tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57334415489677842562024-03-13T14:59:50.793-04:00 Critical AnimalThe agony of the rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. - Deleuze and Guattari, <i>What Is Philosophy?</i>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comBlogger567125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-81997309446953078942024-01-16T20:04:00.000-05:002024-01-16T20:04:14.435-05:00The non-distinction of ethics and morals<p> I am about to teach a chapter on Ethics in Public Speaking in my public speaking class. The chapter is fine for what I want it to do (mostly cover research and citational practices for public speaking), but there is brief aside where the chapter distinguishes between ethics and morality, and it drives me nuts. Often when I complain about this to others, I get some version of this seems like special pleading from a philosopher. Which, sure, point well taken. But I want to spend a little time here explaining why I think this distinction is not incoherent, but actively harmful. </p><p>Ethics, as you know, comes from the Greek <i>ethos</i>, meaning custom, character, habit, habitat. It's what you do in the place you live. Cicero, seeking to translate ethos, coins <i>moralis</i>, taken from the Latin <i>mos</i>. So, when I used to teaching a lot of moral philosophy and ethics courses, if students asked me the difference between ethics and morality, I would say for the purpose of my course, ethics comes from the Greek, and morality from the Latin. Now, thinkers have created distinctions between morality and ethics for a long time, and if clearly explained, I in principle do not object to those distinctions. But something happens in a lot of professional ethics that seek a distinction. Here, let's look at a pretty typical distinction from <a href="https://thecpt.org/2023/03/24/ethics-versus-morals-a-comparison-2/#:~:text=Both%20ethics%20and%20morals%20refer,principles%20regarding%20right%20and%20wrong." target="_blank">NASBA Center for the Public Trust</a> (which is what google highlights for me if I search "ethics vs. morality"). <br /></p><blockquote>Both ethics and morals refer to “right” and “wrong” behaviors and conduct. While they are sometimes used interchangeably, these words are different: ethics refer to rules provided by an external source, such as a code of conduct in the workplace. Morals refer to an individual’s principles regarding right and wrong.</blockquote><br />From the standpoint of wanting to quickly teach professional "ethics," I can understand the appeal of this distinction. Students come with a variety of beliefs about right and wrong, and you want them to shelf them. You don't want to get into fundamental questions that invite discussions of religion, culture, etc. So, you call all of these things morals, basically gesture to a kind of relativism about them. But you also need your students to adhere to certain rules, behaviors, and norms. You call these ethics, and say they don't have anything to do with your morality. Now you can say that it doesn't matter about what you morally feel is important about what is right and wrong, a lawyer has an ethical duty not the pierce confidentiality. It doesn't matter if you ethically disagree with the lifestyle or health decisions of your patient, a nurse has an ethical duty to provide the best treatment possible. We could go on, but you get the drift. This makes the life of the professional "ethics" instructor easier. Especially if they understand their job as teaching you how to not get sued, or bother HR. Essentially, the solution of the public and private sphere has been imported into the realm of ethics and moral philosophy. <br /><br />But there are serious problems with this stance. The first is that it essentially affirms some sort of principle of moral relativism. While I am a moral pluralist (as I am a pluralist in most things), it is not a moral relativism. Indeed, most of the thinkers that create the schools of ethics and morality are not relativists. But this might not even be the worse. The real problem is the way this version of professional ethics dodges the real issues of ethical reasoning. You have private morals, and you have public ethical standards. By asking the students, or really future and current practitioners, to simply follow pre-given rules, behaviors, and norms, we are asking them not to think, not to reason, not struggle. The part about ethics that is compelling is how it addresses us existentially. Life demands of us to make decisions that are fundamentally undecidable, and yet we must still make decisions. Ethics and morality are not, therefore, principally concerned with "the good," but asking questions about what sort of being do you need to be to care about the good, to do the good, to even understand the good. To engage with ethical reasoning is resist turning ourselves into some sort of calculator (this is even true of the calculative ethical systems such as utilitarianism). It requires us to think and act, as Arendt might say, without bannisters. One cannot simply memorize a bunch of rules and norms and be ethical. To be ethical often requires of us to know exactly what rules and norms need to be challenged or broken. The idea of a private morals and a public ethics brings us into an Orwellian reversal of language, in which people are told to be ethical is to follow this or that code of conduct, to make sure you follow the law, etc. And this is against the very reality of the ethical, which demands us to be able to think when rules, laws, and norms breakdown. Actual professional ethics are essential and important. Ethical philosophy confronts us with profound questions of what it means to be, think, and act. And so often we fail to be ethical by going along with what we have been told, by following our received standards. <p></p>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-3735917552159288722023-09-24T20:18:00.000-04:002023-09-24T20:18:03.885-04:00Why Metaphysics? Some Thoughts on Weird Empiricism and Animal Studies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlU7hXnoQE7ThmJqC7kVP6o4XeO544X61Ry7gErevr90pNQNTt4YRbXUR79Q028gsN6jhrPL9M7JIY3JqTwwypWiRPlegpbvhOBvt3JGKpKkI8EE2dXmuqSYcZR5yOGNoU_baPjUzUWN8-hj57S5Yym9jdKfmuvtamfFd5GUroRRu9q18WMoLRUFp-D1Q/s1024/Octopus%20Weird%20Empiricism.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlU7hXnoQE7ThmJqC7kVP6o4XeO544X61Ry7gErevr90pNQNTt4YRbXUR79Q028gsN6jhrPL9M7JIY3JqTwwypWiRPlegpbvhOBvt3JGKpKkI8EE2dXmuqSYcZR5yOGNoU_baPjUzUWN8-hj57S5Yym9jdKfmuvtamfFd5GUroRRu9q18WMoLRUFp-D1Q/w400-h200/Octopus%20Weird%20Empiricism.png" width="400" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p> Those who know me, or even just looking at my recent blog posts, know I have been doing a lot of work on metaphysics. Particularly on the work of William James, and the trajectory of thinkers that could be called radical empiricists (Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Stengers, Massumi, etc.). I often get some sort of question from people who know my work on animal studies why I have started studying metaphysics so seriously. The point of this post is to briefly explain some of my metaphysical commitments, and why I think they matter (especially for animal scholars all who are concerned with the more than human world). </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">I have been working on what I call weird empiricism. Weird empiricism is a subset of radical empiricism. Radical empiricism, for James, differed from the classical empiricists (you know, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, & co.) in a few ways. First, the classical empiricists saw empiricism as essentially passive (one received experiences), whereas for James empiricism is both passive and active (one wills the world and self). Second, the classical empiricists separated the objects we experienced from our own experiences. That is, they jettisoned the relationship of experience as not real. Radical empiricism affirms the realness of relations. <br />Weird empiricism sees how these principles opens up a strange, bizarre, yes weird, pluriverse. One that can bring in the more than human world. Weird empiricism both sees the reality of our relationship to the more than human world (our relationship to other animals, but also ghosts, the sacred, imagined geographies, the dead and the undying). But also weird empiricism takes seriously the experience of the more than human world. That is, we can understand that other animals have a stake in claims of the truth because they can experience just as well as human. Though their truths may be alter than ours--weird truths from weird worlds. <br />Okay, so weird empiricism has something to do with the more than human world. Cool. But that doesn't answer why I think animal studies needs a metaphysics. And I do think it needs a metaphysics. I'm going to give three main reasons. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">To the degree that animal studies has an avowed metaphysics, it is a rejection of anthropocentrism. That is, of course, simply a negative commitment. We know what we are against, but it doesn't produce the kind of answers I think we have assumed that it will. First, any number of people have tried to critique animal activism, and the commitments of many animal scholars, as being insufficiently anti-anthropocentric. As if the point of what we are engaged in is trying to simply reduce anthropocentrism, rather than trying to create a more just and livable world. And there is no guarantee that only overcoming anthropocentrism will lead to that more just and livable world. As Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa argues in his recent book <a href="https://amzn.to/46ltVbE" target="_blank">The Celluloid Specimen</a>, B. F. Skinner and other behaviorists were dedicated to overcoming anthropocentrism, and not for any sort of liberation. </p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote>Crucially, this shift did not lead to any programmatic improvement in the lives of animals. As Haraway and, more recently, the animal studies scholar Nicole Shukin have argued, one of the strongest catalysts for a posthuman worldview has been global capitalism, which often actively encourages the blurring of boundaries between human and animal. Yet animals are still cruelly tortured, killed, and driven to extinction at rates far exceeding any previous historical period. More than the centuries-old philosophies of Cartesian dualism, this late twentieth-century social formation remains far-and-away the largest threat to both animal and human life in our current milieu. (pp. 14-15). </blockquote>So, while I think it is still important to resist anthropocentrism (see Fiona Probyn-Rapsey's chapter in <a href="https://amzn.to/46jQQE8" target="_blank">Critical Terms for Animal Studies</a>, and Matthew Calarco's <a href="https://amzn.to/3EQrjqk" target="_blank">Beyond the Anthropological Difference</a>) , it is far from sufficient as a ground for our metaphysical commitments. Weird empiricism's emphasis on relationships allows it to honor the specific forms of entanglements that we are involved with in the more than human world. As Lori Gruen points out in <a href="https://amzn.to/3rzm4bv" target="_blank">Entangled Empathy</a>, "recognize life and its various entangled processes doesn't necessarily help us to respond to differences among kinds of fellow creatues" (p. 69). It is not enough to avow we are entangled, we must pay attention to the specific needs and relationships of those beings we are entangled with (see also my chapter on "Matter," also in <i>Critical Terms for Animal Studies</i>). Such a move allows us to have different conversations, such as engaging Eva Haifa Giraud's <a href="https://amzn.to/3ZtWCke" target="_blank">claim that we need an ethics of exclusion, and not one of entanglement</a>. <p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">So, we need an weird empiricism because we need more than simply a negative metaphysic against anthropocentrism. But we also need weird empiricism to help explore one of the central tensions in animal studies. Are animals fundamentally similar to humans, just another creature on evolutionary distribution that refuses any kind of human exceptionalism, or are other animals fundamentally <i>other</i>, alter, different? The answer seems to be <i>yes, and</i> rather than <i>either/or</i>. Matthew Calarco provides an excellent overview of this tension, as well as his own third term, indistinction, in <a href="https://amzn.to/3PR54Hl" target="_blank">Thinking Through Animals</a>. Weird empiricism's emphasis on experience as the unit of truth, and the plurality of worlds, allow us to gesture to way to keep the relationship we have to other animals, while also demanding that attention be paid to the radical alterity of the worlds of other animals. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Lastly, for me at least, I have turned toward radical empiricism as a way of answering questions about how novelty and change come about. There are those who can only imagine our relationship towards other animals as fundamentally broken and in need of repair and restoration. They understand the factory farm and many invasive experiments are wrong, but they fundamentally cannot imagine a world of co-existing in a just way. Some wish to return to a model of dominion, and they simply reject the cruel excesses of the current order. Others, including many who see themselves of animal abolitionists, still do not see a possible world of co-existence. The problem for them is that all human relationship with other animals would be exploitive, and the goal is to create a human world for humans, and a non-human world for the non-humans. And on this, I can at least agree with both groups, what I dream of has not yet existed. What I want is something different, something new. And weird empiricism grants us the possibility of demanding the new, of having a metaphysics that depends upon novelty, change, creativity. I have tried to get at that <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2023/05/critique-of-pure-experience-some.html" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2023/07/deleuze-and-belief-in-this-world.html" target="_blank">here</a>, and <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2023/08/empiricism-and-lines-of-flight.html" target="_blank">here</a>. As Alexis Dianda argues in <a href="https://amzn.to/3ZtqdKE" target="_blank">Varieties of Experience</a>: <br /></p><blockquote>We must organize if we are to survive; yet, James cautions that we must not forget the subjective character of the world we take for granted. Such forgetfulness would likely increase the danger that we will not take responsibility for re-creating the world in new and better ways. This forgetfulness comes hand in hand with blindness <i>to</i> the ways in which other people value and make their world, and blindness to the power held to the power held by those in a position to enforce their views of reality under the auspices of objective, preexistent state of affairs. (p. 113)</blockquote><br />In other words, we have made the world as it is. Our empiricism is not just passive, but also active. Our wills and desires and actions make and remake the world. But we also often depend upon a metaphysics that tells us to forget the ways we have made the world--a metaphysics that limits our creative forces. Instead, we need a metaphysics that understands the productive power of belief, will, and action. