Justin D. Edwards

Speaking from the near ruins of a damaged planet, where tipping points are consistently identified and ignored, the gothic is more apt than ever. The ruins of gothic—the crumbling Otranto, Tinturn Abbey, the southern plantation—signal that which is lost: the shattered remains of a preeminent past. The landed gentry, the plantation owners, absentee landlords, the religious elites, are all economic realities that contain the specter of a powerful history that haunts the present and the future. Those economic waves that flow from eighteenth-century colonization into nineteenth-century industrialization into twentieth-century nuclear military industries into the twenty-first-century empire of globalization and neoliberalism all arise within the detrimental imperious power of the Anthropocene and crash against a gothic narrative that frames ecology in terms of darkness, death, and destruction.

In an environment where ecological understanding is continually repressed in favor of a devastating economic system that produces and consumes itself—the snake eating its own tail—the return of that which has been repressed pushes to the surface under the accumulating force of its own steam, ready to explode in a mushroom cloud of global destruction that can only be mapped out in burning fallouts and nuclear freezes. Has winter come yet? In the face of disaster capitalism, the answer is a resounding yes. Disasters offer hyperprosperity for the economic and political elite. Management by crisis becomes capitalism by shock: when New Orleans is flooded, public schools are replaced by charter schools; when a natural disaster hits Haiti, big-business government aid comes with the imposition of free market arrangements and debt obligations for those who are in dire need of assistance. Expressions such as “hurricane colonialism,” sometimes associated with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, underscore how the ideological agendas of the political-economic elite extend imperialist agendas that can be traced back to, among other things, the cotton plantations of Mississippi, the sugar plantations of Jamaica, and the tea plantations of Sri Lanka.1 The collapse of a region due to climate change is, like the collapse of the stock market, an opportunity for the elite: they buy it all up, increasing their wealth and power. It is not surprising that climate change denials are disseminated from the top.

An anthropocentric point of view glimpses the ruins on the horizon—imagines the number of days left, calculates the years of melting ice and burning fires—but such a perspective can no longer be sustained. Wildlife thrives within the fallout zone of Chernobyl; the absence of the human animal is far from the eradication of life.2 Gothic narratives point to that which is outside the anthropocentric, offering horrified expressions that decenter the human animal and devolve the self into an uncanny weirdness. Gothic has always decentered the Anthropos in its animal–human–animal hybrids, its monstrous forms and its undead creatures. All of this can be mapped from eighteenth-century colonization to twenty-first-century neoliberal managerial forces that we find in the plantation-like “mods” of the Amazon.com warehouses (unironically named “fulfillment centers”), where the “pickers” are run by electronic devices that continuously count down tasks against the clock.3

The plantation has been digitized. The Amazonian Plantationocene moves from the Global South to the North Atlantic, from the colonization of the Americas to the burning of the rainforests. The plantation has engendered the monstrously accelerated agro-industrial-economic structures that are set in a grotesque landscape of what might be, for the human animal at least, a derelict planet that can no longer sustain us, if only because we cannot contain ourselves. The exploitation of labor, the consumption of land, the production of destructive gases, and the massive consumption of water are engendered by a monoculture/product wherein life (human and nonhuman life) is meat: bodies are used up and consumed.4 This is perhaps most apparent in the intensive livestock farming that is based on the modern process of cutting out, disconnecting, and reducing life to production and death in monstrous proportions. Disconnection eliminates biodiversity and negates multispecies complexes. But disconnection is also necessary to sustain an economic system that is ecologically unsustainable.

