1 “[…] die in immer kürzerer Zeit einen immer größeren Ertrag erbringen,“ in the German original. 2 Building on new materialist framings of nonhuman agents, I understand planetary agents as any beings, entities, or phenomena that co-shape planetary dynamics. Asking Animal Questions Literary Animal Studies and the Polycrisis Liza Bauer 1 Introduction Cows, pigs, chickens, and countless other animal species shape the planet’s future alongside human societies. So-called livestock animals spur the develop‐ ment of new technologies, such as milking robots or disassembly lines, neces‐ sitate revisions in labour protection laws, and they are integral components of world-defining economic sectors (cf. Blanchette 2020). On a global scale, they consume a third of the grain harvest; on a planetary scale, the ecological footprint of industrial animal agriculture contributes decisively to pushing the Earth’s biophysical systems towards critical tipping points (Rockström et al. 2009; Agudelo et al. 2023; Lenton 2013). Yet despite this intensive involvement of cows, pigs, or chickens in planetary dynamics, many consumers living in industrial societies regard them as mere objects. They can hardly think of, let alone speak about or relate to, ‘livestock’ beyond their utility for humans; in many consumers’ eyes, these animals appear to be mere production machines that “produce ever greater output in ever shorter time” (Nieradzik 2016: 123, my translation). 1 For the sake of profit and to fulfil culinary preferences and needs, the animal industry hides the living individuals ever more effectively by means of advertising and other strategies. Embedded within this exploitative system, fattening pigs, dairy cows, or laying hens can hardly be pictured as actively shaping societies and ecosystems for better or for worse. Yet in view of the objective to keep the planet habitable, working with these central planetary agents seems crucial. 2 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Dystopian or post-apocalyptic visions of Earth’s future are often devoid of farmed animal characters altogether, thus extrapolating on the perhaps logical developments of current food systems. Whereas these texts appear emblematic of the reluctance or even incapability of western consumer cultures to recognise farmed animals as key figures while navigating the polycrisis (Lähde 2023), other science and speculative fiction (sf) texts may contribute to filling these gaps. Sf is renowned for its capacity to imagine alternative worlds and forms of life (McHale 2010: 23); in this contribution, I argue that they may contribute to the urgent recalibration of human-animal relationships towards more animaland planet-friendly variants. If we undergo the thought experiment of a complete withdrawal from all industrial animal processing, pasture and arable lands previously occupied to grow animal feed could give way to biodiverse and carbon-sequestering wetlands and forests. In contrast to the countless chickens, sheep, cows, and pigs kept in battery cages or factory farms, free-range farmed animal herds and individuals could boost biodiversity by dispersing seeds and insects across meadows or by burying fungal spores into the ground. A large-scale study published by Nature calculates the savings of a global vegan utopia by 2050 to be 547 gigatons of carbon dioxide - roughly equivalent to what humanity currently emits into the atmosphere over a period of fifteen years (Hayek et al. 2021: 21). In that highly unlikely future, factory farms would no longer exist, plant-based foods would have become the default, and hardly anyone could afford meat and dairy consumption. A future of this sort seems unthinkable, even though a whole range of animal ethical reasons as well as aspects of more direct human interest, such as, zoonosis control, antibiotic resistance containment, or particulate matter pollution render a recalibration of global food systems away from animal products imperative (cf. Rockström et al. 2020). The vast majority of consumers do not approve of the undignified conditions under which industrially farmed animals live and die and are aware of their detrimental ecological footprint. Nevertheless, in sight of the lack of concrete political interventions and the fact that only 1,52% of Germans declare themselves as following mostly plant-based diets, animal products remain the more profitable or convenient alternative - both for the people producing, as well as consuming animal products (Lohmeier 2024). Applying an animal studies lens to this controversy shifts the perspective: to gain insights into prevailing views on the relationships humans form with ‘livestock’ animals, scholars in this burgeoning field consult the textual forms these animals take in cultural artefacts, including fictional as well as 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 246 Liza Bauer 3 The anthropological machine is understood as a cultural technical apparatus with many functioning parts that aim for maintaining the human-animal divide in human societies (Agamben 2004: 37-83). In her work on how literary texts negotiate animal ethics, Vera Zimmermann argues that narratives are capable of “throwing a spanner into the gears of this apparatus” (2021: 11, my translation). 4 More detailed versions of the readings mentioned here can be found in my book Livestock and Literature (2024) and in my contribution on “Reading to Stretch the Imagination” (2022). non-fictional texts, visual artworks, advertisement of animal products, everyday language-use, and many others. Among them, literary animal studies scholars focus on literary texts, arguing that the active challenging of anthropocentric perspectives in fictional storyworlds is among the central potentials of literature to impact discourses on human-animal relationships (see Moe 2016: 135; Bauer 2021c: 207). A central aim of critical readings of farmed animal narratives, as I suggest here, is to evaluate to what extent fictional narratives with pigs, cows, or chickens as protagonists play a role in current debates on sustainable human-animal relationships. In connection to this specific group of animals, I argue that literary texts can contribute to the sociocultural negotiation of culture-specific animal categories, such as ‘food animal,’ ‘livestock,’ or ‘pet,’ - which means that animal texts might have the potential to change these categorisations. In my monograph on the subject, I argue that cultural imagi‐ naries about the relationships between humans and ‘livestock’ are caught up in dead-end streets that deliver little visions beyond violence and exploitation, and that sf texts provide inspiration for alternative pathways (2024: 1-39). Connected to this, I argue that narratives featuring ‘livestock’ as protagonists, close companions to humans, or even social agents in fictional storyworlds can function towards deindustrialising the imagination - “an essential prerequisite and a utopian ideal at the same time,” to counter the imbalance of human-animal relationships that is detrimental to the future of all life on this planet (327). In this contribution, I seek to convey how I imagine this process to work and why this is relevant in twenty-first century discussions on future forms of life. For that aim, I unmask what animal studies scholars term a hidden belief system which substantiates the animal industry and therefore feeds into the controversy that dominates discussions around food systems in the light of animal welfare and planetary challenges. The cultural or social ‘work’ I contend farmed animal narratives to perform emerges from their capacity to unveil and challenge how this belief system operates - a cultural process that scholars describe as the anthropological machine (Agamben 2004). 