Guest Post: Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics in the Age of Bio-Mechanical Reproduction

"Guest Post: Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics in the Age of Bio-Mechanical Reproduction"
Vasile Stanescu
[What follows is a guest post by Vasile Stanescu. It began as an extended comment on my most recent blog post. I, however, gave the post its title, so any issues you have with that are on me. If you are interested in writing a guest post for my blog, please feel free to email me at james.stanescu@gmail.com]

I think there is another link between these two long quotations. I think the polar bears do not “matter” because of calculative logics that only values species. While killing individual polar bears both wholly matters in its own right and does hurt the species as whole, the idea is that it only kills individual animals. However, animals in our culture have no “individuality;” animals are believed to be interchangeable, so a polar bear's “loss” is only perceived if there are no more polar bears at all.  There is a similar logic at play with the current project to try and clone extinct animals from preserved DNA (no, not from amber). The danger of such a project is that there would seem to be no need (for many) to worry about animals’ loss or death or suffering as long as an infinite number of new animals could be “recreated” in the future. Indeed, there probably wouldn’t even be the “need” to recreate them in any literal sense (for many) as long as the potential of reaction existed –the simple idea of the possible animals or the DNA bank would stave off some peoples fears of species extinction and biodiversity loss based on the same idea that animals are infinitely reproducible. (We should write an article on the idea of animals’ rights in the age of mechanical reproduction). Here is an ABC article on the practice: "Scientist Preserve Endangered Species' DNA"; and here is  a link to a nonprofit working on the topic:  The Frozen Ark. The main idea I want to highlight from these practices is the much-repeated phrase that the point of preserving these animals DNA is as a “treasure-trove of knowledge.” What comes to matter via these discourses are not the animals themselves, but only the “knowledge” they represent which, since the animals can be transformed into knowledge, need not be grieved (much less saved) since they (it?) can be “preserved” forever.

So too, I think a similar calculus is at play in the new found fears for the global poor. It is worth remembering that the ethnographic fairs, zoos, sideshows, and circus of the 16-21 century have all paired the “exotic” animal with the “exotic” culture. Again, what seems to be at play is not a fear or concern of actual or individual people but a loss of “cultural” or  “linguistic” diversity. And, much like “DNA banks” we witness the rise of “linguistic banks” to preserve languages before they are “lost forever.” For example, here’s an article on “Preserving Language Diversity: Computers can be a tool for making the survival of languages possible.” Again, a technological fix (to re-appropriate Homer Simpson’s claim about beer : Technology apparently has become “both the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”). But what is even more important is the way in which linguistic and cultural diversity is justified:

Languages seem to be disappearing faster than ever before. I estimate that there are about 15 percent fewer languages now than in 1500 A.D. This is alarming in itself, but, just as important, the consequent reduction of cultural diversity may threaten humanity's survival. Our adaptive success as a species - with over 5 billion people in such diverse environments as jungles, deserts, and the Arctic - is due to "culture," implying the communication of ideas through language. Linguistic diversity relates to adaptational ideas about property, health care, food, children, power, and disputes. The loss of language diversity diminishes our ability to adapt because it decreases the pool of knowledge from which to draw. 

The point is the calculative logic is, itself, a type of computeresque way of understanding the world. Somehow these moments of empathy or caring are elided in which the suffering of the world (be it animal or citizens of the global south) becomes repacked as only enlightened self-interest. The Endangered Languages Project, funded, in part, by Google, makes this linkages between animals and languages (and the easy techno fixes that are being proffered) even more clear, claiming:

Languages are entities that are alive and in constant flux, and their extinction is not new; however, the pace at which languages are disappearing today has no precedent and is alarming. Over 40 percent of the world’s approximate 7,000 languages are at risk of disappearing. But today we have tools and technology at our fingertips that could become a game changer.
The Endangered Languages Project puts technology at the service of the organizations and individuals working to confront the language endangerment by documenting, preserving and teaching them. Through this website, users can not only access the most up to date and comprehensive information on Endangered Languages as well as samples being provided by partners, but also play an active role in putting their languages online by submitting information or samples in the form of text, audio or video files. In addition, users will be able to share best practices and case studies through a knowledge sharing section and through joining relevant Google Groups.

