Simply Neoliberalism, Or, the Algorithms of the Natural.

In Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, Alissa Hamilton explores all the ways that industrial processes are incorporated into the mass production of orange juice. What are the industrial processes of orange juice, you may be asking. But think about it, oranges are really only in season a few months of the year, and yet, not from concentrate orange juice is available year round. And while there are ways to grow oranges out of season, orange juice is consumed at a much higher frequency than oranges, and it would be really hard to grow all those oranges year around. If it is January, and you live in Minnesota, you can go to any grocery store and get Simply Orange orange juice. What makes that possible? From Hamilton:

The technology of choice at the moment is aseptic storage, which involves stripping the juice of oxygen, a process known as “deaeration,” so it doesn’t oxidize in the million gallon tanks in which it can be kept for upwards of a year. When the juice is stripped of oxygen it is also stripped of flavor providing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren’t listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature. The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor. Mexicans and Brazilians have a different palate. Flavor packs fabricated for juice geared to these markets therefore highlight different chemicals, the decanals say, or terpene compounds such as valencine. The formulas vary to give a brand’s trademark taste. If you’re discerning you may have noticed Minute Maid has a candy like orange flavor. That’s largely due to the flavor pack Coca-Cola has chosen for it.

Got it? You take the orange juice, put it in tanks without oxygen, and then reconstitute the flavor later. Actually, that makes it sound more straightforward than it actually is, because you have to take into account demand from all over the place, and figure out issues of hurricanes and freezes, and all sorts of other variables. In order to do this, Coca-Cola, which makes both Simply Orange and Minute Maid, has created complex algorithms for their juice business, as reported here. "“We basically built a flight simulator for our juice business,” says Doug Bippert, Coke’s vice president of business acceleration." Because, it seems, vice president of business acceleration is totally a thing. The algorithms and storage vats are all attempts to "take Mother Nature and standardize it,” says Jim Horrisberger, director of procurement at Coke’s huge Auburndale (Fla.) juice packaging plant. [...] Bob Cross, architect of Coke’s juice model, also built the model Delta Air Lines uses to maximize its revenue per mile flown. Orange juice, says Cross, “is definitely one of the most complex applications of business analytics. It requires analyzing up to 1 quintillion decision variables to consistently deliver the optimal blend, despite the whims of Mother Nature.”" All of this resulted in a writer at the Chicagoist to use the phrase, "all-natural orange juice experience, free of algorithms" non-ironically.

So, why all this talk of orange juice? Mostly because as a capitalist product goes, it is one of the ones most identified with its naturalness, its simpleness (as in, Simply Orange). The label of not from concentrate was itself used a marketing gimmick to single the orange juice as being fresher, more natural, more authentic. We can think here that neoliberalism operates as a type of craft or sorcery that works by transforming the constructed and arbitrary into the natural and the essential.  By craft here, I am mostly thinking of the excellent work of Karen and Barbara Fields on Racecraft. Under the Fields, racecraft functions by taking racism (the structure of discrimination and violence), and naturalizing it into race. And in the same way for sorcery I am thinking of Pignarre and Stengers' Capitalist Sorcery, which reveal the ways that capitalism produces infernal alternatives for anyone who seeks to oppose neoliberalism. The artificial becomes natural, and the natural becomes inevitable, maybe even eternal.

At the same time I was making these points on facebook, Robin James and Leigh Johnson posted about neoliberalism and algorithms.  Over at Cyborgology, James argues that "As an ideology, “neoliberalism” is a very specific epistemology/ontology (or, more precisely, it’s an ideology in which epistemology and ontology collapse into one another, an epistemontology): neoliberals think everything in the universe works like a deregulated, competitive, financialized capitalist market.[...] The object of neoliberal economic analysis is the “calculation” of the program, protocol, indeed, the algorithm that makes apparently incoherent choices cohere into a model that can then be used to predict that individual’s future choices. Economic analysis finds the signal in the noise." Under this epistemontology it makes sense for our vice-president of business acceleration to hire the person that optimized Delta flight revenues in order to make orange juice. And over at NewApps (and actually, make sure you read the comments), Johnson expands on James by arguing:

