motivated or not, each order-word carries a little death sentence, which hangs over the head of every animal in animal science education; in fact each teachable moment cannot but deliver a new death sentence, affecting not only animals but also students who

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are taught that their only position available in relation to animals in science education is to issue death sentences themselves. Animal science education is thereby constituted not only by a multiplicity of apparatuses and “a hodgepodge of classes, schedules, subjects, buildings, departments, programs, and projects” (Tiqqun 2011: 201–2), but also by a thousand tiny death sentences, permeated and traversed by affective flows and forces. Educational order-words may morph into various material-semiotic forms, such as direct commands, or more subtle cues, codes, or the promise or threat of high or low grades. They demand compliance and action, as well as mobilize desire. Order-words gain force through desiring-machines, as death sentences and affect work through each other as part of the same machine, for instance, in study visits to farms, where both circulate through animal bodies. Death sentences flourish in animal welfare-oriented classes: In contexts where certain killing practices are explicitly condemned, a death sentence will fall all the harder and more uncompromisingly on the animals who are cared enough about to be spared from “other,” ostensibly less “humane,” forms of killing. In these ways, order-words and their accompanying death sentences connect to all the machinic assemblages of animal production, animal welfare, and slaughter via discursive phenomena (social obligations, student grades) and material entities (candy bags, bolt guns) in animal science education. At this point, they enter into comfort-machines. Comfort-machines deliver promises that work as a buffer between students and the social and educational reality of animal suffering and killing. The “welfare animal” (Armstrong 2007), a specific kind of animal subject, is an offspring of comfort-machines. Comfort-machines deliver assurances that animals in the production system and its institutions are taken well care of and provided with all sorts of comfort, making any case of animal use, incarceration and killing motivated by more important concerns (such as saving endangered species for the future). In this way, comfort-machines create the optimal conditions for killing animals. Comfort-machines thus connect intimately with killing-machines:  Particularly in upper secondary school, but also in higher education, comfort-machines assist killing-machines to smoothly do their job. In upper secondary animal caretaker programs, the ritornello (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004; Sauvagnargues 2016) of “saving a threatened world” is one particular mode in which comfort-machines manifest themselves in everyday teaching and learning activities. The world savior-ritornello is a refrain of reassurance that installs promises, stabilizes a professional discourse, and holds

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the student body together according to a set of assumptions about animals, the animal caretaker profession, education in general, and the students themselves. The ritornello is also an assemblage converter that territorializes students into specific forms of scientific thinking and knowing, while at the same time blocking potential student critique of their education on ethical grounds. Comfort-machines hook up with killing-machines, and also with the edutainment-machines at work particularly through zoos, reassuring that zoos are safe and caring havens with the noble purpose of saving endangered animal species from extinction. Zoos overflow with promises of not only saving endangered animals, but also of realizing visitors’ dreams of intimate interspecies encounters with “the exotic” that, in a capitalist-driven rationale, can never be fulfilled (cf. Pedersen 2010a). Zoos produce comfort-machines as part of their business concept. If comfort-machines function as a protective buffer between students, their education, and the reality of animal suffering and killing, edutainment-machines work as a lubricant of the educational components and processes in the animalindustrial complex. Edutainment-machines operate most obviously through sites of the animal economy sector explicitly designed for the purpose, such as zoos. The zoo is an enclosed, oedipalizing space for the production and circulation of desire and a coordinating node for a number of other machines:  comfortmachines, technical machines, breeding-machines, killing-machines, and, especially in animal science classrooms, command-machines (order-words). The zoo not only displays, but produces and kills animals as part of its economy. As such, it is also a flow-manager, with the spectacle as its diagram (or abstract machine). Edutainment-machines work not only through zoos and other sites designed as commodified spaces for the visual consumption of animals, but also through other modalities and registers in animal science education. Little edutainmentmachines can be employed in certain lectures, by certain teachers, or hook up with the technical machines and comfort-machines of dairy farms to produce didactic events of and through orphan desire, such as during organized study visits to dairy production sites or during public “pasture releases” at farms. Both cases are intense pleasure-producing events forming specific human/ bovine subjectivities, and specific forms of knowledge; both of which enter as components and motors of the animal-industrial complex. Whatever their nature, animal edutainment-machines are apparatuses of capture, transforming animal exploitation to pleasant and enjoyable events.

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Technical machines in animal science education are controlling and coercive devices that may be material and immaterial, of sophisticated or more mundane design. They are as ubiquitous in education as in the animal-industrial complex itself. Technical machines do not discriminate between the nature and function of animals; rather, these collapse into one and the same machine. Animal bodies are both information-processing and product-producing entities. These production units interact and merge with other technologies, forming myriads of hybrid machinic assemblages as appendices to the animal production apparatus. Technical machines, however, do different work at different educational levels. One primary task for animal science students is to learn how to become handymen and flow-managers as they forge new machines together with the animals to be distributed across the animal-industrial complex: To each student her own animal-machines. In animal science education, this kind of knowledge is disseminated by necessity:  recurring mismatches between organic matter (animal bodies) and mechanization (cf. Giedion 1948) require certain skills and expertise to be handled. Each technical machine in the animal-industrial complex has its own designated area of use and its own output: docility, fear, information, offspring, meat, milk, egg, wool, pelts, semen, death, profit, affect, and connections to other machines. They also produce an abundance of flows that must be regulated: flows of animal bodies, feed, excrement, blood. Technical machines may work indiscriminately on all animals, or be adjusted to each animal individual, as needed. This is a knowledge and a skill that is also part of the animal science curriculum and becomes particularly explicit in veterinary education. A specific set of technical machines connects with comfort-machines (“comfort brushes,” “comfort cages”); another set enters slaughterhouses to hook up with killing-machines. A killing-machine accompanies and codes each animal in animal science education. Killing-machines cannot be separated from breeding-machines; in the animal-industrial complex and its educational settings, they are coextensive and part of the same machine:  a diabolical series of connections, flows, and intensive states that precede, select, and put to work the technical tools of killing. Like breeding, killing is a production form, and in the classroom, killingmachines work as vital discussion-catalysts, energizing student involvement and damming up desire, often—but not always—accompanied by comfortmachines. Whether hooked up with comfort-machines or not, killing-machines are didactic, regardless of educational level or student age.

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In the slaughter process, the animal is a nexus of convergence, cut through by all sorts of technical, social, and desiring-machines. Her body is violently wrought open with its interior organs forcibly becoming wheels and motors of an insatiable, capitalist-driven market. As animal science education enters the slaughterhouse, investments feeding into the animal production process circulate among students as intensive affective forces; forces that also situate them—not as coherent subjects, but as ambiguous, fragmented, and torn states. Chapter 1 introduced the animal-industrial complex as an abstract machine, and suggested that each machinic assemblage of animal science education, as mapped in Chapters  2–7, is provisionally held together in a functional arrangement by one of its diagrams. The pedagogical work of these diagrams is of a piloting character: they guide, encourage, and connect students to new realities; new ways of configuring themselves in relation to animals, regulated by animal science in intimate interplay with a system of production. They forge students, animals, and technologies together into new machinic assemblages, which are distributed across the social field of animal capital. This book has been an investigation into the animal-industrial diagram, which must always be conceptualized in its plurality. Sauvagnargues (2016: 202) insists that the abstract machine is empirical, in the sense that it emerges from the “coadaptation” of a given form of power with a given form of practice. It is the detailed empirical existence of concrete educationmachines and their pedagogical practices in animal science education, including the little insanities of everyday pedagogical life, that I have begun to identify in this book: How they work, what their different components are, how and when they connect to other machines, circulate, redirect, and interrupt flows of desire, utterances, affect, information, knowledge, bodies, organs and liquids, and the specific didactic nature of each one. Above all, I  have attempted to find out what they produce and the effects of these production processes. These effects are as multiple as each machine or machinic assemblage it emanates from. For the animals, the effects are always and ultimately destructive. To students, the implications may be more multifaceted but still, in the end, regulative, delimiting, and coercive. This brings us back to the quote by Anne Sauvagnargues (2016) in Chapter 1, where she explicitly refers to science and education as a machine: The industrial machine is built on a scientific machine with a cognitive output. This scientific machine capitalizes on the cognitive factor from elementary school to the university, according to complex networks (arborescences) of teaching, research, laboratories, institutes and companies, as well as circuits

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of finance, research funds, foundations, economic investment in education, research, production and commercialisation. These elements not only make the fabrication of artifacts possible, but even more, they make them profitable by producing humans capable of using them and especially of purchasing them. (Sauvagnargues 2016: 188)

Translated to education in the animal-industrial complex, there appears to be no available spaces external to the animal production system where animal science education can take place. Education, rather, works by plugging itself into a certain set of machines through a myriad of connections and couplings and by keeping the flows and circuits between their different parts open. Quite indifferent to coherence, meaning-making, or any “higher aim”—as pedagogical objectives are produced alongside other effects and objects in the machinic processes of education—; education thrives on desire as well as on its own contradictions. We need to understand more about the nature of desire, and how desire operates through education at all levels—from the large capitalist schemas that tie education to the animal-industrial complex, to ordinary classroom practices of animal exploitation such as animal dissection exercises (Chapter 2) or hunting (Chapter 7). The final chapter will look into to what extent there are potential points or passages of escape from the education-machines we, and animals, inhabit, and how such passages might be created, that may help us act through education differently and put its machines to new use.