I know that “Thing theory” has long been an interest of ours, but I cannot help but wonder—what are the political stakes behind defining languages themselves as an endangered living entity nearing extinction? I see in this move the erasure of the speakers of these languages who cannot but matter less as long as the “languages” themselves are “protected.” Furthermore, however, it seems to me that static perseveration via an audio of video upload (more true in the second example than the first) only “preservers” a language if it in fact ceases, itself, to be a living entity at all. Again, much like the DNA banks, the idea seems to be that static preservation of languages will, in some way or some manner, allow for their “recreation” in the future—although who would respeak these languages in the future (if anyone) is never addressed. In other words what we are offered is not the languages' protection but instead only a techno-mausoleum to their loss. More importantly, like the DNA banks to the “vanishing” animals, there seems to be a way in which the disappearing of the people (both individually and as groups) seems to no longer “count” since the formula that people=culture=language=information means that people can be “stored.” As though a person's language was her “cultural DNA,” as it were. The losses are rendered ungrievable because they can be endlessly preserved and recreated. Again, just in case anyone thinks I am making a stretch between this idea of species loss and linguistic and cultural loss here is an excerpt from the Endangered Languages Project on “Endangered languages: Why so important”:

The disappearance of an individual language constitutes a monumental loss of scientific information and cultural knowledge, comparable in gravity to the loss of a species - for example the Bengal tiger or the white whale. However, the disappearance of whole families of languages is a tragedy comparable in magnitude to the loss of whole branches of the animal kingdom (classes, orders, families), such as the loss of all felines or all cetaceans. Just as it would be difficult to understand the animal kingdom with major branches missing, it is impossible to understand the history and classification of human languages with the loss of entire language families.

The point of this, for me, is the calculus by which either “culture” or “species” becomes valued. Animals, themselves, as themselves, matter not at all. Even the loss of the entire species, as a group of animals who have all now died, matters not at all. What is calculated to count, to matter, is only the “monumental loss of scientific information.” So too, I wish to argue, the people of the global south are not, in and of themselves, deemed to count. While, as you know, I am a huge critic of Achille Mbembe (from his unnecessary coining of the neologism “necropolitics” to his incorrect understanding of Foucault) in this one area I have to completely agree with him that “death” in the post-colony are simply uncounted by "us," are simply viewed as a “letting die” of all involved. In both cases, for animals and the world’s poor, all that seems to “count” is the “monumental” scientific information. However if both animals and the poor are rendered as purely informational, as only counting in terms of the knowledge they can express, the very forces which are now fueling their shared destruction (Western capitalist global technological development and control) can, ironically, be viewed as the vehicle for their salvation by transforming both human and animals into pure information which can be “protected,” “preserved,”  and mechanically reproduced forever.

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.

Call for Nominations for the 2014 annual ICAS Awards

(Please post to facebook, tweet, send to listservs, reblog, tumblr, instagram, carrier pigeon, telegram, read aloud on the phone, etc this call for nominations widely. Pdf link at the bottom).

Call for Nominations:
2014 Annual International Critical Animal Studies Awards of the Year
________________________________________________________
• Critical Animal Studies Media of the Year – For outstanding media such as documentaries, films, books, visual art, operas, plays, and music in the field of critical animal studies. The media cannot be older than three years. We stress that critical animal studies includes any topic, issue, or concern (from environmentalism to prisoners’ rights) that promotes the protection, liberation, and freedom of animals in the world and is based not only on theory, but in practice as well. The media can come from any discipline or topic including, but not limited to, international studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, religion, sociology, environmentalism, critical animal studies, social work, biology, history, economics, public  administration, criminology, philosophy, anthropology,  chemistry,  medicine, agriculture, political science, disability studies and information studies. If the media needs cannot be emailed, please contact me for an address.
• Critical Animal Studies Undergraduate Paper/Project/Thesis of the Year  – Awarded to an undergraduate student who has written an outstanding paper/thesis that promotes, or who has established and organized a project that fosters animal protection, liberation, and freedom. We are strongly interested in projects that bridge the gap between academia and the surrounding community. To nominate an undergraduate student for this award, the nominator must write a one page letter and include the paper or write a one page detailed description of the project.
• Critical Animal Studies Graduate  Paper/Project/Dissertation of the Year – Awarded to any graduate student working on a masters or doctorate degree who has written an outstanding paper/thesis that promotes, or who has established and organized a project that fosters animal protection, liberation, and freedom. We are strongly interested in    projects that bridge the gap between academia and the surrounding community. To nominate a graduate student for this award, the nominator must write a one page letter and include the paper or write a one page detailed description of the project.
• Critical Animal Studies Faculty Paper/Project of the Year – Awarded to a faculty member conducting research or working at a college, university or institute who has written an outstanding paper that promotes, or who has established and organized a project that fosters, animal protection, liberation, and freedom. We are strongly interested in projects that bridge the gap between academia and the surrounding community. To nominate a professor for this award, the nominator must  write a one page letter and include the paper or write a one page detailed description of the project.