Perhaps the single most important proposition in modern capitalist economic theory, inherited from Adam Smith, is that competitive markets do a good job of allocating resources, that such markets channel individuals' self-interest toward the collective good as if directed by an "invisible hand."  (I won't detail the manner in which such a proposition qualifies as "onto-theological" here, partly because there simply isn't room to do so, but mostly because I think it is self-evident.) [...] One of the problems with neoliberalism's particular ("invisible hand") iteration of onto-theological prejudice-- and this is something that James' account of the neoliberal "algorithmic modelling" fetish made more clear to me-- is that it effectively blinds itself to the manner in which it not only does, but must, conflate the Hand-that-Guides with the hand(s)-that-are-guided.  When synchronicity or harmony is absent, when dissonance is resonant, when the aleatory interrupts or real human freedom (s'il y en a) insists-- that is to say, when the Invisible Hand is not only non-apparent but also non-existent-- neoliberalism's epistemonto(theo)logical commitments force neoliberals to, quite literally, phish or cut bait.  And what is phishing, after all, but the manufacturing of an Invisible Hand?

This is all very important, because no matter how much it is clear that the algorithm is produced (and look again at the earlier quotations on orange juice, in which two different people talk in terms of opposing the algorithm to Mother Nature, and therefore one assumes the natural), and no matter how much violence is marshaled to make these algorithms work, they are always naturalized. As Bruno Latour has argued (and he is not the first) we have witnessed a strange shift of first and second nature. First nature represented the stuff that is unchangeable, that is usually what we mean we say something is natural, or talk about the world. Second nature is that which is produced by us. But in our era of global warming and the anthropocene, it is clear that the unchangeable first nature of the world is really second nature, something we can produce. Meanwhile, our economic systems, those things we clearly produce, have increasingly become seen as first nature, and inherently natural and unchangeable. And the results of this are clear and devastating. So much so that Fredric Jameson's now famous quip "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism," came first as farce, then as tragedy.

But I think the chicagoist line about algorithm free shows another fear. In the face of the deterritorialization of global capitalism, with its simulacrums and appeals to nature, has arisen a relatively conservative response that argues for the local, for the slow, for the authentic, for the non-calculative. In other words, there are those against the artificial, but in favor of something they see as truly natural  and algorithm free. Anyone who has been reading my blog knows that I do not think that is the way out (see especially here and here, and make sure to read my brother's more critical take on the calculative here). It is a bit like Heidegger's critique of the standing reserve. I am sympathetic, entirely. But his alternative reeks of agrarian fascism. Instead, I believe we should engage in a different craft and sorcery. Not one that turns the artificial into the natural, but one that instead seeks to undermine the narratives of nature while producing a new world.

EDIT: I was unclear in that last paragraph (as both Leigh Johnson and DMF made clear). I am not saying that it is conservatives who support the local, etc, but that it is a conservative ideology. And there are, of course, very conservative advocates of the local and the non-calculative, such as Joel Salatin, who is overtly xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, etc (he is the owner of polyface farms, and was made famous as a sort of hero of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma). But in addition to the Joel Salatins of the world, I am lumping in certain proponents of locavorism, and certain Heideggerians.

What I should have been clearer about is that I have no problem with the desire of the local, or the slow, or whatever from a tactical standpoint. I usually buy a share in Community Supported Agriculture wherever I live, I usually think that putting your money in a local credit union rather than a large bank is a good idea, I almost always buy beer from local or regional microbreweries when traveling, etc. In an era of globalized capitalism, creating local alternatives can be a real form of resistance. My problem is when moved to the level of strategy or a vision. When the advocacy is for a world of nothing but the local, the slow, the authentic, the non-caclculative, that is when I see a creeping conservative ideology.

Guest Post: Was Communard Louise Michel a vegetarian?

Was Communard Louise Michel a vegetarian?
By Jon Hochschartner
[This is a guest post. If you are interested in writing a guest post, please email me at james.stanescu@gmail.com]

Since I'm interested in both socialism and animal rights, historical figures who managed to reconcile the two ideologies fascinate and inspire me. That's why I find the question of whether the French communard Louise Michel was a vegetarian so interesting.

During the Paris Commune of 1871, she served the working-class uprising as an ambulance worker and militia member. When the rebellion was overrun, Michel was captured and tried. She dared the court to execute her, but ultimately was imprisoned in France for almost two years before being deported.