8

Schizoanalysis and Micropolitics: How to Change the System from Within

Teacher: What could possibly happen, is that there might be some kind of urban student who has some idealist view that they will apply to this program in order to, to release all [farmed] minks in the long term. It is, it is this kind of thing that could happen. Helena: Yes Teacher: But then they surely get disappointed Helena: Yes, right Teacher: Because that is not, sort of what this program is about. It, it is not (nervous laughter), I mean it’s not that we try to preach that we should engage in fur farming, it’s not that, but it . . . animals do fare bad in society Helena: Mm Teacher: That is the way it is. In the handling process. But it’s also about what we talked about previously, where, where in the chain is the human being positioned, and where are the animals, so to speak (Interview transcript)

Above, I interview an assistant principal of an animal caretaker program in upper secondary school. I asked whether he thinks that talented, presumptive students might be turned away by the information on the program website, saying that students are expected to use animals for research purposes. His response above signals an anxiety about the risk of attracting nonconforming, animal advocacy students to the school and what this may lead to. His anxiety, as this chapter will show, is well motivated. There are things going on in education institutions that are beyond educators’ control. This chapter will seek to explore and expand

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educational thought, politics, and action through their uncontrollability, as focus moves to the micropolitical dimensions of schizoanalysis. In the special issue on education and schizoanalysis in Deleuze Studies, the collection of contributions is described by the editors (Savat and Thompson 2015) as engaging with how we, as teachers and scholars, can find an existence despite the plethora of education-machines of competition and standardization that capture and code us and distribute ourselves along with our students across the specter of a new kind of control society. How, they ask, is it possible to find a life within these machines that inhabit our educational institutions? The present chapter addresses these questions. For this purpose, I  turn to four activist-students whose examples suggest how life may be found, or, rather, invented, in the machines of animal science education, which the previous chapters have described. Although the content of the chapter will build on these individuals and their stories, it is not to be read as an account of their personal experiences, narratives, or relations. They do indeed appear as subjects, but as subjects without fixed identities, defined by the states through which they pass (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009). What is of interest here is their investments, their molecular investments of desire in a social field that can’t bypass education, but rather invent life through its distortion, and the little machines they assemble, together with animals, in these processes of investment. What is going on in the educational spaces these students inhabit is a series of deterritorializations, possibly, as suggested in Chapter 2; but addressed in this final chapter is also the non-containment of education itself (Lather 2006), education as an open space of potentiality (Peim 2009) that exceeds predetermined positions presented to students, and that can, under certain circumstances, be revolutionary. As in the previous chapters, it is the effects that are of interest, and the details of the machines at work. These details are of primary significance. They open a possibility, again, to a configuration of these activist-students and their education that goes beyond their individual experiences, agencies, and agendas. What I  suggest is, following Manning (2016), that they are approached as a heterogeneous collectivity of minor gestures. The minor gesture, according to Manning, is a force that works the major, or the molar structures or systems, from within, unsettling their integrity and normative standards. While “grand” gestures, such as political manifestations or organized revolutions, are typically seen as the site where “true” change occurs, they tend to mobilize around the solidity of precomposed narratives. Uncontained by preexisting models, minor gestures

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create, through subtle shifts, conditions for major, system-altering changes. They change the direction of the unfolding of events. Minor gestures create sites of dissonance and disturbance, and also invent new forms of living, in education and elsewhere, as this chapter sets about to explore. “The minor gesture,” writes Manning (2016: 7), “is the force that makes the lines tremble that compose the everyday,” in this case, the everyday mundane practices in education. Among the activist-students followed in this chapter, these minor gestures don’t follow the same patterns, moves, or logics. Their modalities unfold in different educational settings, under different conditions and form different compositions, but they all affect and work through the same structures. This chapter engages the operations of activist-students’ minor gestures and explores their effects on education-machines. These effects may not be immediately obvious, or world-transforming. On the surface they may not change anything at all. They take the shape of resistance and activism, but what they do above all is point to the possible, or, in Manning’s words, “what else life could be” (2016: 8): in the present chapter, especially school life and academic life as containers of both student and animal life. They create a potential for new diagrams (Manning 2016) to be drawn. In this way, minor gestures are micropolitical and little machines in themselves. What kinds of practices can be crafted that are generative of minor gestures? What might a politics of the minor gesture act like, here, now, in the event? (Manning 2016: 24, emphasis in original)

While the analysis undertaken in this chapter is affirmative, it is not idealistic. Animals who could potentially be liberated from education institutions (and other parts of the animal-industrial complex) through deterritorializing action, will soon be replaced by others. Still, micro-revolutions are significant. They open cracks, produce leakages, multiply connections. They show how to invent life in education-machines that cannot but produce death sentences (Chapter 3). These death sentences are constantly delivered by animal science education in very concrete and specific ways, which this book has set about to investigate, but are in no way exclusive to this particular educational territory. They were also evoked in an interview with “Shirin,” a politically active student in a teacher education program profiled toward the social sciences and philosophy. While passionate about teaching, she describes what happens to philosophy, once it is detached from everything that is inspiring, and becomes stratified as a school subject. In the interview excerpt below, Shirin talks about her time as a student in upper secondary school where philosophy teaching assignments are often

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given to teachers without formal qualifications in the subject matter. It can be teachers of religion, or teachers of social science, or, as Shirin puts it, “almost anybody”: Shirin: Yes, philosophy, psychology, I don’t know why, yes psychology maybe less-, I don’t know why, it is actually so bizarre. ‘Cause I had my religion teacher in secondary school as, as philosophy teacher, and it was worthless. So, and it depends on many other factors, she was so -, and old and uninterested in teaching and then very specific, very religious parts of . . . she was a believer and things like that, actively believing, er . . . and she incorporated it a lot into philosophy. And in addition it was, was so old somehow, it was like, old man after old man after old man and . . . quite unrewarding actually. Helena: (laughing) Yes it really sounds like it. Shirin: Mm. And at that time I had read Peter Singer and was like, really triggered about the course, and it just collapses . . . (laughter) Helena: Yes . . . but when you yourself have taught, philosophy you haven’t done it yet you said, no, right, you didn’t have the possibility. Shirin: No, but I know exactly how I wouldn’t do it. And that is to pick up these old, actually it was these, what are they called, these pict-, you push click, and then change it Helena: Yes transparency slides Shirin: Transparency slides somehow. And then it was the same test as my friend’s older sister had done three years ago, you know the same papers, same transparencies, old man old man old -, actually I would rather say history of idea-ish, religion-history of idea-ish, it was not philosophy the way I have studied philosophy at university level. Of course it can’t be the same, but actually it wasn’t even similar . . . it wasn’t the same subject. (Interview transcript)

Education, or more specifically philosophy education at least in the form Shirin knows it, is an awkward assemblage of old men, religious beliefs, recycled tests, and obsolete transparency slides that collectively impose an overwhelming death sentence threatening to kill every possible seed of emerging enthusiasm for the subject area. Shirin’s utterances above come out as tiny pass-words that inject an element of rupture into the order-words that undeservedly go under the name of “education.” For learning to take place, there are certain components that need to be done away with or reworked; components that

