Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics Around 1900

but whose bodies can be butchered as meat. Animal suffering, even on small farms, has become a commodity to be sold. The result is revenue at the expense of painfully ending individual life. Their point is that philosophical theories (e.g. utilitarianism as an aspect of consequentialism) distract us from the reality of the emotional, social, and intellectual lives of the animals we eat. For a consequentialist, value is based on the best outcome. For a utilitarian, value is placed on function or pleasure over pain. There’s human worth and then animal worth, an inequality that is proportioned unfairly. Results matter for the utilitarian, not the individual; that’s moral irrelevancy. Behavioral intelligence related to environs, predators, prey, etc. is shown at the beginning of Chapter 4 on minds and octopi. This gets to the authors’ thesis: normative considerations and meaning are not, as in academia, separated from reality. Animals are not lab subjects or philosophical abstractions; they and their world, the earth we share, are in crisis, with extinction along with habitat loss. These are moral concerns, since many animals have consciousness, affective states, minds that experience physical suffering and emotional deprivation. The authors discuss animal empathy, especially in rats (Chapter 5), and ask, How do we consider the “moral significance” (p. 82) of rats? Like many people, rats are forced into constrained, crowded human places that make us label them pests. To resolve this dilemma, especially for animal advocates, would be to gravitate away from human-constructed hierarchies and point to the inherent dignity of animals. Rats, for example, as shown from experiments in the late 1950s, have demonstrated sympathy for conspecifics in trouble and should not be categorically shunned as vermin. Likewise, the authors relate, animals are ridiculed in circuses or treated as food for humans. It’s not hard to see the ethical crisis here: many social structures across countries similarly demean and demoralize people. Building away from Kant’s emphasis on human reason, the authors explain through contemporary philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler that animals possess capabilities to live well. Humans are not supreme creatures but live in a community of species, all of whom are “vulnerable” (p. 89) to the present danger of climate crisis. Crary and Gruen confirm that the equation of capitalism includes disdain for and oppression of animals as well as people, especially women, marginalized persons, and those of color. The authors see problems in the emphasis on humanity as separate from animals. While a broader discussion could be made about illegal poaching and trading of animals, hastening their extinction, the authors focus on parrots in Chapter 6. Animals should not be considered commodities to be bought and sold. Colorful birds in faraway places of the Amazon fetch sizeable sums of cash, opening an irresistible temptation for poor people. In their final chapter, Crary and Gruen mention human chemical warfare against insects. The problem is that insecticides kill pollinators and then birds who eat poisoned insects. The authors seem to say that humananimal interactions are governed by politics run by big business. Rather than focusing on individual action, animal welfare, or rights, the core of the animal crisis is the “political structures” (p. 127) that continue to oppress animals as well as people. Policies that harm animals must be challenged. Backed by federal and state agricultural departments, the corporate food industry cares little about animals and uses them for profit, foisting dishonest labels like “free-range” or “grass-fed” onto unreflective and uninformed consumers. There’s a concise but thorough discussion of ecofeminism, a social issue where women along with the environment are seen as resources for labor or profit, controlled and manipulated. Using reason and feelings, ecofeminists, they say, help us become aware of the “sensitive discernment of values” (p. 134) concerning connections between any organism and groups marginalized by politically capitalistic structures. Ticks can go many years without sustenance, waiting in suspended time. Humans, however, are shortsighted and live in the moment, ever consuming. Earth’s destruction by humans is not coming, it’s here. This predicament is why a new critical theory focused on the “animal” crisis is needed, with champions to fight existing corporate, capitalistic, and political systems that debase, demoralize, and ruin people, animals, and the environment. The authors suggest that moral revolution and social resistance, in the form of narrative and visual arts, are needed to create interspecies’ commons, as seen in some ecofeminist sanctuaries they mention, to fight “life-destroying structures” (p. 144).