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.

On nonnative species (aka "invasive" species)

I am currently trying to finish an article on nonnative species. What follows is a small blog post about some of the issues around nonnative species. However, I have been provoked to write this article/post by conversations with (and resources shared), by Kevin C, Vasile S, and Matthew R (I didn't get their permission, so I am not including last names right now).

"Human beings shorten all food chains in the web, eliminate most intermediaries and focus all biomass flows on themselves. Whenever an outside species tries to insert itself into one of these chains, to start the process of complexification again, it is ruthlessly expunged as a 'weed' (a term that includes 'animal weeds' such as rats and mice)." --Manuel Delanda, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, p.108. Emphasis in the original.

(1) Issues surrounding nonnative species (both plants and animals), is one of the perennial questions in environmental ethics, environmental studies, resource and animal management, and a variety of other fields concerned with the environment. I will also be the first to admit that the issue is complex. However, despite the complexity, it is also an issue that is often spoken of in the most apocalyptic tones and terminology. We can get this in the more common term of invasive species.  Tim Low has argued, "As any invasion biologist will tell you it’s a threat more ominous than the greenhouse effect, indus- trial pollution or ozone depletion" (Feral Futures, p. 295. Cited in Nigel Clark's "The Demon-Seed"). And as Chew and Carroll have pointed out in their op-ed in The Scientist, "invasion biology, like epidemiology, is a discipline explicitly devoted to destroying that which it studies.  This necessarily constrains its research program and colors its communications, both internal and external, in very particular ways." In other words, the hyperbolic communication around nonnative species allows us only hyperbolic reactions. We can have a relationship to nonnative species that is only permanent war or total eradication.

(2) A lot needs to be unpacked when we talk about nonnative species being a problem. What makes a nonnative species a problem? A lot of lip service gets paid to ecological balance, but that isn't really a thing (ecology not having much to do with balance, hippies be damned). Sometimes by problems we mean problems for humans -- that certain species eat our gardens, run onto our roads, or attack our pets. These are issues, but are they really issues of nonnative species? So, when we say that an animal species is negatively impacting the ecosystem, what does that mean? Are we complaining about, for example, a decrease in species richness?  Mark Sagoff does a good job on the complexity of talking about harm when we talk about nonnative species, especially with the question begging that certain definitions of harm are used.

(3) This is why the issue of nonnative speices is often overstated. For the most part what we see is the occasional issue of nonnative species being used to justify a vaster belief in the problem of nonnative species. It is a little like pointing to the European colonization of the Americas as reasons to oppose immigration. There are certainly studies exploring the broader question species richness and nonnative species. Which isn't to say this is a settled question in the environmental science literature, but at the same time these are not cranks, there are real debates around species richness and nonnative species.

(4) Also, just as we know that immigration does not usually hurt jobs and resources, it usually helps it (again, not universally), we are just now beginning to explore the ways that nonnative species can be used for conservation techniques, something that has been routinely ignored in most studies of nonnative species. For more on this, see this debate: "The Potential Conservation Value of Non-Native Species," "Revisiting, etc", and "Toward a More Balanced View of Non-Native Species."

(5) Why do we tend to focus on the destructive aspects of certain nonnative species, rather than the overall issue around nonnative species? It is here that I find Banu Subramaniam's work particularly on point: there really is something about the language and desire around nonnative species that is rooted in a broader xenophobia.  This isn't anti-realism, but the sort of basic situated knowledge questions that an early Donna Haraway raises. There are really good reasons to look at the ways that this stuff gets framed in order to understand research programs and policies, particularly to understand which ones get attention, funding, and support. On that last point in particular, see Helmreich's "How Scientists Think; About 'Natives,' for Example."

(6) If everything of 1-5 is correct, then I think we can agree with Paul Robbins that "It is not
species, but sociobiological networks that are invasive."  That is to say that nonnative species are not only questions of ethics, but also politics and policy. You know, constructivist political ecology. Not that ethics will not be a part of those issues, but we could in the short term engage in management systems that are not principally non-lethal, and in the long term target sociobiological networks as opposed to individual species. But, of course, that is not where we are in terms of political will. There is no real desire to discover, spend money on, and implement these sorts of management systems.

One of the reasons that we do not spend time on developing non-lethal management techniques, and one of the reasons we spend a lot of time publicizing the problems of nonnative species, is that people like hunting, they like killing, and they like eating meat. While Chamayou's work is horribly anthropocentric, I think his arguments about a cynegetic power (hunting power), is right on. Likewise, if you look into MacKenzie's The Nature of Empire, you see the strong connection that hunting has to conservation. Conservation has been stapled to hunting for a long time. And what we need now is not conservation. We need ecological or ecofeminist constructivism, not more natural conservationism. One that can honor and respond to what Lori Gruen has called the wild dignity of nonnative species.

