Exclusion versus loss of life

This will be the final post on the bear statue, I promise. The last thing to note with this structure is its place in a general economy of "things to see" at the park, the most noticeable counterpart being the nearby duck pond. There are probably fifty ducks in this pond of varying plumages and god knows how many koi fish swimming in the water.

Recently two swans were added. I learned from talking to old-timers that there had been previous installments of swans but that people would kill them under cover of night (senselessly, it seems). There is no monument to this violence. The new swans assume a kind of identity with their predecessors. Two faces of violence and monument in the park, a hundred feet apart. The loss of a human life must be remembered ("in loving memory," not just the remembered being loved, but the very act of memory being the new cathexis-object for this love) and the loss of animal life must be effaced, not metaphorically or mimetically, but identically.

There is an important difference drawn here between exclusion and loss of life ordered by the concept of the animal other. Exclusion of animal life is memorialized; loss of this life is not. Loss of human life is memorialized; its (inclusive) exclusion is not.

Following the line of thought connecting animals to the Agambenian economy of inside/outside, we find this process registered in material culture as a question of aesthetics or, more specifically, design and architecture. How animals are reduced to bare life or mistaken for bare life is a question of mis/representation, both philosophical and popular. One point of entry for altering this ellision is in the depiction of animals in public works and public places.

The question of how metaphoricity handles animals must remain open for another day. But if we can't memorialize violence against animals without simply importing their lives into the obverse biopolitical economy structured by anthropological concepts, then we must develop new representational tactics for bringing to thought this injustice in a way true to its being.

Monumentalizing Opacity

Following up on the previous post about the bear violence memorial in my town, I had a couple more comments to make hoping to elucidate its meaning and the utility of critical animal studies for everyday life.

First, what went unspoken in the previous post was the very opacity of the memorial. In this area there is no shortage of Civil War commemorations at otherwise unremarkable junctures of sidewalk, memorializing otherwise deservedly forgotten events in very forgettable detail (My god, a few miles east of this sign Turner Ashby fell! Open the google browser on your iPhone, honey!). Close by the bear memorial is a miniature (less than quarter mile) kiddy train circuit with a posted history worthy of Livy.

In contrast, it was only by serendipity that I gained the slightest insight into the meaning of this memorial. While pointedly unusual in its design and content it is also obscurantist concerning the reasons for those decisions. So, for the makers of this structure it is important that it is both 1) eye-catching, extensive, alluring by its impenetrability and 2) unexplained, whimsical, mysterious.

The memorial draws spectators in through the promise of meaning (by its spectacularity) but then rebuffs them. You get very little out of viewing it, only a vague pathos that someone died—and this sense is undercut by the conjoined but meaningless spectacles of the wire bears (so…he really liked bears?).

In line with my previous remarks, I see this opacity as a political decision. And, I must say, I don’t see it as an entirely negative decision. On one hand, the animal is a figure consistently construed as aesthetically ambivalent for the sake of masking real determinations of animals as meat, labor, spectacle, etc., and this structure partakes of that economy. On the other hand, I think in this case the meaninglessness of the monument directs the viewer to social reality to make sense of it. One can’t ask the bears what happened, but one might have to confront the existence of history to understand this memorial.

Now is one of the saddest times to talk about Holocaust memorials, but what if there was just a gigantic rock in the ground in Chicago forcing one to ask, “what the hell is this?” There is a real answer, and one would learn it through social interaction with persons partisan to spreading knowledge of the event. It is only by chance that I learned about the history of the bear statuary. Inevitably it is the fate of any monument to mark only the loss of memory about its origin. In the case of animals it is rare to find any enduring trace of their erasure, but I think in this case there is resistance from the domain of the aesthetic in presenting a strange and morbid object that demands we engage our history.

I meant to say more but that went on for awhile and it got late. Tomorrow I'll write something about the relation of this static monument to the other parts of the park contextualizing it, especially the duck pond (which seems like an innocent enough place but is quite weird).

Monumentalizing Exclusion

There’s a park I frequent with a memorial that perplexed me for a long time. It is a sturdy iron cage, maybe fifteen feet to a side, inside of which are several wire statues of bears. One of the bears is covered in ivy, giving it a soft, full exterior; the other bears are empty and spectral. They are all about four feet tall and proportioned to a kind of “teddy bears picnic” cuteness. Footlights illuminate them at night. A plaque reads “In Loving Memory [some guy’s name].”

All this made a lot more sense after I learned from an old lady that there used to be a small zoo in the park with bears among its occupants, until a kid climbed in the bear cage and was killed by them.

How does this memorial arise, in its specific form, from its tragic original, and why would it make sense to deal with this event through such a structure? Agamben’s notion of the inclusive exclusion begins to shape an interpretation. If animals are not bare life, which they certainly are not, they can at least be connected to the analysis of homo sacer by the shared process of inclusive exclusion. Animals, as they exist for the Western experience since the 18th or 19th century and (not coincidentally) for rights discourse, are usually confined. Otherwise they are part of “the environment.” They are locked out of political consideration by being locked up inside the polis or by being driven into the wilderness.

