Harming Stupidity?

When you reach a decision, close your ears to even the best objections: this is a sign of a strong character. Which means: an occasional will to stupidity. -- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. 

To harm stupidity.- Surely, the faith preached so stubbornly and with so much conviction, that egoism is reprehensible, has on the whole harmed egoism (while benefiting, as I shall repeat a hundred times, the herd instincts!) -above all, by depriving egoism of its good conscience and bidding us to find in it the true source of all unhappiness. "Your selfishness is the misfortune of your life"-that was preached for thousands of years and harmed, as I have said, selfishness and deprived it of much spirit. much cheerfulness, much sensitivity, much beauty; it made selfishness stupid and ugly and poisoned it.
The ancient philosophers taught that the main source of misfortune was something very different. Beginning with Socrates, these thinkers never wearied of preaching: "Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, the way you live according to the rule, your submission to your neighbor's opinion is the reason why you so rarely achieve happiness; we thinkers, as thinkers, are the happiest of all."
Let us not decide here whether this sermon against stupidity had better reasons on its side than did the sermon against selfishness. What is certain. however, is that it deprived stupidity of its good conscience; these philosophers harmed stupidity. --Nietzsche, The Gay Science. 

Deleuze, echoing Nietzsche, wrote that philosophy "is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought." (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 106).  Deleuze formulates the problem of stupidity most strongly in chapter three of Difference and Repetition, "The Image of Thought." There are, recently, some very strong resources charting Deleuze's argument on stupidity (see Jason Wirth's recent Schelling's Practice of the Wild, and Nobutaka Otobe's amazing dissertation, Stupidity in Politics), so I won't go over the argument here in detail. However, this is the space that Deleuze wishes the problem to be heard, "Philosophy could have taken up the problem with its own means and with the necessary modesty, by considering the fact that stupidity is never that of others but the object of a properly transcendental question: how is stupidity (not error) possible?" (D&R, 151). Deleuze wishes to distinguish stupidity from error, from nonsense, and from idiocy. Indeed, the idiot will be an important conceptual persona that allows for the production of concepts in What is Philosophy?. Stupidity has nothing to do with being bright, or the ability to reason logically, rationally, or rigorously. It might be a kind of gullibility, but not in the traditional sense of the term. For Deleuze, stupidity is, as Nietzsche tells us, "submission to your neighbor's opinion." It is a sort of incuriosity, a kind refusing to think. We substitute thinking with cliches, with "everybody knows..." and "no one can deny..." (D&R 130). Stupidity is then a kind of disavowal. It is not a lack or a passivity, but rather an active force, a will to stupidity. Stupidity takes place in the epistemic register that Donald Rumsfield infamously called "known unknowns." These are things we could know, that on some level we do know, but that we refuse to know. Like all forms of disavowal, stupidity is a kind of psychic self-defense against facing our existence.

When talking about stupidity and cliches, we are reminded of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (Otobe is excellent on the differences and similarities of Arendt and Deleuze).   She quotes Eichmann as saying, "Officialese [Amtsprache] is my only language." She would then explain:

But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché…Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what [Eichmann] said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. (48-49). 

Stupidity's safeguard and protection against reality should remind us of the distinction between the skeptic and the empiricist in William James' essay "The Will to Believe." Remember, the skeptic is the one who would prefer to not know the truth, as long as they will never be wrong. The empiricist is one who does mind being wrong, mind being made to seem stupid, if that means they will be more likely to know the truth. This brings me, I guess, to the point.

I worry that we thinkers, we knowers, believe we are in the business of harming stupidity. I worry because I assume we are all very, very stupid. In Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche, he challenges us to read Nietzsche as losers. To read Nietzsche as the herd animal, as the slave, as one of the many instead of the few. I think we should read Nietzsche as one of the stupid ones. Does our seeking out to harm the stupidity of others make us more or less likely to see the stupidity in ourselves (like when Derrida critiques Deleuze for being stupid on animals being unable to be stupid). Nietzsche says that we submit to our neighbors' opinion. But also, perhaps, it isn't always submission, but inhabiting the world our neighbor, of, as Arendt put it, "to think from the standpoint of somebody else." This is the tension of stupidity, it both disavows reality, but also forms the ground for a kind of empiricism. It both allows us to reject the world of the other, while forming the very common space and language of inhabiting the worlds of others. Deleuze warns us of a stupidity of cliches, while at the same time yearns after a kind of pop philosophy, and challenges us to write in slogans.