3 To illustrate how they do so, I provide exemplary glimpses into readings that demonstrate how the aesthetic repertoire of sf potentially widens readers’ animal-sensitive imaginations. 4 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 247 Yet, before I dive into the ambivalent dynamics inherent to the relationships humans form with farmed animals, I introduce the emerging discipline of animal studies in terms of its significance for literary and cultural studies. In the light of this volume, I suggest that the questions literary animal studies scholars investigate and the methods they apply have already shaped the trajectories of their overarching disciplines and will continue doing so. For asking animal questions in literary studies tends to reveal that cultural and literary productions not only reflect critically on current forms of life but may also contribute to generating new ones. These poietic, reality-, and world-making potentials of literature are of crucial relevance today (Nünning 2021: 332). As cultural theorists argue, there are multiple possibilities of how to live or die in the future, which means that it is high time that human cultures learned how to live well (see Berardi 2017: 14; Bieri 2011: 12). Models of living well in multispecies worlds are not compatible with the animal industry’s designation of individual beings as per se killable objects (cf. Haraway 2003: 79-80). If consumer cultures do not come to realise this inconvenient truth out of respect for their more-thanhuman, subjective partners in world-making, then perhaps the detrimental rise in temperatures, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and the ever-growing number of humans to feed will prompt the necessary shift. After all, the so-called polycrisis concerns all animal species, including human ones (Lähde 2023), and the co-dependent relationships human societies sustain to farmed animals constitutes an integral driver of planetary imbalances. To take part in these conversations, literary and cultural studies need to embrace the question of ‘the animal.’ 2 Literary Animal Studies as a Timely Trajectory of Literary and Cultural Studies Animalor human-animal studies scholars are asking this question in nearly all academic disciplines by now, united by a shared interest in the perception, practice, and reconfiguration of human-animal relationships. This often man‐ ifests in their critical unveiling and challenging of exploitative dynamics, but also in more neutral or descriptive engagements with human-animal interactions or mutually beneficial relationship models. Thematically, animal studies scholars may engage with questions on animal rights, politics, com‐ munication, welfare, geography, training, or trafficking, hunting practices, industrial livestock farming, species extinction, horseback-riding, petor zoo keeping, animal-assisted therapy, animal art, interspecies music, postcolonial 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 248 Liza Bauer 5 Recent and foundational introductions and overviews on the field can be found in Borkfelt and Stephan (2022), Wright and Quinn (2022), Woodward and McHugh (2017), Kompatscher (2019), Marvin and McHugh (2014), Borgards (2015a+b; 2016), Kalof (2017), Ortiz-Robles (2016), Taylor and Twine (2014), Weil (2012), and others, as well as in the many volumes of the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies, or Tierstudien. 6 All direct and indirect citations from Borgards’s work have been translated by me, except for 2015b, which was originally published in English. 7 Many scholars consider Derrida’s lecture the founding moment of the cultural and literary branches of animal studies; Derrida’s contribution “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (2002) consolidates the thoughts voiced in the lecture (Köhring 2015: 260-62). 8 For a more nuanced differentiation between different approaches cultural and literary scholars of animal studies follow, see Roland Borgards’s contribution on “Cultural Animal Studies” (2015a). or feminist questions, and many more. 5 The animal turn describes an increased attention to the ways nonhuman animals co-shape human lives as well as cultural production that can be observed in the humanities since the 1990s (Ritvo 2007; McHugh 2009a: 24). It follows that cultural animal studies scholars, for example, are interested in how human culture and philosophy shape animal lives. For example, they reconstruct how Eurowestern traditions of thought have contributed to the myriad injustices done to other animals, thereby particularly challenging Aristotle’s anthropocentrism, Cartesian du‐ alism, Kantian idealism, or Heidegger’s humanism (Borgards 2015a: 71, 69). 6 The origin of this branch of animal studies can be traced back to the 1970s: during the first wave of ecocriticism, when humanities scholars started to challenge anthropocentric views in the face of environmental threats and the obvious fallibility of human rationality, they disclosed the conceptual space necessary to think seriously about humanity’s alleged ‘others’ (cf. ibid: 73). Within this space, animal studies scholars have applied poststructuralist theory and new materialist thinking as formulated by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway to “mediat[e] between semiotic culturalism on the one hand and factual naturalism on the other,” and to rethink anthropocentric conceptions of agency, subject/ object oppositions, or the nature/ culture binary (Borgards 2015b: 156). Following Derrida’s infamous 1997 lecture at the Cerisy conference and his insight that humans cannot ever know for sure who or what the so-called “animals” 7 are, the literary and cultural branches of animal studies have rapidly spread into many different directions. 