A Post of Links

I haven't done one of these in a while.

There is an upcoming Sistah Vegan Conference, it is internet based and registration is due super soon (like, days). And there is now some scholarships possible.

Stuart Elden and Peter Gratton briefly discuss David Farrell Krell's new book, Derrida and Our Animal Others. 

Speaking of which, you can now buy Stuart Elden's long anticipated book The Birth of Territory. As soon as I figure out a way to make money this year, I will spend some of it on purchasing that book. I can't wait.

There is an IAI lecture from Mark Rowlands entitled "Can Animals be Moral?" (warning video starts as soon as you click the link).

There is also a short IAI debate between Mary Midgley and Peter Singer on Humans and Animals (warning video starts as soon as you click the link).

Harper's published a cover story about slaughterhouses recently. However, if you do not have access to Harper's, the article is currently free on longform. The author of the article did a podcast interview here.

There is an excellent seeming upcoming conference, Why Do Animal Studies?.


Lastly, it seems Azathoth is coming to Oklahoma City. You have been warned.

Okay, Neko Case has a new album, it is amazing, and this song might have something to do with recent discussions going on.

Inappropriate environments is bad for female students (The no duh edition)

One of the links I posted yesterday was to an excellent post by Samir Chopra. There was a comment on that post, that she has responded to today here. I suggest reading them all in full, but I just wanted to add an additional point.

The original comment suggested:

Since that time, I’ve considered ANY interaction with a female student as a potential minefield to be avoided if possible. I certainly kept my office door open during consultation and only met with female students during office hours. I was a little more casual with male students, sometimes meeting them at a campus coffee shop if, for example, they had class during my office hours. Ironically, then, I suspect that ‘male anxiety’ does not foster more equality, but is more likely to result in preferential treatment of male students by male professors. I still consider my policy a prudent one, but it’s unfortunate that female students had less access to my time than did male students. Sadly, however, the practical effect of male anxiety might be that female students don’t get the best out of male professors which may contribute to an already existing problem: the dearth of women in the discipline.

Okay, let's give all of that the benefit of the doubt (I plan to come back to it shortly). Let's add another point. Say there is a male professor who is known to engage in inappropriate 'banter' in the classroom (maybe often repeating the same middle school jokes about manicures). Say there is a male professor who is known to hit on students at parties, or has been known to have sex with female students. Would a female student feel more or less comfortable having these out of classroom experiences with such a professor? I don't want to generalize this, but I have known female students were downright afraid of going to open-door office hours with a professor because he had a reputation for sleeping with other students in the department. I have known female students who had a male professor crack an inappropriate 'joke' while making a point about her paper. That student froze, never went to see the professor for help again, and was worried she seemed unintelligent to the professor after freezing. I am sure that I can give other examples. Even if things are as bad as the original commentator suggests, having male students enjoy extra coffee shop time with the professor just is not as bad as female students being unable to access the professor during office hours. This is a really simple and obvious point, but inappropriate environments are far worse for the outcomes of female students than the world where you have a slightly more informal relationship with your male students. This is where the arguments made by Louise Anthony and Samir Chopra are completely on point, such objections are just ways of re-centering male anxiety.

Now, none of this to say things have to be as bad as the original commentator suggested.  I think being conscious of the ways we treat male and female students differently is a really good start. Then, the next step, is try to figure out how to confront those realizations in ways that promote and produce a good environment for all of your students.

Women in philosophy: The Hannah Arendt edition

Recently, The Stone at The New York Times has published five female philosophers--Sally Haslanger,  Linda Martín Alcoff, Rae Langton, Louise Antony, and Peg O’Connor--on issues and conditions of being a woman in philosophy. There has been some excellent discussion over at Feminist Philosophers, see here, here, here, here, here, and here (also see this post by Samir Chopra). Also, a while back, Jennifer Saul had a piece in Salon on the topic, and she and Helen Beebee discussed this on the BBC show Women's Hour. Okay, I don't have much to add to this discussion, but I want to add some earlier comments from Hannah Arendt. These comments might not have much to do with the current conditions and issues, but I happen to be reading this as all of this was going on, and just thought it was worth sharing. This comes from the interview that was conducted by Gunter Gaus, and I am citing from Essays in Understanding: 1930-1945.

