Abstract
Who gets to define and discuss ‘rights’? Issues of who and how knowledge is controlled. Violence towards animals in movies and movie-making. Cruelty as contiguous with loss of rights. State controls including the control and profiteering from ‘genetic’ material(ism). Darwin and Lamarck. Consensus, ‘faith’ and ‘belief’. Mutual respect and mutual aid leading to rights and dignity.
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Notes
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- 2.
For the links between abuse of animals and the spread of viruses that have made the leap (or potentially been encouraged to in the case of Level 4 bioresearch labs) we are lead more often than not to think of ‘wet markets’ or other such interfaces of slaughter and sale of animals, and especially of the vectors from say ‘reservoirs’ (e.g. bats) and ‘bush food’ markets, but intensive animal farming brings its own logistics of spread and also mutation. Consider the mink farms of Denmark (world’s biggest farmers of mink) and the mutation of Covid-19 late 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/05/denmark-lockdown-north-mink-blamed-coronavirus-strain.
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From the outset, in this discussion, I wish to differentiate clearly between the racist false science of eugenics so readily wielded and manipulated by the Nazis, from the ‘science of genetics’ across its history, but indicate the potential racist usage of genetics. The so-called ‘Father of DNA’, James Watson, is an example of the elision of fields—of ‘hard science’ being the companion of irrational racist and bigoted ideology: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/james-watson-racism-sexism-dna-race-intelligence-genetics-double-helix-a8725556.html.
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Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (p. 232; Penguin, London, 2017).
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See Polysituatedness (pp. 411–413).
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For the poem, along with my comments that accompanied its appearance in an online discussion forum that brought the threats (from outside the discussion forum—such positions travel fast among the fascist accruals), see Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (pp. 54–58).
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When I started a process I didn’t complete for Irish residency, I had to have my fingerprints taken digitally and was told my fingerprints had vanished (‘Do you work with books?’ I was asked!).
Fingerprints Lacking in Bantry
Verse
Verse To register a presence, the ancestral fingerprint irrelevant to the Garda, you place a finger on the glass glowing red, blood offering, and the officer says try again, roll your finger, take some natural oil from behind your ear and press on the glass again, roll your finger. And still no print will show. Decades ago your prints were taken in ink when there was still enough of you to show, confirm what they didn’t want. Have you worked with chemicals? Laboured on a farm or in a factory? That will do it, she says. I’ve seen prints of a bookish man of seventy that are so beautifully preserved he could still be a child. But yours aren’t even a shadow of what you were, burnt off and never coming back. Great storms a fortnight ago threw waves and seaweed up into the Garda station, picked away at the seawall. The tidal surge that will reach to the bay’s elbow, main town of the region. Mountains hold it in place, but denuded of their copper souls, they too have lost their prints. And the old forests have gone. Little is left of the stretches of oaks. And I have these blank fingers, these shiny hands, made of the emptying out, the tendency to go elsewhere and wear new worlds to the bone. We’ll deal with this situation at the next stage, she says, when residency wants more than prints, when you’ll pay.
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Kinsella, J. (2022). Choice and Whose Rights We Are Talking About? Cruelty and Animal Rights… Justice, Genetics and Consensus. In: Legibility. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_14
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