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block the free flows of desire that would constitute education as an open space of potentiality. One primary blocking component is the book; the school book, the root-book, the unitary, linear, stratifying, totalizing script that, in Shirin’s words, delimits her, imposes hard frames around her teaching, and it keeps coming back in our interview (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004). The school book as an order-word bestowing death sentences onto everyone (“And I think it is insulting toward the pupils, the level [of the school-book] . . . They have potential to learn so much more I  would say”), including the novice teacher (“It is as if it is so absolute and, and, a small room, sort of, and then you get stuck there”). While the book traps Shirin into a teaching mode she can’t endure, at a different level it also epitomizes education as such as an apparatus of capture, and Shirin’s strategy is to enlarge the small room of the book, enlarge the space of the possible (cf. Osberg 2009) with a repertoire of alternative teaching approaches. Together with other educational root-tools such as old men, religious beliefs, recycled tests, and transparency slides, the social science school book is a death sentence, although of a different order than the death sentences of animal science education. According to Shirin (and in contrast to Savat and Thompson 2015), there is a freedom in the classroom that a teacher can exercise in a number of different ways, although this freedom rarely extends to the pupils. For instance, as an upper secondary school student, the order-word of meat (Chapter 3) hit down upon Shirin with full force when she displayed her animal rights commitments in school: Shirin: And then they say, “yes, young people are not interested in politics,” and as soon as youth show a political engagement in animal rights for instance, yes then it is to be rejected, then they don’t get demonstration permission, then they don’t get, like, cred at home because they are politically active, that they want to change something, no-no, quite the contrary, then it’s something that will pass when they get older, or something bad. So it’s, it’s so double-edged, on the one hand [they] say that youth, they don’t give a damn about anything, they don’t care, they are not as politically active anymore as they used to be, they are apathic, but then when they actually do something then they are repressed because they do it . . . I had a conflict when I was in upper secondary school with my Principal, because I displayed a poster, and everybody is allowed to display posters if you are a student, and I was, yes but I had my Amnesty-group there, there was like a lot I was allowed to do. Eh, but then when I displayed a poster which said, I don’t remember what it

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said, but it was from [the NGO] Animal Rights Sweden, and there was a huge hullabaloo. Eh, because some pupil had been offended, one in my class. “Choose life, choose vegetarian,” [the poster] said. And she was like, “but shouldn’t I choose life,” there was really a hullabaloo around it, there were meetings with the Principal and they were buddies, her mother and he were good friends. So it was really . . . we came to a point where we were forced to question, but do we have the right to display posters or not, do we have a right to express ourselves politically or not, I had a T-shirt which said “vegan” Helena: Yes Shirin: I had, I ha- I had a meeting with my Principal only for that reason, he said “you have to take it off ” Helena: What?! Shirin: YES . . . (laughter), he said it in a much more cowardly way, he said “yes but there are pupils who can feel offended because you wear it,” then I had it on two consecutive weeks without washing [it], because I was so damn annoyed . . . I simply refused to take it off . . . I was always in conflict with the Principal during three years (laughter). First it was the food, and then this. (Interview transcript)

Shirin’s molecular political moves (poster, T-shirt) to invent an existence (“choose life, choose vegetarian”) in a rather schizoid school environment, disturbed the meat-machine and its regime of normativity. These minor gestures were immediately met with repression, micro-fascist style (“you have to take off your T-shirt”). Ringrose (2013) analyzes gendered subjectivity-producing processes of teenage girls in schools, asking how lines of flight may open up rather than block flows of energy and desire, in assemblages that are cut through with relations of power. Under what conditions energy or desire might escape and stray outside normative strata (even momentarily), is a key question. Ringrose identifies molecular becomings, minor gestures of resistance (such as Shirin’s refusal to take off a T-shirt with a political message, even to wash it; cf. Ringrose 2013: 82–3) as crucial in these deterritorializing processes, and suggests that it is these minor gestures we must map. Now I turn to the veterinary student, “Erica” (introduced in Chapter 1), whose battle against her education takes a different form than Shirin’s above. Enmeshed in the schizoid conditions of an educational pharmakon-machine that on the one hand teaches medical treatment of animal

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disease, on the other teaches loyalty to the production system that causes these problems, Erica develops a strategy of letting these schizoid conditions reveal themselves to her peers, with herself only as a catalyst: Erica: When I was in upper secondary school, everybody hated me because I always expressed my thoughts. So . . . and [in the veterinary program] you will be together for five years, I think that, it also feels like a, almost like a task maybe, or it’s a little bit like hubris but I want to influence all my fellow students to [have them adopt] a better view on animals and . . . they will graduate and meet a lot of animals, a lot of pigs and cows and . . . and so that they don’t have that production [view] on animals. But then it’s crucial to stay on good terms with them. And . . . yes, so that every statement becomes like, needs a strategy behind [it]. This is the worst possible [condition] for feeling outspoken and . . . questioning. So, I’ve often gagged myself. But somewhere there in the midst of it I found out that the way I will do it is to ask questions instead, so then I started, for instance like this, how many, if [teachers] talk about mastitis for instance, Helena: Mastitis? Erica: Mastitis. Mm. Simply from a purely medical perspective you can ask, “Yes but how many cows get mastitis each year?.” Then the teacher kind of has to say, “Yes it’s 100 percent approximately. All cows get mastitis some time.” “Really, but why?” “Yes . . .” Then it’s impossible for them not to address that they might have bred the cows too intensely, and that it’s an entirely unhealthy environment they live in and . . . then the criticism against the production is brought up, but from their part. Or for instance once, I remember, there was a really enthusiastic lecturer who had some kind of close collaboration with the poultry industry. And she like started her lecture with talking about, about, yes how much protein there is in chicken meat, and… she was like superpropagandistic almost . . . But then I asked, “yes but what happens to… the male chicks?” “Yes, they are gassed to death. Or are macerated.” And, the whole class, like, “WHAT?!” You know, nobody knew about it. And then afterwards I heard several [students] saying, “Gassed to death, holy shit!” . . . so then I thought, “Yes but this is my way,” I will simply ask questions that make [things] visible. (Interview transcript)

The posing of seemingly “neutral” and naive questions fully within the framework of veterinary medical science convention, evokes provocative answers that may,

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by force of their own insanity, send a shock wave through a class of novice veterinary students not yet entirely desensitized by their education:  A casual pedagogical killing-machine disconnected and reprogrammed through minor gestures with accompanying molecular twists and turns in the lecture hall. My interview with Erica also tells about mobilizing energies and creating lines of flight by assembling and organizing peers into animal ethics networks; subject-groups collectively working to redefine the veterinary profession, support critical thinking among students in the program, and prevent new students from dropping out on ethical grounds. Still, this is not enough. Changing an exploitative system from within—while being part of the machine—is difficult, emotionally draining, perhaps not even possible (cf. Chapter  1). Seeing her education as an extended form of activism (interview transcript), an important task is to mobilize a critical general public through information, education, and media debates about what goes on in the animal industry. Erica prepared herself for this task by taking notes during each lecture about technical details of the animal production system, not only to pass the exams, but to keep them for later use as materials for writing an animal rights book. As part of multiplying the connections of veterinary education with this larger social field, she lets her veterinary knowledge feed into her animal rights activism (although she suspects that this activism risks expelling her from her education, should the extent of her engagement become known to the veterinary education faculty). Given an animal science education-machine, what can it be used for? (cf. Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009): A lot of things. “Emma,” an ethology student in her final year, had reached the point in her education when it was time to draw up plans for her BSc thesis project. According to the project guidelines disseminated to the students by the university department, the thesis project can take the form of a literature study, an investigation, or an experimental project scientifically exploring an ethological problem identified and chosen by the student. Emma had clearly developed ideas of what to do. Her plan was to carry out a rather unusual and experimental ethological field study: moving into a pig crate in a commercial slaughter swine facility and share the pigs’ life and daily routines, 24 hours a day, during a month, in order to gain firsthand experience of life in the pig production industry. What kind of relations between pigs and humans can be developed in an environment conditioned by the instrumental position of pigs as “production animals”? How can a human enter a collectivity of other species, a herd of pigs in a crate under these conditions, share their life and daily routines, and begin communicating about common matters such as the allocation of food and resting places within the herd? What do the material

