Soy Calculus? Hypocrisy and Ethics

Do you ever feel like your vegan or vegetarian friends are a little touchy sometimes? Ever feel like someone is being curious, and your friend is acting like they are personally under attack?
Well, one of the reasons is that we are constantly bombarded by bad faith arguments, that are laughably bad, and that we are expected to take seriously. Here is an article that I recently saw on my facebook wall.
In the article, the argument is made that after America, soy production is the highest in Brazil, and that it often involves destroying rain forests to produce land for soy production. And that further, vegans and vegetarians eat a lot of soy, so our dietary needs are not pure and innocent. All true.
But the article itself is totally absurd. It admits that only 6% of all soy produced is consummed directly by humans. Only six percent. The article admits that most of the soy produced is feed directly to livestock. Indeed, in the same article that claims 6% is consumed directly by humans, it points out that 85% is consumed by livestock. So, in an article when all of the facts points to a strong pro-vegetarian/vegan argument, somehow the article furthers an anti-vegetarian/vegan. Straightforwardly the argument should go: Soy production sometimes destroys rain forests. 85% of soy is produced to give to livestock. We should become vegans to significantly lower soy production and demands. But rather somehow this becomes an argument is the opposite direction. This is perplexing, until you realize that these sorts of arguments have absolutely nothing to do with figuring out hard ethical truths, or advancing a vision of a better world, or even figuring out reality. Rather, these arguments are about alleviating guilt, about creating the thinest form of excuse for someone to give in to their addictive and harmful life habits. Once we understand this, the arguments make sense. They are a game of ethical tag, in which the person advancing them is able to prove that the vegan or vegetarian are not pure. It matters not at all if purity or innocence has ever been brought up in these discussions. This is because the arguments being advanced are not concerned with attacking vegetarianism or veganism per se, but rather with attacking the vegan or the vegetarian. They are aimed at delegitimizing the vegan and vegetarian as ethical actors, aimed at erasing our being. This is why vegans and vegetarians are so defensive when arguments are being made, because almost all of the arguments being advanced are meant to be attacks on the vegetarian or vegan as such. It is about turning us into hypocrites so the one attacking can feel better about themselves.
I know I am an hypocrite. My guess is that you (whoever you are) know you are, too. One of the great evils of systemic violences is that those of us who are privileged from such violence (whites with racism, humans with speciesism, men with sexism, straights with heterosexism, etc, always the etc). To care, to give a damn, to try and be ethical or political, requires being a hypocrite. Because the individual cannot singularly overcome the contradictions of the systemic. While we cannot overcome the contradictions, our twinned tasks of short circuiting the systemic violences while building alternative communities and worlds are still left to us.

(h/t to Robert S. for the title of the blog post. But I really liked Dianne B's suggested other title: What are my shoes made of? Why don't you bite me?).

On Pets: A Provocation for Uncanny Ethics

I call the two cats that live with me my pets. I cringe a little when people refer to their pets as if they were their children. I cringe even more when people call their pets their roommates. Are these cringes fair? Probably not. Pets are a complicated matter.

Those who have read Deleuze and Guattari probably know about their infamous cry that "Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool," (ATP p. 240, emphasis in the original). This rejection of domestic pets is something found not just throughout A Thousand Plateaus, but also in the opening discussion of L’Abécédaire. He explains there that despite having a cat in his household, he hates having a human relationship, and instead wants an animal relationship to animals. His concern, in both texts, is less with the animal herself, and more with how the domesticated pet oedipalizes humans. In other words, he is interested in the ways that pets are used as immunization against our own animality. I find that interesting, but that is not what makes me cringe. Instead, I want to focus on how our human relationships to pets, our decisions to make them one of the family, immunizes ourselves not against our shared animality, but rather our non-shared sovereignty. We take what should be an entirely uncanny, disturbing ethical relationship, and we, well, domesticate it. As usual, a complex ethical situation is suppressed for the desire of the innocence in roommates or children.

Why is the ethical relationship to pets one that should disturb? That should be uncanny? In a recent interview with 3:AM Magazine, Lori Gruen discussed the ethics of captivity. Her argument, that our pets are really also our captives, is important. I quote at length:

The ethical issues around captivity are remarkably complex and it is surprising how little philosophical attention has been paid to them. [...] When we start thinking about pets or “companion animals” as captives then we may start reflecting in new ways on how we treat them. Clare Palmer and Peter Sandoe wrote a provocative chapter in the book that questions the received wisdom that routinely confining cats indoors promotes their well-being. Cats may be happy with our affections and their lives may be longer if we keep them safe indoors, but there is a loss here, to their freedom to go where they want and interact with and shape their larger environment. In captive contexts, the trade-offs, between safety and freedom, protection and choice, are often obscured. [...] Seeing pets as captives, I think, does bring some of the complexities of captivity into sharper focus. [...] One justification for keeping individuals captive has been that captivity is better for them. In the context of companion animals and zoo animals, for example, one often hears that they will live longer lives and they won’t have to worry about injury or predation or hunger. The sense is that they are better off having lost their freedom. The same sorts of justifications were also heard in the case of slaves. Captors wanted to believe that slaves were better off, became more civilized, more human, because of their captivity. Of course, this is odious in the case of human beings, and there are some who argue that this attitude is equally objectionable in the case of other animals. Comparing captivity to a type of slavery, some animal advocates are opposed to all forms of captivity, even keeping pets. They take the label “abolitionist” as a way of linking their views to earlier abolitionist struggles to end slavery. But I think our relationships with other animals (of course humans, but also nonhumans) are a central part of what makes lives meaningful. Rather than thinking we must end all captivity and thus all our relationships with other animals, we’d do better working to improve those relationships by being more perceptive of and more responsive to others’ needs and interests and sensibilities. Since we are already, inevitably, in relationships, rather than ending them we might try to figure out how to make them better, more meaningful, and more mutually satisfying. Importantly, by recognizing that we are inevitably in relationships to other animals, replete with vulnerability, dependency, and even some instrumentalization, and working to understand and improve these relationships, I’m not condoning exploitation. Acknowledging that we are in relationships doesn’t mean that all relationships are equally defensible or should stay as they are. Relationships of exploitation or complete instrumentalization are precisely the sorts of relationships that should change. And this is where an exploration of conditions of captivity and the complexity of the individual captives’ interests comes in. Some animals, like whales and elephants, cannot thrive in captive conditions. As much as we might want to have closer relationships with them, it isn’t good for them. Others, like dogs and chimpanzees, can live meaningful lives in captivity but only if the conditions they are captive in are conducive to their flourishing and they are respected. Part of the problem with captivity is the relationship of domination that it tends to maintain. By re-evaluating captivity (and for many in our non-ideal situation, there is no real alternative) we can start to ask questions about whether and how captive conditions can, while denying certain freedoms, still promote the dignity of the captives.

When we talk about our pets as children or roommates, we are disavowing the fundamental, more confusing relationship we have with our pets. How do we go about undoing this moral sleight of hand? One way can be by focusing on the disconnect between our rhetoric of how we think of other animals, and how we treat our pets. In Kennan Ferguson's wide-ranging and fascinating book, All in the Family: On Community and Incommensurability, he examines the relationships between humans and dogs in his chapter, "I ♥ My Dog." The chapter opens with the predicament of spending money to save your dog's life (or even to make her life more comfortable or happier), versus spending money to give to aid agencies to save the lives of other humans. Despite all of our claims that humans' lives matter more than animals, those of us with pets both do and do not act like this. On the one hand, the money we spend on our pets could easily translate into saving the lives of humans; on the other hand, our relationship to our pet will never be like the relationships with other humans in our household. The pet becomes this sort of strange liminal being. This realization is what moved Erica Fudge to ask, "Is a pet an animal?," which she follows up with this observation, "They are both human and animal; they live with us, but are not us; they have names like us, but cannot call us by our names" (Animal, pp. 27-28). Deleuze's desire that we have animal relationships toward our pets cannot but seem foolish now. After all, you cannot relate to a pet as an animal, or as a human. The pet forms a kind of becoming-human, a minor subject who enters into a becoming of a majoritarian subject. No wonder pets, dogs and cats, constantly haunt the arguments of A Thousand Plateaus. How much easier the world would be for Deleuze if it only had wolves.

