The burden of canons & the freedom of philistines: Undoing Eurocentric civilization

"Go out upon the street; choose ten white men and ten colored men. Which can carry on and preserve American civilization?"
The whites.
"Well, then."
You evidently consider that a compliment.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: Toward An Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 146.  

I am teaching two sections of Intro to Philosophy this semester. I recently sat and figured out that half of the days I am teaching material written by women and/or philosophers of color. I was kinda proud of myself. But, you know, it is not like white men make up anything close to 50 percent of the global population, nor have they produced half of the world's philosophy. The only way one could feel proud of producing a syllabus with 50% non-white men is by adopting the worse standards of what should be included. That is to say, the standards of including what everyone else includes, which got us here in the first place. And yet, I will admit, it was kinda hard to get to even 50%. I feel constrained by what I feel I should be teaching my students, and feeling like everyone expects them to have read things that other people will recognize as important texts in intro. I feel sometimes like I would be letting down my students if they left my class, and couldn't at least talk about some of the stuff everyone would expect them to have read. They should be able to have at least something in common with everyone else in philosophy. At least a few things--a little Plato and a little Descartes, spiced with Nietzsche.

As a matter of fact, it becomes really hard to imagine a course that reduces white men (and white people in general, and men in general) to something resembling demographics of the world. Or perhaps harder still, it is hard to imagine the sort of person who would design such a course. What person could get rid of all the beautiful texts that inform the culture around us?

* * *

I have increasing become interested in what could be called negative conceptual personas. These are ways of understanding the world that consist of figures and attitudes that have normally been abjected; seen as beings who must be repressed, resisted, and preferably destroyed. To cite at least a few examples there is the clown of Adorno, the idiot of Deleuze and Guattari and furthered in Isabelle Stengers, the concept of stupidity in Avital Ronell and furthered in Jacques Derrida. These are figures that can serve to slow everything down, that can ask questions whose answers everyone knows and that goes without saying. The idiot, for example, might be resistant to the urgent syllogism of the national security state. You know the one, "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done."  But there is more that such negative conceptual personas might allow.

Often, when I am telling colleagues that we need to include less eurocentric work in our introduction to philosophy classes, and undergraduate classes in general, I am often told things like, "No one here knows how to teach outside of the Western tradition." Or I am told things like, "It is great that you are bringing in all of those different traditions, but I am not trained in that." They say it like it is destiny, like a law of nature. They say these excuses like there is no way to change. I am not asking them to do scholarship in those areas (though, it would be nice), or to provide graduate courses on these areas (though, again). All I am saying is to incorporate diverse thinkers and texts in your undergraduate courses. But I realize that for many of these people, what they are afraid of is transforming from the sage on the stage into the fool on the hill. That is, they are not just saying they don't really think those areas and thinkers matter, and that they are unwilling to spend even a little bit of extra time to make a more pluralistic syllabus. They are also deeply afraid of appearing stupid in front of their students. Sometimes things don't change without a bit of a stupidity and an army of fools.

One of the works that I have been obsessed with since it came out, is Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche. This is a book in which the main protagonists are all negative conceptual personas. The heroes of the book are the losers. Indeed, Bull challenges us to read like losers. He explains, "In order to read like a loser, you have to accept the argument, but to turn its consequences against yourself. So, rather than thinking of ourselves as dynamite, or questioning Nietzsche’s extravagant claim, we will immediately think (as we might if someone said this to us in real life) that there may be an explosion; that we might get hurt; that we are too close to someone who could harm us. Reading like losers will make us feel powerless and vulnerable" (p. 36). Another hero of Bull's book is the philistine. As Bull reminds us, the anarchist and atheist were originally created by others as terms to attack their enemies. Originally, no one self-styled themselves anarchists or atheists. "In the sixteenth century, therefore, atheism, like philistinism today, was everywhere condemned but nowhere to be found. Yet by denouncing atheism, theologians mapped out an intellectual position for their phantom adversaries that was eventually filled by people who actually espoused the arguments the theologians had given them" (p. 8). The philistine, for those of you who remember your Nietzsche, "is the antithesis of a son of the muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture" (Untimely Meditations).   But I want to follow up the question that Bull asks later (though our answers will be different from his), "Could something as inherently unpromising as philistinism be an opening to anything at all? And if so, where are philistinism's new seas?" (p. 26).

* * *

Back in February (I know in blogging time that is the dark ages), Jon Cogburn at NewApps asked for reading suggestions for trying to get analytically trained philosophers to understand some of the stakes of what is going on in continental philosophy. Here is the original thread, and here is the follow-up thread.  A somewhat sad and predictable pattern occurs at first, with almost exclusively male and white names being suggested for being read. However, this changes as Robin James, Peter Gratton, Ed Kazarian, and whole host of excellent anonymous commentators suggest a variety of readings, and make a strong case for prioritizing diversity in readings, rather than reducing the analytic and continental divide as the only one in philosophy, and a debate that is principally between white dudes. Jon Cogburn explains that he is "Let me reiterate that in the extended sense of 'pluralist' I think that a pluralist reading group would not be nearly as helpful. Since we're all busy, we don't have time to study everything under the sun. Given these strong constraints it makes sense to read books that will help analytics best understand the maximum number of talks at SPEP that they would otherwise not understand given their poor training in so many important areas of philosophy. Philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, American Pragmatism, feminism, or the new pluralist philosophy of mind (all things suggested above) in general would be poor subject matters with a group with this as an end-goal. German Idealism and Phenomenology are very good subject matters for this end-goal." I know, right? But, at the same time, I recognize here the very same arguments that constrain my own syllabus designs. The desire to create philosophical commons, the belief that teaching too much stuff outside of the canon is to do a disservice to your students (or colleagues). It is to open up your students to ridicule for not really understanding the stakes of most philosophical discussions. This is why I wanted to include a discussion of the very possibility of syllabuses for Ferguson.