One way of thinking about gothic and Anthropocene is with reference to binaristic narratives that pit the human animal against the environment: haunted wildernesses, threatening jungles, dark forests, black lagoons, the gothic sublime. In the early European novel, the land is neither elevating nor enriching; it is vertiginous and plunging, threatening the individual with lost control. It is a destabilizing source of instability that must be domesticated in the greenhouse, the flower bed, the lawn, the botanical gardens. Likewise, in the territories beyond Mount Snowden, the Lammermuir Hills, and the Alps, the unmapped lands of other continents posed other threats: here there be monsters. The dark place “out there” is the ecological space—a source of terror—to be mapped and tamed into a homely sense of place. These by-products of (gothic) imperial conquest narratives appropriate the exotic and control the threat that is “out there” by bringing it “in here”—the untamed to the tamed, the colonies to the metropole—so the unhomely is pressed into the homely. This supports the human animal’s belief that we can improve on environments that pose threats to us.

It is vital to think differently about gothic and Anthropocene. By bypassing binary thinking and moving outside the Anthropos, it might be possible to circumvent the teleological conception of the anthropogenic destruction of ecological systems (and the domination as well as extinction of other nonhuman animals), which are taken as inevitable results of the “development” of Homo sapiens as a species. The human animal has a destructive potency—a dominant force more powerful than ecology—that is wielded over a planet. We have the power to trigger a mass extinction event and the agency to prolong “tipping points” through planetary management and geoengineering. We are both the problem and the solution: a way of thinking that falls back on the self-referentiality of the human, its human-centeredness. There is, then, a need to decenter the human in discourses on the Anthropocene, even though the Anthropos of the epoch inherits so much from a philosophical tradition that places the human animal at the center of life and history. We too often revert to tropes, narratives, and concepts of humanity that position the human animal at the top of a hierarchical food chain where humankind has the sovereign right of dominion.5

Gothic, I suggest, offers up a diet of flesh and blood: vampires and zombies have insatiable appetites, reminding us that our bodies are meat. In this, gothic asks questions about human hierarchies, as it points to the fleshy body of the human as a source of protein and iron. Gothic thus poses questions about how and what we might eat: Is it possible to eat less destructively? Can we eat less violently? What are the ethics of consumption? How can gothic enable us to embrace an ethical ecocentric position? By reflecting on gothic, Anthropocene, and animals, I argue that we, the human animal, can place ourselves both inside and outside an anthropocentric position from which we can glimpse the interconnectedness of species and move toward a sense of multispecies that challenges hierarchies. The power dynamics in this way of thinking engenders an objectification of the nonhuman animal and negates the significance of seeing the Anthropocene in terms of its intertwining forces, conceived as human and nonhuman species, where the future of one determines the future of the other.

Throughout this book, the authors have pointed to the limits of the word Anthropocene, but one of its possibilities is its potential to identify the human as a species among many other species and, in so doing, shift human supremacy toward human–animal relationality. In other words, the term can be reappropriated as a way to reorient our thinking toward relationality and away from presumptions of human mastery and separation that are a big part of anthropocentric thinking. It can be, I suggest, a driver for overcoming the stranglehold of objectification, a path toward an interconnected subjecthood between human and nonhuman animals.

An important stage in the rise of the Anthropocene is animal agriculture and its accompanying slaughter. In fact, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer argue that there are three significant sites of human and animal interaction—the growth in global cattle populations, species extinction, and the expansion of industrial farming—and these are significant markers of the Anthropocene.6 Approaching this from a different perspective, Foucault identifies animal and plant agriculture as a powerful political technology that impacts populations and species across a threshold of biological modernity, a form of biopolitical power that regulates birth and death, disease and health, and dovetails with the “anatomo-politics” by which capital disciplines the productive capacity of bodies.7 Speciesism and biopolitical thinking both pinpoint animal domestication as a pivotal point in the human animal’s ability to modify ecosystems, control bodies, and regulate power in communities that have contributed directly to the Great Acceleration.