As is infamously known since Donna Haraway's When Species Meet, Deleuze and Guattari write:

It is clear that the anomalous is not simply an exceptional individual; that  would be to equate it with the family animal or pet, the Oedipalized animal as psychoanalysis sees it, as the image of the father, etc. Ahab's Moby-Dick is not like the little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it. Lawrence's becoming-tortoise has nothing to do with a sentimental or domestic relation. (ATP p. 244)

Of course, Delezue is trying to invoke a certain image of an "elderly woman" here, but there is another image that an elderly woman with her dog or cat that she honors and cherishes should conjure up for us. 

Regardless of age (but not class), in the witch trials there is a constant identification between female sexuality and bestiality. This is suggested by copulation with the goat-god (one of the representations of the Devil), the infamous kiss sub cauda, and the charge that the witches kept a variety of animals, called "imps" or "familiars," with whom they entertained a particularly intimate relation. These were cats, dogs, hares, frogs the witch cared for, presumably suckling them from special teats; other animals, too, played a crucial part in her life as instruments of the Devil: goats and (night)mares flew her to the Sabbath, toads provided her with poisons for her concoctions – such was the presence of animals in the witches’ world that one must conclude they too were being put on trial. (Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 194). 

The witch's familiar represents another vision of our relationship with other animals. These animals, of course, are not the mere pets of the witch, rather, a familiar is a witch's assistant. While I have not done the research to know the history of how we called the witch's animal companions familiars, I cannot help but see the name as being a little ironic. After all, the familiar of the witch's is also uncanny, it is a being that exists in excess of what we imagine defines the being. The familiar is that which "ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light." And what secret is that? Why, that of animal agency. The familiar is not just a pet, but also an actor.

We know that the domestication of other animals have been part and parcel of both settler colonialism and global capitalism. The abolition of domestic relationships seem straightforward when dealing with animals treated as livestock. But, what do we do with pets? Kari Weil, in her Thinking Animals, argues for us to take seriously the agency of other animals when we think about pets. She wants us to take seriously the question "could animals have 'chosen' domestication[?]" (p. 56). This is not some sort of an idea of a social contract or species contract in which animals choose to enter into a pact with humans where we provide for them and treat them humanely and the animals agree for us to eat them. Rather, it is the acknowledgement that other animals have been active participants in their own history, and this might be especially true for the unique intersubjective relationship between pet and human. It is an affirmation that not all domestication has been conscious, and that humans can be domesticated by animals as much as animals are domesticated by humans. And this brings us back to that uncomfortable truth that Gruen raises for us. Namely, that many domesticated animals, including many pets, would no longer exist outside of their relationships with humans.

The animal abolitionist wants to destroy the property status of other animals. And when we think of the animals trapped in abattoirs and factory farms and laboratories, this makes perfect sense. But what do we do with our cats and our dogs, what becomes of our pets? The usual abolitionist line is that we love and care for these animals as best as possible, and we work hard to make sure they are the last generation (through spaying and neutering). It would be too easy to wave my hand at this point, and gesture toward the absurdity of loving animals to death, of loving animals to extinction. But there is a real love here. When I think of the turkey, so changed and transformed she can no longer reproduce of her own, when I think of her body that grows so large it crushes her bones and organs, I cannot help but think we should love and care for these turkeys as best as possible, and work hard to make sure they are the last generation. Our tendency to breed animals with the thought of the corpse backwards, so that life is but preservation for the animal's flesh, has made it so that there are some animals that are no longer born living, but born deading.  But most dogs and cats? They are still born living. But they are also born dependent on humans for a good life. The abolitionist desire here seems clear enough, better that an animal no longer exist than for her to be born a slave. But is this really true? I can't help but believe the abolitionist desire to no longer have pets is a bit like the person who claims their pet is their child. They are both disavowals of the great asymmetry in our intersubjective relationship. They are both claims toward innocence rather than facing the hard work of ethics.

I love my cats. And it is part of this love that means I am haunted by my cats, and the decisions that I make for them. I am disturbed by keeping them inside in the city, and disturbed by letting them outside in the country. I spay and neuter my cats, and am horrified by people who declaw their cats, and understand the sovereign violence in both decisions. I am haunted by cats, and I wish they were familiars. I wish my black cats came from pacts with the Devil, and that they could speak a language I could understand. But they are not familiars, and all I have is the opaque affective communication of our intersubjective relation. They are not familiars, but are instead that uncanny being, they are pets. 

Plants, Again (or, ethics, still). Part I

Planted, An Introduction.

This post tries to think issues of veganism and vegetarianism alongside issues of the active nature of plants. The first part of the post will respond broadly to this question, and lay out my general ethical framework for these issues. For those of you have diligently read this blog for at least a few years, you might find part one repetitive (also, wow, thank you). The second part of the blog post (which will be posted another day) engages theorists forwarding these arguments, particularly Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology, and Michael Marder in his Plant-Thinking, his article "Is it Ethical to Eat Plants?," and his debate with Gary Francione (Marder also has a forthcoming book I haven't read, The Philosopher's Plant).

Plants I:

This is not the first time I have addressed our ethical relationships to plants. See this post, and this post (and several more asides in other posts). This most recent post is immediately caused by a new scientific study that shows that "Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewing." This has caused a variety of news sources to frame this recent discovery as being some sort of unique challenge or cause of concern for vegetarians and vegans. See, for example, this Gizmodo article which actually ends with this line, "Either way, we do know one thing for sure: The world just got a little less smug for the vegan set." Okay then. So, here is the relevant question, why? Why is it each time that some new study comes out expressing the idea that plants are more active and intentional than previously considered, there are a flurry of articles that seem to see this as somehow an argument against vegans? If you are concerned about plants, and any sort of suffering that may come from consuming them, wouldn't adopting a vegan diet be a first step to lowering that suffering? This is true because it takes from more plant protein to produce animal protein, and because that much of animal agriculture includes polluting and destroying lands. And of course, some people concerned with our ethical obligations to plants have made this very point. Near the end of Matthew Hall's Plants as Persons, he makes this very argument:

A third very significant driver of harm to individual plants, plant species, and plant habitats is the unnecessary, unthinking use of plants. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the use of plants to feed massive numbers of animals for the world’s wealthiest nations to consume. Recent estimates suggest that humankind farms and eats over thirty billion animals each year. In a plant context, this live- stock rearing is important because it accounts for more than 65 percent of the total global agricultural area. It also accounts for large volumes of grains and soya beans which are used as feed. In 2002, approximately 670 million tons of grains were fed to livestock, roughly a third of the global harvest. They were also fed 350 million tons of protein-rich products such as soya and bran. The areas cleared to rear animals and feed them on such a huge scale are natural plant habitats such as tropical forests, savannahs, and grasslands. The rearing of livestock on such large scales is one of the major drivers of habitat loss. Basing diets on meat consumption excessively inflates the area of land that is put under human cultivation. Reducing the amount of consumed meat is a direct way of reducing harm done to plants, animals, and human beings. Not least because this large industry is also responsible for generating 18 percent of global carbon emissions—which to provide an idea of scale, is more than all forms of transport combined. (p. 165)

So, rather than seeing plant sentience as a unique challenge to vegans, it seems vegans are already doing something to limit harm to plants. Rather than making the vegan set less smug, wouldn't this make the vegan set more smug? Actually, wait a second, don't you assume that the author of the Gizmodo article probably eats plants herself? So, there is no reason that plant sentience is at all something particular to vegans. This argument could be used against literally any social justice movement. For example, imagine this conversation:

Person 1: Would you like to help out to end genocide against X human population?
Person 2: Did you know plants might be sentient? So, I can't help you.
Person 1: Uhm... okay...?
Person 2: Well, see you are trying to expand our ethical obligations to X human population. But there are still groups you haven't expanded our ethical concern to. And until you figure out a way to respond ethically to all beings, you really haven't done anything yet, have you?
Person 1: I'm pretty sure that's not how ethics work. 