Reproduction and Veganism in the Age of the Anthropocene

This is going to be a blog post about overpopulation and having children in the age of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene, as I am sure you know, is the geological epoch we live in, the one where the earth itself has been shaped by humans. This is, like most claims about humans, kinda a lie. Depending on when you want to start dating the Anthropocene from will determine how much of a lie. But clearly not all humans are equal members in this geological formations (for better and for worse). Claims about the anthropos are never really about only and fully the anthropos. But that is fine, we know that we are living in an age where some humans have managed to create geological and climate realities. This reality has brought heighten feelings that humans have a moral duty to decrease their population. Fears about overpopulation, of course, are in no way new, and are not only caused by knowledge of the Anthropocene. One of the things that is new to me is the particular ways certain vegans are taking up the fears of overpopulation.

If you look at this blog post entitled "Liberation, not procreation" for one example. This powerful post is from a vegan mother and moves within the animal liberation community to shame her (or even make her justify) having had a child. Before I go any further, I want to make a few statements: Pro-natalism is almost always sexist, heterosexist, and often fascist (at the least). And while I might have some disagreements, I agree with Lee Edelmen that there are certain problems with reproductive futurism. But just because I oppose pro-natalism does not mean I think we need to advocate a politics of anti-natalism. Nevertheless, a politics of anti-natalism seems increasingly common in vegan community, and I want to focus on the arguments against overpopulation in anti-natalism arguments.

It was helpful that while I was figuring out how to respond, we got these two articles in the NY Times about the carrying capacity of earth (see here and here). What Ellis is arguing is both fairly simple and rather convincing. The short version is that there are many times that humans would have been projected to hit the carrying capacity of earth at the time, and every time the carrying capacity of earth increased. There is, according to Ellis, no predetermined amount of humans that will exceed the carrying capacity of earth. Does this mean we will never hit a carrying capacity? No, but if we do it will almost certainly be through a failure of social systems, not through an absolute limit in carrying capacity. I agree with Tim Morton that Ellis' framing is anthropocentric, but I see no reason this rules out the basic principles of Ellis' argument.

I also know these sorts of arguments are often put forth by conservatives, many of whom use these arguments as part of their kettle logic on global warming. You know the one I mean, (1) there is no such thing as global warming, (2) global warming is happening, but not anthropogenic, and (3) global warming is happening, but it now so badly advanced only unfettered capitalism can produce the technology needed to save us all. Conservative denial about global warming is part of a broader denial of the Anthropocene, and the solutions we have to the problems that the age of the Anthropocene are raising. So, when Ellis argues that advances in social systems and technology means we cannot know the absolute carrying capacity of the earth, many conservative hear that as saying "FREE MARKET CAPITALISM TO THE RESCUE", which is bunk. While Ellis is a little cagey in those articles about what the social system changes will require, we know it will include many of them that look nothing like the conservative agenda. And indeed, veganism strikes me as one of the most likely social system changes we can take on to increase the carrying capacity of the earth and to fight many of the threats produced by the Anthropocene.

As with factory farming, our inability to stop global warming is mostly what Peter Hallward, in his best Green Lantern Corp moments, would call a failure of the will (see here and here). We know what needs to be done, but we somehow lack the popular will to make it happen. There is no reason to believe that children will have to live in the same world we were brought into. There is no reason to believe we will live in the same world we live in today. The bad news of the Anthropocene is that certain humans have made the ability of living on this planet harder for so many types of beings. The good news of the Anthropocene is that it means that certain beings would therefore have the power to reshape the earth in different ways--the earth is not done becoming. Vegans worry that another life would be another murderer, speaking to our own great guilt on never actually being able to be vegan, just becoming-vegan. The challenge, then, is to create a world that is different. I don't know why we would then encourage vegans to be uniquely the ones to stop having children?

Ursula Heise has recently written a beautiful essay on literature trying to come to grips with the environment in the age of the Anthropocene. In it Heise starts mapping out the possibilities of hybrid ecologies and natures for the future. And one gets the feeling that the anti-natalism of certain vegans come not from a radicalism, but from a profound conservatism, a conservatism that is based on conservationism. Perhaps what we need is less conservationism, and more constructivism for thriving ecologies for nonhumans and humans-- a constructivist ecofeminism, if you will. Perhaps we need less Heidegger, and more Arendt.  Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy, wrote about the importance of producing a new people and a new earth. Perhaps it is time we focus on both of those terms.

Gary Francione tends to end his emails and blog messages with the announcement that the world is vegan, if we want it. I'd only make a small, but important correction-- The world is vegan, if we make it so. Here is to the constructivists ecofeminists, and to all the vegans (parents and nonparents, bioparents and nonbioparents) who are working to make it so.