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">In a 1903 letter to the philosopher Francois Pillon, William James described his "humble view of the world" as "pluralistic, tychistic, empiricist, pragmatic, and ultra gothic, i.e. non classic in form." The weird empiricist would say yes to all of this. And simply add, "and more than human." </p>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-12921471347028504762023-09-04T14:51:00.003-04:002023-09-04T14:51:32.850-04:00A Pedagogy of Festina Lente<p>I have started including the below in my class syllabuses.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXuKVKpi_PjrmYDY7Y7hjPl_ctY4XPgaECsvxr158y1Fyf7MAyJ52tQRV_6WKSqaN7lYXs9U_BwCovHhqGYIqwGPXjIE35oZOBcWCCuyLRsaP5TrwODUE4v5Qkwl7KAYnFh5VxCP0wYyanYsdB_U30DOJ76ka0_XI50Hdlxf7cXo7I4Wm9LYSH4F67nls/s928/Festina%20Lente.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="642" data-original-width="928" height="443" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXuKVKpi_PjrmYDY7Y7hjPl_ctY4XPgaECsvxr158y1Fyf7MAyJ52tQRV_6WKSqaN7lYXs9U_BwCovHhqGYIqwGPXjIE35oZOBcWCCuyLRsaP5TrwODUE4v5Qkwl7KAYnFh5VxCP0wYyanYsdB_U30DOJ76ka0_XI50Hdlxf7cXo7I4Wm9LYSH4F67nls/w640-h443/Festina%20Lente.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>The Latin Motto <i>Festina Lente</i> means to make haste, slowly. Perhaps you remember the fable of the tortoise and the hare. Despite the seeming speed of the rabbit, it was the tortoise that wins the race. We must develop within ourselves the ability to make haste, slowly. We must learn to focus, and to grind away at the problems around us. Our word school comes from the classical Greek <i>skholē</i>, which means literally leisure or free time. When you leave school, and enter the so-called real world, some of you might discover that school was the last time that people wanted you to think deeply and believed you might have some important insight into how the world should be. This is the kind of free time we cultivate in this class. Not the free time to do less, but the free time to do more. Here we still can think, read, argue, plan, and strive for a different tomorrow. Here we still think we have a chance to become someone else before we become some more efficient cog in some ever more efficient workplace. I hope this sense of school stays with long after you graduate. </p><p> This class is housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Well, science comes from the Latin <i>scientia</i>, meaning knowledge, understanding, or study. So, we have not just the natural and physical sciences, but also the social and human sciences. But what about the liberal arts? Liberal here comes from the word for freedom (think liberty), and art here means simply practice. The Liberal Arts are the practices and techniques of freedom. They are the things a free people should know, they are the practices a citizen should develop. We study the liberal arts and sciences to not become better workers (though we surely will gain that too), but to become better citizens—to become freer within our responsibilities to each other. </p><p> My training is not in the social sciences or the physical sciences, but the human sciences, also known as the humanities. We study what it means to be human. Our techniques for doing that are text based. We will read difficult, often strange texts in this class. We will learn to slow down when we read them. To make haste, slowly. And in so doing, we will carefully rebuild and understand the arguments of the books, articles, stories, and other texts in this class. And we will learn to build our own arguments through our careful understanding of the arguments of others. The first skill that all the others are based on is careful reading. We must learn to read with minimum distraction, to make friends with the frustrations of difficult prose, and to seek after the excellence of finding what is front of us. Few tasks are harder than seeing what is front of you. So, <i>festina lente</i> everyone.</p>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-5458225906729349382023-08-27T13:43:00.003-04:002023-08-27T13:43:22.168-04:00Empiricism and the Lines of Flight<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifEQ2YJxuKj8b7jO24JAdU0XPMREl0GKpHwlQy7rXLT5HfiqBctGKgpMGpexDchqZaVZ4Quztpas5QOZ6WKdwsujvLlcSyiaJEE82uEXQeBqAtuiGaIc-VZMNpPE_7VbpJmU6hkoFD9WIKTTY_VmAIO-J_4fWdcf45vOHwTpRja1ZN16VMmwzZuEJhiDg/s1024/Empiricism%20and%20Lines%20of%20Flight.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifEQ2YJxuKj8b7jO24JAdU0XPMREl0GKpHwlQy7rXLT5HfiqBctGKgpMGpexDchqZaVZ4Quztpas5QOZ6WKdwsujvLlcSyiaJEE82uEXQeBqAtuiGaIc-VZMNpPE_7VbpJmU6hkoFD9WIKTTY_VmAIO-J_4fWdcf45vOHwTpRja1ZN16VMmwzZuEJhiDg/w400-h200/Empiricism%20and%20Lines%20of%20Flight.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>On Friday I taught Le Guin's "<a href="https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf" target="_blank">The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas</a>" again. This is probably the piece I have taught the most in my career. Inevitably my students make the same objection: why are they walking away? Aren't they just quitting? Shouldn't they, as the title of Jemisin's story goes, <a href="https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/" target="_blank">stay and fight</a>? As I then try to get my students to understand, the students are transforming the kinds of questions that Le Guin's story is asking of us. She wants us to wonder what we are willing to give up, how we are willing to change, what we are willing to remove of our lives, in order to no longer be complicit of the suffering of the child. Political change is not outside of the questions, but rather deeply connected to them. The story implies that for change to happen, people need to transform through the outside. </p><p>The same is true for Deleuze. As you point out, these are questions here of subjectivity and subjectification. Who are we? Who are we becoming? What do we want? What are all the ways we have learned to hate our bodies and desires? And what are all the ways we've learned to turn that hate on others as much as on ourselves? These questions are not ancillary to questions of the political, they are bound up with each other. Strangely, we need to turn to Deleuze's empiricism to understand the political questions of subjectivity here. </p><p>In the preface to the English edition of <a href="https://amzn.to/3OVRSiJ" target="_blank">Dialogues</a>, Deleuze starts by saying, "I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)." This is a very strange claim at first, that empiricism is fundamentally about a commitment to pluralism. In my <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2022/12/empiricism-far-too-basic-primer.html" target="_blank">empiricism primer</a> I tried to explain some of the connection of empiricism and pluralism, but what is key here is that for Deleuze, empiricism--that is, a focus on experience--provides what he calls in his book on Foucault a "thought of the outside." This is what I was trying to get at in my posts on "<a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2023/07/deleuze-and-belief-in-this-world.html" target="_blank">Belief in this World</a>" and in this post on <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2023/05/critique-of-pure-experience-some.html" target="_blank">Jamesian pure experience</a>. There needs to be something outside of interpretation (however fleeting, however absurd, however unthinkable) in order to undue the images of thought. For James this is pure experience, for Deleuze it is the chaos of the plane of immanence. For Deleuze, it is the outside that gives us someway to contest not just the answers that are produced in the present order, but to contest the very questions that we ask. (While there are plenty of reasons that it might be hard to include Ranciere with this discussion, there certainly is something that rhymes here. For Ranciere, the part that has no part disrupts the counting logic of post-political consensual order. The post-political consensual order, what Ranciere often just calls the police, is used to fights about how to recount society. That is, they are used to arguments about how to cut up the pie. But the part that has no part challenges the very logic of counting and pie cutting. And that is why it is so unhearable and unseeable, so unthinkable. This is why Ranciere tells us in <a href="https://amzn.to/3OLgjPG" target="_blank">Disagreement</a> that "politics is not made up of power relationships; it is made up of relationships between worlds" (p. 42). )</p><p>Just as Deleuze's metaphysics depends upon a transcendental empiricism to provide an outside to the problems of <i>doxa</i> and stupidity, the issue of lines of flight, nomadism, becoming-molecular, etc. are ways thinking the outside of subjectivity. And that is why they are always paired with other political questions. The nomads come with war machines. The witch's flight calls forth a new people and a new earth. The line of flight is articulated with George Jackson's imperative that as one runs, one should be looking for a weapon (and again, from the essay "On Societies of Control," "There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons"). So Deleuze does not bring up lines of flight, nomadism, etc. as some sort of quietism, but rather as an outside that can create new forms of politics. Just as his empiricism is his answers to how we have novelty and creativity in thought, the lines of flight are his answer to how we have novelty and creativity in politics and subjectivity. </p><p>Think of that Deleuzian movie: <i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i>. They flee down fury road, but eventually the War Rig is turned around, and the Outside comes back to destroy the realities of Immortan Joe and his brothers and sons.</p>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-92185523404332171722023-08-06T19:32:00.002-04:002023-08-07T12:02:57.653-04:00The Future Is Coming On: An Hauntological Murder Mystery (or, haunted meliorism against left pessimism) <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V_xRb0x9aw&ab_channel=Gorillaz" target="_blank">I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad</a></p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V_xRb0x9aw&ab_channel=Gorillaz" target="_blank">I got sunshine in a bag</a></p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V_xRb0x9aw&ab_channel=Gorillaz" target="_blank">I'm useless but not for long</a></p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V_xRb0x9aw&ab_channel=Gorillaz" target="_blank">The future is coming on</a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>The future, as an aesthetic, is dead. It was murdered, slowly. It has been replaced by formal nostalgia. We are detectives trying to solve the mystery of who, or what, killed the future. But, as we look for clues and interview witnesses, we keep hearing things that aren't there, seeing things that cannot still be. Deja vu keeps slipping into jamais vu. Are the ghosts we keep hearing from the past or the future? Are they the murders or the victim? Reality keeps glitching. Haven't we done this before? Haven't we been here before? I know we've been here, I would swear this was our home and we grew up here, but it feels like the very first time. <br /><i>Shhhh</i> the ghosts are speaking again. If we strain our ears, I think we can hear them. <br />Time is out of joint <br />Anything you say,<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmcnnRv58Z4&ab_channel=Ryssen" target="_blank"> Lloyd</a>. Anything you say.</p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: center;"><b>***<br /><br /></b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiFTjIvapxHWlRTYCs35wOGnb5_J9F8YJItm7IwngKBdhhxvXHklKSB-qAG56jg_-A_piS9TBKkYvofcxvZi32qM2XgFVzVTqJuz2pvhnQvWeoJk6ZqHfv96JFIKsnzf682asta3KldlYOYG5Aw1-lWddoNxWvDiOwGZy1BS_Sg_IdCbqDml7E4XFnUxw/s1280/andrew%20wyeth%20painting.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="1280" height="618" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiFTjIvapxHWlRTYCs35wOGnb5_J9F8YJItm7IwngKBdhhxvXHklKSB-qAG56jg_-A_piS9TBKkYvofcxvZi32qM2XgFVzVTqJuz2pvhnQvWeoJk6ZqHfv96JFIKsnzf682asta3KldlYOYG5Aw1-lWddoNxWvDiOwGZy1BS_Sg_IdCbqDml7E4XFnUxw/w640-h618/andrew%20wyeth%20painting.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /></div><p></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></div>This is how I introduced teaching Mark Fisher's <a href="https://amzn.to/3YpenAJ" target="_blank">Ghosts of my Life</a> to my students in our class on ghosts, haunting, and mourning. For those who haven't read the book, Mark Fisher explores what he calls "the slow disappearance of the future," a phrase he gets from <a href="https://amzn.to/45hTVDY" target="_blank">Bifo</a>. As Fisher puts it, "time keeps moving, but somehow the future never comes." The future, at least as an aesthetic category, is no more. As Fisher points out, could you imagine a band like Kraftwerk now? Not a band that sounds like Kraftwerk, as my students pointed out, we have all heard Daftpunk. No, can we imagine a band trying to sound as if it was from the future (and not some sort of retrofuture)? Now, I wasn't sure I bought this argument from Fisher. My students certainly didn't buy it. But in their objections, I became more and more convinced. In Fisher's intro, he explains that ghosts are virtual (engaging in a Deleuzian reading of Derrida's Specters of Marx):<br /><blockquote>we can provisionally distinguish two directions in hauntology. The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat’, a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour). The ‘spectre of communism’ that Marx and Engels had warned of in the first lines of the <i>Communist Manifesto</i> was just this kind of ghost: a virtuality whose threatened coming was already playing a part in undermining the present state of things.</blockquote>The example a student gave about how a future can be virtually real is the present was to imagine there is a report that a massive storm is coming (in the deep South in the US, we can imagine any storm that is supposed to snow). You know if you go the store it will be sold out of batteries, bottle water, milk, etc. It does not matter if the storm comes, the forecast is enough. Likewise, I suggested thinking about the recent bank runs. It did not matter if the banks were actually insolvent--the threat they were caused them to become so.<br />So then I said, "Okay, we know that fear of certain futures can create actions now. What about the possibility of a good future?"<br />The students didn't understand. <br />"Like, do you mean a hopeful night?" <br />"Sure. But I mean something more. What would it mean if we could believe in some sort of better future." <br />Another student spoke up, "Well, we know how we get promised things, but they don't happen. So we need to ask a better future for who?" <br />"Sure," I responded, "Every dystopia is someone's utopia and all that. But can you take seriously the idea of a better tomorrow for all us earthlings? What would it mean if we could believe, really believe, in the possibility of a real, true, better tomorrow? What sort of actions would we engage in today, if we thought a better tomorrow was possible?" <br />A student, who seldom speaks, sitting way in the back, yells out, "No one would believe you!" <br />Students laugh. Heads nod.<br />A student up front adds, contemplatively, "I'm not sure I can imagine the future as being really different from the present. Or if I can, it's only dystopias." <br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>I think I can still hear the future, softly. I think I can still see it, sometimes. Out of the corner of my eye. It's standing near you. Even now. