Encountering the animal: Temple Grandin, slaughterhouses and the possibilities of a differential ontology

Abstract

In its consideration of the so-called animal question, sociology faces a new opportunity to productively examine some of its fundamental disciplinary assumptions. This article argues that the problem of the violence of our relationship to animals draws attention to the question of how the animal is encountered at the level of ontology. Through the work of Temple Grandin, a highly influential figure in slaughterhouse design, the authors examine the dominant model of encountering the animal, and offer an opening to an alternative ontological frame. The authors read Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘transcendental empiricism’ through Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s work on neuroatypical modes of perception, in order to argue for an encounter with the animal that remains open to the sensate and emergent dimensions of experience. This, they argue, prevents the premature closure of the problem of ‘the animal’ to which a moral framework sometimes falls prey, keeping it open as a vital problem for thought. In doing so, the authors aim to move beyond the inclusive gesture that would welcome the animal into the social, as though there were something accidental and non-essential about its exclusion from the social in the first place.