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and social life conditions offered by modern farming do to the individual held in captivity in this production system? (interview transcript). These are Emma’s research questions, all of them guided by ethological science and carefully adhering to the university’s BSc project guidelines. She describes her project as having three different theoretical approaches and entailing a repositioning of the ethological researcher not as independent and objective in relation to her study, but as a subjective and entangled part of it (Pedersen 2012c). The particular fieldwork method proposed, however, deviates from the standard format of ethology thesis design as well as the scientific knowledge conventions that tend to code humans and animals differently: My idea was that I  would cohabit with pigs in a commercial slaughter swine facility and live under their conditions . . . I wanted to do it to get attention or to get, like a statement sort of. Challenge how we think about other animals, as compared to ourselves. Because that is a really good parallel that is always possible to use. As soon as it comes to animals, how would I have experienced it, how would people have reacted if it had been about humans. These questions, kind of. Yes, and then I  wanted to cohabit with them maybe for a month or shorter in order to see . . . What is it like for a social mammal to live in this kind of environment? And tell with my own words. They can’t talk, so I can tell about [their experiences] . . . I am also an animal. And I can actually describe what it’s like to live in this environment as the kind of animal I am. And as the pigs are too . . . I think it could give new insights [that researchers who have studied pigs throughout their careers never have thought about]. And be able to say that the worst thing was to get the same food every day. Or . . . the absolutely worst was that you didn’t know when someone would come and take some of the other pigs to slaughter. Or the worst was that there were so many conflicts in the group, that we fought a lot and the competition over the food. Only to be able to say what is, what is the worst. Or the most obvious. (Interview transcript; cf. Pedersen 2012c)

With the cross-species assemblage she plans to enter, Emma hopes to bring about concrete change in the actual conditions under which so-called production animals are most urgently suffering, as one of many possible ways of achieving the ultimate goal of ending animal oppression altogether. As part of this work, she seeks to recode the perceived human–animal divide by a breaking down of boundaries between herself and the pigs destined for slaughter (on the grounds that both humans and pigs are omnivorous, inquisitive, active animals who sleep eight hours and keep busy eight hours per day), as well as recode the status hierarchy that the animal sciences produce around wild and domestic animals, respectively (see Chapter 7). In this way, she resists didactic control over the trope of the animal

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as well as the stratifying schema that renders both animals and students subject to presumably controllable processes (Pedersen 2011b). She also aspires to produce knowledge differently, and different from, molar scientific knowledge forms in the service of animal capital (Pedersen 2012c). Driven by an activist agenda, Emma’s thesis plan would insert her in a specific pig-production machinery in order to, through her education, manifold its connections with “the outside”; that is, a larger social field of public knowledge and animal advocacy work. These connections are however cut off when Emma’s university department disapproves of her project on the grounds that it may not fulfill the scientific quality requirements, and due to lack of supervisory competence (although one supportive professor agreed that Emma’s unusual research design could be viewed as something equivalent to a “deep interview” with the pigs; see Pedersen 2012c). As a result, Emma reorients her project plans in a less controversial direction that explicitly adheres to the conventional criteria of the ethological sciences: A behavioral study with hens (a so-called cognitive bias test), designed to study emotional states of animals by the use of different cues. Emma carries out her field study in a facility housing former battery hens, purchased from a commercial farm, to investigate if hens seem to look more positively on life after a number of months in remarkably improved living conditions (littered, enriched pens as compared to their previous life in battery cages) (Pedersen 2011b). Although the cognitive bias field study is the “second choice” for Emma—a re-territorialization into conventional science as it seems—also this project is part of her larger activist agenda. She needs empirical data to back up the claim that battery cages have a detrimental effect not only on the physical, but also on the psychological well-being of the hens; information that can be used for animal advocacy purposes. Moreover, included in her research design already from the outset is the subsequent rescue and re-homing of the thirty-three hens participating in her project, who would otherwise be scheduled for euthanization by the staff the week after the field study is finished. Thus, as Emma shifts to a different crossspecies assemblage and becomes immersed with thirty-three former battery hens (instead of pigs), she plugs her desiring-machines into the cognitive bias testmachine, and this machinic assemblage folds open the egg industry to the outside. – “I have laid an EGG, I have laid an EGG” – “Have you laid an EGG, have you laid an EGG” (field notes) When a loud sound is heard from one of the cages in the research facility, Emma informs me that this is the sound hens make when they have laid eggs. By staging

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an imagined dialogue between a hen and a rooster presumably sharing the egglaying news—with rising, high-pitched intonation, strict body posture, blank facial expression, and staring gaze—Emma becomes immersed in an intimate energy-flow not yet fully captured and axiomatized by the egg production industry. Once during a training session, says Emma, the hen didn’t come out of the box, as she was laying an egg inside. Then the session had to be interrupted for a few hours (Pedersen 2011b). The test-machine that Emma enters has molar science as its diagram, but is not contained by it. Rather, it overflows this diagram. Bodies recruited by the science machine tirelessly produce excess; intensities that can’t be accommodated. During the testing process, Emma and the hens form a subject-group (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2009), entering a fluid state that emits and shores up desire-flows that traverse everything that goes on in the test facility and the bodies that move around in it. Desire-flows pick up speed, fluctuate, and produce cuts throughout the testing procedure, in synchronicity with the minor gestures and bodily rhythms of the hens. Hovering above this subject-group in action is a chorus, cacophony, of different scientific and epistemological claims jostling for attention:  Who is the test subject? What is “data”? How reliable are they? How to interpret them? What can they be used for? What about all other information, which does not smoothly fit into the cognitive bias model? How do the “test subjects” actually feel? The testmachine leaks in every direction:  hens performing “poorly,” hens who are busy laying eggs or dust bathing at the time of testing, hens refusing to enter the testing area, hens declining the cue that is offered (corn kernels)—the test scheme, the diagram, must be constantly adjusted, as part of the shifting dynamic assemblage it works coextensively with; an assemblage where hens and objects are moved in and out of the cages, like a map which is continuously redrawn. This cartography of individual and collective assemblages, writes Bergen (2010: 34), aligns with the Deleuzian notion of the political in terms of lines, as “an orientation operating at the heart of every assemblage, its lines meeting everywhere where an assemblage . . . operates.” And then there are codes:  numerical measurement systems, seconds, scores, all components of the cognitive bias test-machine, which are never sufficient as they can’t cover the complexities emerging from the test situation: There is information that Emma would like to include but that is not visible in the figures, such as, for instance, when the hens are doubting and biding their time and express this with their body language. At the same time, there would

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be a delimitation problem: Should she take notes every time the hen jerks her head? I refrain from telling Emma that this is more or less the way I work myself in my ethnographic studies. More informative than the figures is how the hens look like when they get disappointed (Emma imitates their facial expressions and body posture). This doesn’t work as data, but it aids her own understanding of what goes on inside the hens’ heads. If some researcher would use it as data, it would be too subjective: Someone else can look at it and say that you interpret it in this way, but I don’t. (Field notes)

Research results are not unambiguous and “clean,” but rather multidimensional, complex, and messy. The “qualitative” information produced through intraassemblage activity is not only richer but also more reliable than the figure-based measurements, that are, according to Emma, “too one-dimensional” (field notes). The problem is finding a way of handling this “qualitative” information that would be scientifically acceptable. Although Emma-the-ethologist can’t think of such a way, Emma-the-group-subject invents her own complementary symbolbased code system that she inserts into the cognitive bias testing-machine. As in an old-fashioned school note pad, the hens who have produced a good result get a black star in Emma’s table. To these codes, Emma adds “pickup scores” for each hen (indicating how easily they let themselves being picked up), and notes their un/willingness to enter the testing area (for a visual reconstruction of Emma’s code system, see Pedersen 2011b). Minor gestures weave together Emma and hens. As one hen refuses to cooperate, circles around the bowl containing the corn kernel cue in the testing area, shakes her body and attempts to catch a fly, Emma is momentarily swept away, abandons all scoring systems and starts experimenting wildly with offering the hen excessive corn kernels, just for the fun of it. It ends with her taking the hen in her arms, addressing her with a cackling sound, and tenderly scratching her neck (field notes). As I am drawn into the research assemblage I also become part of its subject-group, move items around on Emma’s request, carry her notebook and pen, assist her with caring for injured hens, caress their soft feathers, take part in their conversations. Occasionally I am left uncertain whether Emma addresses me, or the hens. “What can an assemblage do, what experimental states can it reach, what are its speeds, the affects of which it is capable, how does it construct its plane, how does it grade its stratified folds, its tangency to chaos, its layout of lifeintensifying lines?” (Bergen 2010:  35) These are political questions, writes Bergen, and in whatever way an assemblage positions itself in relation to life, the assemblage is political: Politics as the manner in which each body, individual