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>In the 90s, when the seers came and chortled that it was the end of history, we knew it was a conservative doctrine. We knew it was despair, disguised as triumph. After all, was this as good as it gets? <br />Fisher tells us that pop music in the Aughts became melancholic party music. We are demanded to party as if it was our job. The biggest example is the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling." Despite the narrative claims of anticipation of the future, everything about the song is a longing for something lost. Something you know that will not be found tonight. Indeed, the feeling that one has is a desire that tonight can finally fill whatever has been lost, with knowledge of that impossibility. The song is a dirge of mournful loss. In the same way the 90s conservative triumph about the end of politics, the end of history, was just so much melancholic pop. But since then, something has shifted. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>During a discussion of Tuck and Ree's "<a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557744ffe4b013bae3b7af63/t/557f2d6ce4b029eb4288a2f8/1434398060958/Tuck+%26+Ree%2C+A+Glossary+of+Haunting.pdf" target="_blank">A Glossary of Haunting</a>," one of my students pointed out that ghosts don't want rights, <b><i>they want vengeance</i></b>. I keep thinking about that. I wonder, for the ghosts of the future, what would vengeance look like? And who would they want vengeance against? <br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>Something has shifted (haven't I said that already?). Now, anything that rejects a pessimistic affect is perceived as insufficiently radical. It is as if one believes in a better tomorrow is seen as rejecting the suffering around you. It is also seen as fundamentally unserious. As if the desire to find a better future makes one panglossian or polyannish. Perhaps worse is the reaction to finding anything good or improving today. If one ever disagrees that this is the darkest timeline, one is taken to be defending the status quo. Of course, the exact opposite is often the case. If everything is shit today, then you are absolutely right in assuming tomorrow will be shit too. Maybe you, too, can only see dystopias. If, on the the other hand, one wishes to build an alternative to the status quo, one has to find the elements that exist today that are not total immiseration. It is from these elements that we nurture, intensify, and coalesce around to create something different. <br /><br />Fredric Jameson famously said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. The strange corollary is that for many leftists, they have come to believe that it is only by the world ending will we be forced to end capitalism. In a way they are like ecological Posadists. Not with the cool alien stuff, but rather a belief that, like the Posadists desire for a nuclear war to destroy capitalism, now we earn after ecological doomsday. This is why so many of my fellow travelers on the left react so differently to any kind of optimistic news. Time and again I have seen reactions to positive news stories about the economy, the pandemic, or the environment as if they are propaganda for capitalist industries. If they assume that it is is only by facing the end of the world that we will get mass revolutionary action against the capitalist status quo, then yes, any stories that are about things not being terrible become counter-revolutionary. Affectively this is a doubly whammy. First, of course, you are committed to the world being terrible, Second, good news becomes a kind of bad news--because it signals that the world is further away from ending than you had hoped. <br /><br />Of course, there is no reason to believe the old slogan, often attributed to Lenin, the worse things are, the better. Fascists and strongmen do not seem to arise so easily when things are going well. It is not usually in times of plenty and hope that we seek scapegoats and leaders promising a return to a golden age. There is a reason that so many of the white supremacist terrorists have started explicitly identifying as eco-fascists. The future, the future as something different than a return to an imaginary past, has always been a weapon against reactionary forces. As the future as a power on the present recedes, I cannot imagine that liberatory alternatives to the present will expand. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p></p><blockquote>And thus we return to end with that paradoxical feature of haunting. Haunting always harbors the violence, the witchcraft and denial that made it, and the exile of our longing, the Utopian. When I am a spooky phantom you want to avoid, when there is nothing but the shadow of a public civic life, when bedrooms and boardrooms are clamorous ghost chambers, deep "wounds in civilization" are in haunting evidence. But it is also the case that some part of me in abeyance of the injury and some part of the missing better life and its potentialities are in haunting evidence too. The ghost always registers the actual "degraded present" (Eagleton) in which we are inextricably and historically entangled and the longing for the arrival of a future, entangled certainly, but ripe in the plenitude of nonsacrificial freedoms and exuberant unforeseen pleasures. The ghost registers and it incites, and that is why we have to talk to it graciously, why we have to learn how it speaks, why we have to grasp the fullness of its life world, its desires and its standpoint. When a ghost appears, it is making contact with you; all its forceful if perplexing enunciations are for you. Offer it a hospitable reception we must, but the victorious reckoning with the ghost always requires a partiality to the living. Because ultimately haunting is about how to transform a shadow of a life into an undiminished life whose shadows touch softly in the spirit of a peaceful reconciliation. In this necessarily collective undertaking, the end, which is not an ending at all, belongs to everyone. (Avery Gordon, <a href="https://amzn.to/3OvZwQG" target="_blank">Ghostly Matters</a>, pp. 207-208)</blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>The desire for hope, for Blockean concrete utopias, for listening to the ghostly mutterings of the the future, is not a demand for blind optimism. William James, who knew a thing or two <a href="https://amzn.to/3Qne7jO" target="_blank">about ghosts</a> and <a href="https://amzn.to/3QsTHFV" target="_blank">the struggle to find hope and meaning in life</a>, rejected the simplistic binary of pessimism and optimism. Instead, for James, the point was meliorism. As James points out, "meliorism treats salvation neither as inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a possibility the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become." The concept of meliorism sounds almost trite. Isn't it, after all, just saying we need to work to make the world we want? <br /></p><p>I think any triteness here underscores my point. How can meliorism be both trite and unthinkable? For surely the idea that we can work to build the collective conditions of the salvation of the world is exactly that which we seem to no longer believe possible. It is why every response to global warming has the same double-bind. Either the action/policy is too small and therefore what even is the point. Or the action/policy is too big, and thus too demanding or controversial to actually be taken seriously. The idea that we can affect local conditions, the idea we can make more numerous the conditions for salvation, has washed away in a sea of systematic complaints. Simultaneously our actions are not enough and how dare you ask so much of us. More and more, people seem to think that only an apocalypse can save us now. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>My students are obsessed with authenticity. I get it. While I have come to <a href="https://amzn.to/43SNmXC" target="_blank">agree with Adorno</a> about the fundamentally reactionary language of authenticity, I certainly cared about authenticity when I was a teenager. But as teenagers in the 90s, we didn't use the language of authenticity, exactly. We talked about poseurs and sell-outs. Authenticity, therefore, had something to do with keeping some sort of distance to crass commercialism, even if that distance was all a fiction. I still remember when Lars Urlich was responding to criticisms that Metallica had sold out, and he said, "Yes we sold out, selling out whole stadiums." Yeah, that didn't help. </p><p>I tried to explain this concept of selling out to my students--that authenticity had something to do with being orthogonal to capitalism, or at least commercialism, and my students didn't really understand. To be authentic, they explained, meant expressing one's own inner truth, and had nothing to do with capitalism. Indeed, authenticity was the key to making it as an influencer. It felt like that old joke (<a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake-honesty/" target="_blank">often attributed to Groucho Marx</a>) "honesty and sincerity are the key to success. Once you can fake those, you have it made." For my students, the inability to take seriously claims about selling out follows from an intensification from a point made by Mark Fisher, who points to David Guetta's hit, "Play Hard," whose chorus demands of the audience to "keep partying like it's your job" (when I was a teenager I taught I had to fight for my right to party, now the party is work). Fisher then discusses the unpaid content creation we do for websites like Facebook, where we often post our images of partying. But as my students pointed out, they do know people who party as their job. Or they go on vacations as their job. Many students were envious. And who knows, they may be right. But my immediate reaction is that such influencers are perfect examples of real subsumption. You can never have a vacation from work, your night outs become just another task. Like Duffman from <i>The Simpsons</i> or Slurms MacKenzie from <i>Futurama</i>, their life is not just alienated from labor, but also from the very possibility of leisure. How, in such a world, is selling out even possible? </p><p>The future represented some sort of possible outside of capitalism. But if all we have are variations of dystopians, sold to us (would you like yours more <i>Handmaiden's Tale </i>or more <i>Brave New World</i>?) then there is no outside. Everything's a hustle, and "a hustler's work is never through."</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbpf5QM2dKM8fvS2I4VglaroLfMKhwleTMeyGGnjq-IxRti-yc9lcAE3evGxELnKxVQ70zkTN3AMtsmDZdOFtQgWqbfig6qKJJcj8WOJzvPALfSjTrUf4alS8zdL7sYCrYbk_L80KN1ecRTT0se1UserRDxEna-CHCaoxmsgx1Y-uvgud2H7HHk3migpU/s1280/Dorothea%20Tanning%20painting.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="848" data-original-width="1280" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbpf5QM2dKM8fvS2I4VglaroLfMKhwleTMeyGGnjq-IxRti-yc9lcAE3evGxELnKxVQ70zkTN3AMtsmDZdOFtQgWqbfig6qKJJcj8WOJzvPALfSjTrUf4alS8zdL7sYCrYbk_L80KN1ecRTT0se1UserRDxEna-CHCaoxmsgx1Y-uvgud2H7HHk3migpU/w640-h424/Dorothea%20Tanning%20painting.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><b><div style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></div></b><div><br /></div><div>In Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters, she discusses Argentina's Dirty War and the mass disappearances. The disappearances, of course, are a kind of haunting. The goal of such a haunting is to make civic life disapper, to make the possibility of anything else impossible. "To live under the mantle of the omnipresent dread disappearance produces, a fear that 'exterminates all social life in the public realm,' a fear that eats away at you bite by bite, is to live not 'in the light of cold reason, of realistic calculation, of party traditions' (Perelli) but in the vestiges of your own shadow, in the gray shades of an everyday life charged with a phantom reality" (p. 124). The authoritarian state does this because they were first haunted by ghosts--ghosts of the will of the people, ghosts of a future they cannot control:</div><div><blockquote>What has the state tried to repress? What looming and forbidden desire is this system of repression designed to inhibit and censor? Subversion, opposition, political consciousness, the struggle for social justice, the capacity to imagine otherwise than through the language of the state, the ability to see "what is going on below: hunger, pettiness, misery" and to act on it (V 12.3). It has many names that I will call simply, and despite the reputation it has acquired of evasive naïveté, the Utopian: the apperception of the fundamental difference between the world we have now and the world we could have instead; the desire and drive to create a just and equitable world. The Utopian, the most general object of the state's repression, makes its appearance too, lingering among the smoldering remains of a dirty war. (p. 127)</blockquote></div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></div><br /></div><div>I can hear it now. So loud in this moment. Not whispering, but thundering. No. No, not thundering after all, but the whispers of thousands, millions, billions. So many, so loud. Can you hear it? <br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>William James, writing about moral thinking, wrote, "If we follow the ideal which is conventionally highest, the others which we butcher either die or do not return to haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every one applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear." Isabelle Stengers, commenting on this passage, put it this way, "For James, this first means to accept that the question is tragic. Philosophers should be able to resist the temptation to justify the sacrifice, the exclusion of other ideals. They should accept that the victims haunt the interstices of their adherence to an ideal. They should accept to let their experience throb with the complaint of those who were sacrificed in the name of what they define as moral" (<a href="https://amzn.to/3YsbCii" target="_blank">Thinking with Whitehead</a>, p. 334). </div><div><br /></div><div>The claim I wish to end here is that the future is haunted. Or, rather, the future haunts. If we are going to restore the future, we must learn to listen to ghosts. The future is a force capable of undoing the present. But the only way of summoning the future is by finding elements in the present that are sympathetic to the future. Against apocalyptic fantasies and pervasive pessimism all I can offer is a haunted meliorism. The future must be made. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Don't close your eyes. <i><b>Shhhh.... </b></i> </div>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-24229770415708664212023-07-22T20:16:00.002-04:002023-07-22T20:16:59.470-04:00Deleuze and Belief in this World<div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a" style="background-color: white; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"We need an ethic or a faith, which makes fools laugh; it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part." Deleuze,<i> Cinema 2</i>, p. 173. (French publication is 1985). </span></div><div dir="auto"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume. It’s what you call pietas. Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people." Deleuze, in conversation with Negri, in "Control and Becoming." (Original publication is 1990)</span></span></div><div dir="auto"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span></span></div><div dir="auto"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"But, on the new plane, it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. it may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion (we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have lost the world, worse than a fiancee or a god)." - Deleuze and Guattari, <i>What is Philosophy?</i>, pp. 74-75 (Original French publication 1991).