Okay, I hear your objections. This scenario ignores that maybe there is something particular combining our thinking about eating ethically. In other words, the failure to create a completely harm free eating experience negates trying to reduce harm in other ways. But again, if we aren't talking about veganism, would that objection really hold any water? Imagine this conversation:

Person 1: No thank you, I try to avoid X product because I try to avoid products produced by slave labor.
Person 2: Well, all capitalist labor comes from a system of exploitation (surplus value is theft), so there is no need to fight against products produced by slave labor.
Person 1: ... . So are you doing anything to stop either slave labor or capitalist exploitation?
Person 2: What? No, I am just saying stop being so smug, I don't have to feel guilty for using slave labor because of capitalist exploitation.
Person 1: I'm pretty sure that's not how ethics work. 

So, plant sentience is not an argument against veganism because (1) veganism already reduces harm against plants, and (2) if plants present an ethical call, it is an ethical call for all of us, not just vegans. There are, of course, other arguments we can explore. For example, while the research that plants are active beings seem undeniable, what that means in terms of how sentience is expressed seems to be a fairly open question at this point (see this article by Oliver Sacks, and this blog post from Scientific America). And even if sentience was answered, it would not always be a guide about what interests plants have. For example, I am concerned about voting rights being denied felons, but I am not worried about getting voting rights for my cats. And while I am concerned about what Lori Gruen calls the "ethics of captivity" in prisons and zoos, I have trouble believing there are similar issues in botanical gardens. But let us, for now, bracket these broader questions about our ethical obligations toward plants.
So, if there is no reason that vegans are uniquely implicated in the ethics of plants, why is it that we are constantly bombarded with arguments that plant sentience undermines ethical veganism? First, as I have long contended, there is a confusion between ethics and innocence. If there was the possibility for innocence, we wouldn't need ethics. Ethics exist because we have to try to figure out ways to live a good life out of a bad life. What are the ways we can live and act in a world where innocence is impossible? And as in the conversations above, the argument that there is no way to eat without harm is a way of removing responsibility. Universal guilt becomes its own form of innocence, a way of avoiding ethical calls. People don't want responsibility, so they figure out a series of ways to push ethical obligations away. Problems are seen as systematic, so individual change is not called for. Because no solution will be perfect, we know that any change and tactic can be co-opted, so we don't do anything. You only want to help these individuals who are in pain and suffering, and because it focuses on individuals, it is neoliberalism and we don't have to help those in pain. Because there is no innocence, we might as well go ahead and do what we wanted to do anyway. And suddenly, enough excuses pile up so that we somehow have managed to be radical and ethical without ever having to change who we are. It is hard, after all, to be responsible (even just for those lives in front of you). It is confusing to know that we will have politics that will be tainted, that we will communications that fail, and that we will have actions that will cause harm. Spinoza defined conatus as the striving to preserve oneself, and he called that joy. So, perhaps it is sadness to be haunted by others, perhaps it is despair to have to change for others. No wonder we want to create excuses to not act and still pat ourselves on the back. So, maybe we need some other definition of joy. One that finds in our vulnerability the basis of sociality, of laughing together, and of mourning. Perhaps we can find joy (as well as frustration and love) in the difference of others, and with the creative impulse to build a different world. To yearn, and to act, together.

Pluralism Wars: Strike Back Against the Empire

Btw, my link aggregating is on-going with The Pluralism Wars!. So, every day I plan on putting up a new edit sign, and then putting the links as the discussion goes on. Either until I get bored, the discussion ends, or the intellectual terrain is scorched and salted. Whatever comes first.

While I hope you have read some of the various posts of the pluralism wars, I understand there are so many, and so many really deep discussions going on in comments (and even more occurring on facebook and twitter). This post should be read most in conjunction with Arran James' post here.

In Kennan Ferguson's excellent book on William James as a political thinker of pluralism, he writes, "Jamesian pluralism, as an ethical and philosophical system, encourages engagement with the world based on terms we do not ourselves control" (p. 47). Jamesian pluralism, then, is based upon an idea of finitude. Finitude, of course, has increasingly gotten a bad rap among certain new realists (I wonder why), but what is being advanced here is not a Kantian finitude. Here, let's turn to James himself: "But the knower in question may still be conceived either as an Absolute or as an Ultimate; and over against the hypothesis of him in either form the counter-hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge that ever was or will be still contains some ignorance, may be legitimately held. Some bits of information always may escape (James, Pragmatism, p. 81, emphasis added). This is not the finitude of being trapped in myself, and being unable to access the thing-in-itself, but is the finitude related to the infinity of what is, the thing-itself can always be more. This is why, for example, Latour claims that the genius of ANT is its very inability to be applied (Reassembling the Social, pp. 141-157). The issue of finitude is not just that the world can always be more, it is also that reality is fundamentally constructivist itself. It is unfinished. "But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis that the actual world, instead of being complete 'eternally,' as the monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject to addition or liable to loss" (James, Pragmatism, p. 82). As James adds in A Pluralistic Universe, "that the substance of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that a distributive form of reality, the each-form, is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonly acquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing."

Such a relationship to finitude and pluralism has obvious political and ethical implications. It forces us to attend to the realities of others. Kennan Ferguson, again: "What happens to those creatures that are judged deficient in their intelligibility, or those that transgress these boundaries, or those who understand but ignore them? This includes the traditionally and contemporarily problematic categories of slaves, women, criminals, the insane, and children, each of whose inclusion and exclusion from intelligibility and political involvement has been contested." (p. 10) And animals. Jamesian pluralism, unlike, say, the Bush administration, forces us to understand the legitimacy of another's world. Like Ranciere put it in Disagreement, "Politics is not made up of power relationships; it is made up of relationships between worlds" (p. 42). The idea of learning from and avowing the legitimacy of other worlds risks, of course, voluntarism. But it does so as being irreducibly opposed to the authoritarianism of the Bush administration understanding of truth that Levi has mentioned.  Against the authoritarian doctrine of truth from the Bush administration, Jamesian understandings of truth sides with those who have been systemically excluded from the intelligible. In his own life, of course, James was publicly opposed to militarism and imperialism, and frequently spoke out against the Spanish-American War, and the colonialism of the Philippines.  James' pluralism granted the legitimacy of the world of the neighbor. His philosophy is profoundly social. Again from Ferguson, "James opposed this homogenization, celebrating those people who were overtly unlike him, for it was they who could teach and change him: people who loved war, people who hated nature, people who believed in the afterlife, people who had new ideas of medicine, and Cubans, Hawaiians, and Filipinos." (p. 46). Such a move has nothing to do with discursive or social construction, and is certainly not "first world philosophies" (an ethos stealing phrase if there ever was one). I am sure that W.E.B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and Paul Taylor (to name a few) would be surprised to hear they are engaged in first world philosophies. Because Jamesian pluralism is not a project of tolerance or liberalism. It is perhaps a project more disconcerting, one that has to take seriously the worlds of those who are most dissimilar from yourself.