Animal agriculture in the Anthropocene has led to narratives of catastrophe and apocalypse. Methane gases released into the atmosphere produce radically destructive climate events; mass drought and human suffering are brought about by water consumption and changing access to fresh water; the demolition of ecosystems such as rainforests and boreal forests distort micro- and macroclimates; and unsustainable feed for husbandry triggers extensive desertification and famine among human populations.8 These catastrophic visions are fueled by multiple socioeconomic conditions, ranging from the increasingly large-scale animal agriculture corporations to massive factory farms to powerful animal product conglomerates and imperious meat lobbyists. The desire for profit sustains a disregard for life. This indifference to planetary life meshes with the indifference to lives that are consumed within the factories that raise and slaughter nonhuman animals for meat.9

Depending on where we live, animals used for livestock may or may not be visible, but they do fill up the planet. Their presence is seen in the biomass that exceeds the human animal, and one-third of the planet’s surface is given over to feeding them. So even if we do not eat them or their products, we are still influenced by the capitalist biopower of the meat industry and its relation to the corporate enterprise and consumer culture that is woven into the fabric of the global bio-economy. Within this process, then, it is not only the nonhuman animals who are consumed. The planet is eaten away, and the workers who are exploited by the corporations are expendable. The same thinking that objectifies nonhuman animals intertwines with the objectification of human animals and a contempt for ecological concerns. What I am suggesting here is an extension to the central argument in Carol J. Adams’s influential book The Sexual Politics of Meat, in which she argues that meat consumption and violence against animals are structurally related to other forms of violence, specifically violence against women. Adams demonstrates how many cultures equate meat eating with masculinity, and she points to the significant links between the prevalence of a carnivorous diet and patriarchal attitudes, particularly the idea that the end justifies the means, and the objectification of others.10

This objectification is integrated into the labor market of animal agriculture. The expenditure of bodies in this industry is not limited to cows, chickens, or pigs: human labor is also consumed, and with it the bodies of laborers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, as well as Statistics Canada, there are more than one million full-time and part-time workers on Canadian and American factory farms, where billions of animals are raised and slaughtered for human consumption every year. Factory farm workers, often people of color and migrant workers from Latin America (many undocumented), are exploited so that their bodies become mangled, distorted, and disfigured, and sometimes expire. In most cases, they do not earn a living wage; they suffer from exposure to harmful gases, repetitive stress disorders, cardiovascular problems, and premature death. Driven by rigid contracts set forth by corporate employers, factory farms consume their workers to maximize profits. And the violence toward nonhuman animals extends to violence against human animals.11

This is the domino effect of objectification. We have reached a stage in the Anthropocene when the objectification of animals in corporate agriculture is indifferent to ecological decline, catastrophe, and devastation. This disregard for ecological life collapses into the structural disregard for nonhuman animal life, subjecting animals to torturous violence that is part of an objectification whereby the workers who are employed to raise and slaughter the nonhuman species are subjected to abuse by the corporations that exploit them. The binary separating the human from other species falls away. And what we are left with is a cannibalistic capitalism that extends Marx’s vampire metaphor: the constant sucking of the workers’ blood by a corporate body that appears to be vampire-like in its desire and ability to suck the life out of those on the abattoir floor. Yet instead of overcoming the stranglehold of objectification by moving toward an interconnected subjecthood, we continue to drive over the cliff edge of ecological collapse.

The treatment of animals—human and nonhuman—is vital for understanding the impact of the Anthropocene, and gothic narratives are rich sources of material for such an exploration.12 For instance, the treatment of animals is intimately linked to violence against human animals in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843), in which the drunken narrator, who has always loved pets, has a deep bond with a beautiful black cat, Pluto. One night, though, in a gin-soaked rage, he turns on Pluto and gouges out the cat’s eye with a penknife; this is a prelude to a murderous rage that leads to him killing his wife with an axe. Similarly, more than a hundred years later, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984) focuses on Frank Cauldhame’s life on a small island in rural Scotland, where he takes pleasure in collecting the bodies and heads of the small animals he kills and the dogs he burns. As the narrative unfolds, it is revealed that he murders three of his relatives: two cousins and his younger brother. The violence directed at nonhuman animals is replicated in the violent acts toward human animals.