8 Literary scholars, in particular, follow the assumption that the way we think, speak, and write about other animals shapes the way we perceive and treat them (see Bauer 2022: 206-209; Kompatscher 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 249 2019). They start from the core premise in cultural studies that any subject to whom humans relate becomes a cultural construct in the process, the ‘animals’ studied are first and foremost cultural animals, understood as materially as well as semiotically constructed (Borgards 2015a: 70). As Roland Borgards illustrates the material-semiotic hybridity of the emerging, textual animals, “[r]eal wolves seem to play a formative role in every literary wolf - a process requiring serious scholarly attention - and every real wolf likewise exhibits traces - equally meriting careful scholarly attention - of their literary counterparts” (2015b: 156). Connected to the question of so-called livestock animals, “[t]he assumption that cows lack intelligence and pigs are unclean, whereas dogs are loyal, find [sic] expression in literary texts, which means that these texts participate in the sociocultural negotiation of these assumptions” (Bauer 2024: 58). Following cultural narratology, the resulting, textual animals contribute to sociocultural processes of meaning-making while becoming parts of narratives, which means that they can indirectly impact the lives of animals beyond the page (cf. Nünning et al. 2010; Gikandi 2012). Therefore, to shed light on how these processes function, literary animal studies scholars examine (1) how these textual animals relate to the ‘real’ world in terms of the sociopolitical, -cultural, material, and historical contexts from which they emerge, and (2) how the living creatures themselves get entangled with the semiotic, discursive processes of human meaning-making that, once again, impact humans’ perception of them. A challenge that literary animal studies faces is that, for a long time in the history of literary criticism, animal texts were assumed to have no connection whatsoever to living animals, causing literary scholars to read them through purely anthropocentric-allegorical lenses. The practice of reading animal representations strictly in the light of the human messages they convey treats fictional animal characters as mere metaphors or empty containers to be filled with any meaning human authors and readers desire to write and read into them (McHugh 2009b: 492). Narrative has, after all, been defined as “somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2012: 3). As cultural mediums relying on human language, they have therefore been studied and interpreted in light of what they convey about humans. The result of anthropocentric-allegorical reading practices has caused literary and cultural studies scholars to overlook the full critical or pedagogical potential of some canonical texts featuring animal figures (cf. McHugh 2009b: 487-88). For example, John Drew convincingly argues that the long-standing tradition of reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) strictly as an allegory for a human story “turns a blind eye to the cruelty of agricultural animal containment 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 250 Liza Bauer 9 See also Susan McHugh’s animal reading of Animal Farm (2009a). 10 See, e.g., the work being done in the burgeoning field of plant studies (Stobbe et al. 2022; Middelhoff 2022; Middelhoff and Peselmann 2023). 11 See, e.g., Borgards, Kugler, and Shah’s interdisciplinary work on the entanglement between island narratives and knowledge production in the Pacific (2023) and Jan Rupp’s contribution to this volume. 12 Animal studies scholars differentiate between an inevitable epistemological anthro‐ pocentrism (the human perspective as formulating knowledge) as opposed to an ontological one (the human perspective as the centre of the universe) (Borgards 2015a: 71). and slaughter,” thus missing out on the opportunity to encourage students to question human exceptionalist beliefs after reading Orwell’s classic as a story on the “asymmetrically distribute[d] frailties that confront all animals, human and otherwise,” in times of ecological crises (2022: 197). 9 To work against what German scholars term ‘Tiervergessenheit’ (the forgetting of animals), literary animal studies scholars dedicate themselves to recovering the many disregarded traces other than human animals have left throughout literary history, asking what anthropocentric filters have caused literary and cultural studies to miss while unravelling sociocultural histories (cf. Borgards et al. 2016). As a productive side-effect, this meticulous uncovering reveals that also plants, fungi, mountains, winds, or bodies of water co-constitute cultural imaginations dynamically with human authors, poets, natural scientists, historians, and oth‐ ers. 10 In the face of planetary challenges, investigating these more-than-human processes of meaning-making may help us overcome anthropocentric and binary perceptions on human-planet relationships. 11 Moreover, animal readings can shed light on analytical blind spots of specific toolkits, such as narrative theory, and thus contribute to expanding upon their analytical depth and potentials. As I argue elsewhere, “[t]o uncover literature’s means of challenging an explicit anthropocentrism” - an ontological privileging of the human perspective as exceptional and central to the universe - “animal studies scholars need to reflect critically upon the insurmountable anthropocentric bias of literary narrative and work with it” (2024: 7). 12 According to Borgards, this work can result in a reflective animalisation of the underlying rationales of literary studies (2019: 124ff.). As the fifth and retroactive effect of the animal reading method he has framed, Borgards states that “an animal text can possibly react upon the prerequisites of looking at an animal text” (2019: 124; 2016a: 228-234). He explains that “key terms in literary studies, such as, metaphors, authorship, literarity, figure, narrator/ narrating, writing/ text, fable, autobiography, theatre and so forth” may have to be reconfigured into versions fit for the analysis of animal narratives (2019: 124). Several animal studies 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 251 13 For a more detailed introduction on Herman’s continuum, see my contribution “Reading to Stretch the Imagination” (2022: 110-112). 14 Another example concerns the expanded conception on a material-semiotic animal agency to convey that material and semiotic processes of meaning-making always work hand-in-hand in the changes animal representations enact in fictional storyworlds or beyond (Borgards 2016: 235; McHugh 2009b). Moreover, Frederike Middelhoff has expanded the genre of the literary autobiography into a literary autozoography to engage with fictional self-narratives about nonhuman characters (2020), Susan McHugh has framed the theory of a narrative ethology to engage with potential impacts of animal narratives to readers’ ethical engagement with them (2011: 217); and I have described genetically modified animal characters in sf texts as postanimal figures in my contribution on postanimal narration (2021b). scholars have already contributed to this process by expanding upon specific concepts, genres, or analytical tools. To mention a particularly useful example, David Herman has contributed an invaluable continuum that describes transfers of “human” or “animal” attributes in animal representations in a more nuanced manner than conventional metaphor theory does (2018: 139). 13 In fact, he ‘ani‐ malises’ the study of narrative as a whole by suggesting a bionarratology, where he expands upon a whole range of narratological categories, such as narrative time, space, and scale to engage with representations of the more-than-human (139; 253-58). 