Can the death of a cow talk about ours?

Animal tanatopolitics producing modern

state lives

Gonzalo Correa, Universidad de la República

Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Boston, Massachusetts,
August 30 – September 2, 2017,

Abstract

In this paper I want to show the conceptual and methodological guides that addressed the
research project “Flesh variations” (in spanish: Variaciones de la Carne). Its main aim is to
analyse the role of the mass slaughter of animals (cows) for infrastructuring the State modern
lives since the second half of 19th century to the present. This research takes Uruguay as a
case, a republic in South America whose economics is mainly based on the meat production.
Based on the concepts of biopolitics, coined by Foucault, and tanatopolitcs and necropolitics
derived from his oeuvre and the developments of others authors (such Agamben, Braidotti,
Sposito, Mbembé, among others), I want to describe the parallel history of an animal
tanatopolitics in a global scale (installations of slaughterhouses, an international traffic network)
and a human biopolitics in a local scale (the installation of the uruguayan modern state). And at
the same time, the reverse, an animal biopolitics that underpins necropolitical processes. In
order to make that possible, I introduce the rumination of cows as method: passing a same idea
for different instances with the purpose of making visible different perspectives of the problem.
In this sense, the four stomachs chosen by me are the uruguay historiography of 19th century
(historical dimension), the cow as inspiration for artists (aesthetical dimension), an ethnography
in a slaughterhouse about the introduction of an animal stunning box (socio-technical
dimension) and conversations with consumers and non-consumers of meat (ethical dimension).

Intro

This research asks about the role of the massive death of animals on the constitution of

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the modern State. It could well be the flesh of another animal, nevertheless the leit motiv
of this project is the cow flesh/meat, and how it is changing as it is put into circulation
within society.

It is not by chance that I choose this meat. The reason for my choice is due to the
preponderant place that the beef occupies in the Uruguayan society and its economy.
Uruguay is a country that lives basically from the production of raw materials, mainly
grains and products derived from cattle and sheep farming.

The cow was introduced in the Uruguayan territory by the Spaniards in the 17th century.
That is, these animals were entered before the Europeans themselves founded their cities
in that place. Thus, a rather interesting phenomenon occurs, the cow society predates
modern human society.

The absence of a natural predator and the dominant one that resulted this species over
others, caused that they quickly multiplied producing an overpopulation of cows, altering
the fauna and the physiognomy of the territory. Around 1835 there were about 17 cows
per capita, which acquired commercial value due to the exploitation of their leather (the
meat was not of very good quality and at that time there were no effective methods of
conservation). In a region where there was no state until 1830, the traffic and contraband
of cattle permanently blurred the borders, even after the formation of the state, a very
weak state, the passage of cattle from the Uruguayan territory to the Brazilian was a
constant. Cows were, in short, as mobile as the territorial limits of the state.

It is worth mentioning that the cows that grazed from the 17th century to the late 19th
century are not the same cows as today. They were bony cows, with horns longer and
somewhat more agile and violente than the present ones. Their ancestors came from Cape
Verde, Spain and Peru. The cimarrón cattle, was product of that mixture of races.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a change would begin to take place according
to what was happening at the global level. The first saladeros begin to give value to the
meat and to make of it a profitable product. The meat, in the form of tasajo, begins to be
exported mainly to the markets of Brazil and Cuba like food for slaves. This change
means that the cows stop being hunted as was done in the time of bonanza of the leather
and begin to be raised in the so-called 'vaquerías'. This, at the same time, will mean a
change in the forms of death: the 'desjarretador', a sort of spear with a crescent-shaped
knife at the end which served to cut the tendon from the legs of cows, is left aside and in
its place begins to use a device of confinement and of apprehension that facilitates the

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slaughtering immobilizing the animal. This form allows a proto-industrial sequence,
increasing the effectiveness and intensifying the amount of deaths.

Genetic variability

At the end of the 19th century, the idea of the possibility of crossing and improving
breeds began to be introduced in the region. The cows that grazed the extensive prairies
were of a species that had grown wildly and by natural selection. Around them there had
been a particular mode of human existence that was known as gaucho. This only
emphasizes human-animal coevolution: the destiny of that human form will be tied to the
change of the model of animal exploitation.

But the methodical selection, that made by a herder to obtain the animal that projects and
imagines, begins to take place with greater force in the second half of the century. This
intentional genetic variation that sought to produce better meats is correlates to the
technological developments of conservation. We can see two examples: in 1876 the first
shipment of meat to Europe was made from the port of Montevideo on the refrigerated
vessel Le Frigorifique, built with the refrigeration technology of Charles Tellier, and the
development of corned beef, a canned meat extract facilitated by the German chemist
Justus von Liebig's conservation method a decade earlier in 1865.