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or collective, constructs its diagram. The boarding of the cognitive bias testmachine, the scrambling of its codes, the cacophony of its claims, its affective flows, excesses and cuts that it emits and starts anew, unfolds as a line of flight; a liberatory resource of this particular student-hen assemblage (cf. Bergen 2010). In the weekend after Emma finished her field study, she arranges with a couple of friends to bring a car to move the hens to a new home (Pedersen 2011b), thus intervening with the killing-machine that would otherwise have been put to work the subsequent week when the hens were scheduled for euthanization. Later on, Emma sends me an email with an attached photo of the (now free-ranging) hens in the garden of their new home, reporting that the rescue has been successful. Although Emma’s thesis advisor does not consider it appropriate to mention the hen rescue in the thesis, Emma includes a minor gesture pointing to the possible in the form of the following brief text, accompanied by two pictures, in the “Ethical considerations” section of her final BSc thesis: After the study was completed, all 33 hens were rehomed to a private home in the country with outdoor access and rooster company, where they will be able to lead the rest of their lives regardless of their utility for humans.

She also thanks the new caretakers under the “Acknowledgements” section in her thesis: Two months after [the hens] arriving there [in their new home], they are reported to all have feather score 0 [no obvious naked parts] and “look like little angels.” (Pedersen 2011b: 24)

The fourth activist-student I  want to introduce is “Adrian,” a graduate from an upper secondary animal caretaker program at the same school where I interviewed an assistant principal (see the interview excerpt at the beginning of this chapter). Like the ethology student Emma, who inserted herself, through her education, in a specific animal production machinery in order to open up and multiply its connections with a larger social field of animal advocacy work, Adrian’s micropolitical moves work in a similar way, but through different means. Within the animal science education-machine, he drives a sophisticated machine of his own—an undercover-machine—with its own orientations, flows, codes, and schemes of operation. An undercover worker looks for employment in institutions of animal exploitation, such as in research laboratories, fur farms, slaughterhouses,

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or breeding facilities. The undercover worker is a molecular infiltration of these workplaces, carrying out ordinary job duties while secretly collecting information and documentation of what is done to the animals by video footage, photographing, and note taking. The purpose of undercover work is twofold: to make public animal abuse, change people’s attitudes toward animals and ultimately to end animal exploitation by forcing labs to close down; and to rescue animals by secretly removing them from the facility (interview transcript). The rationale for undercover work is spelt “ABCD”: Animals Behind Closed Doors (Rolke 2005). Institutionalized animal oppression is not normally open to the public, but is safely carried out behind high fences, window-less walls, barbed wire, and security guards (Pedersen 2012b). Adrian devoted his educational career to prepare himself for the undercover “profession.” He enrolled in the animal caretaker program with the intention to gain the formal credentials (and knowledge) required to get access to the otherwise closed facilities of the animal experimentation enterprise. This included preparing himself for future undercover work, in both theory and practice, and the formal curriculum of his educational program unintentionally provided him plenty of preparation opportunities. Adrian took every chance to obtain as much knowledge as possible in the area of animal experimentation. He also saw his compulsory internship period in an animal research facility as a way of getting valuable experience of undercover work and of gathering material. Still formally a student, he started off his undercover investigations by bringing in a small camera (this was before the invention of smartphones) that enabled him to secretly document what was going on in his internship lab. During his internship periods at animal research labs, and also after graduation when he got hired as a lab employee, he secretly documented animals and experimentation procedures, as well as rescued animals from the labs (Pedersen 2012b). Adrian’s undercover-machine is thus put to work already at the moment of embarking on the animal caretaker program. It short-circuits the school curriculum and realizes the anxieties haunting his school (voiced by the assistant principal above), anxieties which are shared also by the veterinary education program (interview transcript); namely, that radical animal rights activism will pick up speed and move forward through the education system. In the beginning however, Adrian’s educational achievements impressed his teachers, as he, despite being an animal rights advocate, volunteered to do two periods of animal research internship, while many of the other students were reluctant to accept even a single period of compulsory laboratory internship

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work. Adrian was praised by his teachers for his professional attitude and ambition of not letting his personal animal rights values and opinions interfere with his schoolwork, especially when he returned to his school with excellent credentials from his first internship lab. The certificate Adrian received from this workplace has opened the door to employments at animal research laboratories after graduation (Pedersen 2012b). Adrian’s educational success did not, however, last for long. Much like the teacher student Shirin’s story, described earlier in this chapter, Adrian’s upper secondary education history includes several occasions of being summoned to the principal’s office “for everything that had to do with animal rights”; molecular interruptions in the order-words of the school such as displaying posters in the school’s animal facilities—regardless of whether it really was Adrian who had done it, or some other student (quite a lot of students at this school were active animal advocates, but Adrian was frequently targeted as scapegoat). Conflicts escalated through the connections the animal caretaker program made with various branches of the animal-industrial complex; connections that put the students in direct contact with animal-exploiting practices. During Adrian’s second internship period at an animal research lab, he witnessed severe animal abuse on his first working day: They dripped different solvents on a rat’s brain to find out what part of the brain is affected. Then they placed [the rat] on a plastic “island,” surrounded by water, and then they pushed it [into the water] to find out if it would be able to swim. And then when they noted that it didn’t [swim], instead of just noting that it, it’s not able to swim, they measured the time, how long time it took for it to drown. And this is what I saw on my first trainee day there. The rat that struggled and drowned, and then I just felt that, no this will never work out. No matter how much I want to. (Interview transcript; see Pedersen 2012b: 377)

When Adrian complained to the lab staff, they discontinued his internship period. The lab, in turn, complained to Adrian’s school, refusing to accept more trainees from this school, whereby Adrian was summoned to the principal’s office and asked to go back to the lab and apologize (which he refused to do). Another source of conflict was a zoo study visit organized by the school, when Adrian was told that he was not welcome to join the group and had to stay at home. Adrian was well known to the zoo, as he had led rescue campaigns and manifestations for their captive dolphins through an organization he started in his early teens—an organization that had been quite successful in its media outreach (Pedersen 2012b).

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Despite these incidents, Adrian’s undercover work was carefully concealed to his teachers, and he developed his undercover expertise throughout his education, as well as after graduation when applying for jobs in animal research labs. The undercover worker is a flow organizer, redirecting flows of information as well as animals between the lab and the outside. Normally this flow goes in one direction:  Animal research facilities may house twenty thousand rodents and are engaged in a constant trafficking in animals. When an animal experiment is finished, two thousand mice may be euthanized, and an additional two thousand are ordered, assembly-line style. This inflow of animals is reversed by the undercover worker, however slightly. One of Adrian’s peers brought home hundred rats and mice each month during a year of lab employment (with the lab’s permission); animals who were subsequently rehomed. Adrian himself learnt to become a handyman of minor gestures, with his own little machines, a whole machine park actually, together with which he forged an undercover-machine for bringing documentation and animals out of the lab: a small ordinary camera, a video camera, notebook, and pencil; and small home-made containers constructed out of travel alarm clock cases of the perfect size for holding a mouse. After making tiny air holes in these travelalarm-clock-mouse-containers, he took one under each armpit and transported two mice a day out of the lab (Pedersen 2012b). As indicated in Chapter 2, however, the undercover worker, getting immersed in an environment where each and every day is filled with violence toward animals, is traversed by stress, discomfort, grief, and paranoia. Adrian describes going through excruciating periods of desensitization, attempting to manage his affect for the animals and his colleagues’ suspicion against him (to come out as a vegetarian would be one source of suspicion) while fulfilling his duties as a lab employee and secretly documenting what happens to the animals at the same time. These desensitization periods were followed by intervals of schizzes, when he simply broke down. One of the risks Adrian identified is becoming swept up by the structure of the workplace to the extent that it really does become an ordinary workplace, where the undercover worker one day finds that (s)he has things in common with the colleagues, such as hating to be there, hating the boss, and even ends up in some kind of friendship. The undercover process is thus not only paranoid (avoiding by all means to evoke suspicion), it is, above all, schizoid: “Since you play a kind of role . . . because you get into it all days, if you do it for a long time it is, can be difficult to distinguish who, what you are, who you are, when you are there.” (Interview transcript; see Pedersen 2012b:  376) Defined and altered by the states through which he passes, the undercover