The literary critic Xavier Aldana Reyes correctly identifies the slaughterhouse as a significant gothic site for exploring violence against human and nonhuman animals and reads the abattoir as a place where the horrific treatment of nonhuman animals bleeds into the exploitation and abuse of people.13 Reyes identifies abattoirs in gothic texts like Matthew Stokoe’s Cows (1991) and Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat (2008) as dehumanizing machines that are oblivious to the suffering of livestock or workers and driven by corporate giants. Here slaughterhouses foreground a potential collapse in speciesism, and given that human factory workers are regularly and severely physically compromised in animal-processing plants, people are frequently victimized and disenfranchised by monopolistic business practices in the animal-processing industry.14 This means that community members are physically endangered by the presence of meatpacking factories at a local level, but human communities worldwide are also threatened by the overall effect of concentrated animal feeding operations on climate change.

This relationship between the local slaughterhouse and the global impact of the animal-processing industry is significant. In some cases, small-scale impacts have been seen in areas around large-scale animal-processing facilities, but the global concerns about land degradation and deforestation, air and water pollution, and the loss of biodiversity have been convincingly documented.15 From a planetary perspective, animal agriculture contributes significantly to anthropogenic climate change. And if this continues at the current levels, the potential ramifications of meat production could have profound impacts on large populations of people due to the generation of methane, high levels of water consumption, and the high amounts of manure produced on industrialized farms. In addition, the thousands of animals in industrialized farms require large amounts of food, typically in the form of cereal grains. It is estimated that more than one-third of the world’s cereal output is dedicated to farm animal feed, despite the fact that “it would be much more efficient for humans to consume cereals directly since much of the energy value is lost during conversion from plant to animal matter.”16

Recognizing the impact of the local slaughterhouse can, I suggest, extend outward to the planetary effects of anthropogenic violence on human and nonhuman animals. And recent gothic texts, such as the French–Belgian coproduction Raw (2016), include representations of the mesh of violence that is incorporated into institutions not directly related to slaughterhouses or the animal-processing industry. Here the techniques of power around the consumption of meat work to induce docility by not questioning carnivorism. This extends to the suggestion that the living body must consume nonhuman animals to enliven the living body by fueling our energies. The normalized body eats meat; the rest are relegated to the margins, labeled abnormal. This, then, legitimizes a human speciesism that excludes nonhuman animals from the protection that is, at least in theory, afforded to the human community. On the other hand, though, following Foucault, the biopolitical form of governing in modernity includes a detached and technical stance toward lives, turning individuals into life as a mass and resource, so that speciesism is unsettled and humans enter the same biopolitical nexus as other animals. I am not suggesting a rejection of agency in the face of biopolitical power that includes the pure and simple capacity to legislate or legitimize sovereignty in the mesh of human and nonhuman animals. Rather, biopolitics is, above all, a strategic arrangement that coordinates power relations to extract a surplus power from living beings.17

A synopsis of Raw might go something like this: Strict vegetarian, Justine, enters a decadent, merciless, and dangerously seductive world during her first week at veterinary school. Desperate to fit in, she strays from her principles and eats raw meat for the first time. She soon experiences unexpected and terrifying reactions as another side of herself begins to emerge. Is this a true self? A core self? Surely not. For the film questions essentialist notions about the human and, more generally, the tenets of speciesism. More accurately, the emergence of the other Justine marks a corruption of the body whereby the corporeal is invaded—infected—by a foreign body of flesh that contaminates the living. The infection sees her collapse back into a primordial nature as her largely plant-based diet gives way to a craving for raw meat and she becomes the sign of a horrifying carnality, cannibalism, that overwhelms the distinction between nonhuman and human animals.18