In one of Judith Butler's essays on Arendt, she writes:

But more than this, [Arendt] faults [Eichmann] as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a sociality or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. Of course, they can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot be called thinking, in her view. How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself.

Perhaps the point of philosophy is not to harm stupidity at all. Perhaps its goal is to push stupidity farther still. To take stupidity to the point that it fosters pluralism. To take it to the point it stops protecting the self against reality, and instead opens the self up to the outside. Maybe we must get to the place where we stop thinking we are harming stupidity, but instead understand ourselves as profoundly stupid. Huh, maybe I am wrong. Everybody knows I don't know everything.

Matthew Calarco has a new book out

Matthew Calarco's Zoographies was one of the first books in animal studies that focused on the intersection of continental philosophers and the ethics, politics, and ontologies of other animals. Now, Calarco has a new, short book: Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction. This book has just been released, and I am excited to read my copy when it comes in the mail.

Summary from the Amazon page:

The rapidly expanding field of critical animal studies now offers a myriad of theoretical and philosophical positions from which to choose. This timely book provides an overview and analysis of the most influential of these trends. Approachable and concise, it is intended for readers sympathetic to the project of changing our ways of thinking about and interacting with animals yet relatively new to the variety of philosophical ideas and figures in the discipline. It uses three rubrics—identity, difference, and indistinction—to differentiate three major paths of thought about animals. The identity approach aims to establish continuity among human beings and animals so as to grant animals equal access to the ethical and political community. The difference framework views the animal world as containing its own richly complex and differentiated modes of existence in order to allow for a more expansive ethical and political worldview. The indistinction approach argues that we should abandon the notion that humans are unique in order to explore new ways of conceiving human-animal relations. Each approach is interrogated for its relative strengths and weaknesses, with specific emphasis placed on the kinds of transformational potential it contains.

Recent books I am excited about

No real overarching theme to these books, except they have come out recently (all at least from this year), and I am excited about checking them out.

Recent

Judith Butler -- Senses of the Subject

Lori Gruen -- Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationship with Animals

Katherine McKittrick -- Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis

Wendy Brown -- Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

Robin James -- Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism

Steven Shaviro -- No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

James McWilliams -- The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

Franco "Bifo" Berardi -- Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide

David Graeber -- The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Forthcoming

Tobias Menely -- The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen -- Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

Quentin Meillassoux -- Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction

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?).

Digital Manifesto Archvie interviews Jeffrey Schnapp, Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society

The Digital Manifesto Archive interviews Jeffrey Schnapp (Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures @ Harvard University, Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society) about The Digital Humanities Manifesto and the history and future of the digital humanities.

CFP: When Species Invade: Towards a Political Invasion Ecology (at DOPE Conference).

When Species Invade: Towards a Political Invasion Ecology.
Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) Conference | University of Kentucky | Lexington, KY | 26-28 February 2015
Organizers: Matthew Rosenblum (University of Kentucky), Laura Ogden (Dartmouth College)