14 It is here where animal studies scholarship may directly shape the future trajectories of literary and cultural studies. As global warming, extreme weather events, sea level rise, biodiversity loss, pollution, pandemics, and other chal‐ lenges increasingly push ecological questions to the attention of humanities scholars, animal questions automatically feed into their analyses. The individ‐ uals affected most severely by environmental disasters tend to be the ones who either cannot escape into safety or be informed about looming threats; this applies to many humans and countless other than human beings (see Twine 2024; Borkfelt and Stephan 2022). Therefore, to critically engage with the many dimensions of planetary crises, it is worthwhile to examine human and nonhuman animal living and suffering side-by-side. In Haraway’s words, in learning how “to live and die well” with other earthlings and allow for the possibility of multispecies co-flourishing on a damaged Earth, it matters which stories we tell and how we read them (2016: 101, 12). Therefore, literary and cultural studies need to expand upon their repertoire, so that they become fit for unlocking cultural artefacts produced by and with more-than-human agents. As I show in the following, animal studies can contribute to that expansion. To come back to the nexus between the animal industry, literature, and imagining the future, a literary animal studies lens tackles the issue at its core: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 252 Liza Bauer Instead of engaging with the violent mainstays of the animal industry directly, it examines the sociocultural processes which have brought them into existence in the first place. Direct aims are to generate knowledge on the complex politics and histories of human-animal binaries and violence (cf. Borgards 2015a: 76). Even though predominantly text-based approaches like the one I suggest might seem detached from the practicalities of animal suffering, they can contribute to destabilising, dismantling, and reconfiguring anthropocentric and logocentric thinking - which may be held responsible for many forms of violence against animals of all kinds, including humans (cf. Calarco 2015: 36). In connection to farmed animal narratives, this concerns the ideological bedrock upon which the animal industry is built, and which continuously legitimises its persistence despite all critique. A literary animal studies perspective unveils this bedrock as a socioculturally constructed belief system, held intact by the anthropological machine and prone to sabotage by literary texts. 3 Negotiating Ambivalent Human-Animal Relationships in Literature on Meat Culture The anthropological machine can be understood as the product of a long history of distancing strategies human cultures have developed while constructing their identities in contrast to other animal species. Between humans and domesticated animals, co-dependent relationship dynamics have always been particularly complicated: without their nonhuman providers of essential materials and products, integral contributors to agricultural processes and developments, or comrades in arms on battlefields, human societies would take markedly different shapes today. Throughout their histories of domestication - reaching back 8-12,000 years depending on the respective species - these animals exchanged their freedom of movement for protection from predators and evolved in close proximity to humans. Ideals developed in animal breeding have thus been deeply ingrained into their bodies. To highlight this mutual dependency or co-becoming of humans and other animals, Haraway has introduced the concept of companion species: an alternative to conventional and culturally specific animal categories, such as, wild, endangered, companion, or food animals, which includes all beings who share their lifeworlds with each other, so that they eat, play, work, live, and “die together” (Bauer 2024: 2; Haraway 2007: 14; 2013). Following Haraway’s definition, farmed animals must be companions to humans, as I have argued elsewhere, they are “most poignantly present at our dinner tables” (Bauer 2021a: 302). However, with the industrialisation of animal agriculture and the accompanied sophistication of breeding practices, recognising ‘livestock’ as 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 253 subjective beings with whom humans can form relationships not only becomes increasingly difficult, but even undesirable in view of the suffering humans inflict upon them. Novels such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) document how these companions to humans have been evolving into beings resembling high-per‐ formance machines since the onset of industrial livestock farming. Published in the aftermath of a crucial turning point in the history of meat production, the installation of the first disassembly line at the world’s first industrial meat plant in 1863, Sinclair’s text extrapolates on the upscaled violence shaping the lives of slaughter animals and human slaughterhouse workers (cf. Armstrong 2008: 137). This phenomenon has severely intensified in the twenty-first century, as molecular breeding techniques are disclosing ever more effective ways to capitalise animal bodies (cf. Nieradzik 2016: 127; Twine 2010: 16). Genetically modified, featherless chickens or cattle with doubled muscle strands illustrate how consumer capitalism has inscribed itself into the bodies and lives of farmed animals. Speculative fiction novels like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) reflect on these developments through fictional counterparts to these living, modified species, which I will describe in depth, shortly. In line with these advanced technologies, the cultural apparatus of what An‐ nie Potts describes as meat culture - one of the many gears of the anthropological machine - distances humans from other animals even further (2016). Not only do advanced mass slaughterhouses create an ever more fundamental, spatial separation between the majority of people and living farmed animals, but the specialisation of industrial livestock farming has also caused the emergence of specialised sub-breeds (e.g. broilers, laying hens, or porkers) and utility-related animal categories (e.g. livestock, pet, food animal). Advertising strategies that conceal the violence taking place in and around the industry obscure the realities of animal lives. The logo of major German meat producer Tönnies, one of countless existing examples, shows an anthropomorphic image of a pig, a dairy cow, and a large cattle of a pig and two cows that are cheerfully ‘smiling’ and form their tails into a heart-shape. Thus, many people do not associate the minute steak on their plates with a living animal - Deborah Levy’s novella Diary of a Steak (1995) takes this up to extremes by envisioning a steak retelling the fragmented narratives of several former cows on their ways to the supermarket