Language & Ecology Online Journal (2004) available from http://
www.ecoling.net/journal.html
Poetic
Activism and Pigs
by
This special issue started with
an article which described how the discourse of the pork industry devalues the
lives of pigs and contributes to a form of farming with damaging ecological
consequences. This makes pork industry discourse a fine target to challenge
with a bit of poetic activism. William Hedgepeth's The
Hog Book provides an example of a discourse which poetically challenges
pork industry discourse and powerfully reconstructs the image of pigs. For Hedgepeth, pigs are not machines, objects, or resources, they are 'creatures of boundless charm and
enchantment' (Hedgepeth 1998:160).
The creativity of Hedgepeth's counter-discourse can be seen right from the
start of the book:
DEDICATED…to
the millions of porkers who've gone to their final resting sites inside us…I'd
like to call them all by name, but the list is long and I cannot remember. (Hedgepeth 1998)
The human-body-is-pig-grave
metaphor here resists the industry's 'To be a pig is to be pork' ideology, and
the dedication provides a very unusual way of emphasising the individuality of
pigs.
The Hog Book challenges mainstream and pork industry
discourses through the use of parody and a good dose of humour:
"Hog," to many people means any obscenely rotund beast with a tropism for mud who trundles filthily along oinking (Hedgepeth 1998, 21)
[In an artificial insemination system] sows are viewed as simple pork machines and boars are vaguely undesirable characters who happen to make sperm…[the system has] the aim of turning out germ-free, computer-recorded pieces of living pigmeat. (ibid :99)
To provide a 'new definition of hogness', Hedgepeth uses intertextual borrowing (Fairclough 1992:101) to apply
discourses from other domains to the human-pig relationship. One of these intertextual borrowings makes use of the discourse of
psychology:
Cultural
Hogrophobia…is a socially institutionalised fear of hogness (ibid: 6)
We
rely upon the hog in many ways for support and for a sense of definition -
definition of ourselves, for instance, as presumably superior, handsomer and
all-round more legitimate creatures. It's in this way that we subconsciously
employ the hog (ibid 200)
Paralleling self-help psychology,
Hedgepeth claims that in coming to terms with hogrophobia you can develop a 'new hog consciousness'
(ibid: 197) and 'eventually emerge as a changed and better person' (ibid: x).
This change is constructed not just as psychological growth but spiritual
growth too, through intertextual borrowings from the
domain of spiritual discourse:
True 'hogritude' - the mystical essence and condition of being an
actual hog - demands extended periods of meditation. (ibid: 173)
The
all-pervasive essence of Hog had resonated across time and insinuated itself
deep into…our collective mind. [We are] awaiting some hopeful opportunity to
transcend ourselves…[and pigs provide]…an ideal agent
for inducing us to break our narrow containments…and thereby scale new heights
of enlightenment and psychic liberation…(ibid 198)
In this way, Hedgepeth
resists mainstream discourse and replaces it with an entirely new way of
constructing pigs. There is no hint in Hedgepeth's
works that this new way is somehow 'correct', or the only possible way of
reconstructing pigs. The Hog Book therefore forces open the door of
limited mainstream discourse, takes some bold steps out to create new
alternatives, but, crucially, leaves the door wide open to other novel ways of
constructing pigs. This is the mark of poetic activism.
And the reason why poetic
activism is so necessary in the case of pigs becomes clear on reading the
following from The Hog Book:
And so we go on about the routine exploitation of our hogs in the name of Agriculture or Industry & Commerce or Better Pork; and in the end it all contributes to the vast-scale devaluation of life itself, for one cannot deny the legitimacy of another creature without diminishing one's own (Hedgepeth 1998:199)
Notes
This brief article is based on Stibbe,
References
Fairclough,
Hedgepeth, W. (1998). The Hog Book (2nd edition,
1st edition 1978).