The memorial marks the disturbance of this balanced equation, the moment when the physicalization of social division failed. Thus it cannot be memorialized simply as the remembrance of the deceased, but must be a re-enactment of the violated process. The bears are again inclusively excluded qua their bear-ness. The two aspects of the bear statues display the dual movement of power: the bears are either hollow, ideal forms, made of the same material and techniques as the cage, or they are covered over in the ivy leaves, sedimented by the slow growth of time.

A Guest Blogger!

I'll be gone over the next two weeks, and I won't have access to the internet for a lot of that time. However, someone stood up and is willing to keep this blog going for the next two weeks. So, don't forget to keep checking in.

Greg will be here, a fellow scholar in critical animal studies, and I hope you bring him the same level of insightful comments and keeping him on his toes that you bring me.

Maybe the experience will be positive enough for him that we convince him to keep blogging, as well.

Bare life isn't animal life

I almost feel like I post on Agamben, and Agambenian themes, too much. Oh well.

Bare life is not animal life. I don't mean that Agamben feels this is true, I am unsure in my readings of him on this stance on this issue (my guess is that he will agree with that statement). Many commentators have assumed that bare life is the same thing as bare life. I can understand the confusion. Bios is opposed to zoe, and zoe is often understood as animal life. Furthermore, what does a human have left after all the things that makes that being a human have been stripped from them? One might thing the answer to that is simply its animality. Indeed, there seems to be a confusion here between the animal and the biological. That confusion needs to be resisted.

Let us take the paradigmatic example of bare life in Agamben, the musselman. By all descriptions, the musselman barely reacts when attacked, has little understanding of the world around him/herself, stumbles around like the living dead. Animals don't act that way. They react when attacked, they experience pleasures and joy, they have complex social interactions, in short, animals have a whole series of capacities that make them who they are outside of a mere, biological existence. Animal life is not bare life, unless it is made into bare life. Take the example of tail docking. Pigs in factory farms are lined up in rows, with no room to move side to side or turn around. The pigs become so stressed they start suckling and biting the tails of the pigs in front of them. Normally, the pigs would fight off the biting pig, but they have become so depressed in a factory farm they don't fight off the other pig. Infections are common, so the factory farm has started cutting off part of the tails of pigs, so the pain is so much it produces responses from the pig. This is just one of countless examples by which animal life is reduced to bare life. But, for us to understand that, we have to first realize that animal life is not the same thing as bare life.

Coda on my last post on biopolitics in Pollan and Haraway

My last post was rather harsh in many ways. And I stand beside the analysis, completely. However, it is sometimes hard advancing critiques against people who are partial allies. Donna Haraway obviously feels a great deal of emotional confusion over her flesh eating practices. What is odd to me is that she feels we all should feel equally confused, and call that confusion political practice. I have trouble buying that.
Michael Pollan's justifications for meat eating rubs me to wrong way because he not only is trying to make meat-eating practices ethically okay, but also ethically superior to vegan/vegetarian practices. That requires some obvious push back. Also, I have frequently meet people who are former vegetarians and cite Pollan's work as the intellectual justification for their switching to flesh eating. That also bothers me. However, Pollan's work has re-invigorated arguments over the treatment of animals, government subsidies towards CAFOs, et cetera. And just as there are former vegetarians who now eat flesh, there are people who try to avoid factory farmed animal flesh who wouldn't otherwise. And I believe that the factory farm is a unique evil (even if that word is out of fashion). So, if there are people who wish to fight the factory farm I welcome them, even if I don't understand or share Haraway's moral confusion or Pollan's strange psycho-sexual desire for flesh eating*. I recognize that in the hard work of coalition building, they are allies more than opponents.

* I know that calling Pollan's arguments psycho-sexual may seem a little off, but I present this strange paragraph from "An Animal's Place"

Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.'' We might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere ''recreational preference.'' Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

The biopolitics of Michael Pollan and Donna Haraway

Most of you, by now, have seen this blog, which asks the question, Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault?

This reminded me of some work on Michael Pollan I had been doing, most of the arguments having never made it on here (with this one exception). This time, however, I want us to turn toward a rather strange and discomforting shift in Michael Pollan's justification for meat eating. Once again I will focus on the condensed "An Animal's Place", mostly for cutting and pasting purposes, but also because shorter works can sometimes bring out contradictions more clearly than longer pieces. However, every move that Pollan makes in this essay is replicated in The Omnivore's Dilemma.