shelves. According to feminist Carol J. Adams, meat culture transforms living animals into absent referents, allowing consumers of animal products to emotionally disconnect from animal suffering (1990: 14). In this process, living beings are being declared as food items. Dystopian novels like 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 254 Liza Bauer Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat (2008), Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), or Augustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh (2020) conduct terrifying thought experiments on how belief systems and cultural practices could one day transform certain humans into edible “products” as well (Bazterrica 2020: 70): The rooms are all connected by a rail that moves the bodies from one stage to the next. Through the wide windows, they see the way the head and extremities of the female stunned by Sergio are cut off with a saw. […] A worker picks up her head and takes it to another table, where he removes her eyes and puts them on a tray with a label that says “Eyes.” He opens her mouth, cuts out the tongue, and places it on a tray with a label that says “Tongues.” (Bazterrica 2020: 69) As I argue elsewhere, brutal narratives of this sort “fall short of providing any alternatives to the brutal realities they illustrate so effectively,” but they encourage an “uncomfortable imagining into the flesh of ‘livestock’” and may trigger critical reflections on real-world food systems (2024: 135). Moreover, these texts exemplify discursive processes that real-world cultural rituals unleash while serving to mark the divide between inedible human subjects and their edible animal others. From an animal studies perspective, the cultural norm of eating other animals but never human ones can be under‐ stood as a crucial cultural performance that secures beliefs in a fundamental distinction between humans and all other animals, the so-called anthropological difference (cf. Borgards 2015c: 184; Diamond 1978). Canonical literary texts pick up on this: The ceremonial roasting of dozens of suckling pigs in Spanish cultures (Cochinillo asado), for example, marks the homecoming of Miguel de Cervantes’ hero Don Quixote in Castilla-La Mancha (1615), and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson (1719) secures his position as a civilised human by roasting the meat of a goat before eating it (cf. Borgards 2015c: 175-85). More recent, speculative texts, such as Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), feature human characters under threat of being roasted themselves. In contrast, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), which traces several human survivors’ journeys through a post-apocalyptic wilderness, closes with a passage where the protagonists observe another group of survivors roasting a gene-spliced animal. In this speculative future, the two women’s pity for “[t]he poor creature” and their accompanied fear of the flesh-eating humans illustrate their detachment from beliefs in the anthropological difference (432). In pointing to these dynamics and playing with the fearful idea of reversing them, literary texts of all genres may set impulses to shake readers’ convictions about certain animal species, particularly farmed ones, being ‘more edible’ than others. Ironically, George Orwell’s pigs not only turn inedible after the barnyard revolt, they 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 255 fashion themselves as ‘more equal’ than the other animal members of the collective to justify their tyrannical leadership (cf. Bauer 2024: 122-23). On ‘Animal Farm,’ which is tellingly renamed into ‘Manor Farm’ when the novel ends, anthropocentric hierarchies are ultimately not overthrown but reinstated. There are few literary texts that move further than that and set counterim‐ pulses. Relationship models in which ‘porkers,’ ‘dairy cows,’ or ‘laying hens’ take on the role of individuals with their own perspectives, desires, and needs are not easily thinkable for many people living in industrial countries; they may even lie beyond their imagination. Perhaps justifiably, they may wonder where liberated cows or chickens could fit in current societies, were they to stop producing dairy products and eggs. It is in fact difficult to imagine what might happen to the hybrid-pigs of modern meat production in a vegan utopia, as their in-bred dependency on antibiotics and in-door spaces impedes their easy survival as wild boars and sows (cf. Cudworth and Hobden 2018: 94). If animal advocates wish to convince others of their cause, they need to come up with concrete designs of sustainable forms of living with these animals. Refugia for former livestock, as an increasing number of animal sanctuaries is creating them worldwide, experiment with these very ideas. To convince consumers that animal sanctuaries or plant-based agribusinesses are socially and economically viable options and that non-exploitative relationships to farmed animals are possible, the very concept of living with cows, pigs, and chickens without exploiting them needs to take roots in peoples’ imaginations first. Encouraging such perceptual shifts is far from an easy task, as connected to the apparatus of meat culture, animal advocates are facing three major obsta‐ cles that farmed animal narratives unveil and challenge: speciesism, carnism, and the so-called meat paradox. Speciesism describes the cultural practice of attributing moral worth to other beings on the grounds of their species (Singer 1975). Unsettling the firm conviction in many consumers’ minds that cows, pigs, chickens, and others are less worthy of ethical consideration than dogs, orcas, and rhinos seems almost impossible - not at last for the fact that individuals hardly ever shift their convictions if they are told to do so. In connection to farmed animals, encouraging someone to outthink speciesism is further complicated by questions of tradition and identity, eating habits and the emotions that come with them, slaughter practices and rituals, as well as by the wide-spread usage of derogatory animal designations, which continuously serve the categorical exclusion of ‘livestock’ from the circle of moral community. This connects to what psychologist Melanie Joy describes as the ideology of carnism, which “propagates meat consumption as ‘a given,’ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 256 Liza Bauer the ‘natural’ thing to do, the way things have always been and the way things will always be’” (2010: 29). In contrast to clearly visible lifestyle choices, such as veganism or vegetarianism, carnism cannot easily be opposed or criticised, as it actively works towards keeping itself hidden (33). The result is termed the meat paradox: many people feel compassion for animals yet avoid confronting themselves with the violent realities of meat production to detach themselves emotionally (15). Nearly any discussion between convinced consumers of animal products and advocates for plant-based diets will bring these dynamics onto the table. Whereas these discussions tend to lead into