Scholars from a range of fields loosely organized under the banner of ‘political ecology’ have become increasingly attentive to the lives of non-human beings. Political ecologists in geography have situated their research in sites as diverse as the laboratory and the slaughterhouse, spaces where non-human life is made and unmade, to the end of showing the relevance of non-human bodies in socio-spatial processes. The turn toward affect, experimentation, and liveliness in the ecological humanities and social sciences has produced fruitful accounts of the intimacies involved in ‘when species meet’ but has left much about the being ‘out of place,’ the radically contingent, irredeemably destructive, or invasive species, yet to be said. What has been said in the social sciences, and indeed even in the natural sciences, is often preoccupied with the existing vocabularies of invasiveness and the ways in which the rhetoric of invasion ecology is linked to rhetoric’s of colonialism, nationalism (Olwig 2003, Groning & Wolschke-Bulmahn 2003), xenophobia (Subramaniam 2001), etc., with attention to how these emotive and value-laden discourses implicate the practice of conservation biology Of course the link between the discourses of the natural sciences and modes of human marginalization is important since such taxonomic strategies have facilitated “beastly behavior toward the animalized and the naturalized” (Coates 2006; 135). But beyond these anthropocentric arguments which problematize invasion ecology largely because of its effect on human communities are the violently excluded bodies of the invasive and the feral. In many ways the popular discussions of invasiveness have abounded to the detriment of exploring questions of how metaphor and discourse motivate agents to act upon the world (Bono 2003), to what end these actions endeavor towards, and whether or not those actions are commensurate with a worthwhile ethical framework. After all, “the search for a precise lexicon of terms and concepts in invasion ecology is not driven by concerns for just semantics” (Pyšek et al. 2004; 131), it is about action, and surely a process of categorization that is meant to decide which beings belong and which do not has real, felt, material, consequences. While the discursive focus takes furry, leafy, and other invasive bodies as its object, these beings are, ironically absent. Discussions about what nomenclature is best suited to categorize certain forms of nonhuman life have virtually ignored the fact that the practice of invasion ecology implicates humans as well as nonhumans in an economy of violence directed at the attainment of a certain ecological ideal (Robbins & Moore 2013) through the use of “quarantine, eradication, and control” (Elton [1958] 2000; 110). In this light, even many of the most critically aware scholars has failed to ask questions about the value of invasive lives and whether killing them is in line with a truly political ecology, one that views “ecological systems as power-laden rather than politically inert” (Robbins 2012; 13)- one that includes non-human lives as subjects of politics rather than mere objects of human fascination.

The aim of this session is to move beyond the discourse of invasiveness to explore alternative ways of both politicizing the science and practice of invasion ecology and bringing invasive entities, both alive and dead back into the discussions that implicate them. Topics might include, but should not be limited to:
-Queer critiques of ecological futurism
-Emotional geographies of ecological loss
-The ‘invasavore’ movement
-Non-constructivist approaches to invasiveness
-The biopolitics of invasive species management
-New directions in the discussion of the rhetoric of invasiveness
-The conflict between environmental ethics and animal ethics
-Invasiveness and landscape studies
-Animal Diaspora and non-human mobility
-Political ecologies of bordering
-Hunting power
-Invasiveness and the politics of the Anthropocene
-‘Novel ecologies’ and engagements with scientific concepts such as equilibrium, resilience, etc.  
Anyone interested in participating in the session should send an abstract of 500 words or less to matthew.rosenblum@uky.edu by November 10th, 2014. Participants must also register at the conference website: politicalecology.org by the registration deadline of November 17th 2014.

References
Bono, J. J. "Why Metaphor? Toward a Metaphorics of Scientific Practice." Science Studies: Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge. Ed. Sabine Maasen and Matthias Winterhager. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2001. 215-33.
Coates, Peter. American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006
Elton, Charles S. The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. Chicago: U of Chicago, [1958] 2000.
Groning, Gert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn. "The Native Plant Enthusiasm: Ecological Panacea or Xenophobia?" Landscape Research28.1 (2003): 75-88.
Olwig, Kenneth R. "Natives and Aliens in the National Landscape." Landscape Research 28.1 (2003): 61-74.
Pyšek, Petr, David M. Richardson, Marcel Rejmánek, Grady L. Webster, Mark Williamson, Jan Kirschner, Petr Pysek, and Marcel Rejmanek. "Alien Plants in Checklists and Floras: Towards Better Communication between Taxonomists and Ecologists." Taxon 53.1 (2004): 131.
Robbins, Paul. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2012.
Robbins, Paul, and S. A. Moore. "Ecological Anxiety Disorder: Diagnosing the Politics of the Anthropocene." Cultural Geographies 20.1 (2013): 3-19.
Subramaniam, Banu. "The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2.1 (2001): 26-40.

Forthcoming titles in Italian Philosophy (plus a French one)

First the French:

Grégoire Chamayou -- A Theory of the Drone.
Grégoire Chamayou, who we have talked about before, has a book coming out January, 2015.