Submitting Nominations:
• All nomination letters must be sent via e-mail as an MS Word document attachment with: (1) a description of the project and person being nominated, (2) how it relates to critical animal studies, and, if applicable, (3) the details of when it was published, who published it, and ISSN or ISBN number, along with the work itself. Individuals may nominate themselves.
• Deadline for award submissions is March 7, 2014.
Please email all nominations and information to james.stanescu@gmail.com. The awards will be given out at the 2014 North American Institute of Critical Animal Studies conference, but attendance is not required to be considered for the award.

(pdf of this call, please share widely). 

New PhaenEx special issue on Animal and Food Ethics

This is just a quick note to let you know that Christiane Bailey and Chloë Taylor have done a great job editing the new special issue of PhaenEx on Animal and Food Ethics. The issue also features an essay I wrote.

CFP: Legal Bodies: Corpus/Persona/Communitas, May 15-17, 2014. Submit by Feb. 14, 2014

Legal Bodies: Corpus / Persona / Communitas
CFP
15-16-17 May 2014



LUCAS (the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society) will host a three-day conference on the various ways in which literary and artistic texts have represented, interrogated or challenged juridical notions of ‘personhood’.  The guiding assumption behind our conference is that ‘personhood’ is not a (biologically) given, stable property of human beings (which precedes their interaction with the law), but that ‘personhood’ is assigned to selected (and historically varying) ‘bodies’ by discursive regimes, such as those of law, medicine, politics, religion, and education. During the conference we will study how literature, art and culture form domains in which the implications and scope of legal, political or medical conceptualizations of personhood can be dramatized and thought through, and in which alternative understandings of personhood can be proposed and disseminated.

The symposium broaches the question of personhood on three different levels: those of the body, the individual and the community. Questions to be addressed include (but are not limited to), firstly: From which discourses did notions of bodily integrity historically emerge? Which social, political and medical developments are currently challenging these notions? How do artistic, cultural and socio-political phenomena (such as bio-art, body horror, the right-to-die movement, etc.) invite us to rethink our notion of the human body?
Second, what literary and rhetorical figures made it possible to think of legal personhood in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern era? What is the legal status of ‘not-quite persons,’ such as children, illegal immigrants, the mentally disabled, the unborn and the undead? What could ‘animal personhood’ entail?
Finally: how do collective bodies acquire personhood? How did art and literature represent legal entities such as the medieval city, the seventeenth century trade company or the nineteenth century corporation? Or what is the legally defined status of sects, networks, conspiracies, and resistance movements?

The conference is organized in cooperation with NICA (the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis) and is made possible by LUCAS, the Leiden University Fund and NICA.

400-word proposals for 20-minute papers can be send to Frans-Willem Korsten, Nanne Timmer and Yasco Horsman (LUCAS, Leiden) at legalbodies@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

Deadline: 14 February 2014

See: http://hum.leiden.edu/lucas/news-events/legal-bodies-corpus-persona-communitas.html

For more information on LUCAS and NICA, see
http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucas/
http://www.nica-institute.com/

Or contact: f.w.a.korsten@hum.leidenuniv.nl; Y.horsman@hum.leidenuniv.nl; n.timmer@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Accelerationism, animal ethics, and the factory farm

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

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

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

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

Okay, back to Maureen Ogle. She has argued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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