"[W]e understand the novelty of American thought when we see pragmatism as an attempt to transform the world, to think a new world or new man insofar as they create themselves. [...] It is first of all the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago. Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines––for Truth always has “jagged edges.” [...] the American invention par excellence, for the Americans invented patchwork, just as the Swiss are said to have invented the cuckoo clock. But to reach this point, it was also necessary for the knowing subject, the sole proprietor, to give way to a community of explorers, the brothers of the archipelago, who replace knowledge with belief, or rather with “confidence”––not belief in another world, but confidence in this one, and in man as much as in God [...]. Pragmatism is this double principle of archipelago and hope. And what must the community of men consist of in order for truth to be possible? Truth and trust. Like Melville before it, pragmatism will fight ceaselessly on two fronts: against the particularities that pit man against man and nourish an irremediable mistrust; but also against the Universal or the Whole, the fusion of souls in the name of great love or charity." --Deleuze, "Bartleby, or the Formula" in <i>Essays Critical and Clinical</i>, pp. 86-87. (Original French publication 1993)</span></span></div><div dir="auto"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></div><div dir="auto">Okay, so we have four quotations, in order of publication as best as I am able. (The one from Cinema 2 is particularly short, and the whole section is worth a close read). I have not been able to find this kind of language, the belief in the world, earlier in Deleuze's career. At the same time that it is a reoccurring theme, but one that is not particularly explained. (If you know of other instances, let me know! I also found <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/45331433" target="_blank">this article</a> from Kathrin Thiele, which is a nice addition). <br /><br />It seems clear, with the references to pragmatism and to empiricism (and there are deeper references to a radical empiricism in <i>What is Philosophy?</i>, for example), that what is at stake is Deleuze's own project of empiricism (which he often called transcendental empiricism). Again and again Deleuze comes to the same problems that animated Plato and so much of the history of Western philosophy: How do we resist doxa? how do we stop thought terminating cliches? how do we harm stupidity? But Deleuze's answers, indeed his very understanding of the problem, is so different from Plato's (and later thinkers who take up these questions, such as Heidegger). For Deleuze this is what is at stake with empiricism, it provides an affirmation of experience, an outside to doxa and cliche. The term gas-lighting was not around in Deleuze's time, but we can imagine it becoming a metaphysical concept for Deleuze. As he writes in <i>Cinema 2</i>, "The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film" (p. 171). Empiricism, in it's radical, transcendental, and frankly weird register, resists gas-lighting and doxa. It grounds us in our experience, refusing the tendency to find our own world as a bad movie. Our experience pushes against the attempts to make us trapped in other people's narratives, other people's stories, other people's thoughts. If Deleuze is concerned about empiricism, it is not out a desire to just get the metaphysics right, but instead we find another counter-intuitive claim. For Deleuze, it is only by believing in this world that we can make another one. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-388364858271395922023-05-14T11:27:00.001-04:002023-05-14T11:27:13.153-04:00Critique of Pure Experience: Some thoughts on R.A. Judy, Du Bois, and William James<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf2TpwhZLuGcXcKN6hQTkKo_En5gjm4nOb4KjD9nJ5HawxFaQVcxa2UUbZrAIX0VlthS-Tt6lSdMt_wdNklSEQo5MjmlAWNc5desCmoEUo7yzsygyQHXMHpVaVcHXEeAyIJtPAaimMrXYHkKf5L0oRZ8jBi6UBK943rJpvbaWfOlm8igZtzYqhizEx/s600/semiosis.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf2TpwhZLuGcXcKN6hQTkKo_En5gjm4nOb4KjD9nJ5HawxFaQVcxa2UUbZrAIX0VlthS-Tt6lSdMt_wdNklSEQo5MjmlAWNc5desCmoEUo7yzsygyQHXMHpVaVcHXEeAyIJtPAaimMrXYHkKf5L0oRZ8jBi6UBK943rJpvbaWfOlm8igZtzYqhizEx/s16000/semiosis.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>In this post I engage R.A. Judy's Sentient Flesh, in particular his critique of ontology and para-ontology. He critiques William James' notion of pure experience, and argues instead for a generalized para-semiotics. I do my best to lay out his argument, and then briefly at the end argue why I think James' pure experience is an important concept to keep. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>Recently we began discussing what our departmental summer reading should be on (we are leaning towards Armond Towns' <a href="https://amzn.to/3VCeYOg" target="_blank">On Black Media Philosophy</a>). Last summer we read R.A. Judy's 624 page book <a href="https://amzn.to/423p64P" target="_blank">Sentient Flesh </a>(Duke UP 2020), and talked about the parts of that book that have stayed with us. I realized there was an important intervention in American Pragmatism that Judy makes in that book I've wanted to address, but have not gotten around to. Here is my quick overview. <br /><br />A significant part of the book deals with readings of W.E.B. Du Bois. Among the discussion concerns Du Bois' famous discussion of double consciousness, and it's relationship to Du Bois' teacher, William James. Now in a long footnote to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25090529" target="_blank">a 1994 article on Du Bois,</a> Judy defends that Du Bois' notion of double consciousness is indeed inspired by James, arguing against the position taken by David Lewis in his <a href="https://amzn.to/3nqiuOU" target="_blank">biography of Du Bois</a>. In the intervening years, Judy returns to relationship between James and Du Bois, but this time, he understands Du Bois as making an important corrective to James' work. First, let us turn to the summary of James' work from Judy: </p><p>
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<p><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">This account of the constituent elements of empirical
self-consciousness sets James well on the course to what will become his radical empiricism and his postulating consciousness has no existence as an entity,
as a primary substance of being in contrast to material things, out of which
our thoughts of them are made. The point is not that thoughts don’t exist;
undoubtedly they do, but there is “a function in experience that thoughts perf</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">orm and for the performance of which ‘consciousness’ as a quality of being is
invoked. The function is knowing, and ‘consciousness’ is supposed necessary to
explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known.”</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro; vertical-align: 4pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">James
is alluding to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro; font-style: italic;">Critique of Pure Reason</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">,
which, pursuant to its agenda of discovering the requisite faculties thinking
beings need to have cognizance of the world, distinguishes between thinking
something and having even phenomenal knowledge of it. And by his account,
if the fruit of Kant’s endeavor, “the transcendental ego,” undermined the soul
and put the Cartesian body/soul bipolarity off balance, it then established as
fact that experience is indefeasibly dualistic in structure, so that the fundamental Kantian proposition is epistemic dualism.</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"> [...]</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">Contra the Kantian thesis of epistemic dualism, James’s radical empiricist
thesis is that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world that constitutes everything, which he called “pure experience.” On this thesis—which
aligns with the neutral monism James came to expose, holding that both con</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">scious mental properties and physical properties are derived from a primal real</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">ity that is itself neither mental nor physical—knowing as a function of mind </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation toward one another into </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure
experience; one of its terms becoming the subject or bearer of the knowledge, </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">the knower, the other becomes the object known.</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro; vertical-align: 4pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">A key task of </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro; font-style: italic;">Principles of
Psychology </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">is to demonstrate that there is no need for any knower other than </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">the stream of thought itself, identified with continuous self-consciousness. </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">As for the individualized self, it is part of the content of the world experi</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">enced, which James also called the “field of consciousness,” maintaining that </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">it “comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">action, centre of interest.”</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro; vertical-align: 4pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">There lies in the body a systematization of things, </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">of everything with reference to focused action and interest. As for the activity </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">of thoughts and feelings, these also terminate in the activity of the body, “only </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">of the world.” </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro; vertical-align: 4pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">On this basis, James then offers the formulation that will be </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">so crucial for Edmund Husserl in his own phenomenology and subsequently </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">for Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well: “The body is the storm centre, the origin </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train.”</span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro; vertical-align: 4pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">This </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">means that “I” is primarily a noun of position, just like “this” and “here,” but</span><span style="font-family: AlegreyaSans;"> </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">not in the Kantian sense of merely a necessary logical, purely propositional and </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">hence conceptual correlate for knowledge. The positioning of the self indexes a
complexity—James’s term is “plurality”—of relations in experience that articulate the field of consciousness in their dynamic interactivity. (pp. 36-37).</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">This is a very generous read, and I think that Judy gets a lot of fundamental stakes correct. James' radical empiricism takes standard epistemological questions and transforms them into ontological questions, undermining dualities of subject and object, mind and body, self and other. Those dualisms become ways we divided up, ways we verify and validate, the pulsations of pure experience. But this experience is more than our understanding. A basic point here for James is that chaos created by the plenum of existence is norm to our ability to grasp truth. Pure experience always exceeds our understanding in it's too-muchness. The James of the <i>Psychology</i> famously tells us that the world is "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." In his <i>Essays in Radical Empiricism</i>, he tells us that only the newborn, people who have been punched too hard, people who've done drugs, or people with certain mystical practices can briefly capture pure experience. But for the rest of us, it is closed off. (One can't help but be reminded of the discussion of Deleuze and Guattari about how you can find your Body without Organs, ATP chapter 6, perhaps particularly the lists on p. 151). So pure experience is a force from outside that structures our perceptions of the world and undoes those structures. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"><b>***</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">Now, Judy then makes a strange shift. Like many critics of James, Judy fundamentally does not buy the undermining of the subject/object and mind/body dichotomy, and ends up deciding which side James actually is a partisan of. So we are told, emphasis in original: <br /></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">We can state this summarily as the proposition governing all James’s theorizing about consciousness: <i>Access to phenomena lies in experience and the basis of the phenomena lies in the body</i>. [...] When it comes to the foundations of the social self, James’s psychology falls into methodological individualism [...] which explains social phenomena as resulting from individual actions determined by the motivating intentional states of individual actors. (p. 38). </span></blockquote><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"><br />Ah, we find, James is fundamentally committed to the body! Then he immediately contrasts this with Du Bois. "Du Bois avoids such entanglement, not by disregarding or trivializing the physiological, but by recognizing the experience of the body centering the “field of consciousness” is itself gained in accord with the symbolic order of the social." (p. 38). Thus: <br /></span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">Du Bois’s usage of the phrase “double consciousness” describes a socially extended consciousness [...] While even the most minimal form of pre-reflective self- consciousness—as a constant feature, whether structural or functional, of </span><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">conscious experience—may be present, whenever I am living through an experience, whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, it is never an event alone, never a moment reduced in isolation and fully disengaged from, or unaware of other perceiving minds. [...] Of course there is subjective experience, but it is always already social—social, not intersubjective, because none of these subjects, not even at the pre-reflective level, have come into being alone. (p. 40).