And in so doing, pragmatism continues, as I argued before, a refusal of first philosophies and grounding. It removes the satisfaction of being one of the knowers. It seeks to develop an allergy to what Stengers has called "the desire to be the thinking brain of humanity." It means taking seriously beliefs that get sneered at, rather than being the sneerer (again, images taken from Stengers). As satisfying as it is to rant about the global warming deniers and the young earthers and the birthers and all of that. Let's be honest, the ability go scream "you are wrong" has not somehow managed to help the climate at all, or change income inequality, or stop factory farming, or little else. And even if tomorrow climate denying went away, it doesn't really mean that we be doing what needs to be done. The political, social, and ethical problems of the world are not fundamentally cartesian problems that after the right truth follows right actions. I spend my whole life having discussions with people who all agree with me about the evils of factory farming and fail to do anything in their own lives about it. So maybe, instead, we need to understand the worlds of others. Not tolerate them, or concern troll them, or proselytize them, but actually engage those who are most dissimilar from ourselves. This is, of course, a not inconsiderable part of the projects of Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour. This is the issue of mediators (Deleuze), the issues of diplomates and cosmopolitics and ecologies of practices. This is to understand politics as a relationship of worlds, and to understand the realities of how truth goes about being validated in those worlds and about those worlds. And therefore pluralism is profoundly antithetical to the projects of universalism. But it is not relativistic or solipsistic, and certainly is not the liberal project of polite tolerance.

But, to return us to Arran James' questions, does this not just return us to a position of neutrality? How do we account for what Fred Moten has called a general antagonism? As Bill Haver has put it, isn't non-neutrality the very condition of immanence (in which the god-trick of transcendence allows neutrality)? How do we combine this Jamesian pluralism with those for whom in their fundamental existential comportments require the ability to resist against worlds that treat them only with violence and domination? Maybe cosmopolitics and pluralism seeks to stop imperialism before it happens, but does it also cause us to demand that the insurgents put down their arms? Or that we remain neutral between those who are fighting for the right to exist and those who deny that right?

I have tried to argue before that a Jamesian understanding of ethics is one that cannot be neutral (see here and here). One is forced to act, without the assurance of being right. It is the register of the tragic, before it makes a world that was a live possibility now a dead possibility. But for all of that, we must of course act. In this way, James is, of course, a meliorist. Long quotation, I apologize:

Midway between the two [optimism and pessimism] there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant doctrine in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.
It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism. Some conditions of the world’s salvation are actually extant, and she cannot possibly close her eyes to this fact: and should the residual conditions come, salvation would become an accomplished reality. Naturally the terms I use here are exceedingly summary. You may interpret the word ’salvation’ in any way you like, and make it as diffuse and distributive, or as climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please.
Take, for example, any one of us in this room with the ideals which he cherishes, and is willing to live and work for. Every such ideal realized will be one moment in the world’s salvation. But these particular ideals are not bare abstract possibilities. They are grounded, they are live possibilities, for we are their live champions and pledges, and if the complementary conditions come and add themselves, our ideals will become actual things. What now are the complementary conditions? They are first such a mixture of things as will in the fulness of time give us a chance, a gap that we can spring into, and, finally, our act.
Does our act then create the world’s salvation so far as it makes room for itself, so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create, not the whole world’s salvation of course, but just so much of this as itself covers of the world’s extent?
Here I take the bull by the horns, and in spite of the whole crew of rationalists and monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask why not? Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world–why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this? (Pragmatism, pp. 137-138, emphasis in original)

Against the universalists and the idealistic monists, it is the very unfinished nature of the world that allows for us to respond to this age of catastrophes. (And one should take seriously Bill Connolly's political project as spelled out in Pluralism, The World of Becoming, and The Fragility of Things). The point is, to quote Bill Haver quoting Samuel Delany, to "practice invention to the brink of intelligibility."

Okay, I know I haven't yet answered Levi's questions about evil spirits yet (maybe I won't, we will see), but I wanted to address the issues of political philosophy and ethics more.

Abstraction, Calculative Thinking, Global Warming, and Environmental Ethics; or the Polar Vortex of Thinking!

This polar vortex seems to be a good cause for our annual winter jokes from Republicans that global warming is somehow a lie. This time from Ted Cruz, but he is hardly the first. At the link, Weigel argues that the issue is a fundamental confusion between weather and climate. Weather being the immediate phenomenological event, climate being an abstraction. In order to understand something like rapid climate change or global warming, and the ability to understand its causes, and the ways we may stop or divert its destruction, requires serious calculative thinking. It requires care for our abstractions.

Abstraction here should be hear in the register of Whitehead. It is a idea (like Nishida Kitaro's transcendence, Althusser's problématique, Foucault's historical a priori, and Deleuze and Guattari's concept) to talk about the way that knowledge's knowing comes to be known (that is an ugly 90s-style phrase, but I think you get the idea). To quote Massumi quoting Deleuze, "the opposite of the concrete is not the abstract, it is the discrete."   As Massumi adds, “[t]he discrete: the slothful just-being-there of an inactive chunk of matter.” (Semblance and Event, 27).  Abstraction does not take us out of the situation, rather abstraction gives us prehensions of the situation. Let us take the abstraction of global warming.

Global warming is a lure for thinking about issues of consumption and production, of energy and waste, of diet, transportation, and development. We can understand how, as ethicists, we need this abstraction of global warming in order to ask and answer certain questions. And, we can also see here how the discrete is the opposite of the concrete, rather than the abstract. For example, Ted Cruz's 'joke' that Al Gore told me this wouldn't happen.  Such a move refuses the very actual, very concrete reality of global warming by discreting the moment of snow and cold in D.C. from the broader reality and the broader context of global warming. We can give many other examples. How colorblind policies discrete the reality of racism, or how 'tone' criticisms are used to discrete the lived experiences under the abstract and concrete realities of white supremacy and heterosexist patriarchy. To bring us to animals, when we are able to cherish the family pet and treat her as if she was a family member, and then to go and eat the parts of bodies of other animals, is certainly a manifestation of the discrete. That is to say, the ability to de-contextualize our pets from animals in general is a moment of discretion, and not abstraction.

My point here is that our response to global warming cannot simply be through appeals to phenomenological immediacy. Moreover, we will not be saved by virtue, infinite responsibility for the infinite other, or voluntarism. What we need is better abstractions, more calculative thinking, more en-framing, and stronger institutional responses. As David Wood has shown, when it comes to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina, global warming, and a variety of other events, it has been the conservative response to embrace the impossibility of calculative thought.  Perhaps our project going further is to, as Isabelle Stengers has argued, to calculate again. This is not the calculative thought of the capitalist cost-benefit system, but a different calculation. It is, to steal a phrase from Jane Bennett, about mutually enabling instrumentalizations.  Long quotation from Stengers ahead, so bear with me:

The cosmopolitical Parliament is not primarily a place where instantaneous decisions are made, but a delocalized place. It exists every time a "we" is constructed that does not identify with the identity of a solution but hesitates before a problem. I associate this "we" with the only slogan Leibniz ever proposed: Calculemus. Let us calculate. It's an odd expression, constructed to conceptualize the possibility of peace during a time of war. But Leibniz was a mathematician, not an accountant or statistician. For him, calculation was not a mere balance sheet contrasting homogeneous quantities, calculations of interest or benefits that were presented as being commensurable. For a mathematician, the accuracy of a calculation and the validity of its result are relatively simple questions, "trivial" in the language of mathematics. What is important, and which is not in the least trivial, is the position of the problem that will, possibly, allow it to be calculated, the precise creation of relationships and constraints, the distinction between the various ingredients, the exploration of the roles they are liable to play, the determinations or indeterminations they engender or bring about. There is no commensurability without the invention of a measurement, and the challenge of Leibniz's calculemus is, precisely, the creation of a "we" that excludes all external measures, all prior agreements separating those who are entitled to "enter" into the calculation and those subject to its result. [...]
Calculemus, therefore, does not mean "let us measure," "let us add," "let us compare," but, first and foremost, let us create the "we" associated with the nature and terms of the operation to be risked. It is not a question of acting in the name of truth and justice, but of creating commensurability. It is a question of knowing that the "truth" of the created common measure will always be relative to what such creation will have been capable of, knowing also that a radical heterogeneity preexists such creation, the absence of any preexisting shared measure among the ingredients to be articulated. (Cosmopolitics II, pp. 399-401). 