All this process aims to improve the quality of the meat and, therefore, to modify the type
of livestock existing in the territory. The English breed Hereford was the dominant model
to develop during that time of boom of the production and consumption of meat. This
breed improvement was in tune with the installation of the first slaughterhouses in the
region, around 1900.

Rumination

Since the object of inquiry and exploration is the cow-process or the bovine assemblages
that compose and recompose a human society, I have set out to follow these variations
and mutations of the flesh, that evidently include meat. Based on the premise that these
mutations have rhizomatically some point of connection, I affirm that they are part of the
same process but by other means. Therefore, my interest does not rely exclusively in
studying how the animal's body becomes a steak, but also in understanding how that body

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becomes commodity, object of death, national symbol or identity component and its
different assemblages. That is why in carrying on this exploration I have resolved to take
the rumination of the cow and turn it into a method. Rumination has been present in
classical philosophy but also in the modern one, for example, in Nietzsche's work.
Ruminate is a slow digesting a re-chew. In ruminants, it means a system composed of
four divisions, the intake will pass through each of these differently, complementarily
changing.

Rumination as a method involves constructing some divisions that contribute to

answering the same question, in this case, how does the mass slaughter of cows
contribute to the production of human society? The four divisions chosen respond to four
angles of the problem.

The first is an ethnography in a slaughterhouse that studies the incorporation of an animal

stun box. It is a machine bought to New Zealand by the old owners of the slaughterhouse,
English capitals, that stuns to the cows, following the international norms of animal
welfare. The incorporation of this machine modifies the forms of the deaths, changing the
system of production and incorporating different rhythm and dynamics in relation to the
previous forms of stunning (hammer, pistol).

The second division consists of an analysis of works by contemporary artists who take
the cow as an object of inspiration. In this instance I have proposed to adapt the technique
of life stories to the works, rebuilding the process of artistic construction. At the moment
I am working with a composition called Bilateral Relations of Fernando Foglino and
Valentina Cardellino. This development analyzes the passage of animal flesh to the sign,
dialoguing with the specificity of the semiotic relationship given by the work.

The third division focuses on the relationship between ethics and dietetics or what is to

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say, it analyzes the role of what we eat in the production of individual and collective
identity. It focuses on the role of meat in defining the personal and collective
identification, taking the case of Uruguay. To carry out this task, a mechanism of
participation called The Green Pudding will be adapted and conversations will be helded
by people with different diets.

Finally, the fourth division is a historiographical study centered initially on two series of
events. The first, the Congress of the Rural Association, celebrated in 1896, which is an
economic political milestone that radically modifies the country's physiognomy and meat
production (basically means the jumping of the saladeros to the slaughterhouses). The
second is a historical journey through the technologies of death and its evolution.

It is worth noticing that for the proper work of rumination, it is necessary to carry these
four divisions simultaneously, with the intention of bringing elements from one into
dialogue with the other.

Las políticas de vida y muerte

In Uruguay 50,000 cows are killed per week, that is, about 2.4 million a year. The bovine
population is 12 million, which if related to the population of humans, 3.4 million, gives
us a ratio of 3.6 cows per person. This overpopulation is the most visible sign of this
animal biopolitics. The life and death of these beings is a massive phenomenon that
occurs in conjunction of strictly ordered dispositifs, technical-legal-economic dispositifs
that convert the animal's flesh into commodity.

A whole animal biopolitics is put into play: race improvement, life sciences in the service
of improved production, good food, sanitary control, population control. However, this
occurs within a tanatopolitical device: these lives are exceptional, the slaughterhouse
appears as an architecture of death, the law allows the existence of these animals only
within the system of production. On certain occasions, this industrial machinery around
the lives and deaths of the cows fed the necropolitic regimes like the plantations of Cuba
and Brazil and the main wars of the twentieth century (World War I, World War II and

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Korean War).

These coexistence of regimes encourages us to think perhaps of the ecological character

of the concepts of biopolitics, tanatopolitics and necropolitics. Mbembé had already
observed that while the biopolitics described by Foucault developed in Europe,
something different happened in the colonies. Different forms of government centered on
death and terror associated with the threat of disappearance operated on the lives of
colonial subjects. He called these processes necropolitics. In other words, necropolitical
practices were necessary in the colonies for biopolitical processes to take place in Europe.
The slaughterhouse, connected with these biopolitical, tanatopolitical and necropolitical
regimes, extends the scope of the anthropological machine of Agamben and interposes
that what is being produced there is only the anthropos.