argumentative dead-end streets, literary texts can bring these dynamics to life in readers’ minds without causing as much resistance. Douglas Adams’s science fiction classic, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), stages a self-butchering cow offering her various body parts as the “Dish of the Day” to an Earthling and a group of alien guests, explaining to them that, “to cut through the whole tangled problem” of eating nonhuman animals, it was eventually decided “to breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly,” while ensuring them to be “very humane” while butchering herself (93). Whereas the human is appalled by the idea of eating an animal “that’s standing there inviting [him] to,” the other guests are confused at his reaction, as they know that on Earth, other animals are eaten as well (93, see Bauer and Castle 2024: 133). As Nora Castle and I observe in our work on sf animal characters enabled to speak by means of biotechnology, the opening scene of Adam Roberts’s Bête (2014), “plays on this same scene by presenting instead an animal who markedly does not want to be eaten, and is capable of saying so clearly and distinctly” (133, original emphasis). Even though Roberts’s cow is pleading to a butcher in human language to be spared from slaughter, the human protagonist shoots her without hesitation; he does not “feel like [he is] talking to a cow, even a really smart one. [He feels] like [he is] talking to a spokesperson from the Deep Blue Deep Green organization,” - the science fictional animal rights group who implemented AI-enabled microchips in the animals’ brains enabling them to talk (2014: 7; original emphasis). As most consumers base their decisions on whether to eat other animals or not on the basis of emotional, much less on logical factors, Roberts’s butcher is unaffected by the activists’ strategy. In negotiating these moral ambivalences without directly criticising the animal industry or personal consumer choices, these texts expose and thus shake the underlying belief system that legitimises the systematic exploitation of other animals. They showcase that the objectification of farmed animals is 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 257 not only the product of the violence taking place in slaughterhouses but also its reproducer. As I argue elsewhere, “the animal industry transforms nonhuman animals into objects, and because they are designated as ‘livestock’ animals by means of language use, consumers may easily detach themselves emotionally from their suffering” (2024: 343). As a result, neither moral considerations nor legal regulations prevent the continuation of their suffering, not even for the sake of safeguarding planetary habitability. Literary animal readings of these texts shed light on how this cycle functions and point to its weaknesses. This way, they can provide inspiration for animalor environmental activist strategies that dig into the epistemic, rather than the subjective violence against other animals (cf. Wadiwel 2015: 34). This is essential, as small improvements to the conditions under which other animals live and die in factory farms do not change the fact that many people regard ‘livestock’ as categorically killable beings (cf. Haraway 2007: 105-10). This is where literary texts may set crucial impulses, for while they will certainly not set an end to industrial animal agriculture, they may disrupt readers’ ingrained mental patterns that cause them to associate certain beings with objects, destined to be killed. 4 The Forms and Functions of Farmed Animal Narratives in Science and Speculative Fiction Science and speculative fiction (sf), an increasingly popular literary genre in Western cultures, proves particularly productive in this regard. In the previous sections I have introduced the co-constitutive relationship between the reflection, discourse, or writing about, and the encounter, interaction, or coexistence with other animals. Thus, real-world perceptions of pigs, cows, or chickens infiltrate literature, which in turn influences how living humans and animals live together. The societal functions of farmed animal narratives emerge from this nexus, and they operate through narrative forms and strategies that generate effects on the fictional storyworlds and on the ways readers perceive them while immersing in the story. Alongside many other literary scholars, I have praised the sf genre as an effective vehicle for telling animal stories, as their distance from reality allows for extrapolating on literary thought experiments that reimagine new models of worlds, societies, futures, planets, individuals, and relationships (Bauer 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 258 Liza Bauer 15 For a more profound engagement with the genre in connection to animal questions, I refer readers to the works by Vint (2007, 2010, 2021), Jameson (2005), McCorry (2021), Bulleid (2023), and particularly to the recent collection Animals and Science Fiction (Castle and Champion 2024). 2022: 96; cf. McHale 2010: 23; Vint 2010: 227; 2021: 510; McCorry 2021: 467). 15 Particularly, narratives featuring biotechnologically-altered farmed animal characters may temporarily distance readers from the realities of industrial animal agriculture and aid their imaginative capacities to outthink speciesist and carnist patterns of thought or the ‘livestock’ category (cf. Bauer 2022: 98). According to Haraway, sf crafts alternative worlds in an interplay of “storytelling and fact telling” (sf), which allows these texts to critically portray the living conditions of “real” farmed animals side-by-side with fictional explorations into (yet) impossible versions of these (2016: 31, emphasis added). This way, real-world developments, such as in genetic engineering practices, merge into futuristic narrative worlds, inviting readers to critically engage with them and reflect on potential future impacts. Applying methods from narrative theory to reading these texts reveals that authors frequently employ an aesthetic that alienates readers from assumed realities and familiarises them with new ones. Sf stories tend to build their worlds around one or several central novelties or innovations, the novum/ nova. In animal stories, this can concern fundamental changes to human-animal relationships, as in animals ruling the planet in Dietmar Dath’s The Abolition of Species (2008) or humans and animals being able to communicate in Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020). Alternatively, the novum can concern new subject forms, as in the many gene-spliced animals in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013) or in the human phenomenauts enhanced with high-tech suits enabling them to experience animal phenom‐ enology in Emma Geen’s The Many Selves of Katherine North (2016). While immersing themselves into these alternative worlds and imagining new indi‐ viduals and relationship models, readers’ imaginative capacities are transported into a state of suspension, where they may be uncertain about where the fictional projection starts and where it