There were many smart responses to this, and I suggest reading the comments. However, here is part of one of my comments from those threads: "This goes back to the post here on New APPS about citation practices, as well. The names that we immediately think of, and think of as important, are bound up with a whole history that ignores why we cite some names instead of others. I agree with Robin James, sometimes we got to knock 'em down and rebuild. [...] And maybe Fanon or Arendt or whomever are not as canonical (maybe?), but how cool would it be if your reading group just pretended they were? What if one of the analytic folks were talking to a SPEPer one day and said, "Well, I haven't really read Husserl, but I read this great book on Fanon, and I was wondering...", or "you mention Derrida on play and difference, and I haven't read him, but Maria Lugones argues..." that would be a better philosophical world. And if the SPEPer hadn't read seriously Fanon or Lugones as important intellectual figures, it would be a great kick in the rear." It is a bit of a utopian impulse, but it is also one that requires a type of philistinism. It requires someone who honestly does not understand what the culture is suppose to be, what is normally counted as great, or foundational, or enduring. In the mixed up world of the philistine, the ephemeral becomes the lasting and the marginal becomes the central. The philistine designing her syllabus is not interested in preserving and carrying on the civilization around. Perhaps because she knows that is not a compliment.

The Invisible Molecular Moral Forces of William James, Or, The Hunt for the Misquotation.

This is a random story about a (mis)quotation of William James.
So, I was flipping through Jean Wahl's Vers le concret: études d'histoire de la philosophie contemporaine : William James, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel (and, side note, why is Jean Wahl basically not translated into English, or out of print?), and he had a quotation from William James that I had not seen before. Here is the quotation in French:
<> 
However, the footnote was a little wrong, and so when I went to check the suggested text of James, I didn't find it. So, I rendered the French into English (poorly, I might add), and googled it. When I did, I got several pages that suggested this:
"I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride." You can see one of the many examples here.
So, cool, now I have a quotation, no problem, we're off to the races. Except, of course, when I put this quotation into google, I got a bunch of weird hits. Besides a lot of those quotation aggregator type sites, there were a whole bunch of new age books, alongside Christian self-help books, and Arianna Huffington posted it to her facebook page once. And honestly, many of those books just randomly slotted that quotation with no reason why. It was weird. Also, needless to say, these fine books of scholarships had no citations to help me find the original. So, then I decided to just google William James alongside a shorter, unique phrase of molecular moral forces. And then I was rewarded with the actual quotation. From a letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, June 7, 1899: "As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.—You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself."
There isn't really a point to this story. I don't know how the quotation first drifted. And I find it really odd that the strange quotation has ended up in so many different, and awkward, places (not as weird as the Beckett fail again quotation, but still). Also, we need more Jean Wahl in translation. You can see other tracked down misquotations here, and here.

New PhaenEx special issue on Animal and Food Ethics

This is just a quick note to let you know that Christiane Bailey and Chloë Taylor have done a great job editing the new special issue of PhaenEx on Animal and Food Ethics. The issue also features an essay I wrote.

How to teach intro to philosophy

A better title might be how I teach intro to philosophy. In general, I see the intro to philosophy course as a way of teaching students how to engage primary sources of philosophy in reading, writing, and talking. As such, I don't see the principle purpose of the course is to introduce students to the various subfields within philosophy. So, in terms of syllabus design, I usually pair a reading from the canonical tradition with a text that is usually at least a little outside of the canonical tradition. This has two important consequences: (1) It really helps to get the students in the work of comparing and contrasting works we read. In an intro class, that sort of work could be something that needs scaffolding, and starting with the syllabus really helps. (2) It gives the students a large breadth in philosophy. So they see that philosophy can be produced outside of the 1.5 million or so square miles that usually comprise the production of most texts read in intro classes. So, if I was to teach an intro class tomorrow, it would probably look something like this (excluding departmental demands):

Block One:
Plato's Crito and Apology. These are both fairly classical texts in intro to philosophy.
We move from the Apology of Plato's Socrates, to the apology, the closing statements, of the Russian punk feminist band Pussy Riot (their closing statements can be found here). These statements, which are explicitly philosophical, also help contemporize Plato's own work. From Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's closing statement: "We were searching for real sincerity and simplicity, and we found these qualities in the yurodstvo [the holy foolishness] of punk."
We move from Pussy Riot, to Henry Oruka "Sage Philosophy" and "Philosophical Sagacity in African Philosophy" (h/t to Peter Gratton for the Oruka suggestion). Oruka's work on Sage Philosophy is obviously contrasted to the the punk sensibilities of Plato's Socrates and Pussy Riot.