</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"><b>***</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">Part of the pay off, here, comes much later in the book, when Judy argues for a para-semiosis as opposed to a paraontology. The term paraontology comes from Nahum Chandler, and is further explored in the work of Fred Moten (pp. 319-320). But Judy finds the origins of paraontology not just with Chandler and Moten, but traces it to the work of Lacan, as well as the Nazi philosopher Heidegger, and the Nazi mathematician Becker. This section of <i>Sentient Flesh</i>, as throughout, is filled with long steelmanning of thinkers that Judy fundamentally disagrees with. It really is this intellectual generosity I find so compelling throughout his work. And I wish I could do the same here. However, I will say I am not sure I buy that the concept of paraontology has to be associated with Becker and Heidegger. I never fully understood that internal link of how their use of that term comes along with Chandler's and Moten's term. And more fundamentally, I just don't buy that the ontological analysis <i>has</i> to be Heidegger's ontological analysis. However, for Judy the disjunction here is key. As he goes on to explain: <br /></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">As a sign-instrument in the existential analysis of fundamental ontology, the primitive is not merely conspicuous, it is opaque. And it is not a passive opacity; that is to say, it is not merely a function of the limit of the ontological analytic in the way Heidegger casts it. Rather, the opacity is an effect of the primitive semiosis at work with the fetish. That semiosis presents to the ontological analytic as a sign indicating something is happening, is occurring, which the analytic can only glimpse at by way of the fetish but cannot grasp or comprehend into its ambit. We can say that the fetish-semiotics, <i>in its workings</i>, defies ontological analysis. This is not to suggest that it offers no ontological resistance, which seems to be how Heidegger construes its conspicuousness, as an ontic phenomenon that cannot be comprehended ontologically. Nor is it to suggest that fetish-semiosis resists ontological analysis. Rather, it is to say that it simply defies, or better put, “flies far away from” ontology. (p. 361, emphasis in the original). </span></blockquote><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"><br />As we can see here, for Judy, the way out of the colonizing ontological analysis is not some sort of paraontological move, but rather, the key is to be found with the working of "fetish-semiosis" whose opacity flies far away from ontology. And while Glissant is not mentioned here with regards to opacity, we are told earlier that Glissant's process of creolization "instigates a semiosis" (p. 236), and that para-semiosis approximates Glissant's créolisation (p. 416). And in his confirmation of this semiotic opacity, we see Judy's doubling the same criticism he charged William James with. Paraontology has, for Judy, the same weakness of James' philosophy.<br /><blockquote>Native semiosis [...is] dismiss[ed...] either as utterly incomprehensible or, to the extent it is comprehensible, as an archaic and inferior mode of knowing and talking about the world. In this respect, the paraontological is inextricably bound to the ontological. And that project flounders before the fluid plasticity of the flesh, needing to fix it in a homeostasis of body taxonomics, in which different bodily types express different modalities of knowledge, arranged in a hierarchical line of civilization. Paraontology is all about the body because it is still invested in somehow adjusting the ontological project. And the ontological project is about the body because it cannot think with the flesh. (p. 375)</blockquote><br />The paraontological, like the ontological, remains caught up with the body. And as long as the body is the site of understanding, as long we believe different bodies produce different "modalities of knowledge," there will be an on-going project of hierarchy. There will always be some bodies that are more legitimate than others, and some understandings that are more real than others. Against this, Judy wants to pursue a para-semiosis, which is connected to the flesh instead of the body. While the body is individualizing (such individualizing is really the entire point of the existential analytic of Heidegger), the flesh for Judy is always already social. Because it is always and only ever social, it is question not of ontology, but rather of semiosis, even para-semiosis. As Judy explains: <br /><blockquote>being-<i>in-flight</i>-with-one-another apart from, which is what is meant by <i>para-semiosis</i>. [...] The <i>para-semiosis</i> of being-with- one-another in-flight means leaving-off ontology altogether, <i>without much more thought</i>. The hyphenated <i>para-</i>, the “beside,” does not merely denote parallel movement alongside of ontology. It is a dynamic constitutive <i>besidedness</i>; that is, <i>being-in-besidedness</i>, not as a bijective function; not being as the break- in, but in the break, à la Moten. <i>Para-semiosis</i> denotes the dynamic of differentiation operating in multiple multiplicities of semiosis that converge without synthesis. (p. 391, emphasis still in the original). </blockquote><br />Now, obviously, I want to return to William James. I am going to leave aside the discussion here between Judy, Chandler, and Moten (though it seems important). And I am no Du Bois scholar, like Judy and Chandler, so I am also going to bracket for now any interpretative disagreements about Du Bois. But there is still this issue about James. </span><p></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;">***</b></div><span style="font-family: GaramondPremrPro;"><br />The charge that James is an individualist, that his philosophy remains tied too much to the individual, is a common charge, and I don't think an absurd one. Creating the common is never presupposed in the work of James, nor is it presumed that the common once made will stay. How we are to make the common in the chaos of pluralism is very much the challenge of William James, and I think even more so for those of us who are communication scholars (remembering always the etymology of communication from communicare, that is literally, to make common). But already we begin to see some of the differences of the ontological analysis of James from Heidegger. Heidegger is very much interested in how we individualize, and the enemy is <i>Das Mann</i>, <i>the they</i>. There is just nothing like that in James, whose ontology is filled, to steal the phrase from Judy, of multiple multiplicities (as we know, the unfinished work of James' academic philosophy was to be called <i>The Many and the One</i>, flipping the common phrase backwards). Furthermore, I think that Judy is right to flag the disagreement at the point of pure experience. It might seem strange to focus on something that James himself admits we have almost no direct connection to, why would it be so important? While I disagree strongly with the reading that conflates the pure experience with the body, I think he is right about the importance. Pure experience comes to answer questions about where novelty and creativity come from in the Jamesian pluriverse. It is again a force from the outside that exceeds any symbolic order. While the social matters for James, if everything is always already social, then we need an understanding of where newness comes from. If we cannot breath the experience of the outside, how do we keep a plurality? How do we not suffocate? Something exceeds the social, and from our "workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making" as James tells us in <i>Pragmatism</i>, it is possible to make the world otherwise. This is the promise of James' forerunners, as he explains in <i>The Varieties of Religious Experience</i>: <br /><blockquote>Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animators of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant.</blockquote><p>Or as Octavia Butler put it in her epigraph of her unfinished novel <i>The Parable of the Trickster</i>, "There is nothing new under the sun. But there are new suns." </p></span><p></p></div></div></div></div><p></p>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-27921099926179826632023-04-06T21:14:00.000-04:002023-04-06T21:14:34.464-04:00A girl, a goat, and the force of law: What a local story tells us about animal advocacy<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgABuXj3QY-AoQAqAEyvhjMf8zsl6FHG5UX6sR5XS7JoF1GEaIj3d98d9ayyyQIKp3EEThfk3KKqvSc5Oi7zMSBr7v1lCfifF2uVoGSlBt-tv5kf-Y1RedeiqKb4tSGfweGRotPQH1msGj_QFKlzFl6_AkfCgqVUYNH_bifgTyp2qqnbJ8mRKfSigPC/s1024/A%20girl%20a%20goat%20and%20the%20force%20of%20law.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgABuXj3QY-AoQAqAEyvhjMf8zsl6FHG5UX6sR5XS7JoF1GEaIj3d98d9ayyyQIKp3EEThfk3KKqvSc5Oi7zMSBr7v1lCfifF2uVoGSlBt-tv5kf-Y1RedeiqKb4tSGfweGRotPQH1msGj_QFKlzFl6_AkfCgqVUYNH_bifgTyp2qqnbJ8mRKfSigPC/w640-h320/A%20girl%20a%20goat%20and%20the%20force%20of%20law.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Perhaps you have already heard the story, but a strange thing recently recently happened with a 9 year old girl and her goat, Cedar. <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair" target="_blank">As reported in the LA Times</a>, a girl had spent nine months raising a goat through a 4-H program. When it came time to turn the goat over for slaughter, she didn't want to. The girl's mother removed the goat from the fair, and tried to settle this through civil means. The Shasta District Fair called the police, and the police got a no knock warrant, and then traveled more than five hundred miles to claim the goat. They then turned the goat over to the fair, who slaughtered him. The whole story is absurd, a kind of evil, horrific, reversal of a Disney story. </p><p>Of course, why is this something more than just a local story of the Fair abusing it's power, and another story of police power run amok? Well, the incident raises several important questions. The first is simply, why were the cops ever involved? As many have pointed out, this is a civil matter over a contract dispute, not a criminal matter. So why did the local fair bring on the force of law? And second, why did the fair even care in the first place? The amount of money at stake is tiny, and the girl's mother had already promised to pay it anyway. Lastly, what do the answers to these questions have to do with the animal advocacy movement?</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>Both of these questions are addressed <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23669586/goat-girl-4-h-shasta-county-seizure" target="_blank">in part in a Vox article</a> by Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz. Rosenberg has written a <a href="https://amzn.to/3UgdKHG" target="_blank">whole book on 4-H</a>, which I keep meaning to read, but haven't. Maybe now I will. But I have read several of his articles, and taught a couple of them ("<a href="https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/10161/21582" target="_blank">No Scrubs</a>" and "<a href="https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/10161/21581" target="_blank">How Meat Changed Sex</a>". If you haven't read them, you should, because he is just a first rate animal agricultural historian and theorist). As they explain in their Vox article, 4-H serves an ideological, affective role: <br /></p><blockquote>Sociologists Colter Ellis and Leslie Irvine have argued that 4-H’s livestock projects implicitly teach young people how to manage the emotional dissonance that can result from sending a beloved companion animal to a grisly fate. The program’s cognitive and emotional socialization is consistent with broader strategies deployed in animal agriculture to justify what many workers may experience as the disturbing and even traumatic labor of slaughter, Ellis contends. Livestock projects systematically undercut and confound the basic moral intuitions youthful participants like Long’s daughter start with, teaching them that it’s natural and right to lovingly care for an animal companion and then slaughter it and sell it as meat for a tidy profit.</blockquote><br />The affective regulation of 4-H is meant to also displace emotional reactions we might have towards other animals, such as mercy:<p></p><p></p><blockquote>Philosopher Cora Diamond [...] has noted that mercy is the quality of recognizing the suffering of one over whom we wield power and choosing to treat them with compassion. To make mercilessness into a virtue, as such programs inherently do, propels violence against the vulnerable, whether animal or human, but it also strips people of what Diamond sees as our human moral capacity. Mercy emerges not because we are bound by some abstract inhuman rule, but the opposite — because we are exposed to the particular suffering of a creature in our power and moved by our consciences to spare them, as Long’s daughter was. Perhaps the county’s brutal response to a single girl’s act of mercy came in part because she reminded the adults around her that they were not metaphysically bound to cruelty to animals; they could choose mercy, but chose not to.</blockquote><br />Of course, one could feel mercy to anyone who is suffering. What is going on with this relationship is more. As the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/us/goat-cedar-auction-shasta-county.html" target="_blank">NY Times</a> reported in 2022: <br /><blockquote>She fed him twice a day and walked him everywhere, often on a leash, like a puppy, Ms. Long said in an interview on Thursday. The goat was afraid at first, having been taken from his herd, but he warmed up to the girl and ran up to greet her, Ms. Long said. So as the June 25 auction approached, the idea that Cedar would be sold — not as a creature but as 82 pounds of meat — began to horrify the girl.