In her memoirs, Michel wrote that she traced her progressive politics to animal-protectionist feeling. "As far back as I can remember, the origin of my revolt against the powerful was my horror at the tortures inflicted on animals," she said. "I used to wish animals could get revenge, that the dog could bite the man who was mercilessly beating him, that the horse bleeding under the whip could throw off the man tormenting him."

She wrote that from an early age she rescued animals and that habit continued into adulthood. "I was accused of allowing my concern for animals to outweigh the problems of humans at the Perronnnet barricade at Neuilly during the Commune, when I ran to help a cat in peril," she said. "The unfortunate beast was crouched in a corner that was being scoured by shells, and it was crying out."

Michel believed there was a link between the subjugation of animals and the subjugation of humans. "The more ferocious a man is toward animals," she wrote, "the more that man cringes before the people who dominate him." In fact, she credited her opposition to the death penalty to witnessing the slaughter of an animal as a child.

She raged against vivisection, writing, "All this useless suffering perpetrated in the name of science must end. It is as barren as the blood of the little children whose throats were cut by Gilles de Retz and other madmen."

According to the International Vegetarian Union website, one Louise Michel attended the 1890 International Vegetarian Congress in England. The report of the meeting states she "expressed her views on Vegetarianism. The eating of flesh meant misery to the animals, and she held that it was impossible for men to be happy while animals were miserable."

And yet, search her memoirs for the term 'vegetarian' and you will find nothing. As a very young child, Michel was traumatized by the sight of a decapitated goose. "One result was that the sight of meat thereafter nauseated me until I was eight or ten," she wrote, "and I needed a strong will and my grandmother's arguments to overcome that nausea." This of course suggests she consumed flesh and her memoirs do not immediately mention a later-in-life change in practice.

She also wrote, "Instead of the putrefied flesh which we are accustomed to eating, perhaps science will give us chemical mixtures containing more iron and nutrients than the blood and meat we now absorb." This could be interpreted as anticipating the in-vitro meat now being developed. But it could also be read as a reflection of her belief that animal-derived foods were nutritionally necessary or superior in her era.

While it seems clear where her sympathies were, I'm unsure if Michel was a vegetarian.

Accelerationism, animal ethics, and the factory farm

I am probably not an accelerationist, but I think certain core principles of accelerationism are useful for exploring tensions within the animal ethics community.

Accelerationism is a term coined by Benjamin Noys in his book, The Persistence of the Negative. Accelerationism is a philosophy loosely based on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Jean-Francois Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, and Jean Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death (sidenote, I had an undergraduate class utilizing those three texts back in 2002, weird), along with the writings of Nick Land. As Noys explains, "they are an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call these positions accelerationist." (p. 5) It is important to note that Noys is critical of the accelerationist move. There many who have adopted the mantle of accelerationism as a positive radical political project. You should look to Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek's accelerationist manifesto, as well as Steven Shaviro's talks on accelerationism (this link contains both an video giving an intro, plus the text of another talk). The only animal ethicist I know who has also written on accelerationism is Patricia MacCormack. Though it is not principally on animal ethics. And David Roden has written about accelerationism and posthumanism. While there is a lot about accelerationism I probably would not agree with, I do want to focus on a couple of points I am in agreement with, and how those points pertain to animal ethics and the factory farm.

Accelerationism argues strongly that there is no going back. Or at least, back is not the direction we wish to go. In this sense, Marx (or at least a certain Marx) is a principle figure for accelerationism. Just as anyone who has read Marx understands that he has no wish to move from capitalism back to feudalism, or to destroy the machines of capitalism. Instead, the machines and factories of capitalism are the basis of the general intellect and the powers of social production necessary for communism. The accelerationist, then, is in opposition to the Heideggerian critiques of free floating intelligences, the das man, and en-framing. In other words, we do not suffer from too much calculation and too much abstraction, but rather, from too little or the wrong kinds of calculation and abstraction. As Negri wittily once put it, " But here we are once again, always at the same point: Marx frees what Heidegger imprisons. Marx illuminates with praxis what Heidegger reduces to mysticism." (Insurgencies, p. 29). Animal ethics is stuck in a similar fight: Do we embrace calculative and production capabilities of the present, even with the its taint of the violences of modernity, or do we strive for a premodern remedy to the violence against other animals?