Block Two:
We read Plato's The Symposium. Again, a traditional reading in intro to philosophy classes.
We move from that text to John Cameron Mitchell's film Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The film obviously references Aristophanes' talk in "The Origin of Love", and in general you can read the film as commentary on The Symposium.
However, both of those texts focus on gay male or heterosexual love. So we move to Maria Lugones' essay "Playfulness, "World"-Traveling, and Loving Perception". While not an necessarily a contrast with the previous texts, Lugones provides us with another iteration, in a different direction, on the thematic of love.

Block Three:
We start with Descartes' Mediations, again a traditional text in intro to philo courses.
(Depending on the time, we might watch The Matrix).
We then pair Descartes with Shankara's The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination (h/t to Jason Wirth for this suggestion). Shankara is a nondualist Indian philosopher, and his views of reality and nondualism contrast with Descartes. His views of students and teachers is also a good place to revisit the question of the practice of being a philosopher that we had explored in block one, this time adding the ideas of Descartes' methodologies and Shankara's notions of discipleship.

Block Four
These three texts probably get taught equally in intro classes, but they work so well together.
(1) Nietzsche's The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life.
(2) Simone de Beauvoir's introduction and conclusion to The Second Sex.
(3) William James' The Will to Believe.

So, a few questions for you, dear readers. (1) How do you approach your intro to philo courses? (2) What texts do you find pair well? Are there obvious pairing that I am missing? (3) Any major criticisms here?

Poseur Alert about Poseur Alert

I have been thinking of writing a blog post about Dominic Pettman's wonderful review of Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking. I might still, but I instead I feel compelled to write about something else. I noticed today that Andrew Sullivan has listed the review as part of his poseur alert series. For those not familiar, Sullivan occasionally quotes something, and usually without commentary, labels it a poseur alert. As he has explained, "Poseur alerts are awarded for passages of prose that stand out for pretension, vanity and really bad writing designed to look like profundity." And sometimes I agree, like Colin McGinn's horrible justifications for his sexual harassment. But usually it just refers to some subject being subjugated to intellectual interrogation that Sullivan does not believe merits that attention. Often done in the cadences of American cultural and media studies, and/or continental philosophy. So, not just Pettman, but also people like James Williams. You get the idea. One has the impression that if you gave Sullivan the collected works of Freud, he would scribble 'poseur alert' on their spines. Or, hell, he probably did that on the first critique of Kant. Here, I'll do it for him:

Poseur Alert

Our apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive, and therefore is always varying. Hence through apprehension alone we can never determine whether this manifold considered as object of experience is simultaneous or sequential. We cannot determine this unless something underlying in experience is there always--i.e., something enduring and permanent of which all variation and simultaneity are only so many ways (modes of time) in which the permanent exists. 

Actually, "pretension, vanity and really bad writing", hmm... .

And that is part of the point, here. It has been a trend of certain people to use what they feel to be bad writing to reject taking seriously intellectual positions. As someone who has done a lot of work on Judith Butler, I find this pretension beyond annoying. If I have to hear one more time that Butler won a bad writing award, I think I will lend them a copy of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and say, "If you want some bad writing!". Look, I think writing matters. We should probably strive to be good writers (though, I think I have bigger spectrum for styles that count as good), but the quality of writing is not an intellectual reason to denounce a thinker.

Lastly, there is no way to write a post on poseur alerts, without doing something that looks like a poseur alert, so here is mine.

Whenever I hear the word poseur, I am immediately transported back to high school. I was a teen in the 90s, of the goth/punk/glam variety. It was a common insult in those groups to refer to other people as poseurs. Basically, we had grown up before Hot Topic, listening to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. As we got older we discovered The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc. This all seems so terribly silly now, but what comes next is even sillier. We of course labeled as poseurs all those younger goths who shopped at Hot Topic, and listened to Korn and Slipknot and whatever else it was they listened to. This is was a time period when a band you heard of the day before, you used to look down your nose at someone who haven't already heard of them. What, you like NIN but you haven't heard of Skinny Puppy?! That sort of thing. See, calling someone else a poseur was all a part of the pretension of that subculture; it was all a part of boundary maintenance and hiding our fears of incompetence. When I hear grown people refer to someone as a poseur, I can't help but immediately think, What are you afraid of?.  This is clearly not just a problem of Andrew Sullivan, but of a broader mentality that attacks certain styles of writing. You know the kind I speak of.

Though, the fact that Andrew Sullivan once included himself in the poseur alert was nice. I still thinks he should stop calling people poseurs, and just go listen to some Nine Inch Nails (or, whatever).

Update: Hi Andrew Sullivan readers! I will add that I appreciate his tendency to post dissents on his blog.

Killing Animals in Video Games

So, Cameron Kunzelman has two short articles out in Five Out of Ten. I purchased the issue for $5.60 (£3.50), and you should too. There is even profit sharing.* He has two articles, one on second gaming (which I will try to get to later), and the other playing Minecraft while vegetarian.