</blockquote><br />This is clearly a form of care. The girl cared for Cedar, or as he was nicknamed, "Cedes." And this is exactly why so many animal ethicists have worked within the <a href="https://amzn.to/419UT35" target="_blank">tradition of feminist ethics of care</a>. It is because, as Lori Gruen has so often reminded us, <a href="https://amzn.to/3UhYwBR" target="_blank">empathy can entangle</a> us with the other. It is obvious that most of us would become close to creatures we cared for, that it bonds us, entangles us, calls out to us. Just the simply affective contagion of one being becoming attuned to another is one that calls for care, calls for mercy, calls for the recognition of one creature to another. So programs like the one under discussion by 4-H serves an important affective regulation, that must shape the caretaker into the future slaughter, or at least servant of the slaughter. <br /><br />The NY Times ends with this heartbreaking question: <br /><blockquote>Ms. Long did not learn about Cedar’s slaughter until a week or so after the seizure, and she did not tell her daughter until several weeks after that, when she kept asking to see the goat. When Ms. Long told the girl, she ran down the hall, jumped in her bed, slipped under the covers and cried, Ms. Long said.<div>“She asked, ‘Why did they do that?’”</div></blockquote><div></div><div>To that question, Rosenberg and Dutkiewicz give us an answer in their Vox article, "If an exception is made to spare one animal’s life, the whole ideology is undermined." </div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></div><div>In the past, I have called the condition of animals in the factory farm <a href="https://phaenex.uwindsor.ca/index.php/phaenex/article/view/4090" target="_blank">as deading life</a>. We can understand this as the inverse of the living dead--beings who should be dead, but are somehow still alive. Instead, in deading life, we have beings who should be alive, but are somehow already dead. This is an intensification of Cicero's claim that pigs were given life as a kind of salt, that is, as a was of preserving them until they can be eaten. Thus, the factory farm and industrial slaughter understands the animal as a corpse, backwards. This is why the <a href="https://www.agdaily.com/news/understand-that-market-livestocks-end-game-is-on-the-dinner-table/" target="_blank">Ag Daily's response</a> to this incident is to stress, over and over again beginning with the title, "It’s important to understand that market livestock’s ‘end game’ is the dinner table." The idea that these animals are somehow already dead, and their life is but salt until the barbecue, is an essential part of this ideology. The being of animals is meat, not a fellow creature. Therefore, we are told by the Ag Daily editorial, "these animals had a clear purpose from the beginning, and it’s our job to understand that purpose, and to ensure that our kids do too." It is this challenge that causes the Fair to send cops to go kidnap a single goat. This is why large agriculture companies have pushed for prosecution of activists who rescued animals that were going to suffer to death and would not cost the company anything (see <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/10/08/smithfield-animal-rights-piglets-trial/" target="_blank">here,</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23647682/factory-farming-dxe-criminal-trial-rescue" target="_blank">here</a>). The point is the not the economics or the law, but rather, the maintenance of the ideological apparatuses and affective institutions that prop up the ontology of deading life. <br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></div>About four years ago, Vasile Stănescu posted on this blog a long exploration about the so-called failures of traditional animal advocacy. <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2019/07/guest-post-response-to-claim-that-only.html" target="_blank">You should read it all</a>. His argument is that the failures are overstated, and there is good reason to believe that direct advocacy about animals is working. However, many leaders with the animal advocacy movement has become despondent about the success of these advocacies, so they have turned to promoting things like alternative proteans and <i>in vitro</i> meat. And while Vas and I have some nuanced disagreements about these things, I think his overarching point is correct: <i>We are not going to be able to trick people into creating a vegan world</i>. While having food that competes with animal corpses on taste and price might be a useful tool (and I probably think a more useful tool than Vas does), it's not going to be sufficient. If sending cops after a little girl's goat should teach us anything, it should teach us how entrenched this ideology is going to be, and it should teach us how hard people who believe in it are going to fight a vegan world. We will not get to that world through some sort of trickery of consumer products alone, but will require us to fight the ideological apparatuses and the affective institutions that keep us from feeling and staying in the entanglements with other animals. The project is one of building institutions (not just political, but aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and affective) to extend our sympathies. What are the institutions, practices, and artifices we can create to overcome these limitations? What are the affects and the abstractions, the precepts and the concepts, we can multiply and circulate? What are the communities we can build and nurture? How do we create a matrix that allows us to change and transform the vectors of desire? These are questions about what beings we are to become, what worlds we are to make.</div><p></p>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-16557792569841125162022-12-05T20:12:00.004-05:002022-12-05T20:28:39.371-05:00Empiricism: A far too basic primer<p>"Never interpret; experience, experiment." -Gilles Deleuze</p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgM3qjioa0k8ONNXARQbECr5xliqHdDFkfu5x5XtmqnQl3KCubKU4R_rkTc6-H-OxNBcO2MledDBqGZLW5KXwxH4vtOQPJGHiZZLSSnU0zHTMudfP4GDIi3rPm2EIyL8oFNve8Hmtsb6UyiClSm8G5Hph3io91s4IMHHOq-EL1I8nfiKsluwwbkvDUB" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="740" data-original-width="588" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgM3qjioa0k8ONNXARQbECr5xliqHdDFkfu5x5XtmqnQl3KCubKU4R_rkTc6-H-OxNBcO2MledDBqGZLW5KXwxH4vtOQPJGHiZZLSSnU0zHTMudfP4GDIi3rPm2EIyL8oFNve8Hmtsb6UyiClSm8G5Hph3io91s4IMHHOq-EL1I8nfiKsluwwbkvDUB=w319-h400" width="319" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>Speculative pragmatism or speculative empiricism seems to have had a moment (maybe is still having a moment). It is best understood as something like an intercontinental inquiry, beginning with the works of William James and Henri Bergson, then including Jean Wahl, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers, Brian Massumi, and the various people working in their wake. As such, I’ve been reading a lot of random articles and chapters that engage William James and radical empiricism. And it is really shocking the number of articles that just seem to get basic terminology wrong (the worse was <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/683116/" target="_blank">that article</a> attacking “radical empiricism” and yet never cites James, and clearly has no idea what radical empiricism is). Anyway, if you planning to write in this area, here are some basic definitions that would help to know. The four terms are <b>empiricism, rationalism, radical empiricism, and neutral monism</b>. The funny thing is when I finished writing the part below, I went to check some stuff on Wiki and SEP, and all of this was there. So, no one really needs this. But still! It’s worth knowing some of the basic terminology. </p><p><br /></p><p>(1) Let’s start, obviously, with empiricism. It has something to do with experience. Perhaps also experiment. The term comes from a school of Ancient Greek physicians, who opposed the Dogmatic School. The Empiric’s believed that the knowledge that they needed to treat the body would come from experience and dissection of bodies. The Dogmatic School stressed reason. It might be interesting to see how much the field of empiricism has a reoccurring connection to medical science. William James, a college dropout, only ever earned one degree, an MD. However, when philosophers use the term empiricism without qualifier, they are usually referencing the school of thought that includes Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Locke. Like their Greek medical forerunners, they are all variously emphasizing that knowledge comes first from experience. And while it is true that we often call things empirical sciences, and that these thinkers were promotors of the empirical sciences (that focused on experiments) it is important to note, empiricism doesn’t have anything in particular to do with science. Or at least, it is not a synonym for science. It is possible that much of science is empirical, but empiricism is primarily about experience as such. Indeed, the rationalists also supported the empirical sciences. </p><p>(2) If the ancient empiric’s were in opposition to the dogmatists, we have tended to <i>contrast</i> the empiricists of modern philosophy to the rationalists. One of the most common mistakes I see is a tendency to treat empiricism and rationalism as being coterminous with each other, when the normal way of treating these subjects is to see them being in tension. The sort of b-flat understanding of both would be that the empiricist believes we access knowledge through experience, while the rationalist believes that we access knowledge through reason. Indeed, the usual way of talking about this sort of thing is to compare the British empiricists (Francis Bacon, Hume, Locke, etc.) with the continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, etc.). Now, obviously this story of reason versus experience is far too neat and tidy, and the separation here is not in reality that clear. But one should at least know that usually there is an understood tension between rationalism and empiricism, and these terms are not synonyms for each other. And yet I see this confusion again and again. (I assume it has something to do with critiques of modern or instrumental rationality and the connection there to the physical sciences, and I guess empiricism again. So people assume that a discussion of empiricism and of reason are discussing the same things). Another confusion, that is far more plausible, is confusing rationality and empiricism as synonyms for that other split in modern philosophy between idealism and materialism. But again, this isn't completely right. Berkeley, for example, was both an idealist and an empiricist. The way this is usually understood is that rationalism and empiricism are epistemological problems--how do we know the world--and idealism and materialism are metaphysical or ontological problems--what kind of stuff is the world. But these separations are never really that neat, either. When Deleuze names his project transcendental empiricism, we are supposed to hear it in tension with Kant’s project of transcendental idealism. Nor is it the case that empiricism is clearly an epistemological project. The way James is read by most of us doing speculative pragmatism or speculative empiricism is that his project of radical empiricism is mostly a metaphysical project. </p><p>(3) The radical of radical empiricism seem to also confuse people. It is not a political label, nor is it a distancing or critical label. Radical here is meant as “thoroughgoing, or extreme” (from etymology.com for what the term was used as in the late 1800s). One might say one could call it hyper empiricism. The argument James is making here is that the previous empiricisms were <i>not empirical enough</i>, he is not saying that he is making a leftist empiricism, or rupturing his views from the empirical project. The famous way of understanding this from William James is his lines from “The World of Pure Experience,” “To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy,<i> the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as anything else in the system</i>” (emphasis in original). So, relations are as real as the object you are relating to (the beauty or horror of an artwork is as real as the artwork itself). This is principally a metaphysical claim. As Barry Allen puts it in his book <a href="https://amzn.to/3F3LQYc" target="_blank">Empiricisms</a>, “Radical empiricism is not an epistemology, not even a radical epistemology; instead it returns empiricism to ontology. The modes of being are experimental, not semantic. We do not know with finality how many different beings exist or even what the modes of existence are” (p. 305). As James pithily put it from "The Place of Affectional Facts", “There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff.” Our relations to the world is not a mere psychic addition to what is real, our relations to the world is part and parcel of reality. This is how James is both a neutral monist and a pluralist. </p><p>(4) Neutral Monist is a term coined by Bertand Russell, so it is not a phrase that James uses about himself. But it is a common way of discussing both James and radical empiricism. In debates about mind versus bodies, or idealism versus materialism, the neutral monist refuses to take sides (that’s the neutral part). Consciousness is the same sort of stuff as bodies, and neither of them are inherently material or ideal (that’s the monism). And James does say that thought-stuff and thing-stuff are the same thing, they are all experience. Buuuut, this is where things get weird. As James clarifies in "Does 'Consciousness' Exist", “there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the things experienced.” It might be better to understand James as a neutral pluralist. Yes both thought-stuff and thing-stuff are made of the same thing (experience), and they are equally real, but really, experience is not one thing, but every thing, all the things, and as such, always more. </p><div><br /></div>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-61838340355632251742022-09-25T17:13:00.002-04:002022-09-25T17:13:30.621-04:00The Sophist Socrates and Other Heresies<p> I've been teaching Classical Rhetoric this semester, and I have become convinced of something I have long believed. Not just convinced, but really discovered that for anyone who studies this stuff, it seems to be an obvious truth (so obvious in the literature, I almost decided not to write this post). Namely, that Socrates was a sophist. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjri67--bhzyNIsLELs1jf6z3JoVbBHVGiNG-2FjX_kv5E1jX3iCAaKxY_Gow9QB9pAyOHaYN80JFxK055lVQqv7uaBB2jiafZjeP4ghHCBjtjODtCFcQhCmBGMXCI9DPjXum2-jRZnYkk0AFG0JI26s3kivLKKgL5umg8rPS5TxIbzMFQCVvV8MsGj/s1024/Sophist%20Socrates.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjri67--bhzyNIsLELs1jf6z3JoVbBHVGiNG-2FjX_kv5E1jX3iCAaKxY_Gow9QB9pAyOHaYN80JFxK055lVQqv7uaBB2jiafZjeP4ghHCBjtjODtCFcQhCmBGMXCI9DPjXum2-jRZnYkk0AFG0JI26s3kivLKKgL5umg8rPS5TxIbzMFQCVvV8MsGj/w400-h200/Sophist%20Socrates.