One can begin to understand that the way of an abstraction of global warming, and our calculating, can produce a different we. Malcolm Bull has argued that global warming has the power to extend our moral imagination (another long quotation coming on):

What this reveals is the extent to which climate change is now constructed not as a scientific problem that generates unexpected moral dilemmas, but as an ethical problem that necessarily requires moral solutions. The sceptics are understandably wary of this, and, as Björn Lomborg has argued, we are not generally as moral as climate change ethics assumes, for if we were we might not make climate change our top priority. If we were concerned about polar bears we would start by not shooting them, rather than worrying about how much ice they had left to stand on, and if we were really worried about the global poor, we could help them now rather than helping their descendants at the end of the century, who will probably be a lot better off anyway.
These are in many respects valid arguments, but they miss the point that were it not for climate change, we would be giving even less thought to polar bears, or to the global poor, and would see little connection between our actions and their fate. As Peter Unger’s Living High and Letting Die showed, our customary moral intuitions barely extend to poor foreigners, let alone to their descendants, or to Arctic fauna. It is thanks to climate change that an entire body of political thought has emerged which positions our everyday actions in direct relation to their most distant consequences.
[...]
Contrary to Gardiner’s concerns about moral corruption, climate change does not tempt us to be less moral than we might otherwise be; it invites us to be more moral than we could ever have imagined. [...] Climate ethics is not morality applied but morality discovered, a new chapter in the moral education of mankind. It may tell us things we do not wish to know (about democracy, perhaps), but the future development of humanity may depend on what, if anything, it can teach us.

The calculative thinking and en-framing of responding to global warming, and the abstractions that will be necessary for such a response, is not one that will leave the world as it is.

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). 

Eating Grass-Fed Animals Will Not Save Us: Part 2 of 3

This is part 2, feel free to read part one on the environment, here. You can also read part three, here.  [Also, keep in mind this was written a few months ago, before the most recent series of ethics posts].

The Ethics

Let’s begin with what the author gets right, there is a real issue with the production of agricultural products. Lots and lots of animals are killed, and often killed horribly, in such circumstances. And for those of us who want a more just and kind world for other animals, this is surely something we need to pay attention to. One of the reasons that I tend to purchase CSAs (Community Supported Agricultural) is in order to decrease this effect. Furthermore, I certainly agree to the idea that we all have blood on our hands, that we are not innocent. Of course, innocence is not the point. The reason we need ethics is not because we need to learn to be innocent, but because innocence is foreclosed. And unless we want to face our post-lapsarian world with relativism, quietude, and inaction, we must learn to exist without innocence. However, the idea that not being vegetarian/vegan is somehow better or even just a wash as being a vegetarian/vegan, is simply not workable.

Much of the ethical arguments in the original article are mostly based around some sort of calculative consequentialist ethics. So, first I would point out that from that world, the environmental arguments from before are fairly important. A world that is inhabitable to most life will certainly be a world with a lot of death and suffering for all sorts of animals, including human ones. Also, on a more particular note, the grazing of animals on rangelands has resulted in a devastation of biodiversity. Moreover, there is always a cost-benefit analysis we have to engage in when we talk about land to have animals graze on. The article author would have us believe that this land will not usable for anything unless animals are grazing, but, as I said before, that seems doubtful. So, we can graze animals, we can let the land alone and have some biodiversity and natural carbon trapping return, or we can use the land for wind farms and solar farms. The single worse environmental use of the land would be to graze cattle with that, and therefore arguably the worse decision for animals.
Also, it isn’t as if grazing cattle doesn’t also entail a lot of direct killing of animals besides the cattle. “Ranchers have a long history of exterminating animals who could prey upon cattle or otherwise threaten their health. Just about any animal with a spine is considered a varmint and is liable to be shot, trapped, or poisoned. Ranchers have carried out a well organized and far-reaching extermination of wildlife. Over the past century, ranchers have killed billions of prairie dogs, as well as uncountable numbers of wolves, coyotes, and even bear. America’s indigenous cattle, the buffalo, have been nearly wiped off the continent to make way for beef cattle. Ranchers don’t do all this killing alone. The USDA’s Wildlife Services division exterminates animals likely to prey on livestock. In 2002, this division killed 86,000 coyotes, 5000 foxes, 380 black bears, and 190 wolves.” (Marcus, p. 198).
The original article author states and blames agricultural monoculturalism for feeding humans, which is, well, completely false. With the exception of certain sugar monoculturalism produced by slavery and colonialism, much of monoculturalism’s history is tied fundamentally up with eating land-based mammals.
It was not just the states that grazed cattle that were affected. Because people were paid by the poundage of the cattle, rather than each head of cattle, it made sense to make the cattle as fat as possible. It is also worth noting that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, it was uncommon for Americans to desire fatty cow flesh—what we now call the prime cut—however, that type of meat was desired in Britain and many other parts of Europe. This distinction matters because scarcity of meat in Europe shifted European demand to the United States. As Fernand Braudel put it, “In the modern period then, Europe’s privileged status as a meat-eating area declined, and real remedies were only found in the middle of the nineteenth century as a result of the widespread creation of artificial pastures, the development of scientific stock-raising, and the exploitation of distant stock-raising areas in the New World.” British money was invested heavily in building the American beef industry in the mid-19th century. Because of their desire for fatty beef, grass-fed beef became increasingly supplanted by corn-fed beef. The rise of corned beef created heavy demand for corn, and farmers realized that beef became a far more profitable way to convert their corn to money than selling it directly to people. States such as Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, western Kentucky, and others developed a monoculture based upon corn.
Meanwhile, fattening the cows with corn necessitated replace grazing with a different mechanism of feeding cattle. This was when the first feedlots were created. Cows were fenced in, fattened up, and taken to slaughter. In the old days of grazing, cows had between five to seven years to live, which was necessary for the cows to reach a profitable size and poundage. The corned-fed cattle not only meant that it was faster to fatten up the cows, but the rise of feedlots fundamentally shifted the contours of breeding cattle in the first place. Specialized breeders became common, and cattle became bred for certain genetic qualities, such as speed by which they could be fattened up, the size they could get to, and docility. These new, custom-made cattle fenced into feedlots had roughly two years to live, significantly increasing profits.
As the historian Revivel Netz put it:

The bison were now dead, replaced by railroads and farmers. As the Indians retreated to their pitiful reservations, the cow began its trek north of Texas, eventually to introduce there an economy based in Chicago. And this, finally, was the culmination of American history in the nineteenth century. Texas led to Mexico, which led to Kansas, which led to the Civil War, upon whose conclusion America could move on to destroy the Indian and the bison. The final act in the subjugation of the West was under way: the transition from bison to cow. This was the immediate consequence of the Civil War: the West was opened for America --- and America filled it with cows. (Netz, Barbed Wire, p. 10). 

And nothing about any of this has changed! “In 2006, more than a third of all grain produced in the world entered the mouths of animals destined for the abattoir. In the United States, an astounding 80 percent of all grain produced went toward animal feed” (McWilliams, p. 127). The idea that if we just ate more land-based mammals we would see less monoculturalism is absurd, to steal a phrase, it’s nonsense on stilts! And if we eat grass-fed animals, that would certainly be better than eating factory farmed animals, but we are not dealing with this problem because of vegetarianism/veganism, which is actually just as good (if not better) attack upon such monoculturalism.