The slow food and locavore movements have clearly embraced the premodern strategy. The issue for them is not one principally of speciesism, or the killing and eating of other animals, but rather of capitalist and modern 'excess.' If we could just turn the clock back (to the '50s, though I am never sure if they mean the 1950s or the 1850s), everything about our food productions would be fine. Thus we see the simultaneous orientalism of the hunting and eating practices of indigenous peoples, the romanticism of the pasture, and the nostalgia for the food preparation of the immediate post-war generation. As my brother has constantly chronicled, such orientalism, romanticism, and nostalgia is frequently the basis of political and social conservatism of the most extreme sorts (pdf). This also brings us to a post by James McWilliams on the work of historian Maureen Olge. Olge is no friend to the animal ethicist or the vegan activist. At the same time, she completely pegs the mythology of the slow food and locavore movements. We will return to this shortly. Unlike, say, the move from feudalism to capitalism, or sovereign power to disciplinary power, it is a bit harder to not fall for the premodern nostalgia. As anyone who has bothered to pay attention to animal agribusinesses and animal science knows, the current move is to fully realize Descartes' belief that animals are just machines. Agribusinesses do this by simply treating animals in factory farms as if they are machines, and animal science is doing this by actively trying to create biological subjects that will behave just as machines (take away animal's sentience, for example, make animals even more docile, etc). And when I have written about the push to treat and make animals into machines, I have not always been clear to not sound like I support a return to a pre-industrial agrarianism. And much of the slow food and locavore people are advocating for a reduction in the violence to other animals (including an attack on some of the intensive forms of violence). Clearly, however, our only choice is not between the present system, and the romanticized past. And make no mistake, it is a romantic past.

Okay, back to Maureen Ogle. She has argued:

As many Americans know, the agrarian past looms large in both our national identity and mythology: The nation was founded by the sturdy yeoman, the rugged individual, etc. Those who work the land are the best among us, etc. Rural values are the bedrock of American society; threaten those and the republic itself is threatened, etc. (See, for example, Wendell Berry.)
This mythology is just that: mythology. Historically, first in the colonies and then in the new United States, American farmers were less interested in yeoman "independence" than in earning profits from a national and global market for food stuffs. (And make no mistake: American agriculture has served a global market since the 1600s.)

Again, make no mistake, Ogle is not on the side of the animal rights advocate. However, her point here is entirely correct. What I came to understand in my work on the history of the factory farm, is that the seeds of the factory farm existed within the time period before the factory farm. If you want an slaughterhouse that doesn't treat an animal as a carcass to be disassembled like a machine, you will need to go back to slightly before 1850s. We would have to go back, as Ogle states, to before the 1600s to get an American production of animal bodies not for a global market. Want to understand animals before interventions to breed for size, docility, etc? Depending on what you mean, we are are going to have to go to at least the `1700s, or basically the entire domestication of animals if you want a broader understanding. Some of our first institutions of higher education in this country were built to do research and teach animal husbandry. Scientific journals on the intervention of breeding animals are some of the first trade journals in this country. The techniques and technologies of the factory farm are found an encouraged in this history of animal agriculture, not because of the excesses of capitalism, but because capitalism's machinic formation are found and encouraged in the same history. You cannot fully disentangle capitalism's violence and speciesism (I really do believe one cannot oppose capitalism without also opposing a certain expropriation of the animal). So, now what?

Well, you can earn for a mythic past. For the vegan, at least, this seems to be a non-starter. Our relationships to other animals, at every level, does not seem separable. Agamben's claim that we should just let animals be (along with any number of animal rights activists) is just so insane. We build roads and productions and houses in animal habitats. We domesticate animals, we eat animals, we use animal bodies for clothes, jewelry, to clarify wines and beers, to make pills and condoms, to test drugs on, to labor for us, and on and on. While the present system of violence and expropriation needs to be abolished, our lives with other animals seems to be so entangled I do not begin to understand how we would just let animals be. Or why that would be ethical. Instead, we have a world to create. The danger and hope of animal science is that life can be created and recreated. The danger and hope of animal agribusiness is that we can achieve levels of vast production of the relations between humans and other animals. The factory farm is a great evil, but I also have no desire to go back, whatever that would mean. We need less appeals to nature and the natural, and more appeals to a future constructivism. I have before called this an ecofeminist constructivism. Constructivist because the ontology is not on the natural, and the politics are not on the level of voluntarism, and aesthetics is not a romanticism of the past, and the ethics is not a withdrawal of relationships. Ecofeminist because the world that needs to be built is one centered on flourishing, on respecting relationships, on understanding intersectionality and interlocking oppressions. Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy?, called for a new people and a new earth. I have written before of becoming-vegan.  In that I mostly focused on a foucaldian understanding of askesis. But we need not just new human subjects, but a new world. This not the worse it is, the better it is (as Noys put it). But at the same time, this is not something that will come about by going back. Anyway, there is no back to go to.

