Recently, after reading the first chapter from Judith Butler’s Frames of War, I have been considering the idea of “precarious lives” and how some lives are differentially more at risk than others. Butler realizes that “we mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others” because of, what she calls, a “cultural reflex” (Butler 36). The “cultural reflex” we have, is born from the culture we grow up in and reflected in the societal norms we unconsciously obey, in short we are almost “invited” to view some lives with more meaning than those, when lost, we are taught to ignore or celebrate. We are called upon by Butler to question ourselves; Who did I grieve? Whose death did I ignore or even celebrate? Whose lives matter the most to me? While taking the time to critically question whose lives we remember, though maybe not particularly positively, we must question which lives we forget entirely. Deploying Marita Sturken’s discussion of Milan Kundera’s idea of “strategic” or “organized forgetting” (Sturken 7), I have arrived at perhaps the most forgotten, yet simultaneously the most visible lives, the ones on our dinner plates, the precarious lives of farm animals.

The façade around the lives of animals is perpetuated by the history and a culture we live in that normalizes, trivializes, and in fact, profits off their slaughter. Through these processes our “cultural reflex” is in fact cognitive dissonance. Most of us believe we are peaceful people, who wouldn’t kill anyone let alone anything, however, we live with the unconscious feeling of discomfort when we violate our morals when we eat every day. We continue to, though, because it’s culturally accepted.

This problem has only gotten worse because our rapidly urbanizing, industrializing, and globalizing world. Now, very few people are farmers. Few of us see the individual animals, the looks of joy, fear, or pain in their eyes, or their voice at all. The process from animal to packaged meat has never been more hidden and abstract, and “Cruelty… prefers abstraction” (Foer 102).

The call to action here is that of remembrance; to resist the “organized forgetting” implemented by profit seeking corporations and normalized by society. Once we recognize ourselves as enmeshed in society and that our “body is a social phenomenon” that is “exposed to others”, we understand that we are “vulnerable by definition” (Butler 33). Butler conceives that we don’t even exist without others, so if we are so bound up in the lives of others my “I” is, at least partially, “we” (Butler 35). Therefore, if some are differentially more at risk than others, my responsibility should be towards them as well, because they constitute another “I” in the “we” I am bound up in.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Eating Animals . New York : Back Bay Books , 2009.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.