But all of this talk in terms of a certain kind of utilitarianism does not address something else about the ethics of purposefully eating another being. Okay, time for a long quotation from Cora Diamond on this issue:

“We do not eat our dead, even when they have died in automobile accidents or been struck by lightning, and their flesh might be first class. We do not eat them; or if we do, it is a matter of extreme need, or of some special ritual--and even in cases of obvious extreme need, there is very great reluctance.  […] Anyone who, in discussing this issue, focuses on our reasons for not killing people or our reasons for not causing them suffering quite evidently runs a risk of leaving altogether out of his discussion those fundamental features of our relationship to other human beings which are involved in our not eating them. It is in fact part of the way this point is usually missed that arguments are given for not eating animals, for respecting their rights to life and not making them suffer, which imply that there is absolutely nothing queer, nothing at all odd, in the vegetarian eating the cow that has obligingly been struck by lightning. That is to say, there is nothing in the discussion which suggests that a cow is not something to eat; it is only that one must not help the process along” (The Realistic Spirit, pp. 321-322, emphasis in the original). 

As Lori Gruen notes on this passage, “Humans are not food. Imagine how our interactions with one another might be different if we saw humans, or at least some humans, as consumable. If we saw each other as edible and, in fact, ate humans on occasion and really enjoyed it, this could lead to a breakdown in respect for one another and for humanity as a whole.” (p. 102). [Additional note, this passage should be thought alongside Matt Calarco's work on us as being possible subjects to be eaten, and Karl Steel's work on cannibalism].
There is something disturbing beyond belief about treating a life as pure instrumentality, as a being to be raised for us to slaughter and eat. I have trouble believing that the sort of relations necessary to alleviate the suffering and end the violence against other animals is going to come from a cycle of raising, slaughtering, and eating animals.

Part 3 here.

Ethics and Innocence

So, I have some links about my last post on flat ethics: Levi has a response up here, and Peter has an extension here (particularly useful to read in terms of my discussion on innocence), Alex Reid has more thoughts on flat ethics (always worth reading), Jeremy Trombley has more thoughts here (entitled, wonderfully, constructing ethics. Constructivist Ethics has been the recent name I have been giving to my ethical work), Adam Robberts has some thoughts on ethics (similar thread, but not as specific on the issue of flat ethics), also not completely on point but useful is this post by Andre Ling, Craig has a follow up post here (sometimes I think I miss out by not being on twitter, also go read Craig),  Levi has a round up and more ideas here, and lastly Claire O'Farrell has a great little post up on Badiou's Ethics (which also isn't directly related, but I think important to all these present discussions). And I bet while I write this, there will be more posts.
I don't have the time right now to respond to everyone (particularly Levi), but maybe soon. Instead, here is a side discussion about ethics (both flat and otherwise).

This post will still be on my work about ethics, but this is a slightly different route. Karl Steel (whose book, How to Make a Human is really quite wonderful, hopefully more on that later) recently brought me up over at the blog In the Middle. Karl writes:

For some recent discussions of posthuman ethics, relevant to my post, see Levi Bryant and Scu at Critical Animal. I think Scu gets it exactly right when he says "Ethics is not a pathway for innocence. Rather, it is about how to live after innocence, how to exist in a fully post-lapsarian world." I think that "Bisclavret" might answer Levi's statement that he's "not even sure what a non-anthropocentric ethical theory would look like." Well, here's one, and it's lycanthropocentric. It's not a flat ontology (edit of the edit: or rather, not a flat ethics), because--as Bogost reminds us--there's no escaping -centrism, of whatever sort. But to eat from the perspective of the wolf (as I suggest the Wolf-Child of Hesse does) or the werewolf (as Mr. B does), is certainly to be non-anthropocentric. Edit of the edit: although I may be speaking far above my pay grade, and certainly far outside my expertise, while we might be able to conceive of a flat ontology, I'm not sure we, or anything else, can conceive of a flat ethics. 

Read the rest of his post to get how all of this fits together, it will be worth your time. Okay, well, Eileen Joy (whose energy and scholarship has always been impressive for me to behold from a distance) had this to say in comments:

5. I couldn't disagree more with this comment from Scu:
"Ethics is not a pathway for innocence. Rather, it is about how to live after innocence, how to exist in a fully post-lapsarian world."
Any notion of the world [human, inhuman, whatever], as one that is always somehow post-good faith, innocence, etc. just unwittingly participates in what I feel is a kind of Judeo-Christian tragic view of the world. I know [esp. after reading your AVMEO essay] that we need *more* bad conscience [we need to be more hyper-aware of all the ways in which *our* violence has shaped this world], but that is not the same thing as saying this world is always post-lapsarian, always post-evil [as it were], as if the "starting position" for every inquiry, or formulation of ethics, is that there could never be an example, an ontology, of non-violence. At least, I'd like to think "bad conscience" and also goodness outside of religious contexts.

Okay, I was actually both surprised and, well, intellectually provoked by this comment. So, I want to spend some time with it. I had talked to Cameron about this, and he basically said something like, "Well, that's just true". To which I said, "Well, it's not untrue, and I think that is my cue to write a blog post". Which is where we are.

So, first, when I start using phrases like post-lapsarian, I can't really come back and go, "Of course I am not part of the Judeo-Christian tradition", if nothing else my language and images are certainly tied to a Western and Judeo-Christian world I was brought up in. So, I would certainly reject (parts?) of such a tradition. I certainly don't want to trap our ethics back into a religious contexts.

And it is worth noting here how much innocence is so thoroughly criss-crossed by the same religious tradition. To give you merely a very recent example, here is an excerpt from the Christian Medical Fellowship blog (h/t JME blog):
From a post entitled "There are few things more horrifying than the slaughter of innocent children", worried already?

Every child’s death is a tragedy but there are few things more reprehensible than the killing of children by adults. Children are rightly seen as amongst the most vulnerable and defenceless members of society and deserving of special protection. [...]
There is no one more vulnerable, more innocent and being killed in greater numbers than the unborn child. Each year around the world there are 42 million abortions, against only 57 million deaths from all other causes except abortion.

Innocence isn't exactly a concept outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and it certainly doesn't maintain itself, well, innocently.

(Side note, I am going to switch to talking about the particular manifestation of the Judeo-Christian tradition I am most familiar with--the conservative evangelical Christianity, as most represented in the American Southeast).

The fallenness of the world in such a Christian tradition is tied completely up with innocence. It isn't like the entire tradition goes: "Well, the world is fallen, time to move on with figuring out how to live". Instead, the entire point is to return to innocence, or moments of innocent, or support and propagate innocence. Thus, we have confessions, we have penance, we have conversions and born agains, we have the idea of rapture, faith to absolve us of sin, etc.
I am just not entirely sure why critiquing the notion of innocence unwittingly perpetuates such a tradition. This is why in my provocations, right before the line that Karl quotes, I write: "Ethics is not secularized redemption, or a manuel for right and righteous living."