"Gaus begins the conversation by saying that Arendt is the first woman to take part in the series of interviews he is conducting; then he immediately qualifies that statement by noting that she has a 'very masculine occupation,' namely, that of a philosopher. This leads him to his first question: in spite of the recognition and respect she has received, does she perceive 'her role in the circle of philosophers' as unusual or peculiar because she is a woman?
Arendt replies: I am afraid I have to protest. I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory. I neither feel like a philosopher, nor do I believe that I have been accepted in the circle of philosophers, as you so kindly suppose. But to speak of the other question that you raised in your opening remarks: you say that philosophy is generally thought to be a masculine occupation. It does not have to remain a masculine occupation! it is entirely possible that a woman will one day be a philosopher....
GAUS: I consider you to be a philosopher....
ARENDT: Well, I can't help that, but in my opinion I am not. In my opinion I have said good-bye to philosophy once and for all. As you know, I studied philosophy, but that does not mean that I stayed with it.
(pp. 1-2, emphasis added, ellipses in the original).

The whole interview is here, German with English subtitles:


So, not only does she disavow the role of philosopher (and she spends a bit of time explaining why she doesn't), but also, she argues that philosophers as such would not accept her! Moreover, that there is not yet a woman philosopher (and again, one wonders if she means that a woman philosopher accepted by men philosophers).

On this very interview, there is an interesting EGS discussion between Judith Butler, Avital Ronell, and Larry Rickels. You can find the videos here (though, NB: some of the videos seem to be missing. If someone knows of a more full version, I would love the links).

One of the more interesting times that there is this discussion of why Hannah Arendt might not feel accepted into the circle of philosophers begins at the beginning of the sixth video with Judith Butler, but that is not the first or last instance of discussion of this issue. You can see the sixth video below.

Poseur Alert about Poseur Alert

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

Poseur Alert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killing Animals in Video Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Philosophy of Race and Critical Animal Theory

Tom has an interesting post, that I started writing a comment to, and it became really long, so I decided to turn it into a blog post. You should go read it, it concerns tensions between animal ethics, philosophy of race, and the role of intuition in philosophy. Short, but smart. Go read, I'll wait. 

(Also, I am excited for his two new books coming out. His short monograph Levinas Unhinged, and his edited collection on Habit.) 

The point made my the philosopher of race (I wonder who it was?) is pretty common (though from from universal) in many philosophy of race, decolonial and postcolonial philosophy theories. And as someone who takes decolonial and postcolonial philosophy, nonwestern philosophy, and philosophy of race very seriously (and incorporates it in my scholarship and teaching) this is a real issue for me. I've written about these issues a lot on this blog, so I embed some links to past posts to do some of the work for me. Even though I do not fully agree with all of these posts. 

On the one hand, decolonial thinkers advance some of the best critiques of humanism, on the other they usually do it in order to talk about the need for a stronger humanism . And I do think that fights against anthropocentrism are useful for fights against racism (though they are not sufficient!). However, there is more than just the fact that people of color have been compared to animals and dehumanized, but the history co-mingling animal welfare and rights groups with obviously problematic, racist, and colonialist projects. Peta still engages in campaigns that are not only sexist, but frequently racist (often both ). And not just PETA, but if you look at the original animal welfare groups in Britain, you see some complex and interesting things. On the one hand, you have the The Vegetarian Society, which was viewed with disgrace, attracted a bunch of different radicals, and Gandhi credits with his radicalizing on the issues of colonialism. On the other hand, the RSPCA and the first animal welfare laws were all centered around class concerns, race concerns, and connected to explicit colonialists. 

I think there is a lot that needs to be done by critical animal theorists in order to help this. (1) Avoid the seduction of tokenism, of being able to point out a few diverse people in order to shrug of systemic claims of what is going on at conferences, edited volumes, etc. (2) Maybe we need to read less continental thinkers, and start reading more explicitly radical women and queers of color, decolonialist and postcolonialists, philosophers of race, and generally nonwestern philosophy. If I want an anthropocentric thinker who is critical of humanism, I don't always need to go after Agamben when I can read and cite Sylvia Wynter. (3) This will mean, also, to practice the sort of humility in engagement that can be really hard. To expect to be surprised, to be open to being wrong, and generally to not engage in that sort of way when one goes around and explains that the other side just needs to get how right you have been this whole time ("But don't you understand that anthropocentrism is behind racism? So thank you very much for no longer insisting upon your humanity..." etc.). 

None of this entails necessarily giving up our core ethics, or even being critical of other philosophers of race on occasion. For example, arguments about the cultural imperialism of vegetarianism and veganism that continue  simply ignore that other animals have culture is not very convincing or useful. 

In general, critical animal theorists need to admit that we do indeed, as a field, often have a problem with eurocentrism. No, this isn't unique to our field, and no, we are not all guilty of it. But none of that changes the fact we need to change our field.