Drone warfare has raised profound ethical and constitutional questions both in the halls of Congress and among the U.S. public. Not since debates over nuclear warfare has American military strategy been the subject of discussion in living rooms, classrooms, and houses of worship. Yet as this groundbreaking new work shows, the full implications of drones have barely been addressed in the recent media storm.
In a unique take on a subject that has grabbed headlines and is consuming billions of taxpayer dollars each year, philosopher Grégoire Chamayou applies the lens of philosophy to our understanding of how drones are changing our world. For the first time in history, a state has claimed the right to wage war across a mobile battlefield that potentially spans the globe. Remote-control flying weapons, he argues, take us well beyond even George W. Bush’s justification for the war on terror.
What we are seeing is a fundamental transformation of the laws of war that have defined military conflict as between combatants. As more and more drones are launched into battle, war now has the potential to transform into a realm of secretive, targeted assassinations of individuals—beyond the view and control not only of potential enemies but also of citizens of democracies themselves. Far more than a simple technology, Chamayou shows, drones are profoundly influencing what it means for a democracy to wage war. A Theory of the Drone will be essential reading for all who care about this important question.

Now the Italians:

Maurizio Lazzarato -- Governing by Debt, due out February, 2015.

Experts, pundits, and politicians agree: public debt is hindering growth and increasing unemployment. Governments must reduce debt at all cost if they want to restore confidence and get back on a path to prosperity. Maurizio Lazzarato's diagnosis, however, is completely different: under capitalism, debt is not primarily a question of budget and economic concerns but a political relation of subjection and enslavement. Debt has become infinite and unpayable. It disciplines populations, calls for structural reforms, justifies authoritarian crackdowns, and even legitimizes the suspension of democracy in favor of "technocratic governments" beholden to the interests of capital. The 2008 economic crisis only accelerated the establishment of a "new State capitalism," which has carried out a massive confiscation of societies' wealth through taxes. And who benefits? Finance capital. In a calamitous return to the situation before the two world wars, the entire process of accumulation is now governed by finance, which has absorbed sectors it once ignored, like higher education, and today is often identified with life itself. Faced with the current catastrophe and the disaster to come, Lazzarato contends, we must overcome capitalist valorization and reappropriate our existence, knowledge, and technology.
In Governing by Debt, Lazzarato confronts a wide range of thinkers -- from Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault to David Graeber and Carl Schmitt -- and draws on examples from the United States and Europe to argue that it is time that we unite in a collective refusal of this most dire status quo.

Maurizio Ferraris -- Manifesto of New Realism, due out December, 2014.

Retraces the history of postmodern philosophy and proposes solutions to overcome its impasses.
Philosophical realism has taken a number of different forms, each applied to different topics and set against different forms of idealism and subjectivism. Maurizio Ferraris’s Manifesto of New Realism takes aim at postmodernism and hermeneutics, arguing against their emphasis on reality as constructed and interpreted. While acknowledging the value of these criticisms of traditional, dogmatic realism, Ferraris insists that the insights of postmodernism have reached a dead end. Calling for the discipline to turn its focus back to truth and the external world, Ferraris’s manifesto—which sparked lively debate in Italy and beyond—offers a wiser realism with social and political relevance.

Paolo Virno -- Deja Vu and the End of History, due out February, 2015.

This book places two key notions up against each other to imagine a new way of conceptualizing historical time. How do the experience of déjà vu and the idea of the “End of History” relate to one another? Through thinkers like Bergson, Kojève and Nietzsche, Virno explores these constructs of memory and the passage of time. In showing how the experience of time becomes historical, Virno considers two fundamental concepts from Western philosophy: Power and The Act. Through these, he elegantly constructs a radical new theory of historical temporality.

Paolo Virno -- When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, due out May, 2015.

Originally published in Italian in 2002, When the Word Becomes Flesh provides a compelling contribution to the understanding of language and its relation to human nature and social relationships. Adopting Aristotle's definition of the human being as a linguistic and political animal, Paolo Virno frames the act of speech as a foundational philosophical issue -- an act that in its purely performative essence ultimately determines our ability to pass from the state of possibility to one of actuality: that is, from the power to act to action itself. As the ultimate public act, speech reveals itself to be an intrinsically political practice mediating between biological invariants and changing historical determinations. In his most complete reflection on the topic to date, Virno shows how language directly expresses the conditions of possibility for our experience, from both a transcendental and a biological point of view.
Drawing on the work of such twentieth-century giants as Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, and Gottlob Frege, Virno constructs a powerful linguistic meditation on the political challenges faced by the human species in the twenty-first century. It is in language that human nature and our historical potentialities are fully revealed, and it is language that can guide us toward a more aware and purposeful realization of them.