"An internet museum of shame for future radicals": On the radical anti-Mandela memes

The title of this post comes from a colleague who was complaining about certain reactions to Nelson Mandela's death. I think you know the kind I mean, the ones from (mostly white) radicals who have greeted the death of Nelson Mandela as cause to ruminate on how he wasn't radical enough, and anti-capitalist enough. I say mostly white. Of course, the only examples I can find are from white radicals, and the ones who have been posting on my facebook feed have exclusively been white. There is, of course, famously the Zizek article in the Guardian. Weirdly enough, the Zizek piece is the one that has been the most respectful. But you can also see this post and this post. A lot of the people who have been sharing these posts are people I like, respect, and generally support. I have also been shocked by this.

First, we can certainly argue about Mandela's support and/or lack of opposition to neo-liberalism. There is a good chance the arguments about his support of neo-liberalism will win the day. Still, he certainly helped create a state that tries to spend significantly on healthcare, education, and housing. He spoke often and persuasively, even in the last years of his life, about ending poverty as an issue of justice, and and not charity. He spoke on behalf of unions, and against the war on iraq as merely a grab for oil. There should be real anger by radicals that Mandela, like other social justice leaders, are being sanitized and whitewashed. But regardless of all of that, what is implicit (or even explicit) in these critiques is the idea that ending apartheid is somehow less of an accomplishment than opposing neoliberalism. These critiques assume a logic in which racism is merely an extension of the structures of capitalism, rather than a social ill all of its own, and that capitalism and racism are structurally entangled, but separate evils. They imply a world in which the fight against racism is somehow less important than the fight against capitalism.

And I worry about the kneejerk reactions of radicals to take the death of someone like Nelson Mandela and go, "Yeah, well, he didn't topple capitalism while he was at it, so I don't know what the big deal is." Honestly, what is the psychic economy behind this immediate reaction to his death? I don't get it. Here is what I do get, however. The next time my white radical friends are confused why our radical spaces are so often overwhelmingly white, or when they get defensive that their radicalism and/or causes are not racist, I am just going to send them a link to this post. If your immediate reaction to the death of a anti-white supremacy leader who was also opposed to capitalism (even if not in the ways or degree you wished) is to question their radical bona fides, then you are obviously engaged in a sort of epistemic blindness and violence. I am not saying we need to turn Mandela into some sort of radical saint, or that no criticism is allowed or warranted. I am saying this sort of kneejerk reaction to his death both have consequences, and is deeply troubling.

EDIT: Jairus, in comments, pointed out my ableism in the term "epistemic blindness". I apologize. He argues convincingly for the concept of epistemic parallax, and you should just make sure you read his comments.

Interview with David Graeber about Occupy Wall Street

Here. What makes this interesting is first of all, it is simply a smart interview. But more importantly, I have been impressed by the ways that the Occupy Wall Street movement is beginning to garner some serious attention by more mainstream lefty policy wonkish blogs. I am curious what will ultimately come of this cross-pollination. Maybe nothing. However, I really am interested and committed to things like good policy. But I am also a radical, and I tend to find there is a natural tension between those two poles. I think that ultimately the liberal desire to turn radical movements into simple policy disagreements will probably mean that long-term the radical prospects of the Occupy Wall Street movement will be unthinkable for these blogs, but it is still interesting.

Some random dissertation talk

So, I almost never talk about the dissertation on here, and I suddenly realized that many of you may have no clue what the work was looking like. Anyway, here is a brief description of the work, for any that are curious. (I just got through chatting with the philo department here on campus, and realized that I need practice talking about the dissertation project).