It is this form of consumption—eating human flesh—that has provoked the strongest audience reactions to the film. When it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, for instance, paramedics were called to the cinema after some viewers fainted during the scenes of cannibalism.19 After another festival screening, the director, Julia Ducournau, was verbally attacked by a viewer during an interview; the man stormed out of the theater, yelling “the film makes no sense!” Ducournau takes these responses in stride. Referring to the representations of cannibalism, she asserts that “movies don’t have to be easy. The important thing is the impact they have on you afterwards. And what traces they leave in you.”20 And when she is asked about the meaning of cannibalism in the film, she refuses to answer and insists that she wants to leave the meaning open to viewers. Contrast this to the director’s dismissive response to suggestions that the film might support vegetarianism and veganism: “How? Where? Why?” she says to someone during an interview. “Have you seen the movie, really?” Here, her openness to meanings of cannibalism falls away, shutting down a vegetarian or vegan reading of the film. Perhaps this is because she does not want to see the film as entering into the discourses of the vegan killjoy. Or perhaps it is because she does not want her film to be labeled as a preachy text that promotes a pious veganism or naive utopianism.

The film begins with a cafeteria scene in which Justine and her parents have lunch. Suddenly Justine spits out the food in her mouth: there is meat in her meal. Her mother is outraged. She yells at staff, asking them what they would do if Justine had a lethal allergy to meat. Animal consumption is a form of contamination. It is a threat to life—human and nonhuman animals—and the emotive response illustrates a symbolic confrontation with the horrors of carnivorism. From this perspective, Justine’s corporeality and her vegetarian diet threaten the carnivist and speciesist social order that underscores human–animal relations. Indeed, throughout the film, the viewer is reminded of the bodily connections between animals and humans. We see images of horses given tranquilizers alongside student parties where ketamine is consumed; cows are penned up beside the students forced into rows as they take exams or conduct lab experiments; new students are forced onto their hands and knees and led through the dark bowels of the university; horses run on treadmills as students take exercise in the yard. Human and nonhuman animals are linked: they are drugged, herded, examined, prodded, and abused.

The early cafeteria scene is mirrored in the vet school dining hall. Here Justine expresses her ideas about animal rights to explain her vegetarianism and her desire to become a vet. She links the suffering of animals and humans, asserting that an animal is self-aware and thus deserves the same rights as human animals. “I bet a raped monkey suffers like a woman,” Justine says. This sparks a retort from a young woman at the table: “So a raped monkey, raped woman, same thing?” Justine answers a tentative yes, adding, “Why are we at vet school?” Why, indeed. The question is not answered, and the debate (and its ethical underpinning) is met with silence. Justine’s equivalence between animals and humans is not shared by the other vets in training: an institution that is meant to promote the nurturing, care, and support of nonhuman animals is complicit in the ideology of speciesism that supports carnivist practices. Yet the film visually challenges this ideology: directly following the cafeteria discussion, there is a shot of students taking an exam that visually evokes animals in a cage.21

What is instituted here is a biopolitical form of governing that is characteristic of modernity, implying a detached and technical stance toward human lives. In this, biopolitical power in the vet school turns individual life into a collective noun whereby human life is treated as a resource and, as such, the human’s self-proclaimed position as the crowning glory of planetary existence is unsettled and the students find themselves part of the same biopolitical nexus as other animals. The “caged” students in the exams are—as in the initiation rituals—identified by numbers, and an important link is made to the numbering of the animals in the labs. The dogs to be dissected or the cows to be prodded are tagged and reduced to numerical equivalence, just as the students in the labs find themselves identified with their student numbers and, by extension, their grades, impact factors, and h-index numbers. This dynamic of anonymization furthers a biopolitical treatment of life—human as well as nonhuman—as resource, thus reflecting a decentralized form of governing measures and the mobilization of life itself through the technologies that support the animal agriculture industry. Justine’s vegetarian ideology is gradually erased as she becomes carnivore, and as a vet, she is trained to support the institutions of a carnivore economy.