I actually first played Minecraft because of Cameron. He nagged and insisted, and really, it wasn't so hard to convince me I should play video games rather than do my work. Like Cameron, when I play video games (not often) I usually play as a vegetarian/vegan. In most video games that means not eating meat that occurs/drops as premade. It does not usually mean avoiding hunting or domesticating. In Minecraft (at least when I last played, some two years ago), in order to eat meat, you had to hunt and kill animals, that squealed when you hit them. This is Cameron's comments about the one time he decided he'd rather kill the virtual pig than die (also virtually):

I hit it once. It squealed and snorted and tried to run. I chased it. I hit it with a shovel and it tried to run, panicked, and didn’t make it very far. I hit it until it tipped over and pieces of meat flew out of its body.
I’m haunted by it. I’ve killed hundreds of AI humans in video games. I have executed civilians. I have ended civilizations. I’ve cleared out a fictional Dubai of all living beings. I’ve made a wasteland of digital worlds and preemptively struck with nuclear weapons.

Cameron has some theories about why one is perhaps different than the other for him. You have to read it to find out, but here is why it is for me in Minecraft. For those who have never played, Minecraft is the ultimate sandbox game, you mine stuff and you craft it, and you decide what you want to do in the game. Want to build a floating library made out of glass and towers and light and hanging gardens? You can do it. Want to build a replica of the land from The Game of Thrones? You can do it. You get the idea. Minecraft is also weirdly evil. Monsters come out at dark, unless you have light and walls and swords. Look, I am loath to link, but this Penny Arcade comic covers it all quickly and humorously. One, two. Everything in Minecraft is pure resource. Everything is meant to be manipulated, transformed, used. And if you don't make light and walls, the monsters will get you. Using animals in this context always bothered me, because the idea that animals are pure resource is exactly the thing I am always fighting against. Or maybe it is just part of the whole techne tou bios of veganism I have talked about elsewhere.

*Look, I understand it is a weird and roundabout way to give money to someone. It would drive economists insane. That is, honestly, a good enough reason to do it. Buy Five Out of Ten to give Cameron a dollar, and you drive an economist insane. Good call!

Beware the Cyborgs? On Augmented Reality Glasses and related matters.

By now you have all heard about Google Glass, probably more than you wish. For those of you who don't know what I mean, here is a decent overview. And of course, there are plenty of developers for augmented reality goggles, not just Google Glass. Anyway, there is already a movement to try to ban goggle glasses in certain public spaces, (and despite what Eric Schmidt says, these concerns are clearly not just from people "afraid of the future"). I really suggest reading and following the blog, Stop the Cybrogs. As you can see, the blog is about more than just wearable computing and augmented reality glasses, but more broadly, about the way that certain Big Data and computerizations are producing certain realities. This Ars Technica article/interview is really useful for an overview.

What is at stake here isn't any sort of traditional romanticization of privacy, but rather, a very different question is at stake. As Adam from StC has put it, google glasses has the potential to "destroys having multiple identities" and that "You're never going to see a stranger as a stranger again." Remember the time when we all thought the internet was going to make it so we got to be all genderqueer deconstructionist deleuzian radicals? Good times. But rather than the internet making it so that we have so many identities, we are all beginning to confront the reality that instead the internet is also good for fixing Macro and Molar identities. Or, as the StC puts it:

In the past interacting in the physical world was “private by default” and “public through effort” whereas, on the Internet, the reverse is true: What we do is “public by default” and “private through effort.”
Our point is that with wearable’s and the internet of things the physical world also becomes “public by default” and “private through effort.” unless we actively work to replace friction by law and by norms.

Clearly, this isn't some sort of wide-reaching critique of the internet, or a claim that there are not radical possibilities and realities of the internet, or anything of the sort. And, I know for most of us, this is all old, old hat. But yet, I think it is important to remember that Donna Haraway might have gotten this one really, really wrong. Rather than cyborgs being fundamentally hybrid beings, they are vectors of the the digitalization of everyday life. There is something about the singular identity and the removal of the stranger that is philosophically dense here.


Also, I dunno, it is part of my protracted silence for a while on this blog. I went on the job market, and I was encouraged by many to minimize my digital footprint (I did some stuff for things I said as an undergrad and early grad student, but couldn't bring myself to delete and remove most of my extensive online self). Who knows if that was or was not a good idea. But somehow even in the supposed pro-free speech and free thinking world of academia, I thought it was a good idea to curate my digital existence and enter a period of digital silence.

FEA: On Kelly Oliver, disavowal, and the moral community

The first post in the symposium is from Kelly Oliver, who should need no introduction. If for some reason you are reading my blog, and you haven't read her book Animal Lessons, you should fix that right now (you should also read Chloë Taylor's review of Animal Lessons in the special issue of Hypatia).