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worker risks being transformed without noticing it:  the mice he once cared for and attended to on an individual basis gradually become just a job to be finished, a few among twenty thousand others that you soon cease seeing and cease talking to, indeed parts of the animal science machine. Adrian’s undercover engagements did not end when he quit his laboratory employments; they were only redirected. At this point he entered an undercovereducation-machine of a different order, taking on the teacher’s role and organizing professional training courses for aspiring and novice undercover workers in the animal liberation movement, especially for those who lack a formal animal caretaker education and take on laboratory jobs with fake educational qualifications (see Pedersen 2012b). After the course, undercover novices will be better equipped to confidently act as if they had the proper educational background, and know what is expected from someone in the role of an animal technician in a research lab. The undercover-machine is, indeed, an assemblage converter, of a molecular kind. To draw on Bergen (2010), teaching and learning assemblages must be evaluated at the level of intensity of effect that they produce; effects in terms of power to act, effects that may be minor, but that are always political. Shirin, Erica, Emma, and Adrian have all found ways of transforming the education system’s order-words into components of passage; pathways of escape from death sentences into life-affirming territories. What space does this open up for rethinking our relationships to animals, in education and beyond?

Postscript

The micropolitics of Shirin, Erica, Emma, and Adrian remind us that educational control of students, animals, and knowledge never fills all possible spaces available (Lather 2006). They also remind us that every student (possibly also teachers, although this possibility is not covered in this book: see Gunnarsson Dinker and Pedersen [2016] for suggestions in this area) in the education system may catalyze their own “micro-revolution,” make it expand and proliferate to bring about educational, social, and political change for animals, through a multitude of minor gestures. This last point is crucial, as there is a potential risk involved if the minor gesture does not happen to pick up speed, volume, or intensity, but remains “minor,” in the sense of being isolated, restricted to the sphere of the individual, or to small communities (Deleuze 2004) and in a marginal position. The animal-industrial complex, which it must combat is, after all, itself not a minor force, any less than the entire capitalist system is. It is unlikely that it will be dismantled, or even profoundly disturbed, by a minor gesture, regardless of its timeliness and radicality. This brings us back to the machinic processes of schizoanalysis at work throughout this book. The minor gesture, as briefly mentioned above, must be made to work as a machine, making countless connections in all directions with multiple other minor gesture-machines to form machinic assemblages. They must produce flows, interruptions, realities, new machines, and, in Bergen’s (2010) words, intensities of effect, as well as synergy effects. Or, with Deleuze: Clearly, a revolutionary machine cannot remain satisfied with local and occasional struggles: it has to be at the same time super-centralized and superdesiring. (Deleuze 2004: 199)

We must determine how these minor gesture-machines, endowed with revolutionary potential, can fit together, and to what use they can be put (cf.

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Deleuze 2004). For education practice and theory, it means that minor gesturemachinic assemblages must forge together humans, animals, and materialities differently, whenever animals are used for knowledge production, production of consumer goods, production of entertainment, labor, affect, or any purposes and interests other than their own. They must proliferate wildly to catalyze a hitherto unimagined number of possibilities of thinking, feeling, and acting. They must produce not only shocks to thought (Massumi 2002), but shocks to our very existence in terms of our present ways of being with animals. In most areas of the animal-industrial complex (such as factory farming and its ancillary machineries), this will mean a necessary phaseout process toward a definite cut; a cessation of the human–animal relationship (MacCormack 2012, 2013). In the case of wildlife killing and habitat destruction, it may mean withdrawal of human activity from threatened areas of land and sea to return space for other species to flourish (Kopnina 2016). During these processes of phaseout and withdrawal, animal rescue and rehabilitation centers will be needed to take responsibility for the animals liberated from human violence. These centers may have to multiply at first as a direct consequence of the phasing out of animal industries, followed by a subsequent decrease in number as the need for such centers will gradually decline. This will perhaps not come down to a total “undoing of us” (MacCormack 2012), unless looming environmental disasters and climate change force an entirely new condition upon our own as well as other species. But it will come down to an undoing, which may be open-ended, forceful, and continuous. A  key point here, as I  see it, is not only to produce ruptures and revolutions, but what Manning (2016) describes as a redirection of events. According to Manning (2016), minor gestures, such as those described in the previous and present chapters, create a potential for new diagrams to emerge. Each educational diagram of the animal-industrial complex, then, also carries an element of possibility, a potential of a redirection of events. It is the task of everyone involved in education to engage with a redirection of events, in whatever way possible. For some teachers and students, a redirection of events, from destructive human–animal relationships to something radically different, may mean including anti-speciesist and animal liberation theory and practice in the curriculum (e.g., Andrzejewski 2003; Andrzejewski, Pedersen and Wicklund 2009; Corman and Vandrovcová 2014; Kahn and Humes 2009; Nocella et al. in press). For some, it may mean a rereading and reformulation of educational texts that have led us to misrecognize ourselves as humans and our relations with animals, as well as with the rest of the world (Snaza

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2013). For others, it may mean to begin practicing through education a gracious withdrawal from interference with animals’ lives (MacCormack 2013; cf. Kopnina 2016). All three examples are forms of relearning and undoing education; they are forms of critical animal pedagogies (cf. Gunnarsson Dinker and Pedersen 2016)—and must keep making connections, producing flows, intensities and affect; in short, keep becoming super-centralized and superdesiring (Deleuze 2004). There are, of course, more examples than these. In fact, the number of possibilities, and the ways to combine them, are infinite. The examples made by Shirin, Erica, Emma, and Adrian above point toward how a redirection of events may come about in education, under certain circumstances, through minor gestures. What, then, about power arrangements? What goes on in a slaughterhouse, for instance (Chapter  7), may appear as a total closure, due to the enormous production-apparatus of power and domination it materializes and sets in place. What minor gesture could possibly bring about any form of transformation in such a space? Every struggle, as Foucault points out, develops around a particular focal point of power: And if pointing out these focal points of power, denouncing them as such, talking about them in public forum, constitutes a struggle, it’s not because people were unaware of them, it’s because speaking up on this topic, breaking into the network of institutional information, naming and saying who did what, is already turning the tables on power, it’s a first step for other struggles against power. (Foucault, quoted in Deleuze 2004: 211) “Stop it! Open the pens, release all cows! THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE!”

When the veterinary student on her slaughterhouse study visit in Chapter  7 imagines doing the unthinkable, employing a minor gesture (“speaking up”) as an explosive machine (Deleuze 2004) by demanding the release of all cows destined for slaughter, she is beginning to invent new forms of living on the spot. It is an unspoken gesture toward possibilities of undoing the unbearable, undoing what is fundamentally intolerable in this world (Culp 2016). For Foucault, to think is to react to the intolerable, and if thinking does not reach the intolerable, there is no need for thinking (Deleuze 2006). If thinking is to think at the limit (2006), education is to teach and learn at the limit, to exercise reaction to the intolerable. The veterinary student’s unspoken gesture in the slaughterhouse is thereby a gesture toward what education could be: In Culp’s (2016) words, a continuous exercise in intolerance of the present.

Notes Introduction: Education, Schizoanalysis, and Critical Animal Theory 1 For more detailed discussions on schizoanalysis and education, see Ringrose (2011, 2013); Savat and Thompson (2015). 2 In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault ([1972] 2009: xiii) draws our attention to not only historical fascism but also to “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” 3 See Weisberg (2014) for a detailed critique of posthumanism from a critical animal studies position. 4 This has arguably meant and entailed different things throughout different historical, cultural, and geographical locations and periods, but I refer here to the rather loose constellation of ideas around humanist socialization, cultivation, and civilization processes as a guide for education. 5 It should be noted that the dehumanizing qualities of speciesism as “institution” are also addressed in the works of the Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Similar points have been made by ecofeminist scholars. 6 Culp (2016) defines connectivism as follows: “Connectivism is the world-building integration into an expanding web of things. As an organizational logic, it is the promiscuous inclusion of seemingly unrelated elements into a single body to expand its capacities” (66–7).