The dissertation is basically divided into two sections. The first section is dedicated to understanding the way that raising and slaughtering of other animals have changed our mode of production. I want to be precise here, the argument isn't how a different mode of production has given rise to different slaughtering and raising methods, but actually the opposite argument. The way we have killed animals and raised animals has greatly shifted our modes of production. The first obvious way occurs with the invention of the assembly line at the Chicago stockyards (and of course, not just an assembly line, but everything that made Chicago possible. This involved the raise of trains, the invention of refrigerator cars, monocultural agriculture, disciplinary techniques of worker management, new accounting methods, barbed wire, vertical monopolies, feedlots and early genetic manipulations of animals, new advertising techniques, etc). So, the assembly line was birthed through a whole ecology of interactions that centered around and mutually interdependent with Chicago and the packers. In this case, the argument is against a sort of historical accident (though of course, it could have happened otherwise). But that it required a certain disavowal of the animal, a certain biopolitics, that really allowed for these new modes of production ('the machine', as Marx puts it) to develop.
The next major change obviously culminates in the 1970s with the birth of what we call factory farming. This of course brings in all sorts of biocapital changes in the mode of production. In this case the question of eugenics being rooted so strongly in the animal sciences, and the development of certain reproductive technologies really rises out of animal sciences. But what occurs is a certain molecular or genetic primitive accumulation, and again what begins with animals is now beginning to spread elsewhere.
What is important in all of this is to understand that the disavowal of the animal is not ancillary or even produced by these modes of production, but rather the disavowal of the animal is constitutive to these modes.
The second section of the dissertation focuses on the other end, rather than looking at what we are doing and have done to animals, this section looks at proposed solutions to the question of the animal. In this case I explore the concept of the person, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming-animal, an ontology of vulnerability, and vegetarianism/veganism. I think the last two are the ones that I tend to post about the most on this blog, so I'll let that go for now. I have made some small moves on this blog to what I am interested about in the concept of the person, but it is mostly about how that concept is rooted in property ownership and legal obligations. As far as D&G are concerned, I think their work is pretty awesome, but I think there remains a nagging anthropocentrism to their work, a certain obsession with the human that remains in the notion of becoming-animal.

There was a lot more I wanted to do, but my committee and I agreed that the dissertation was going to be big enough as it was (which is why I don't deal the question of sacrifice or the question of rights in any real detail in the dissertation).

So, that's it.

Disciplinary power, still a problem

Deleuze got it wrong. In his "Postscript on Control Societies," Deleuze speaks about the transition from disciplinary societies to control societies:

But discipline would in its turn begin to break down as new forces moved slowly into place, then made rapid advances after the Second World War: we were no longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind. We're in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement-- prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family. (Negotiations, p. 178)

However, there has been no generalized breakdown of sites of confinement and spaces of enclosure. Quite the opposite, we have seen a generalized expansion of sites of confinement. If we take prisons as a privileged example of a site of confinement (and there is good reason to do so), we can see both an extensive and intensive expansion. Extensive in the most obvious way, we have far more people in prison now then we use to. To give a few numbers, in the late 1960s we had slightly over 200 hundred thousand people locked up. Now, we have around 2.5 million people locked up in jails and prisons (this does not include all sorts of other forms of being locked up, like INS detention centers or juvenile detention facilities). Not only do we have have so many people locked up, but we also see an extensive international expansion of prisons, with many countries joining in on trying to lock up more of their populations and some countries opening up their first prisons in recent times (I suggest Julia Sudbury's edited volume Global Lockdown for more on this last issue). But we have also seen an intensive expansion in prisons. We see this in the rise of supermax prisons (also called control units, administrative units, special housing units, etc). In these units inmates are actively lockdown 23 hours a day, allowed out of their cells for one hour period. During this time, they are never allowed to talk to anyone. Cameras are turned on 24 hours a day, as are lights. The walls and plumbing are sound proofed so that zero communications are allowed, and food is given through a slot in the door.

Now, I recognize that Deleuze in his essay is not indicating that prisons or disciplinary power are disappearing, but rather transforming. Moreover, there are many things in this classic essay that I found useful, for example the change of the logic of power from analog to digital. And in this sense, I understand that the opening line of this post is obviously provocative, but provocation is necessary on this point. Too often we see people proceed as if disciplinary power is no longer a present and driving concern, that rather we need to understand how CCTV in London has made it so that we are all prisoners now, or something of the sort. However, those of us that live in the free world, aka are not incarcerated, sometimes greatly misunderstand the importance of sites of confinement in perpetuating the present order (in the same way that some people believe that primitive accumulation is a sin of the past rather than an ongoing process of capitalism).