Oliver's contribution is fundamentally about the avowal and the disavowal of animals other (both about specific and real other animals, and at the same time how the play of avowal and disavowal with regards to nonhuman animals come back to also structure and produce relationships among human animals). She points out that perhaps animal studies can be benefitted from engagements with specific psychoanalytic theories, particularly:

 Freud’s notion of phobia and Kristeva’s reinterpretation of phobia as abjection go some distance toward understanding the dynamics of avowal and disavowal at the heart of our ambivalence toward animals and animality, particularly our own animality. (p. 497)  

Through recourse to theories and phobias and abjection, we can begin to access the particular ways that we displace our own particular psychic constructions onto nonhuman others and ourselves. Oliver points to the ambivalent role of the pit bull, and she also points out the ways this ambivalence often has particular racial codings (added in part by the research of Erin Tarver, and I suggest you go and read the whole thing). Oliver focuses on this ambivalence as foundational to our determining who is, and who is not, part of the moral community. As she writes:

Indeed, I would argue that our sense of a moral community is essentially linked to the ambivalent function that animals and animality play in our fantasies about what is cruelty, what is innocence, and what is natural. (p. 494) 

This contention should remind many readers of this blog about discussions we have been having, such as the relationship between ethics and innocence. By examining the ambivalence of animals as figures and figurations for the moral community, we must turn our attention to what Oliver, in her Animal Lessons, refers to as "sustainable ethics" (see particularly pp. 303-306, this sustainable ethics should also bring to mind Matt Calarco on indistinction and Bull on climate change ). As Oliver explains in Animal Lessons:

What Derrida calls hyperbolic ethics demands that we never give up exploring our own fantasies, especially those in which we are the heroes, the good guys, the just and the true, fighting against the forces of evil and darkness--the fantasies in which we are humane and the others behave like animals. (p. 304)

This is a sense of the ethical in which not only the question of who gets to count in our moral communities radically under review, but the very right and possibilities of our being the counters, of our justness and correctness to count, all radically challenged.
Taylor, in her review of Animal Lessons, writes:

Oliver's book begins and ends as a work of mourning for her cat Kaos: the book is dedicated to Kaos and opens with a poem to her; the conclusion to the book justifies this dedication. (p. 675) 

My own article in the same issue deals explicitly with this question of mourning and disavowal. One the one hand, I explore the ways that mourning is part of a reality that allows  for avowal of relationships and kinships. As I wrote, "Mourning is a practice that opposes disavowal. Mourning both celebrates and grieves our precarious lives. It seeks connections, discovers secret kinships, and recognizes intersubjective relations." However, the threat of mourning often forces a type of disavowal in order to continue functioning, in order to continue existing and relating in the same world as others. Again, I wrote:

Those of us who value the lives of other animals live in a strange, parallel world to that of other people. Every day we are reminded of the fact that we care for the existence of beings whom other people manage to ignore, to unsee and unhear as if the only traces of the beings’ lives are the parts of their bodies rendered into food: flesh transformed into meat. To tear up, or to have trouble functioning, to feel that moment of utter suffocation of being in a hall of death is something rendered completely socially unintelligible. Most people's response is that we need therapy, or that we can't be sincere. So most of us work hard not to mourn. We refuse mourning in order to function, to get by. But that means most of us, even those of us who are absolutely committed to fighting for animals, regularly have to engage in disavowal. (p. 568) 

The ambivalence of animal others are connected to our ambivalences, our abilities to create connections and kinships. And that is why, following Oliver following Kristeva, we have to risk ourselves in the abject, if we are to have a chance for a sustainable ethics. 


Go read all of Oliver's contribution to the symposium (again, here). 

Feminists Encountering Animals

Sorry for the silence here. My mother had surgery recently (she is fine, but still in the hospital), and that has been soaking almost all of my time.

As many of you know, I have a forthcoming article in Hypatia on Judith Butler and animals. I wrote an abstract, but I prefer the what Lori Gruen and Kari Weil say about in the introduction to the special issue:

What bodies are edible and consumable and what lives are grievable are questions that James Stanescu takes up at the meat counter of the grocery store at the beginning of his essay “Species Trouble:  Judith Butler, Mourning, and the Precarious Lives of Animals.”  From the insight that both social and personal pressures are operating in the disavowal of mourning for animals, Stanescu expands Butler’s notion of precariousness as “a way of thinking connections, of claiming kinship and relations. . . . Precariousness is a place for thinking the ethical because it begins with the Other, rather than with the self.” Recognition of vulnerability and of finitude, Stanescu argues, is recognition of our precarious animal lives, lives we honor through mourning. In disavowing mourning, we are not just making such lives unintelligible but are also denying our animality and foreclosing our connections to other animals.  By allowing ourselves to mourn, however, even at the grocery store, we can start making a difference for animals, humans and others.

The article is viewable in early view on the Wiley Hypatia site, but for those without institutional access, I have heard a rumor that you can find it over here.

However, from this special issue also arose a symposium, and it is very exciting. Much more importantly, you will be able to interact with the authors as well as read their papers! All of this starts on July 9th.You can find out who the authors are, and more details over here. And trust me, it is an exciting and amazing group of feminist scholars they have assembled. Assuming I can get some time for myself, I will certainly be participating both over there, and here as well. But regardless, you (YES, YOU!) should follow and participate.