1 An Abstract Machine? Education in the Animal-Industrial Complex 1 Many education scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders (e.g., parents) would certainly oppose this claim by pointing to developments of decreasing economic investments in education, particularly in the case of schools in underprivileged socioeconomic areas, and insufficient governmental funding of higher education. There may however be political priorities at work here, privileging the subject areas included in this book (i.e., the life sciences) more than others (cf. Pierce 2013).

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2 Desiring-Machines: Education and the “Human-Animal Bond” 1 For an overview of research on the so-called animal question in environmental education, see Spannring (2017).

3 Command-Machines: The Order-Words of Animal Science Pedagogies 1 Vegans were, to my knowledge, largely absent during most of the field studies this book is based on. 2 At the time when the ethnographic research for this book was carried out, the Swedish vocational upper secondary school system made a distinction between agricultural programs and natural resource use programs. My research has only included animal caretaker education programs in the latter category, focusing on animal-based sectors outside agriculture. 3 In Swedish this statement produces a rhyme: “90 procent åt buren, 10 procent åt djuren.” 4 Mulesing denotes a practice of cutting off strips of skin from the backsides of sheep to avoid maggot infestation. 5 A personal email I received from one of the veterinary students indicates that conflicts between the students and their education occasionally take absurd expression. I quote from her email message: “The other day when I and another student didn’t want to dehorn calves there was an outcry and we were told that the veterinary education program should be subdivided into one ‘A’ and one ‘B’ legitimation. The ‘B’ legitimation should be for those who, like us, refuse to do a lot of things for emotional reasons” (Personal email correspondence; my translation).

4 Comfort-Machines: Promises of Animal Welfare and Environmental Education 1 I thank Beniamin Knutsson for alerting me to the eschatological dimensions of this empirical material. 2 cf. Twine (2010) on the anticipatory and future-claiming nature of promissory discourses in animal science, especially in terms of environmental sustainability. 3 Also the corporate sphere (business people, conference organizers) is increasingly becoming an important, and presumably profitable, target group for zoos.

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5 Edutainment-Machines: Pedagogies of the Spectacle 1 The most obvious form of desire, a third dimension, is omitted from this analysis due to its different nature, but is, from an animal perspective, of primary critical importance: the desire of calves and cows forcingly separated shortly after the calves’ birth; a material condition for the dairy production process. (This desire would however, in contrast to schizoanalytic understandings of desire, be defined as a lack.) 2 For a critical account of animal attacks and animal resistance at zoos and theme parks, see Hribal (2010).

6 Technical Machines: Didactic Technologies of Animal Control Systems 1 Coding is here understood as a capture of force that transforms a material by causing it to enter a certain assemblage (Sauvagnargues 2016). 2 Here I loosely paraphrase Deleuze’s ([1969] 2015: 85) analysis of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, “We might have thought to be still among little girls and children, but we are already in an irreversible madness,” without the tormented and convulsive schizophrenic body it denotes (Spindler 2013), but with a gesture toward an unbearable hyperintensity that is yet to come during the slaughterhouse visit with the veterinary education class (Chapter 7). 3 For a critique of the animal welfare notion, “happy” meat and “humane” slaughter techniques, see, for instance, Cole (2011); Gillespie (2011); Stănescu (2013); Svärd (2008); and Williams (2004). See also Chapter 4.

7 Killing-Machines: Animal Breeding, Shooting, and Slaughter in Education 1 Zoo animals are, according to this logic, supposed to be taken well care of to avoid public criticism, but not only for their own sake: the zoo order-word “90 percent to the cage, 10 percent to the animals” (see Chapter 3) guides novice zoo workers to devote most of their labor time to cleaning and fixing the animal enclosures, especially when the zoo expects visitors, to make sure that the visual appearance of the captive animals’ living spaces is appealing in the eyes of zoo visitors. When zoo staff are working under time pressure they may use certain tricks of the trade, for instance, hiding garbage from the visitor’s view by placing it behind a stone in the cage (interview transcript; see Pedersen 2012b: 372).

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Notes

2 Similar schemes exist for other animal species. See Twine (2010) for a critical analysis of the “SuperMom™ maternal line” in the pig industry. 3 At least as long as the business is economically viable. A number of Swedish slaughterhouses have recently been closed down or incorporated into bigger units. This must however be seen as temporary blockages in certain local animal slaughter processes, redirected to regain momentum elsewhere. 4 For an analysis of the teacher role at the slaughterhouse study visit, see Pedersen (2013).

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Index Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to endnotes. abstract machines 6, 15, 17–27, 30, 39, 69, 93, 106, 118, 127, 133, 157 of animal-industrial complex 106, 127 in multiple ways 24–5 myriad of 25 operations 24–6 zoo machine 26 activism 137, 142 Adrian 15, 44, 46, 47, 57, 58, 147–51, 153 affective cross-species assemblages 44–7 AI. see artificial insemination (AI) animal(s) behavior 98, 100, 101 breeding 2, 94, 123 capital 17 and knowledge production 17–20 caretaker education 36–8, 40, 98, 102, 117 caretaker program 64, 69, 98, 148, 149 zoo management lecture in 67 caretaker school 68, 93, 122 condition 1 in contemporary education settings 2 in education, political problem 1–4 exploitation 17 employment in institutions 147–8 farms 110 genomics 101 handling professions 13 management 102, 104 resistance, elimination 72 society’s relationships with 4 welfare programs for 72 animal attachment, desiring-machines of 32, 37–41, 45, 68, 99 animal-industrial complex 2, 10, 15, 55, 56, 74, 83, 86, 106, 112, 118, 129, 132, 133, 134, 149, 153–4, 157 abstract machines of 106, 127 didactic formation of 93

and education 20–7, 47 educational diagram of 154 educational machinic assemblage of 87 provisional modification of 27 technical machine in 150 animal-industrial diagram 26, 27 animal liberation 151, 154 Animal Liberation (1975) (Singer) 11 animal production system 44 technical machines in 97 animal research laboratories 74, 149 Animals Behind Closed Doors (ABCD) 148 animal science education 3, 13, 17, 25, 26, 32, 41, 51, 115, 129–30, 132 Desiring-machines in 158 edutainment-machines of 94 order-words in 57 technical machines in 97, 99–100, 159 animal science pedagogies 158 “animal welfare” 63, 70 animal welfare-trademark-machine 73 comfort-machine of 70, 89 Arluke, Arnold 41 Armstrong, Philip 73 artificial insemination 121, 123 attachment 29, 30, 32 Bailly, Jean-Christophe 29, 30, 35 Bentham, Jeremy 110 Bergen, Véronique 146, 151, 153 Berger, John 38 Bezan, Sarah 113 biocapital accumulation 19 biodiversity 91 bioeconomical forces 91 biophilia hypothesis 29 biopolitical forces 91 biotechnology 3, 6, 12, 121 animal 61

174 Foucauldian analysis of 120 modern 101 breeding 124 product development 19 birdwatching 81–2, 84 Boyd, William 19, 121 Bradbury, Ray 31, 111 “breed index” system 71 breeding 119–22 animal 2, 94, 123 biotechnologies 124 breeding-machine 120 Buchanan, Ian 22, 116 Burt, Jonathan 71 Canavan, Jana 55 capitalism 8 Carroll, Lewis 159n.2 chicken 121 childishness, desiring-machines of 88 classroom, order-word in 58 codes 58, 100 coding 117–19 cognitive bias test 144 Cole, Matthew 63, 73 Colombino, Annalisa 114, 121, 123 “comfort brush” 70 comfort-machines 52, 63–77, 79, 88, 91, 114, 130–1, 158–9 of animal welfare 70, 73, 89, 106 of dairy farms 131 function 79, 119, 131 command-machines 47, 49–62, 131, 158 commands 51–6 concrete machines 5 connectivism 12, 157n6 “Cow comfort” 70 cows 126 crayfish dissection 41–2 Crist, Eileen 98 critical animal pedagogies 9–11, 155 critical theory, 9–11 cross-breeding system 123 cross-species assemblages 44–7 Culp, Andrew 12, 155, 157n.6 dairy industry 86–90 dairy production 86 edutainment-machines of 87 technology 106