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>What is the evidence of this? <br />(1)Well, first, the term itself was widely and generally used. In Aristides <i>Orations</i> 46 he tells us that sophist was "a general term," and tells us that Solon, Pythagorus, Socrates, even Plato, were called sophists. The term itself seemed to have meant something like sage, and applied to all sorts of people, including rhapsodes and other poets, learned leaders, prophets and seers, philosophers, and the like. But it also had an ambiguous meaning, in which the term could both be used as a compliment or an insult. Edward Schiappa tells us to think of term like "intellectual" today, and Robin Reames tells us to think of the term like "elite." So it just wouldn't be that surprising that Socrates was seen as a sophist. I mean, it would be weird if he wasn't. But if you need other evidence. <br />(2) Famously Socrates is a sophist in Aristophanes' <i>The Clouds,</i> who runs his own Thinkery. I have seen people call this depiction a mistake, unfair, and inaccurate. While it is clear there are plenty of inaccuracies (Socrates did not charge for lessons, and he was not particularly interested in the cosmos) it doesn't seem to be a mistake, but rather a representation that was widely agreed upon. <br />(3) In the <i>Protagoras</i>, we can see Socrates acting like a sophist. And in Plato's <i>The Apology</i>, Socrates is actively defending himself from being seen a sophist. <br />(4) In Xenophon's <i>Memorabilia</i> he writes, "Now Critias bore a grudge against Socrates for this; and when he was one of the Thirty and was drafting laws with Charicles, he bore it in mind. He inserted a clause which made it illegal “to teach the art of words.” It was a calculated insult to Socrates, whom he saw no means of attacking, except by imputing to him the practice constantly attributed to philosophers, and so making him unpopular." Now it is clear that Xenophon disagrees that Socrates teaches the art of words (logôn technê), but it is also clear that it was widely understood that he did. </p><p>Okay, so there is ample evidence that Socrates was considered a sophist. That he, along with the other Athenian born sophist Antiphon, were put to death partially because they were sophists. That indeed, it would have been weird if Socrates was not considered a sophist. But I haven't proved he was a sophist, because I have been using the term generally. But I have not defined it, and then tried to show that Socrates matches that definition. Which raises the next question: If Socrates was so widely seen as a sophist at the time, why do we tend to see him as an anti-sophist now? <br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>***</b></p><p>Several years ago here I wrote two blog posts defending the sophists, and arguing that they were engaged in a pluralistic metaphysical project (you can see them <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2016/07/welcome-to-thinkery-two-logoi-enter-one.html" target="_blank">here </a>and <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2016/07/ancient-chaosmos-in-defense-of-sophists.html" target="_blank">here.</a> Robin Reames also has an interesting article contending Protagoras was devoted to a project of becoming, which <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/11/5/105" target="_blank">you can read here</a>). The terms I used in those posts--eristic, antilogy, and dialectic--were all invented by Plato. In the 90s, Thomas Cole and Edward Schiappa sought to show (among other things) that rhetoric was also a term invented by Plato (see Cole's <a href="https://amzn.to/3r4p23Y" target="_blank">The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece</a> and Schiappa's <a href="https://amzn.to/3Cb461q" target="_blank">Protagoras and Logos</a>). You can read their arguments yourself to decide if they are convincing, but it seems clear at least to me that the term rhetoric (a) was an invention of 4th century BCE, not 5th, and (b) really fits into how Plato worded words. If so, it is Plato's <i>Gorgias</i> that this term is first introduced (interestingly, the work carries a second title, Peri rhêtorikês--Concerning Rhetoric--and it is at least possible this second title originates with Plato). Why does it matter? Well first, the usual claim that the sophists were ones who taught rhetoric, as opposed to the philosophers, would certainly not have been understood during the time period of the Older Sophists, because the word rhetoric was not in use. They did teach logos, but of course, so did Socrates. So what was at stake was a move by Plato to distinguish what he was doing (and Socrates) from other intellectual schools. (The exact relationship of Plato to rhetoric is certainly complex, and I highly suggest Reames' nuanced treatment in <a href="https://amzn.to/3DX1tlg" target="_blank">Seeming and Being</a>). As Schiappa argues Plato was engaged in a project of dissociation. Long excerpt coming: </p><p></p><blockquote>As Charles L. Stevenson has noted, many of Plato's dialogues can be described as promulgating persuasive definitions: "The purport of the definition is to alter the descriptive meaning of the term, usually by giving it greater precision within the boundaries of its customary vagueness; but the definition does not make any substantial change in the term's emotive meaning." One of the rhetorical objectives of the dialogues was to dissociate the usual or "commonsense" usage of a term such as "knowledge," "justice," or "sophist" from what Plato believed should be the correct usage. Thus, by giving the terms "sophist" and "philosopher" more precise technical meanings and portraying his characters as more or less attractive-depending on the objective of the dialogue-Plato provided a favorable emotive and technical meaning for "philosophers" and a negative emotive and technical meaning for "sophists." [...] Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca have suggested that rhetors rarely offer dissociations in isolation. Rather, "the philosopher will establish a system that will lead essentially to the relating of the various philosophical pairs with each other." (<i>Protagoras and Logos</i>, p. 8). </blockquote><p></p><p>So, Plato's dialogues on the sophists is an attempt at dissociation, to take something that would have been grouped together in the reader's head, and show that they are actually distinct. Our understanding of Socrates as opposed to the other sophists is not because of how far apart he was from them, but because of how close he was. To put it in less generous terms, Plato was engaged in a branding campaign. And branding campaigns requires us to know why the competition is different and worse. This becomes obvious when you realize the goal here is not just to rescue his teacher from bad reputation of the sophists, but to help promote the Academy against his rival, Isocrates. It is, for example, regularly assumed that the target of the Phaedrus was Isocrates, who used written down speeches to help teach. Indeed, Isocrates never claimed to teach rhetoric and instead called what he taught <i>philosophia</i>, which one assumes had to infuriate Plato. it makes sense that a discipline that still involves argumentation, thought experiments, technical and precise distinctions, requires that a regular claim that they are not sophists! And while branding requires making precise distinctions between things that seem alike, it does not necessarily mean the branding is a lie or incorrect. Those distinctions might matter, and it very well could be that all the distinctions that Plato marshals to make Socrates different from the other Older Sophists are exactly the key and important distinctions. But for us, we should remember that the teaching of logos was not seen as a rival of philosophy, and that those trying to adhere to such strict distinctions might be trying to sell us something. </p>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-29555287505085462562022-04-09T15:24:00.001-04:002022-04-09T15:24:55.120-04:00The Varieties of William James Scholarship<div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I started reading James after I finished the rough draft of my dissertation, but before I defended. No one had ever taught me James in any class, and seldom brought up his name. I had no close friends in school who worked on James or the American Pragmatists. I basically started reading James because of the Whitehead resurgence created by Stengers & Co. Because of this, what little secondary literature I knew about James was either from French thinkers, or what could be understood as French-influenced Deleuzians. So it is only after I had been reading and thinking alongside James for a few years that I started to understand his reputation in other intellectual circles, including standard American philosophy ones. Some, like the persistent charge that sees James as a Dale Carnegie figure are completely baffling. One of the things that attracted me to William James is how he frequently makes central depression, sickliness, and failure as parts of the human condition that we need philosophy for. Philosophy is an existential enterprise to make life livable. His work often serves as a rejoinder by the attempts to gas-light us in the world around us, and instead to affirm our experience. James, more than most, is the thinker that has connected the metaphysical to our lived reality. Other charges, like that he is a subjectivist, I disagree with, but I get where it is coming from, and it is a serious claim. Then there is the emphasis that is normal in the French and French inspired readings that are not as common in the American and Anglo-American interpretation of James. Most particularly is that James' pluralism tends to be emphasized (indeed, Jean Wahl basically saw the <a href="https://archive.org/details/pluralistphiloso031655mbp" target="_blank">question of pluralism as the question of American and British philosophy</a>), and the rest of his work is often seen as an engagement with his pluralism. His radical empiricism is often interpreted in ways that relate heavily to both Bergson and Whitehead's critique of a bifurcation of nature (I was basically lost the first time I read a Jamesian explaining radical empiricism in a way that was clearly not Bergsonian and Whiteheadian). Lastly, of course, there are the turf wars between various schools of classical American Pragmatists. There are the Piercians who believe that James is basically not a real philosopher but a stylist, and a deeply sloppy thinker. And the Deweyians in political theory and especially communication theory, who believe that James is an important precursor to the mature understandings of Dewey. (though in general my personal experience with Piercians and Deweyians is not this way).
Basically, there is no thinker I have invested my time in that running across the common interpretative framing is a source of constant surprise. But I am always surprised by the secondary literature on James. So here is a little primer on the secondary readings that really have shaped my understanding of William James.</span></span><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In order to not be here forever, I am going to do 10 things, 5 books and 5 articles or chapters. Though I am going to cheat a little. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt3K3DriGyaxWWmwK6qWKH-lBE_Gg5128xy3CoU9TO6d6jBtP0fXxiCk2qA6UgU-iTQuV3D7P1pBQDHtvoH1XJ0AE5cjZ47DV50vKrWEKObIhVU9LO8PoOGXurPXC6UA7guGJ4tzezFfPyasXmm8tqocn-yMRRLZIjjaTSUFZzR-ka-TZ71ElQPD8E/s1024/pablo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1024" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt3K3DriGyaxWWmwK6qWKH-lBE_Gg5128xy3CoU9TO6d6jBtP0fXxiCk2qA6UgU-iTQuV3D7P1pBQDHtvoH1XJ0AE5cjZ47DV50vKrWEKObIhVU9LO8PoOGXurPXC6UA7guGJ4tzezFfPyasXmm8tqocn-yMRRLZIjjaTSUFZzR-ka-TZ71ElQPD8E/s320/pablo.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">My initiation into William James</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. Isabelle Stengers- "<a href="https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/william-james-an-ethics-of-thought" target="_blank">William James: An Ethics of Thought</a>"(2009): This is one of the first, if not the first, things I ever read on William James. I was busy consuming all the random things by Stengers I could read. I often joke that I finally came to the conclusion that I wouldn't ever be good enough in French to be considered a Deleuze scholar, so I thought, What about this Whitehead guy that everyone is talking about? But then I went and tried to read Process and Reality. That book is hard. Anyway, much like Goldilocks, discovering William James was just right. </span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. Kennan Ferguson- <a href="https://amzn.to/377fVsP" target="_blank">William James: Politics in the Pluriverse </a>(2007). I'm not really sure how I came across this book. I had read and taught Kennan's "<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4148159" target="_blank">I <3 My Dog</a>," and I read his book on William James around the same time I read Stengers. Indeed, really, Stengers and Ferguson were my initiation into William James. </span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; text-align: center;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; text-align: center;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">My understanding of James' Politics</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">3. </span></span><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Deborah J. Coon- "<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2945475" target="_blank">One Moment in the World's Salvation: Anarchism and the Radicalization of William James</a>" (1996). This essay is a classic, and for good reason. There is a tendency to see William James as apolitical. Indeed, for many of his immediate promotors after his death, there was a desire to make him apolitical so he was more acceptable. And many Deweyians were happy to see James' politics as something that was expressed in the more mature works of Dewey. But as Coon and later Livingston argue, James was radicalized by anti-imperialism. Indeed, his politics were first and foremost against imperialism, <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2014/04/the-invisible-moral-molecular-forces-of.html" target="_blank">against bigness</a> in business and government and metaphysics. Coon follows this up, with an argument of seeing James influenced by the anarchist tradition. Indeed, there is a way to see James' individualism as being deeply connected to his anarchism.