A micro-picture of what is wrong with out health system

So, my wife has been sick, and she was kinda worried it could be strep, so we took her took a local medstop yesterday. She went in, got tested. It wasn't strep, instead this is what was written on her Patient Education Form:

VIRAL PHARYNGITIS (Sore Throat)
Your throat pain is due to an infection called 'Viral Pharyngitis', commonly known as 'Sore Throat'. This is a contagious illness. It is spread through the air by coughing, kissing, or by touching others after touching your mouth or nose. Symptoms include throat pain worse with swallowing, aching all over, headache and fever. This illness does not require treatment with an antibiotic. [Emphasis added]

So, the doctor gave her two prescriptions, one of which was for Amoxicillin (an antibiotic). Why? No real reason. It won't treat the sickness. It merely adds to the costs of health care in this country. If taken, it stands the chance of creating antibiotic resistant bacteria. It will certainly decrease the taker's antibiotic effectiveness for the next six months. And, there is also the slim chance of a major health consequences.

Why do I write about this? Because when we talk about the health care system, we usually are talking about the major actors: insurance companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and the various governmental agencies and laws. And all of those are tied in together, but we also need to start changing the way that cost-benefit analysis of individual doctors. On some level we can say this requires patient knowledge (knowledge to know when to ignore a prescription), but that is obviously unrealistic. Anyway, this is another example that we have two problems with our health care system. One is that we are usually underinsured, and underprotected. The other is that people who are insured are frequently given too much care. If you want to know more, read Jonathan Cohn's Sick as a good place to start.

I'm back

So, I know it has been almost exactly 4 months since I updated this. Sorry about that. It was a very whirlwind time for me, and I will get to that in a moment. However, some maintenance issues first.

(1) I know I missed responding to several emails. It wasn't personal (more on that below!), but if you have an outstanding email from me, let me know. I will get back to you this time (promise!).

(2) At some point I stopped reading other blogs, as well (sorry!). When I checked it again I had over a thousand blog posts unread, so I just told it to restart. What did I miss? Any great new blogs to read? Anybody release new books or important articles? Anybody got new jobs? Any massive wars? As always, self-promotion is encouraged.


Now, what I have been up to. I got married. I went on a honeymoon. I dealt with some serious family existential crises. I dealt with some family health issues. I moved. Three times. Seriously, I did three moves since I last updated this blog. Okay, I am not going to expand upon the wedding and other such things. It will be pretty saccharine and self-indulgent. So, if that isn't your thing, if maybe you decided to watch the Republican Presidential debate tonight and are afraid for our future, you might want to stop reading now. For the rest of you, don't say I didn't warn you!

The wedding was wonderful. It was held in the Cuban Club in Ybor City in Tampa, FL. The Cuban Club is a gorgeous building, which a rich and interesting historical past. Also, even more importantly, according to Ghost Hunters, it is haunted. I saw no personal signs of this, but I was a little distracted. The ceremony was presided and written by HJM from Prodigies and Monsters. It was beautiful, and included readings from Judy Grahn and Audre Lorde. To give you a taste, here are our vows:

SCU: I, James K. Stanescu, take you, Sarah Wright, to be my best friend, my most trusted confidante, my favorite being, my love, from this day forward. I promise to always be kind, patient, attentive, caring, gracious, and mostly good-humored, even in the midst of grading finals. I promise to never take our relationship for granted, and to daily renew the commitment we make today, straight into the hereafter.

SARAH: I, Sarah Wright, take you, James K. Stanescu, to be my best friend, my most trusted confidante, my favorite being, my love, from this day forward. I promise to always be kind, patient, attentive, caring, gracious, and mostly good-humored, even in the midst of my residency. I promise to never take our relationship for granted, and to daily renew the commitment we make today, straight into the hereafter.

Yeah, pretty awesome.

Also, Sarah's younger brother is a professional actor, and he performed Mike Birbiglia's hilarious D-U-Why?! from This American Life. You can hear the original here.

The reception was all vegan Latin inspired menu, with a 17 piece big band, the Cigar City Big Band. The groom's cake (that's a thing, just in case you didn't know. Grooms get their own cakes, it seems) was a chocolate, peanut butter, and banana mousse. It was decorated to look like Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Click here to see a picture of it. MLA of P+M set up a twitter account as if I was live tweeting my own wedding, and several of the people involved with the wedding added their own mock tweets. Feel free to go laugh at me over here. Actually I am thinking of using it as my own twitter account now.

The honeymoon was awesome (except for some weird drama some of you know about), and I don't really feel like going into all the other stuff. But, my new plan is to return to regular schedule blogging. Hope you all have been well.

I'm happy to be back, back again.

PhiloSophia Conference wrap up

I think it was a splendid conference, and I think all the conference organizers should be proud of a job well done. I saw a lot of great papers, sat on an excellent Judith Butler panel, and many wonderful conversations. I am also firmly of the belief that more conferences need to end in margaritas, veggie tacos, and a dance party. I treated the conference like a secret animal conference, and I think it says a lot about changes in the field that I can go to a conference not on animals and still manage to see about a paper a panel on animals. Though a lot of that, no doubt, is do to the influence of Kelly Oliver, whom I wished I had a chance to speak to. And all the Vanderbilt students I meet were considerably friendly and I think a lot of smart things are going on with those students. I did get to meet Dr. J, though sadly briefly. Though I just heard about potential flooding in Memphis, so I hope everything is all right. Lastly, I did get to meet Cindy Willett, who is remarkably nice person and doing very interesting work. Indeed, all the Emory students I meet and talked with generous and intelligent.