Being initiated into the institution is increasingly tied to a violence that is endemic in the alliance rites of being accepted into a group. The initiation of the first-year vet students includes, among other things, being bathed in pig’s blood, being bullied in the corridors, and being pushed into performing sexual acts. Her fellow students assure Justine that this is a harmless institutional tradition and that she will initiate the “rookies” in the following year. Inflicting suffering on others, as well as witnessing that suffering, is all in good fun. This particular notion of pleasure is, more and more, part of institutional structures in which brutality is labeled as amusement and violence is endemic in a group as an exuberant kick. The practice of hazing includes a seemingly easy delight in the violence toward and suffering of others; this has led to customs in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen simply as modes of entertainment. If we can find fun when witnessing the suffering of human animals, then it is perhaps easier to accept the suffering of nonhuman animals.

The most significant of these initiation rituals arises when Justine is forced to eat a rabbit kidney. This is the Ur-moment of carnivism: it is the precise second when Justine’s well-meaning worldview begins to collapse and she adopts the principles espoused by the other students and teachers. Nonhuman animals are merely resources to be objectified and reduced to meat that can be consumed and used up by people. The message is clear: vets are trained to support this ontology, regardless of the well-being of animals or any reflection on animal rights. The Ur-moment is heightened by the language—signaled in the film’s title—and furthered by the images of the uncooked meat that Justine cannot resist. In fact, her consumption of a rabbit kidney calls attention to the power of language within meat eating. Here there is no absent referent, whereby the violence of slaughtering nonhuman animals is veiled through metaphor: “cow” becomes “beef,” “pig” becomes “pork,” “deer” becomes “venison,” “fish eggs” become “roe.” Instead, the raw language draws attention to a violence of predation that is a central and defining characteristic of human domination within the Anthropocene.

The institutional production of self is, in this instance, the metamorphosis of becoming-carnivore. It is about rejecting what is the perceived self-denial of vegetarianism and embracing some imaginary primal instinct to consume flesh. This practice of changing being—of becoming—is not just an ontological practice but also the erasure of an ethical position where the nonhuman animal is an accepted, though limited, resource to be exploited, abused, consumed. When asked by her doctor why she ate the raw rabbit kidney that made her so sick, Justine tells her that she said no. “Did they force you?” the doctor asks. “No,” Justine has to admit. For she wishes to fit in and, as she says, be average. “Find a quiet corner and wait out the year,” the doctor advises her. Here the film poses questions about holding certain principles as an individual in the face of institutional forces that challenge those views. And, by extension, the text picks apart the question of how we might transform ourselves and society to extend partial sympathies and, instead, embraces institutionalized power structures and carnivorous relations to others. The animal other does not figure in this particular equation.

It is from this perspective that the background of industrialized animal agriculture in Raw moves into a necropolitics that imposes the right to enslave beings, impose social or civil death, or simply kill others.22 Within this system, the animals are a form of walking death, and the film displays the forms of subjugation of life to the power of death as the nonhuman animal lingers in a state of being positioned between life and death. There is, in other words, a continuum here in which necropower and politics work upon certain populations of beings to further life in some instances and deny life in others. In the latter, the nonhuman animal enables us to fully reflect on the implications of “the living death” within the context of the Anthropocene. Life is the path to the slaughterhouse; life is a process and precursor to death. This view of the factory farm conflates life as the resource for death. In this, necropower is tied to the central processes of the plantation system—simplification and enforcement—both of which are integral to the structure of industrial farming. By reducing the life of the nonhuman animal to the death of meat, the biomedical processes change biological and genetic life and move biodiverse regions into ecosystems that are cut off from multispecies interlocking, and the farmed animal is forced on multilayered but unidirectional levels into interacting with a single species: the human animal. The life of the nonhuman animal is transformed, but so are the land, the environment, and the life of the human animal that regulates the industrial farming system.