In "An Animal's Place," Pollan begins by advancing a rather strong critique of the factory farm. What has caused and allowed to continue the atrocities of the factory farm, according to Pollan, is a specific breakdown in the relationship between humans and animals. Let me quote Pollan:

Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ''Why Look at Animals?'' in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals -- and specifically the loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away.

What broke down between humans and animals is a face to face relationship (and here, I would like to wet your appetite for a future post on the ethics of Levinas, the problem of faciality in Deleuze and Guattari, and the question of this face to face relationship with animals), and if we want to have a way to eat animals ethically, we have to restore this face to face relationship. After this claim, Pollan's article spends several paragraphs explaining, primarily Peter Singer's, arguments for vegetarianism. After that we have Pollan's response as to why eating animals is ethically okay, even more, ethically superior to vegetarianism. The first reason is the rather bizarre political origin myth that Pollan lays out that I discussed in my previous post. This leads to his second, and more forceful point of the ethical superiority of eating animal flesh from non-factory farms. Again, let me quote Pollan:

Yet here's the rub: the animal rightist is not concerned with species, only individuals. Tom Regan, author of ''The Case for Animal Rights,'' bluntly asserts that because ''species are not individuals . . . the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to anything, including survival.'' Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals have interests. But surely a species can have interests -- in its survival, say -- just as a nation or community or a corporation can. The animal rights movement's exclusive concern with individual animals makes perfect sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but does it make any sense in nature?

First, let us put aside the question if nations, communities, and corporations make any sense in nature, as well. So, the problem with animal rights/animal liberation, according to Pollan, is that these doctrines turn us toward the individual or specific animal, and away from the animal as a species. This is a curious move, for not only does it seem to replace the face to face relationship that Pollan claimed as so central before (now the face of an individual pig must be replaced with the face of The Pig, pig in general), but it changes entirely the level by which we are to understand and answer ethical and political question. These questions have now been deplaced to the level of the population, to the level of the species. Michael Pollan goes on to contend that without humans eating animals, many domesticated species would die out. So, at the level of the population, we now have a moral imperative to eat and kill animals so that the population does not die. We have to kill in order to make life live (to steal a phrase from Michael Dillon and Julian Reid). It is the same as the old Vietnam military logic of having to destroy a village in order to save it. However, one might be willing to let Pollan off the hook. He isn't a trained philosopher, and he probably couldn't care less about the question of the biopolitical. Let us turn our attention, now, to someone who should know better.

Donna Haraway's book When Species Meet is a strange and frustrating book for anyone who is serious about questions of animal ethics. It also contains several remarkable similarities to Pollan's An Omnivore's Dilemma (my brother likes to point out that the books end in exactly the same way, with a bunch of professors roasting a pig in California). It is exactly to this pig roast I would now like to turn. Before turning there, I guess I should stay that until her recent turn to discuss animals, Donna Haraway was an essential and keystone philosopher for much of my early theory days. I even sent her a fanboy email once. And her earlier writing on animals still remains radical and exemplary. I still find her writing and style intoxicating. Even so, let us look at her position on flesh eating in the "parting bites" of WSM. She describes how her friend Gary Lease is a hunter who is incredibly concerned with hunting in ecologically sustainable ways. She further describes "[h]is approach is resolutely tuned to ecological discourses, and he seems tone deaf to the demands individual animals might make as ventriloquized in rights idioms" (pp. 296-297). Again, we see how a certain idea of ecology, an inherently biopolitical, makes us tone deaf to specific beings and is replaced simply by the population. Furthermore, it is a little weird to see Haraway accuse other of ventriloquy trick, considering in an earlier chapter she wrote from a first person perspective of a chicken, a chicken who is okay with being slaughtered, I might add. In her desire for a cosmopolitical moment, we are given to believe that the most important aspects of cosmopolitics is what occurs in the conversations of the professors and students at the dinner party where the roasted pig was served. Displaced at the very moment she insists that eating is centralized, is that eating itself is always a cosmopolitical moment. And while one may have a discussion that does not place one is a field of commitment, the act of eating always a partisan act. And if want to avoid the god-trick of transcendence, as see often argues, we have to understand that non-neutrality is the guarantee of non-transcendence. Only god gets to be neutral. The cosmopolitical moment does not occur when we set aside partisanship (and she so often seems to imply), but can only occur through partisanship. Lastly, the biopolitical movement by which we displace the singular animal for the animal-as-population has extreme importance for any possible cosmopolitics. It forfeits our ability to bring animals into this conversation. It forever exiles animals from agents in cosmopolitics, and rather rigs the game as a discussion among humans, while nearby the corpse of a being that should be central in this cosmopolitical discussion is slowly having its flesh burnt to (humanist) perfection(ism). What you chose to do in that moment matters. It isn't merely a random sentence in the a middle of a paragraph (she eats the flesh), but is the central premise by which the rest of the conversation can possibly occur. Any move that decentralizes your action is a biopolitical god-trick, no matter how many times you say it isn't.