I know that because of change in geography the make up of the conference will be different next year, if I can find the funds to go, I will certainly plan to try and attend next year's PhiloSophia.

Will I see you at PhiloSophia?

I will be at PhiloSophia hosted this year at Vanderbilt all day on Friday and Saturday. I am really looking forward to it. If any of you are going to be there, let me know. I will also be presenting on Judith Butler and non-anthropocentric ethics.

PIC Conference Thank Yous!

The PIC Conference is now over, and I am safely back in GA writing up exams and editing papers. The conference itself seemed to go well from my perspective. It was my first time organizing a conference, and there are changes I would make, but I think it went well regardless.

There are many, many thanks I need to give out:

First of all, a huge thank you to Cecile Lawrence, who was called a conference co-organizer but who actually took on the lion's share of work for the conference. It would have been nothing but a CFP without her tireless work at the conference.

Matt Applegate, who gave me a place to crash, drove me around, picked up Peter Gratton when my flight got canceled, help set up everything, and generally kept me sane and grounded.

Gabriel Piser, who became a tech support person for the conference, with zero warning or official training.

The various PIC students who came, asked questions, moderated panels, and generally helped make the conference run.

Peter Gratton, who was an excellent choice for a keynote. He wrote a very smart address for the conference. He looked over the abstracts accepted before hand, and tailored his address to take up themes from various papers that were given. He helped promote the conference on his blog, in person, and over emails. He came to panels, asked questions, socialized with presenters, and treated everyone in an egalitarian fashion. He was also remarkably nice about all issues concerning payments and what have you. So, think about asking him to keynote at your conferences.

Besides those thank you, I met lots of people I really enjoyed. Glad to meet you (and I hope you know who you are if you are reading my blog). In general, the blogging community was really great in person. Devin Shaw was a delight to meet and hang out with, though he encouraged my drinking more than I should! Ben Woodard gave an excellent presentation, and my only regret was not getting to talk to him more. Dan Barber was remarkably fun to spend time with, and has convinced me to the virtues of the phrase "buying back in" as opposed to "doubling down".


Anyway, now that it is over, I hope to get back to my regularly scheduled blogging. Email if there are important posts I have missed, and also email if I have forgotten to respond to your comments or emails!

Two Links, a Note, and a Video

This blog has been basically on hiatus as March has been rather time intensive for me.

Link 1) The Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution: A Conference starts tomorrow. I flew out yesterday 9 am, but got stuck over night in Dulles, where I am still am. So, I won't be in until later this evening.
For those who follow the academic blogosphere, there will be many people from that virtual place gathered together actually. Including myself and one-half of Prodigies + Monsters, Peter Gratton is the keynote. Devin Shaw of The Notes Taken, Ben Woodward, David Kishik, Dan Barber of AUFS, and I am sure other people I don't know or have forgotten. It should be a blast.

Link 2)
Eileen Joy just sent me an email telling me that the awesome journal postmedieval has a special issue on the Animal Turn with free pdf and html access through the end of March. So, go look.


Note: That brings me to my note. I thank Eileen Joy for her email because March has been a terrible month for in terms of keeping up with other blogs. So, let me know about the most important posts out there, things I should know about but haven't noticed.


Video: The Kills have a new album coming out. The first single is beyond amazing!

Not sure if I mentioned this before, but...

... I have ridiculously amazing colleagues. If any of you follow this blog, thank you.

Some thoughts on writing the dissertation

You might have noticed that my blogging has fallen off of late. I am still trying to adjust to my new schedule this semester, and blogging has been the first causality. As I organize my life in better ways, I am sure that my blogging will pick up. Now, to the post.


Tim Morton has been doing a series of advice posts on writing the dissertation. You can find them here, and they are worth reading. I wanted to add in some things from a current dissertation writer.
So far, so true from what Tim has been saying. Getting over the idea that you are writing your first book has been the hardest thing for me. Not only has my adviser been telling me this since almost the first day I ever met him (he didn't realize he was my adviser at that time). It also helped reading some dissertations that became books I also read (for reasons that include legitimate academic ones, I read both Jason Wirth's dissertation and Matt Calarco's. I've also read the books they eventually informed. While similar enough to understand their filiation, they were also different enough to really hammer in that these are two different products). With all of that, on some level I still had been thinking of my dissertation as my book-to-be. It was until about a month ago, when the tension between the first part of the dissertation and the second part of the dissertation (for those who are interested in some details, read this) was too much conceptually for me. Not too much for the same dissertation, but two much to be one book. What will almost certainly happen is that the dissertation will provide the framework and raw research for two different book projects, rather than the one.
Another issue of the dissertation is the balance between writing and researching. I'm the sort of scholar who happily spends many hours in archives, who enjoys taking a weekend to track down the origins of a particular phrase, etc. I've always been the sort of intellectual who befriends the small, marginal, asides in work. The dissertation really allows me to wallow in mode. Switching to a writing mode, and at some point ending the perpetual research has been hard. Focus on exactly what the dissertation looks like, and the goals I want to accomplish has been the biggest helps in this regard.
Marketability is the last thing I want to talk about, here. One of the weird things that emerges for anyone who engages in interdisciplinary work is that despite the tendency of your work to often generate excitement among diverse people, is that it is often hard to translate that excitement in proving you are engaged in a disciplinary intellectual adventure. There is a desire, at times, to put your dissertation in a sort of disciplinary drag. I don't have much to say here, I am bad at that. On some level, a dissertation has got to be thought of as a vehicle to help you get a job, and ignoring that seems like a bad idea. On the other hand, the degree of how to do that and in what ways are not something I can speak to.