But Raw also pushes in other directions, for in the film, becoming-carnivore is an ongoing process that morphs into other practices. Justine moves from eating raw meat to consuming human flesh. Becoming-carnivore bleeds into becoming-cannibal. This erasure of difference signals how her relationship to others continues to change as the affirmation of speciesism begins to fall away. Eating meat moves into being eaten. Meat is meat, regardless of the source.

Raw is a long way from being a preachy film. It is filled with nuance and interpretive possibilities, posing significant questions without offering simplistic answers. Does the representation of cannibalism link the eating of nonhuman animal and human animal flesh? Is the film suggesting that we should stick to our principles in spite of institutional and peer pressures? Or are vegetarians denying important aspects of their primal appetites and thereby giving rise to something darker? Regardless of the answers to these questions, it would be too crude to read the film as narrating a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist finds growth and power only after she has consumed meat. This is not a story of denial. Nor is it a text that promotes eating meat. It does not include answers about how to be an ethical person in an anthropocentric world. But it does call attention to the biopower that relegates nonhuman animals to the margins, as well as an ongoing process in the Anthropocene, or, better, the Plantationocene: Raw enables us to reflect upon different ways of being in the world as a species. It calls attention to our relations to other species, particularly the differences and power between human animals and how these hierarchies are mapped onto other species.

Beyond vegetarianism, veterinary science is an integral cog in the biopolitical machine that drives the industrial farm. Dominating the maintenance of life for nonhuman animals through reproduction, a healthy life-span, and the precise moment of death is the basis for the complete biotechnological control and enforcement of the economic strata of meat production and consumption. The animal factory must produce optimally: meat, eggs, and milk must be supplied in bulk through clearly calculable criteria to maximize profits. Veterinarians are, like other industrial farm employees, workers who must rigorously assess the insemination process at the heart of reproduction through a complex calculus that involves the purchasing of animal sperm and eggs, spatial constraints, legal regulations, and health risks to human and nonhuman animals. Veterinary knowledge and zootechnological practice form the basis of these calculations. In this context, the animal commodity is a product that also gives the products (meat, milk, and eggs); or, to put this another way, the animal is the slave, the production tool, and the produce. The Plantationocene comes into sharp focus when we survey intensively farmed animals, for these plantations reduce life to a determining factor: assets for profit now and investments in the corporate future.23 Any nuanced conception of life is overwritten by the bottom line, a one-dimensional ontology that negates the multispecies of biodiversity and promotes monocultures. The animal body is transformed into an organic machine.

Raw helps us reflect on the possibility of a future that is unique, different from current human animal and animal relations. It interrogates the boundaries between species and the ethics of killing, eating, and consuming meat (human meat or animal meat). It calls attention to the ethics of murder—meat as murder—and suggests that we need to understand a metaphysics of subjectivity that does not exclude the animal but deconstructs the human–animal boundary: the exclusion of the animal is part of the problem. As part of this process, the representation of cannibalism—becoming-cannibal—points to the subject of becoming by emphasizing consumption, for carnivorous culture and cannibalism haunt the text and suggest that the material basis of our culture is a problematic site that must be addressed if we are to have a transformed vision of companion species. This is all the more important now that we see how industrial farming damages ecological systems in many ways and that at the heart of its impact is a plantation structure based on the mass production of life for the purpose of death. This simplified practice strips away all complex multispecies entanglements, ambiguity, and complexity, engendering monocultural life that is easily managed and controlled to breed massive profits. In this, corporate animal agriculture is part of a monocultural sphere of plantations that turn our planet away from the complexities of biodiversity and regenerative ecosystems. Texts like Raw reveal the biopower of hierarchical arrangements that pave the way for a destructively transparent path that is easily accessible and unidirectional. But the corporate path that reduces all life—plant and animal—to profit will inevitably light the flame that will burn down the Plantationocene, leaving it in the ruins of gothic.