Along this chain of thought, we have Mike Konczal's excellent post "Is economic freedom another way of saying we need to build more prisons?". Konczal, taking the libertarian CATO Institutes ranking of countries based on their economic freedoms, finds that countries with high levels of economic freedoms correlate with high levels of imprisonments (this is true even if we control for certain outliers, like the US). Now, obviously correlation doesn't imply causation, but that also doesn't mean these are two unrelated data sets. Konczal goes through several interesting possible answers for this correlation, but from a foucauldian perspective there is another explanation, which is that neoliberalism needs and shares the logic of the prison population. This argument ties together Foucault's book Discipline and Punish to his lectures on The Birth of Bio-politics. Economic freedoms, rather than generalizing freedoms to the rest of society, are built upon a militarized and repressive policing apparatus. Perhaps it is time to give up Deleuze's term of a control society, and rather take up Foucault's term of a normalizing society. As he explains in "Society Must Be Defended":

In more general terms still, we can say that there is one element that will circulate between the disciplinary and the regulatory, which will also be applied to body and population alike, which will make it possible to control both the disciplinary order of the body and the aleatory events that occur in the biological multiplicity. The element that circulates between the two is the norm. The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize. The normalizing society is therefore not, a sort of generalized disciplinary society whose disciplinary institutions have swarmed and finally taken over everything-- that, I think, is no more than a first and inadequate interpretation of a normalizing society. The normalizing society is a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation. To say that power took possession of life in the nineteenth century, or to say that power at least takes life under its care in the nineteenth century, is to say that it has, thanks to the play of technologies of discipline on the one hand and the technologies of regulation on the other, succeeded in covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between the body and the population. (pp. 252-253)

So, it isn't that the technologies and formations of power haven't changed, but rather that whatever these new diagrams of power that exist, they are able to exist because of an extensive and intensive expansion of sites of confinement.

The normalizing society, especially as it is tied to contemporary models of neoliberalism, should be read against (or at least in tension) with Agamben. As Mignolo has noted, bare life is a legalistic category, whereas disposable life is an economic category. Therefore, in Agamben's work we find a series of fascination over various legal lacunas, the nazi lagers, human experimentation, the comatose patient and the issue of brain death, Guantanamo bay. And yet, the concept of disciplinary power is not mentioned in Agamben's work, and something like the site of the prison is not thought through in his work. Maybe it is because the prisoners in Gitmo exist in a legal limbo, whereas inmates in an American prison have a clear legal standing. However, something like the concept of disposable populations would find prisons to be a necessary problem to be thought and understood.

Consider this post a reminder that disciplinary power hasn't gone away, and that the problems and issues raised by that concept have only increased since Foucault's Disipline and Punish. We need to keep such issues at the forefront of our political thinking and work.

The perils and pitfalls of transnational adoption: Haiti edition

Three links, the first two from by brother, and the last one from Vegans of Color. The first one is an article about 'orphans' for sale for as little as 50 dollars in Haiti. The second one is an article about a group of Christian missionaries who abducted 33 children off the streets of Haiti, and were in the process of leaving the country with them. The last one is a statement released by Adoptees of Color on adopting children during a crisis, particularly in Haiti.

I hope that these incidents will bring greater attention to the problems of translational adoption. The continuation of racist and colonialist logics are often combined with overt neoliberal policies that turn children into transnational commodities.

Persons, persons everywhere!

(UPDATE: Greg has a post on personhood up, here).

So, it seems my last post on the history of personhood is quite timely, everywhere we look there are discussions of personhood. Let's track down a few:

Margaret Sommerville has an article arguing against personhood for animals. The article is at least 98% bunk (even her attacks against Singer are off base). Except for the honest argument that personhood for animals should be opposed because it destroys human exceptionalism. That's the problem sometimes, what I want is often exactly the opposite of what someone else wants. It's not a misunderstanding that can just be clarified. Anymore than someone saying their opposition of extending personhood to african-americans in the times of slavery was a problem because it destroyed white exceptionalism. No duh, that's a benefit, not a bug.
This article comes by way of A Thinking Reed, where Lee has two posts up responding, here and here. You might also want to check out his post on corporate personhood.