I should probably take the time to break off a few chapters and try to get them published.

What GPS should I get?

I am thinking about getting a gps, but I am not sure which one I should get. Any suggestions?

I'm back, what did I miss?

I spent most of the break in the mountains of north GA, without internet access. So, I am trying to catch up on emails and blog reading. If you tried to contact me, and you haven't heard anything from me in the next 12 hours or so, just email me again. It means your email got lost in the mix, sorry. Also, if there were any really interesting posts out there over the break, let me know. As always, self-promotion in encouraged.

Books that changed my mind

This post follows up on the meme I picked up from Joshua Miller.

The purpose is not to list books that made me think more deeply about a subject (that's most books), or to list books that made me think a new thought (less books, but still important). This are books that specifically changed my mind about something.

(1) Marx's German Ideology. I picked this up early in college, and it destroyed the humanist, idealist leftist I had been until then. Like many a good leftist out of high school, I was very concerned with individualism and with the power of ideas. Basically, I had read Thoreau's "On Civil Disobedience" too many times. Marx allowed me to think a radical thought outside of the liberal tradition of individualism, and also made me think of collective productions of society. In so doing, I also developed a strong materialist outlook, that also dethroned my "knowledge is power" outlook.

(2) Maria Lugones' Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. It is hard to separate reading Maria's work from working with her. Either way, my early encounters with Maria and her work overturned a certain domination of a particular brand of poststructuralism on my thinking. In particular, I realized the violence inherent with the desire to get rid of identity, to leave behind all forms of identity politics. This, shall we say, nomadic desire for becoming-imperceptible ran into its own limitation. I was forced to confront how my desire to give up my name, history, and identity was strongly rooted in my desire of not being held accountable, of being able to think from what Haraway would call the god-trick. It also made me realize how vital identity, history, and names were for others. That demanding that people give that up or not be radical was the worst sort of reactionary claptrap.

(3) Subcomandante Marcos et al. Shadows of Tender Fury and William Haver's "The Ontological Priority of Violence". Again, I have trouble separating working with Bill Haver from reading Bill's work, but both of these works changed my mind on the issue of pacifism. I had considered myself to be a sort of generic pacifist, but I don't think I had ever really thought through the position. For example, I was convinced that the Zapatistas were already at war before the first gun had ever been picked up. I was convinced that there is an ontological relationship, that we need to pay attention to things like dignity and the need "to have been dangerous for a thousandth of a second" (see Haver's piece for commentary and citation). In other words, pacifism had become a way of delegitimizing certain survival strategies in genocidal cultures. Pacifism, as I had understood it, had become a way of furthering various forms of violences. This isn't really against pacifism, but rather against the sort of generic and default leftist position of something called pacifism.

(4) Agamben's Homo Sacer and State of Exception. I had really inherited Foucault's belief that sovereign power was mostly a reactive and repressive mechanism. Agamben really returns sovereign power to its properly productive functions.

(5) Ranciere's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and really Ranciere's work more generally. The same sort of individualism that conflicted with Marx had never entirely left me. In particular, I was often given to beliefs of elitism, especially when it came to students. Well, an early encounter in grad school with this text really finally changed my mind. I am a pretty strong believer in egalitarianism at this point. Also, it was Ranciere's article, "Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man", that brought me off the fence about the importance of rights. Until then, I basically shifted my position on the question of rights from whatever the last thinker I had read felt about the subject. (Deleuze is against it, must be bad. Foucault is for it, must be good. Etc.). This tends to put me in some level of conflict with most of the other continental or critical animal scholars, almost all of whom echo Derrida's belief that the idea of rights does more to hurt animals than help other animals. This is not to say that I don't think the question and issue of rights doesn't need some sort of critical intervention, but I don't think it can go on the dust heap of history.

(6) Peter Singer's Animal Liberation. This book didn't change my mind in any of the obvious ways. By the time I read it, I had long been on the same side when it came to the animal question. What it changed my mind on was the issue of utilitarianism. Like most good radicals, particularly of a poststructuralist stripe, I had long felt that utilitarianism was some sort of clownishly evil system of 'ethics'. I am sure there are probably people reading this blog who basically feel the same way. After reading Animal Liberation, I decided there was a lot more going on with utilitarianism than I had ever allowed for. This is not to say that I became an utilitarian, but I began to more seriously engage the work of consequentialism.


I am sure there are more, but these are ones I have been able to come up with over the last 24 hours or so. Most of the things that have changed my mind have not been books, but conversations. Just saying, comments always open. Also, I'd love to see this meme spread. What books have changed your mind?