I do agree with Eileen's point that such a conception of ethics requires us to take seriously the idea that non-violence might never be an option. I don't think I want to take quite the maximal stance here that there can never be, and never will be, the possibility of non-violence, but I freely admit to not seeing that possibility. And if it is possible, truly and really to live a life of non-violence, I don't think we need something called "ethics". Rather, ethics is all about choices and decisions, it is about producing certain kinds of realities and beings to the exclusion of other realities and beings (this is what makes it tragic). And that is what I mean by violence, the forceful exclusion of some worlds for other worlds. At times this is profoundly and obviously something we can call violence: you have one liver to transplant, and three patients who need it. You experiment on beings for medical treatment, or you don't.  You choose between development and increased standard of living in your country, or decreasing global warming gasses. If what various people with regards to plants are saying is true (and I am increasingly convinced, due mostly to Steven Shaviro), when we eat plants, other animals, or fellow humans (and yes, I am thinking of both Matt Calarco here, and Karl Steel on cannibalism) we are participating in an economy of lives living and dying. These are, as William James puts it, "a tragic situation and no mere speculative conundrum" (The Will to Believe, p. 203). Tim Morton likes to talk about the sense of unease we get when we really think about the ways we all connected. Rather than some hippie or new age sense of celebration, it is scary. It is scary to think about the mercury in our bodies, and the ways that global warming will effect us. Also, from an ethical point of view, it is unnerving to think about the ways we are ecologically and economically connected. We are constantly working on producing one world (or one set of worlds, or a series of particular worlds, or the possibilities for only these worlds and not those worlds), as opposed to other worlds.Further, as James also argues, "Decisions [... are a] strange and intense function of granting consent to one possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal and double future into an inalterable and simple past (The Will to Believe, p. 158).  This is tragic, this closing off of possible futures into inalterable pasts. But this isn't a move to ask us to repent for our sins, or ask for forgiveness, or pine after a future where tragedy will not exist. There is no thought here of leaving or precarity, or our finitude. This is not a world view that this world is tragically fallen, so we have to leave it, or earn and focus on an (imaginary) time when we will no longer be a part of this world, but immortally otherwise. Instead, the ethical energy is one of constructivism, of constantly building and rebuilding the world. Ethics is a way of putting ourselves into this world, rather than taking us out of this world.

This brings us back to innocence, and also more that I agree with Eileen. I really think there is a bizarre kind of allergy to ethics among certain people, or at least certain issues. For many, it seems to be hung up on a kind of innocence. Agamben and Esposito seem to condemn every complex ethical choice as being the return of nazism. Every time there is some proposition that the complexity of plants is somehow a unique ethical challenge for vegetarians and vegans, innocence is at fault there. I could go on, but much of this also very much in line with what Tim, following Hegel, calls the beautiful soul syndrome. However, I certainly can understand Eileen's recoiling of my attacks on innocence, and her fear that I am somehow claiming we are post-evil (I am not trying to claim that). My focus against innocence, and for ethics, is not a cure all. Just like Deleuze and Guattari warning us to "[n]ever believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us", never believe that critiquing innocence will suffice to give us ethical thinking. Right, I think there is a lot of reason to focus our attacks on BSS and innocence, but there are also surely dangers and failure on that road as well.  I wrote this back in September:

However, being critical of being a beautiful soul is often what someone does right before they, you know, say or do something horribly violent and messed up. Zizek's frankly racist remarks about the Roma is a good example. But this also happens all the time in discussions of vegans and vegetarians. When someone critiques vegans and vegetarians of engaging in beautiful soul syndrome, of just desiring to be pure (like Pollan often does), they almost always are saying their willingness to accept the world as a violent place means they can now slaughter and eat the flesh of animals.
In other words, we cannot have a critique of the beautiful soul leading us into a worse world. This sort of political and ethical 'realism' cannot be an excuse for racism and needless violence. Deleuze was often fond of saying that doing philosophy required a sort of stutter or a sort of stammer. A way of making language do something it wasn't really designed to do. I often think that political and ethical action requires a type of shambling, a type of shuffling. A way of walking that both rejects the beautiful soul while at the same time not allowing that to become an excuse for us to not have ethical commitments.

Some thoughts on flat ethics

First, and very much a part of this discussion, Gary Francione and Michael Marder have a three part debate about plants, veganism, and ethics over at the CUP blog. Preview here, and the debate is here, here, and here. New territory isn't exactly broken in these debates, but it well articulated and positioned, and hopefully I will have more to say later. And it really has a lot to do with flat ethics, which is the point of today's post.

I am not sure, but I think I might have been the first person to use the term flat ethics in some early discussions with Levi (at least in the context of a flat ontology), so it is interesting to see Levi talking about a flat ethics. Which you can see here (and I will claim to have skimmed some of the comments, so if I retread ground, sorry. Though there are some good comments up, by people like Jairus Grove, Thomas Hodgman, Karl Steel, Ian Bogost, and of course, Craig, among others). Craig, at his new digs, also has a very critical response up. Alright, this is mostly going to focus on Levi's post, and generally some thoughts on ethics I have been expounding here and elsewhere.

When I first started talking about flat ethics, it was as a position I was very much for. An anti-anthropocentric and anti-hierarchical ethics. I am no longer sure a flat ethics is possible, but I still very much remember I wanted a flat ethics. I think all of us need to wary of any sort of ethics that engages in easy hierarchy. And I am not even sure it requires so much of a defense, but anything that allows you to add up and calculate the worthiness of life should give us pause, no? It seems absolutely weird to me that flat ethics is seen as a threat, or a harm, or an evil. Flat ethics is the dream, the hope, the promise. But I worry that the only way to achieve flat ethics is to create categories that exclude, fully and fundamentally, types and modes of existence. This is, of course, something that travels along with Matt Calarco's agnosticism and indetermination, and Haraway's thou shalt not make killable (and the Haraway inclusion here should also keep us present to the fears of why we would want and strive after a flat ethics. Her entire justification for killings of the, say, 'invasive' pig is a great example here of why hierarchies are always so suspicious and pernicious. More on this later).
We should turn our attention here to William James, who writes in his Moral Philosopher and Moral Life:

If we follow the ideal which is conventionally highest, the others which we butcher either die or do not return to haunt us; of if they come back and accuse us of murder, everyone applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear (p. 203)

This is why I have insisted that innocence is not the point of ethics. Indeed, innocence (more than evil) is the enemy of ethics, is the enemy of both thinking and performing ethically. Innocence precludes and occludes ethics.

As Isabelle Stengers movingly writes about James' passage:

James thus seems to condemn moral philosophers to relativism, to the admission that all moral ideals are of equal value. Yet this is not so, and the position James proposes, like those of the evolutionary biologists in the sense of Stuart Kauffman, and like those of the sociologist in the Whiteheadian sense, demands an attention to the interstices. For James, the his first means to accept that the question is tragic. Philosophers should be able to resist the temptation to justify the sacrifice, the exclusion of other ideals. They should accept that the victims haunt the interstices of their adherence to an ideal. They should accept to let their experience throb with the complaint of those who were sacrificed in the name of what they define as moral (Thinking with Whitehead, p. 334). 

This sense of the tragic nature of ethical is so far removed from a Spinozian conatus. Hasana Sharp, in the midst of her critique of Butler's Hegelian ethics of recognition (which is smart, and deserves serious attention), writes: "Moreover, by insisting on the impossibility of the Hegelian project, she resigns herself to a melancholy project of perpetual dissatisfaction" (Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, p. 152). However, a melancholy project of perpetual dissatisfaction might very well be the mood and mode of the ethical. (This might have something fundamentally to do with what Jack Halberstam calls the queer art of failure, but there are reasons I hesitate here, and decide to make this a parenthetical argument). But let me put an ellipses here on the tragic and the ethical, and instead move on to the issue of the conatus.