ends. Cast in this liminal zone, disruptions to their expectations can cause shifts in what they deem conceivable. For example, while imagining a first-person, human narrator approaching a dairy cow, readers may be taken by surprise that the cow addresses the human with whom they presumably identify themselves as ‘it’ instead of ’you’: Could it tell My babies I’m 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 259 16 The alternative font in McKay’s novel marks the narrator’s interpretations of animal communication; the line breaks are reproduced as in the original. still here. (McKay 2020: 182) 16 The passage evokes the neutral pronoun humans tend to use while speaking of other animal individuals (“Take a look at that cow, it seems to be pregnant! ”), instead of using pronouns like ‘he/ she’ that would describe the cow as male or female. German speakers use a neuter article to describe ‘the animal’ as ‘das Tier,’ whereas ‘the human’ is marked as a masculine subject, “der Mensch”. The text alludes to the fact that the second-person pronoun ‘you’ is not usually used while speaking to a nonhuman entity - for why should an ‘it’ be addressed personally? Addressed as if they were an ‘it’ themselves, reading the passage above might feel alienating to readers, which may defamiliarise them with the way they speak about other animals beyond their reading experience. Moreover, “feeling as if the cow was directing her message at them,” they might think of the many real calves lost to the dairy industry, perhaps empathising with the cow’s motherly longing (Bauer 2024: 1, original emphasis). Even though these moments of suspension are temporary in nature and readers are unlikely to change their consumer behaviour afterwards, this feeling of bewilderment might resonate in this person’s next encounter with a living animal or an animal product. Here, I locate the potential of narrative texts to expand readers’ animal-sensitive imaginations and help them perceive ‘livestock’ as individuals and companion species - their co-dependent partners in world-making, whom it is high time to recognise as such. Coming back to my initial question on the role of literature in imagining the future, I would like to argue that miniature shifts in readers’ minds can set crucial impulses. Cultural theorist Franco Berardi identifies a need for transcending the visions of total collapse that apocalyptic scenarios in popular culture frequently prophesy; narratives on future societies must follow more unexpected, non-linear storylines to help us towards “the technical possibility of a good life” (2017: 45, 235). When it comes to reconfiguring relationships to farmed animals, our imaginative capacities seem similarly limited as the many dystopian and apocalyptic scenarios Berardi hints at. As I have explained earlier, the animal industry limits the imaginability of sustainable human-animal relationships; mental representations of its real-world products - laying hens and broilers, porkers and veal calves, Angusand minute steaks, battery cages, disassembly lines, and factory farms - are deeply entrenched within human imaginations. Following psychoanalytical gestalt theory, humans perceive the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 260 Liza Bauer world through culture-specific frames that filter any incoming stimuli (Berardi 2017: 193-94). When consumers of animal products engage with cows, pigs, or chickens physically or conceptually, the cognitive frames filtering their experience or perception have been shaped by the animal industry and many other factors. By disrupting these frames and thus potentially transforming them, narratives and the reading experience they evoke can contribute to deindustrialising readers’ imaginations. Even though these highly subjective processes cannot be generalised, narra‐ tological analyses can shed light on how the underlying narrative forms and strategies function. For instance, texts might distort the gestalt or cognitive frame the animal industry imposes on readers’ minds by portraying strange subject forms: “That’s the head in the middle […]. There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those” - thus describes fictional scientist Crake the ‘ChickieNobs’ in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, or, to put it more accurately, “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too” (2003: 237-238). Visions of this sort may remind the readers of the suffering of real-world biotech-creatures, such as featherless chickens, for example, bred to produce eggs and meat in low-wage countries with hot climates without suffering from heat strokes (Young 2002). Unleashing a contrastive dynamic, first-person narrators or other anthropomorphic narrative forms may help readers identify and empathise with fictional animal characters. Another passage from McKay’s novel pictures Jean, the protagonist, liberating a group of ‘battery hogs’ from a truck after she has caught herself fantasising about the taste of the sow’s meat while talking to her (2020: 128). While she watches the ‘porkers’ “stumbling around, blind, mad, and fucking hopeful” while exploring the outdoors for the very first time in their lives, readers may hardly avoid an emotional engagement with the scene: Send me A postcard, The sick one says. […] All the little bits saying, Leave me, and, I’ll hear about it, and, Don’t you see It. Move on. There’s More. The ones that can walk stretch their legs, for, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 261 17 Today, more than 1,000 commodity products consumed or used in the global North can be traced back to hogs - about four hundred of which are inedible and may hardly be recognised as such: the gelatine coats of photographs, the glue seaming together household objects, the bone ash holding together German train brakes, or the hog haemoglobin used in cigarette filters to protect human lungs (Blanchette 2020: 13, 211; Meindertsma 2007: 82, 138). Albeit involuntarily, hogs and their body parts shape the Earth system in countless ways, many of which bear harmful consequences on its habitability, as well as more directly on human health. More, More, more. (130, original emphasis) This productive interplay between narrative estrangement (from high-perform‐ ance ‘livestock’ animals) and empathy-generating narrative forms (towards farmed animal companions) disrupts readers’ expectations and can thus expand their imaginative horizons. This way, sf narratives disclose a conceptual space where relationship models to cows, pigs, or chickens that break with the belief system upon which the animal industry is built gain shape - at least in speculative future scenarios. While they do not aspire to represent any accurate truths, these aesthetically mediated speculations are entangled with real animals’ living conditions. In the future society from Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013), genetically modified, highly intelligent pigs participate in political decision-making processes (cf. Bauer 2021a: 307-14). Readers may realise that the living prototypes of the so-called Pigoons are active contributors to current realities, not only in terms of their body parts permeating nearly all areas of human lives today (Blanchette 2020: 240; Meindertsma 2007). 