Meanwhile, it seems there is a movement to create an amendment in order to define citizenship as belonging just to humans, and specifically trying to stop citizenship rights to be conferred on corporations. I learn this by way of Animal Rights & Anti-Oppression. Over there Mary Martin makes the argument that corporate personhood is bad for the personhood of non-human animals. No doubt.
Of course the whole thing seems to be caught in some sort of weird double bind. People want to pass this amendment because they feel the recent SCOTUS decision gives too much power over the political process to corporations. If this is correct, passing an amendment, the hardest political thing you can probably do, should be easily stopped by the corporations. Oh well. If the language gets changed to something less anthropocentric, let me know.


There is probably more I want to say on all these issues, and I might get to them later.

monstrosity

Over at Shaviro's blog he has a very interesting post on the notion of the monstrous flesh in the work of Hardt and Negri. You should go read it http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=639

I wanted to post here the comment I made over there:

Interesting post. A few issues I have.

(1) The Task of Philosophy:
I think that whatever problems there are in Empire and Multitude (and sure, there are many), these books are not just works trying to describe a political situation, they are also trying to produce a political ontology. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in What Is Philosophy? “We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist” (p. 108). Empire and Multitude is about calling forth this new people, this multitude. I think we have to judge the exuberance of these two books partially upon a criteria of a “becoming-political of philosophy” (as Alliez puts it in The Signature of the World).

(2) On subsumption:

Few people have done more to advance the knowledge of transitions from formal subsumption to real subsumption than Negri. Indeed, one can see in the works of both Negri and Hardt a thorough look at capitalism’s move to a cognitive and affective capitalism. We can see the increasing disciplinarization and normalization of capitalism. Read Negri’s The Politics of Subversion for merely my favorite work on this issue. Also, a good read (if you haven’t already) is Jason Read’s The Micro-politics of Capital, which synthesizes the work of Negri and other autonomists and french political theory. The switch from formal subsumption to real subsumption and the rise of immaterial labor is clearly at stake in both Empire and Multitude, why then does your post imply that somehow it isn’t acknowledged? Your post implies that they somehow think that the categories of immaterial labor and real subsumption are somehow less oppressive. I don’t think they ever imply that (though maybe, in the general sense, that they imply that Empire is less oppressive than the days of nationalism). What they do argue in those texts (and perhaps more forcefully in other works) is that the stage of real subsumption is a stage of contestability. Similar to Foucault, if capitalism now inhabits every moment of our life, then every moment of life is a possibility to fight capitalism. The antagonism against real subsumption becomes the constitutive reality of the multitude.

(3) Monstrosity:
It is the question of constitutive possibilities that seems to be real break you make with Negri and Hardt. Does capitalism contain creative, constitutive powers itself? Does it have poesies and potentia? The argument of Negri is unambiguous on this point, capitalism does not and cannot. (It is here that Agamben makes his criticism against Negri). If capitalism does not have its own constitutive powers, than it proceeds based upon control and normalization (and those words should be not be heard too far outside of their Deleuzian and Foucauldian registers). Perhaps then we should also hear the word monstrosity in its Foucauldian register. Foucault devoted an extensive amount of time to the idea of monstrosity, particular in his lectures on The Abnormal. In there we find that “the monster is essentially a mixture” (p. 63). But it is not enough for the monster to be a mixture. “There is monstrosity only when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil, canon, or religious law” (ibid). If capitalism is only parasitic, if it only has potestas and not potentia, if it has only constituted and not constitutive power, if it only can own the means of production but cannot produce itself; then it needs normalization and control. Capitalism may break taboos (may indeed depend on it), but only to create a new normal. Monstrous bodies are still bodies that need to be controlled or killed in our society. When Hardt and Negri align the multitude with a monstrous flesh, this is actually a very important moment. First of all, it sets up the antagonism between the multitude and those societies of control (deleuze)/societies of normalization (Foucault). Second of all, it contends that the common of the multitude will not be one of normalization. Communism is not and cannot be soviet socialism, it cannot be another way of normalizing, rather, the common of the multitude must be the monstrous. The singularity of the monstrous body, the creativity and productivity of the multitude against the normalizing control of capitalism.

That post makes me sound like I am in the tank for hardt and negri, which surely isn’t the case. It also didn’t express enough that I liked your post.