I worry about the move toward the conatus when talking about ethics, particularly as it relates to decisions of hierarchy and putting the human first (see both Levi's post and some comments, but also Jane Bennett's otherwise impressive Vibrant Matter, specifically p. 104). There seems to be a great deal of passivity when talking about conatus, as if we are forced to simply want to promote bodies that are the most like ours. And yet, this seems strange. Not only do many people support and sustain bodies that very dissimilar to their own, but Spinoza is deeply suspicious  of this being the case. On the first part, not only do people cherish and love their pets, instead of, say, giving that money to OxFam International (more on this, see Kennan Ferguson's article "I <3 My Dog"), but also people care for all sorts of non-living beings. Think of the people who spend money and energy on old cars, or atari systems, or the various other objects and things that attract our money and attention. These pleasures come from combining our bodies with bodies that are very dissimilar to our own (dogs, video games, cars, artworks, books, what have you). But Spinoza himself assumes that we get caught and captured in the affects of non-human others (particularly animals). Thus, when Spinoza retells The Fall in his Ethics, our downfall is other animals: "but that after he ["the first man"] believed the lower animals to be like himself, he immediately began to imitate their affects (see IIIP27) and to lose his freedom" (found in IVP68S). What a strange retelling of the fall! Hasana Sharp provocatively and thoroughly charts why Spinoza was so suspicious of humans engaging with animals in her book, but also in her JCAS article (here, which is free, but also a large-ish pdf download). But for me, the passivity with which people talk about conatus is worrisome, and it is worrisome exactly for the ethical reasons.For William James the ethical act has no meaning unless it is chosen out “of several, all equally possible” acts. Ethics “must sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinching on the arduous path, these are the common ethical energies. The ethical energy par excellence has to go even further and choose which interest, out of several equally coercive, shall be supreme” (Principles of Psychology, p. 191).  The ethical energy involves choice, not passivity.
Indeed, the very idea that desire is something that we have little control over is deeply dangerous and weird. Any decent flipping through the feminist literature on pornography and desire will surely make this case. We can engage in pathways and protocols that forms and transforms our desires and beings, that forms and transforms our conatus. This is not to say, in some sort of self-help way, that we have supreme control over our desires, but neither are we passive receptacles unable to change or engage our desires and bodies. This is one of the reasons that Foucault's late work on the art of living is so interesting and useful, as a way of learning practices and possibilities of change and relation. Indeed, I have suggested (or will. The length from writing to publication creates bizarre time travel paradoxes), that veganism is such a practice, a mode of changing our desires and relations.
And this matters, for the reasons that James goes on to suggest, “The problem with the man is not what act he shall choose to do, than what being he shall now resolve to become" (ibid).
 

Provocations for thinking ethically

So, a lot of preamble at the top. Feel free to drop to the next paragraph. I have been absurdly busy since coming home from the non-human turn conference, so I have a lot of posts here I still need to make about an event that feels forever ago in blogger time. On top of that I still have a few outstanding emails I need to respond to (which I will get to tomorrow, I promise). But in order to try and keep up with blogger time, I wanted to make this post now.


Cameron, over at his blog, has a really great post up on OOO and ethics. Read that first, along with the comments. Don't believe me that it is worth reading, here is a sample:

I accept all of this. I fully believe that I, as a being, inscribe actions and relations with ethical qualities when they do not inherently possess them. There is no ethical quality embedded in the act of eating flesh itself. But I live the life of a conscious being who experiences the world in a very specific way. I have known fear and terror. I have know pain. Cut with a knife, hit with a saw, scraping the skin off my legs in large, painful slabs. These are experiences that I have known. Science tells me that pigs experience the same sensations. Their skin is similar enough to ours that my father was able to replace his black plastic flesh with pig.
And so, knowing my own body and observing the pig, I want to prevent that pain, and more importantly, I don’t want that pig to die because someone wants a spicy breakfast patty from Burger King. I make those considerations first. As Bogost claims, metaphors are a useful tool in order to talk about experiences of the world that are totally opaque to us.
The pig is me.

Okay, and there is also a worthwhile follow up over at Levi's blog (which is more centered on political issues of the commons, which I can get behind). 

What follows are not specific responses to either Cameron or Levi (though they both deserve it). Furthermore, what follows are not fully formed arguments. They are instead thesis and hypothesis , declarations and concepts, in other words, provocations for thinking ethically. (and for people who have read my articles, seen my conference talks, and followed my blog, I repeat myself a lot. Sorry).

(1) We need to seriously come to grips with what we expect from ethics. Ethic is not secularized redemption, or a manuel for right and righteous living. Ethics is not a pathway for innocence. Rather, it is about how to live after innocence, how to exist in a fully post-lapsarian world. 

(2) A lot of critiques made against people who are trying to produce ethical arguments, or even lead ethical lives, is that they fail in actually being innocent. Thus, while there are many people who are sincerely interested in how do we eat if plants are ethically important, so many people immediately see such propositions as being uniquely a challenge to vegetarians and vegans. Why is that? Wouldn't such an argument concern all of us? It works because these challengers don't care about ethics, they care about innocence. In this case, universal guilt becomes the same as universal innocence, no behavior is condemned because all behavior is condemned. For those of us concerned about ethics (even and especially those who are actually and sincerely concerned about the question of the plant), such a path is no path at all, such a move is just more desire for innocence. Such a move is, again, a refusal of the ethical. Either way, it is what Tim Morton calls (following Hegel) the beautiful soul syndrome. 

(3) Ethos, if you remember, originally meant habit and habitat. It was what you did and where you lived. As its cognate ethology should remind you, it is behavior and character. 

(4) The practice of most continental ethicists is to refuse the normative nature of ethics. What tends to be promoted is a double bind of pure radicalism on the one hand, and a pure emptiness to any practical or pragmatic reality of doing ethics. Ethical actions become like the Supreme Court on pornography: We know the ethical when we see it. In this move the hard and rigorous work of ethical argumentation and philosophy is pushed to the side in favor of phenomenology and slogans: we are all infinitely responsible for the Absolute Other! Which doesn't even begin to answer how to figure out transplant donations, or responding to global warming while also improving quality of life, or what to eat when nothing is 'guilt-free'. We are so found of the word aporia, but we never talk about euporias. We are all so interested in blocked paths, we never talk about the plentiful path.  So does ethics need deconstruction and aporia? yes. Does ethics need constructivism and euporia? A thousand times yes! 

(5) This means ethics will need what Whitehead (in a discussion not really about ethics) would call abstraction (think what Deleuze and Guattari call the concept, or Althusser the problématique, or Foucault the historical a priori). Abstraction is not about being removed from the situation, but rather prehending the situation. Global warming is an abstraction, but it doesn't remove us from the situation. Ethics will need abstraction, and it will need (as Bennett puts it) mutually enabling instrumentalizations. Ethics will need calculations. 

(6) But it will also need its uncertainities, its incalculables. It will need, what Matt Calarco puts, as agnosticism. We need an openness to the idea that ethical claims can come from anywhere. As Matt puts it "that insects, dirt, hair, fingernails, ecosystems, and so on" can become beings we can have an ethical relationship to. 

(7) How to take seriously 4&5 with 6 is going to be the problem and burden of any metaethical project that takes seriously the lessons of the continental tradition (or, following Kennan Ferguson, what we can call the intercontinental tradition, taking in traditions like the American pragmatists, Whitehead and process philosophy, decolonial philosophy, American style queer and feminist traditions, the work of radical women of color, and so many others). Versions of 4&5--systems of rules and prescriptions of properly calculated impacts--have dominated the analytic versions of ethics. Meanwhile, 6, with its aporias and its agnosticism have so often dominated the continental tradition. 

(8) When we start thinking ethics in this broad based non-human turn--with its realisms (speculative and otherwise), with its object-oriented ontology, with its panpsychism, with its spinozism, with its vitalisms (dark, material, and otherwise), with its animal studies (critical, continental, queer, dark, feminist, and otherwise), with its posthumanities, so many new questions come out. Sometimes, many of these questions seem answered (at least partially), by these traditions. So, spinozism can provide answers of conatus that I find entirely unsatisfactory. 

(9) For me, ethics is not first philosophy. But nor is ontology, or metaphysics, or aesthetics, or rhetoric, or politics, or epistemology. All philosophy is second philosophies. Ontology isn't rhetoric, and aesthetics doesn't provide the base for political philosophy; rather, each field/question is both discrete and entirely enmeshed and entwined with all others. Of course, this means doing ethics (or ontology, or what have you) is even harder within this rejection of anthropocentrism and correlationism. This means if you are interested about what to do when it comes to plants, or animals, or desks, or iphones, or economies, or Scus, or anything, means we will actually have to do the work of ethics. 

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