Index Danse Macabre, with slaughter instruments 107–10 data accumulation machines 100–3 death, in schizoanalysis 113, 114 death sentences 56–60 of animal science education 56–7 order-word as 60 Debord, Guy 92, 93, 127 deceptive machine 22 decoding 117–19 decoy animals 109 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 4, 15, 24, 25, 30, 31, 49, 50, 57, 60, 103, 105, 142, 159n.2 Deleuze Studies, schizoanalysis in 136 Derrida, Jacques 11 desire 30–1, 136, 140 desiring-machines 3, 4, 6, 29–47, 53, 55, 56, 80, 85, 87, 88, 90, 129, 130, 158 of animal attachment 32, 37–41, 45, 68, 99 in animal science education 129 of childishness 88 of civilization and liberation 71 condition of 8 defined 30 dolphin-desiring-machine 34 of human–animal bond 94 desiring-production 22, 30, 80, 116, 123 Desmond, Jane C. 34 deterritorialization 44–7, 136, 137, 140 didactic killing-machine 114 dolphin-desiring-machine 34 dolphins 33 Swedish dolphin performance 34 dualism, human-animal 7 education. see also specific types of education animal caretaker 98, 102, 117 animal-industrial complex and 20–7 animals in, political problem of 1–4 death sentences 57 environmental 32 hunter 116, 117 institutionalized 9 order-words 129 programs 98 research 32 and schizoanalysis 3–5

Index veterinary 2, 4, 53–4, 58, 62, 98, 100, 104, 115, 117, 121 violence 1 vitality of killing 115–17 vocational 25, 36 edutainment, defined 79 edutainment-machines 68, 79–95, 127, 131, 159 of animal science education 94 of dairy production 87 of different nature 86 in formal education programs 81 of pasture-release events 89–90 pedagogical work of 95 “Elite Lamb” (ElitLamm) 124 Emel, Jody 18 Emma 43, 45, 47, 142–7, 151, 153, 155 environmental education research 32 Erica 22–4, 44, 45, 47, 114, 140–2, 151, 153, 155 ethological science, in veterinary program 102 ethology 98–100 farmed animals 104 fieldwork sites 13–15 formal education programs, edutainmentmachine in 81 Foucauldian microphysics of power 10 Foucault, Michel 5, 51, 155, 157n.2 4-H farm 113 Franklin, Sarah 19 Gannon, Susanne 32 gender machines 4 Giaccaria, Paolo 114, 121, 123 Giedion, Siegfried 105, 108, 121, 123 Goodall, Jane 66–8 Göransson, Michell 12, 21, 51, 56 Guattari, Félix 1, 4, 6, 15, 24, 25, 31, 49, 50, 57, 60, 103, 105, 142, 145 hens 144–7 hierarchical machine 22 Highland Cattle 106–7 hog-cleaning machine 105 Holland, Eugene W. 56 homeostatic model 98 human-animal bond 29, 31, 40, 47, 64 desiring-machines of 94

175

human-animal dualism 7 humane slaughter 71, 109, 159n.3 hunter education 116, 117 identity machines 4 industrial machine 20 interaction, student–animal 35 infernal machines, astonishing repertoire of 108 institutionalized education, history of 9 in vitro fertilization (IVF) 111 Jönsson, Håkan 55, 56 Judas sheep 108–9 killing educational vitality of 115–17 skills 113 killing-machines 31, 72, 91, 113–27, 132, 147, 159–60 knowledge machines 4 lamb index 101 learning, problem-based 84 Lebedev, Oleg 126 leisure as ritual 81–6 livestock genetics corporations 19 “Love your Lagoons” project 32 MacCormack, Patricia 12, 13, 113 machines 5. see also specific types of machine machinic ontology 2 machino-centric analysis 6 Manning, Erin 136, 154 Marinker, Marshall 62 Marxism 3 meat-machines 51–6 mechanization 105 mechanomorphism 98 micropolitics, schizoanalysis and 135–51 milking-machine 86 milk-machines 51–6 milk production cycle 104 minor gesture 136–7, 146, 153–4, 155 machines 153–4 Myers, Olin E. 36 Nibert, David 11 Noske, Barbara 20, 21

176 Oedipal dimensions 94 Oedipal machines 4 Öhman, Johan 32 ontology, schizoanalytic 5–9 open-farm events 90 order-word 50, 129, 130 in animal science education 57 in classroom 58 as death sentence 60 educational 130 “organic” animal production 76 orphan libido 86 ovine breeding-machine 100 pass-words 60–2 pasture-release events 88, 89 edutainment-machine of 89–90 pasture releases 81, 88, 131 pedagogical force, student–animal attachment as 32–44 pharmakon-machine 22 Piedmontese breed 121 Pierce, Clayton 20, 63, 65 pigs 142–4 Pisters, Patricia 91, 92 political problem, of animals in education 1–3 poultry industry 19 power 41, 49, 60, 97, 102, 116, 140, 151, 155 “consumer power” 52 and desire 3 forms of 6 Foucauldian microphysics of 10 regimes 1, 4, 10 social 11 technologies of 5–6 “preference testing” 73 problem-based learning (PBL) 45–6, 84 production 113, 114, 119–20 promises 63, 66, 69–70 promissory discourses 63 psycho-hydraulic model 98 Raunig, Gerald 97 recoding 117–19 Ringrose, Jessica 140

Index Ritornello 64–70 Ryder, Richard 11 Sanbonmatsu, John 11, 17, 18 Sandell, Klas 32 Sauvagnargues, Anne 5, 6, 20, 21, 24, 151 Savat, David 3 Scarry, Elaine 10 schizoanalysis 1, 2, 19, 113, 114, 153 central task of 3 death in 114 in Deleuze Studies 136 education and 3–5 education research project 14 machine 5 and micropolitics 135–51 ontology 5–9 project 14 psychoanalytic roots of 10 study of cinema 91 task of 50 science. see animal science education SeaWorld San Diego theme park 34 Seem, Mark 15 semiotic components 6 sensors 103 sheep-machine 108–9 sheep recording scheme 101, 120, 124 Shirin 137–40, 149, 151, 153, 155 shooting birds 116, 159–60 Shukin, Nicole 19, 81 Singer, Peter 11 slaughter 104, 106–10 slaughterhouse 110, 124, 125 slaughter instruments, Danse Macabre with 107–10 social killing-machines 119 society’s relationships with animals 4 Solot, Dorian 41 speciesism, 11 analytic insufficiency of 11–13 spectacle 90–5 squid dissection 41–4 student–animal attachment, as pedagogical force 32–44 student–animal interaction 35 subject, 8

Index

177

subjectivity 3, 32, 45, 140 animal 8, 70, 109 human 14, 21 transforming 8 Swedish dairy industry 87–8 dolphin performance 34 Szczygielska, Marianna 110, 111

“The Veldt” 31, 33 veterinary education 2, 4, 22, 53–4, 58, 62, 98, 104, 115, 117, 121 ethology lecture in 100 veterinary program 84 ethological science in 102 violence, educational 1 vocational education 25, 36

Taje, Erik 113 teaching-machines 36 technical machines 6, 30, 38, 97–112, 117, 132, 159 of animal control 88, 91 in animal-industrial complex 150 in animal production systems 97 in animal science education 97, 99–100, 150 of avian biotechnology 121 of controlling animal bodies and behaviors 123 educational effects of 112 of ethology 98–100 in zoo 110–12 Thompson, Greg 3 transformation 155 Twine, Richard 19, 21, 23, 63, 101, 119–20, 124, 158n.2

Watts, Michael J. 121 Webb, P. Taylor 4 “welfare animal” 72–5, 130 “welfare-friendly systems” 72 welfare programs for animals 72 “welfare quality” 72 “Welfare Quality®” (WQ®) project 72, 73 wildlife documentary films 69 Williams, Anna 108, 109 Wolch, Jennifer 18 Wolfe, Cary 11

undercover work 148, 150

zoo 69–70 management, animal caretaker program 67 promises 69–70 spectacles 90–5 “surplus” animals in 115 technical machines in 110–12