17 In fact, genetically modified pigs are already shaping the future trajectories of medicine drastically: only two years after the deceased, gene-edited pig whose heart was implanted into the body of an American heart patient generated high hopes in the field of xenotransplantation, another pig whose kidney prolongs the life of a 62-year-old dialysis patient causes doctors to suggest that dialysis therapy may become obsolete thanks to the same practice (Rabin 2024; 2022a+b). Some scholars go as far as to argue that narratives featuring biotech-creatures may feed into bioethical discourse, even though they are unlikely to trigger any direct changes (cf. Pusch 2015: 66; Haraway 2007: 93; Kress 2007: 207). Yet the absence of concrete or quantifiable changes in human-animal relationships attributed to narratives does not translate into them being effectless. While readers envision ‘pet’-like relationships with supposed ‘livestock,’ they are invited instead of told to learn that personal, political, and sociocultural processes of negotiation determine where the distinction between their beloved German shepherd companion and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 262 Liza Bauer 18 In Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals, sociologist Paula Arcari provides intriguing material on these processes on the basis of consumer research (2019). a battery hen lies. The parameters deciding what or who qualifies as fit for being used, consumed, or loved by humans (or not) are not set in stone; instead, they are constantly changing as different invidividuals and cultures re-negotiate them, in relation to historical, sociocultural, and political dynamics. 18 As any literary text is part of these discourses, the small impulses they spark matter, which means that it matters how literary and cultural studies engage with them. 5 Conclusion: Towards Deindustrialising the Imagination To conclude, I would like to point out three main functions twenty-first century sf narratives on farmed animals perform and that are of relevance in the light of reimagining future forms of living with them: (1) When literary texts extrapolate on present and future societies and food systems, negotiating “who or what is considered in/ edible, or morally and politically non/ accountable” in these alternative worlds, they expose the belief system that legitimises the perseverance of the animal industry despite all critique (Bauer 2024: 358). (2) By imagining genetically modified farmed animal individuals and bestowing them with capabilities their living models lack, these texts encourage reflection on bioethical questions, challenge assumptions about a fixed human-animal divide (anthropological difference), and they transform high-performance ‘livestock’ into subjective companion species in readers’ minds. (3) Additionally, literary narratives illustrate that attempts to describe and understand animal perspec‐ tives are never free from anthropocentric biases. Beyond the pages of novels, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we cannot escape this bias in any encounter with our animal ‘others,’ for only then can we learn how to live ‘well’ with any other-than-human being on an endangered planet. Literary animal studies readings become most relevant for the future trajec‐ tories of their overarching disciplines when they reflect on the implications this third function bears onto literary criticism. For while scholars seriously engage with the numerous traces living animals have left in canonical and recent literary texts, they challenge anthropocentric-allegorical reading practices and expand upon the analytical concepts and tools that have been created to serve them. Asking animal questions can retrieve knowledges and meanings overlooked throughout more conventional literary criticism and thereby reflec‐ tively animalise the discipline. Analytical toolkits, such as narrative theory, are thus recalibrated towards the more-than-human world, which enables literary 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 263 and cultural studies scholars to examine how narratives not only co-shape human-animal but also human-planet relationships more widely. By challenging culture-specific animal categories and the anthropocentrically oriented thinking and value systems from which they emerge, literary studies may contribute to the emergence of cultural imaginaries that recognise not only pigs, cows, and chickens, but also lichen, ants, forests, and oceans as more-than-human co-creators alongside whom human societies shape the future of the Earth. Whether literature can truly make a difference in the fight for the planet’s regeneration remains an open question. Yet I can safely argue that the texts I have mentioned fashion farmed animals as subjects entwined in complex relationships with humans and might encourage readers to question the per‐ ception of ‘livestock’ as being mere commodities. Compared to purely utilitarian arguments against industrial livestock farming, emotional and intellectual shifts of that kind pave the way for a consideration of animals’ needs and perhaps their rights for their own sake. Unlike “mobile food pantries” - as historian Juliet Clutton-Brock describes the images of ‘livestock’ inscribed within consumers’ minds (1999: 213) - subjective individuals cannot easily be processed in factory farms without triggering any moral concern. Should these beings consequently receive legally recognised rights, the foundation of the animal industry would start to erode. In this arguably speculative scenario, political interventions aiming for mitigating the industry’s ecological footprint might have a better chance to be implemented than they currently do. However, such interventions fail to materialise for numerous sociopolitical and -economic reasons; cultural perceptions of farmed animals may legitimise their exploitation, but they remain only a fraction among countless other pieces of the puzzle. Moreover, humans do not necessarily cease to eat meat or prohibit the killing of other animals on the grounds of perceiving them as subjects or companions. Nation-wide bans on slaughter, as introduced in Adam Roberts’s dystopian sf society, remain within the realm of fiction. Nevertheless, and as Haraway might phrase it, readers of farmed animal narratives may question their perception of certain kinds of animals as categorically killable objects that are designated for killing only for the fact that they are born as ‘livestock.’ Over time and generations, these impulses may spark larger and more impactful changes in consumer patterns; the consumption of animal products in industrialised societies may one day develop from the dietary norm into an exception. Where literature can make a difference is in providing the space for exper‐ imenting with these possible future ways of living. 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