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">4. Alexander Livingston- <a href="https://amzn.to/37wETlw" target="_blank">Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism</a> (2016). Like Coon, Livingston is interested in articulating James' own politics, and is directly inspired by his anti-imperialism. Livingston shows how the anti-imperialism is woven throughout James' pluralism and pragmatism. He also has a fascinating chapter on the rhetoric of William James on toughness. It is something that has always bothered me, and Livingston manages to have real insight into what is going on there. It's also just a well-written book. It is the first non-fiction book I read after my first son was born, and I was too exhausted to get into much. </span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; text-align: center;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Connecting James to contemporary theory. </span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, .SFNSText-Regular, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">5. Brian Massumi's "</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/095023800334869" target="_blank">Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism</a>" (2000). I originally read it in his <a href="https://amzn.to/3Kv6MJk" target="_blank">Parables for the Virtual</a> (which I just saw has gotten the 20th anniversary treatment). Massumi connects James to the study of affect. And here is where I will just completely cheat, because there is a wealth of great works on William James and affect. There is </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">Donovan Schaefer's "<a href="https://amzn.to/3xk3dBN" target="_blank">The Wild Experiment</a>" (which is also <a href="https://amzn.to/3O0H1m4" target="_blank">the title of his forthcoming book</a>), Shannon Sullivan's </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">"James and Feminist Philosophy of Emotion," (from <a href="https://amzn.to/3DUiPxe" target="_blank">Feminist Interpretations of William James</a>), and </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">Vinciane Despret's chapter on William James from her <a href="https://amzn.to/35ZrYYQ" target="_blank">Our Emotional Makeup</a>. But I want to draw your attention to two articles in particular, </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">Lauren Guilmette's "<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jspecphil.33.4.0590" target="_blank">Teresa Brennan, William James, and the Energetic Demands of Ethics</a>" and </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">Kate Stanley's "<a href="https://www.bicyclescreatechange.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Stanley-2017-The_Palgrave_Handbook_of_Affect_Studies_and_Te.pdf" target="_blank">Affect and Emotion: James, Dewey, Tomkins, Damasio, Massumi, Spinoza</a>." In these articles, William James is tied into a tradition of embodied affect studies from Tomkins and Brennan, where he is usually associated more with the Deleuzian strain of affect studies because of Massumi's connections. </span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">6. David Lapoujade- <a href="https://amzn.to/35UUc6S" target="_blank">William James: Empiricism and Pragmatism (</a>2020). Lapoudade's first version of this book came out in French in 1997, and then again in 2007. His work is in the background of all the Stengers and Latour uptake of William James. Lapoujade would go on to write books on <a href="https://amzn.to/35VevBa" target="_blank">Bergson</a>, <a href="https://amzn.to/3Kl8ZH3" target="_blank">Deleuze, </a>and most recently, </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><a href="https://amzn.to/3KpYqSV" target="_blank">Souriau</a>. And so you get a sense of the sort of intellectual trajectory that he sees James starting. It's an important book for connecting James to thinkers of French pluralism like Deleuze. </span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">Connecting James to lived experiences. </span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">7. Paul Stob- "</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655306" target="_blank">"Terministic Screens," Social Constructionism, and the Language of Experience: Kenneth Burke's Utilization of William James</a> (2008)". Stob has a great book on William James' rhetoric entitled </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="color: #050505;"><a href="https://amzn.to/3LVk9Cz" style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">William James and the Art of Popular Statement,</a><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> but I want to focus on this earlier work by Stob. In this essay Stob connects William James' psychological work to Kenneth Burke's famous terministic screens. In short, just as James understands the too muchness of the world (the "blooming, buzzing confusion") and the psychological need to choose and ignore parts of the world, Burke makes a similar point with rhetoric. That use rhetoric to choose and ignore parts of the world, because the world is too much for representation and understanding (something like this is going on in Whitehead's short work Symbolism). </span></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">8. Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam- </span></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><a href="https://amzn.to/3O31NBQ" target="_blank">Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey (</a>2017). This is a collection of essays from Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna, some co-authored, over the course of their career, on pragmatism (and mostly William James). Ruth Anna Putnam is a serious scholar of William James, and both Putnams are trying to understand pragmatism as a kind of existential philosophy, connected to our lived experiences and our decisions about what sort of beings and world we want to make. It briefly confused, and I tried to read some other analytic thinkers on James. I'm sure there are other good things out there, but without knowing how to look for it, I was mostly wasting my time. But while not every essay here is worth it, most of the essays are good to very good. </span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">Recent things I have read on James</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">9. Erin McKenna "What Makes the Lives of Lifestock Significant?" in <a href="https://amzn.to/38tkcqS" target="_blank">Pragmatism Applied: William James and the Challenges of Contemporary Life</a> (2019). McKenna has frequently written on the overlap of pragmatism and animal philosophy (though I tend to associate her more with Dewey). Her most recent book is <a href="https://amzn.to/3O2DYtB" target="_blank">Livestock: Food, Fiber, and Friends.</a> But in this essay she surveys William James' somewhat ambigious relationships to other animals, focusing particularly on some asides in James' "What Makes a Life Significant?" From James, </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">“When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our relation to the universe in a more solemn light.”</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">10. </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505;">Martin Savransky - <a href="https://amzn.to/3DYu8V3" target="_blank">Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse</a> (2021). Here Savransky draws upon James to develop a pluralistic realism. It very much continues the project of his previous book, <a href="https://amzn.to/3LMI5YM" target="_blank">The Adventure of Relevance</a>, but this one centers the work of James even more. I think it's great if you want to get a sense why Jamesian pluralism matters for social analysis. </span></span></div>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-24458031480360379242022-01-18T22:20:00.001-05:002022-01-18T22:20:38.008-05:00Reading A Thousand Plateaus<p> Today would have been Deleuze's 97th birthday. <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2015/11/short-reflections-on-deleuze.html" target="_blank">Here is a short homage of him I wrote several years ago</a>. Today I also got in a new copy of A Thousand Plateaus. I got my first copy, and until now my only copy, May of 2001. So, that copy is now old enough to drink. And it is falling apart, tons of notes and underlinings. It has seen things. Cameron Kunzelman told me that the Bloomsbury editions were nice sizes, good font size, etc. (<a href="https://thiscageisworms.com/2014/02/19/trying-to-read-again-new-copies-of-deleuze-and-guattari/" target="_blank">actually, seems he told the world!</a>) So I ordered one from the UK, and waited for it to randomly appear. Today is the day! I got the new copy because I decided I wanted to read the book again from cover to cover. Despite being a book that has inspired me a lot, I haven't read it cover to cover since early in grad school. There are chapters I return to again and again, and a few I have barely touched. So, I am going to move through it. Nothing special, about a chapter a week. My goal right now is to post reflections and impressions on each chapter as I go through. Maybe you will want to read along. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjDQFxZkDl0aQVQXpNjtB3RahKrjsIXD-jEjDxE55POpBqIbMdUoKR0AqFht_xEVZ_Fsuc7Y803MsGuppG6PHOBZRBhUxz-xzrJdZeM4j1NxKa4IzI1uK2QCwGCLDr1WfERcO6KuYZaqVUH6SgqloUe1wVU8hUc3n1tBeKotM8GrQ3-2FG7InlAMWx_=s500" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="325" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjDQFxZkDl0aQVQXpNjtB3RahKrjsIXD-jEjDxE55POpBqIbMdUoKR0AqFht_xEVZ_Fsuc7Y803MsGuppG6PHOBZRBhUxz-xzrJdZeM4j1NxKa4IzI1uK2QCwGCLDr1WfERcO6KuYZaqVUH6SgqloUe1wVU8hUc3n1tBeKotM8GrQ3-2FG7InlAMWx_=s320" width="208" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-77902462611529709522022-01-09T23:11:00.003-05:002022-01-09T23:15:09.237-05:00The Truth Is Not Out There: William James and the verification of truth<p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEimSKuxGF8_BYB7SWIkJ9b2hfE39yWs_o0_-UXhbPfF2dR80SMhF-6aFM4FIcT6iFrH_n23nqVDH1icBW20o3zL4FM-HQlAohTLrECIcma2vUrDRPnQOENwSnyrs3aS0MKl1ddqe1qPhqagXGO9fukVPyswlCtT2Tg-2JG5GM1VNE8AhJJwin_hyXyr=s1024" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEimSKuxGF8_BYB7SWIkJ9b2hfE39yWs_o0_-UXhbPfF2dR80SMhF-6aFM4FIcT6iFrH_n23nqVDH1icBW20o3zL4FM-HQlAohTLrECIcma2vUrDRPnQOENwSnyrs3aS0MKl1ddqe1qPhqagXGO9fukVPyswlCtT2Tg-2JG5GM1VNE8AhJJwin_hyXyr=w400-h200" width="400" /></a></div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Over at his blog, Michael Huemer has </span><a href="https://fakenous.net/?p=2746&fbclid=IwAR26Of2yZvMZE5Cr9A9y2zGPC1zAtuJbDGtAQZMgsQU-wqjUJTQXvTpfsQE" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">a recent post</a><span style="text-align: left;"> dealing with, among other things, pragmatism and its conception of truth. I don't know Huemer's work in general, but I am familiar with his </span><a href="https://amzn.to/3HSWUHB" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">writings on ethical vegetarianism and veganism</a><span style="text-align: left;">, but most likely some of his other work might provide better background here. So I am going into this ignorant of any of his arguments about epistemology or metaphysics, sadly. </span></div><p></p><p>Okay, so Huemer argues that pragmatists like William James and Piecer get the concept of truth wrong. He argues that concept of truth is trivial, and that is basically the correspondence theory of truth. So, as he points out in <a href="https://fakenous.net/?p=2725" target="_blank">a pervious blog pos</a>t:<br /></p><blockquote>The correct theory of truth is the correspondence theory: truth is correspondence with reality. I.e., if a sentence or belief represents the world to be a certain way, and the world is actually that way, then the sentence/belief is true. If the world isn’t that way, the sentence/belief is false.<br />I think this is trivial, but somehow people have managed to have big debates about it.</blockquote><p></p><p>This leads him to point on the first blog post I linked to,<br /></p><blockquote>Some smart and important philosophers have held what I would describe as complete non-starter theories about “truth”. (These theories are so far off that I refuse to recognize them as actually being about truth; hence the quotation marks.) For example, “truth is what is useful”. [...] Sometimes people say things. When you say things, sometimes stuff is the way that you say it is. Other times, it isn’t. When stuff is the way that you say it is, we call your statements “true”. When stuff is not the way that you say it is, we call your statements “false”. For instance, if you say that all cats are green, then your statement is “true” if and only if all cats are green.</blockquote><p></p><p>So let's talk about William James. First of all, James agrees. Sorta. As he says in ch. 6 of Pragmatism:<br /></p><blockquote>Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their 'agreement,' as falsity means their disagreement, with 'reality.' Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term 'agreement,' and what by the term 'reality,' when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with. .</blockquote><p></p><p>Okay, so we agree that reality and our ideas have to be in agreement, but, uhm, we are actually going to disagree about all those terms and how we do that. So, James argues a little further down in the same chapter his famous claim that truth is verification and validation:<br /></p><blockquote>The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.<br />This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation. </blockquote><p></p><p>So when Huemer says your statement that all cats are green if, and only if, all cats are actually green, we have to take a step back and figure out what it means to say something is green in reality? Remember this?</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiW2Qp60Vg-cCLffNmCxkOeAf_qDCECUNPjRgHTICnG3gfepdRG7Acbz7vPD60UzdCosTAIrF2rUzje0Z2F2VFvV_ncuexDKbX_sGeq6e6IUwlwBr1_w4u_TBvfRQqa2XPpOYDrxbI5DVlb5gtNSSCl3MMuz_oxasyfTVP_4Tlkw-_rTrXJp3lHibGT=s389" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="389" data-original-width="256" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiW2Qp60Vg-cCLffNmCxkOeAf_qDCECUNPjRgHTICnG3gfepdRG7Acbz7vPD60UzdCosTAIrF2rUzje0Z2F2VFvV_ncuexDKbX_sGeq6e6IUwlwBr1_w4u_TBvfRQqa2XPpOYDrxbI5DVlb5gtNSSCl3MMuz_oxasyfTVP_4Tlkw-_rTrXJp3lHibGT=s320" width="211" /></a></div><br /><p>Is the dress blue and black or white and gold? The correspondence theory of truth might say something like: if you went and saw this dress in the original, it is clearly white and gold, so it is true to say it is white and gold, and false to say it is blue and black. But, to paraphrase Magritte, ceci n'est pas une robe. The question is not what color is the original dress itself, but what color is the dress in this picture. Is color in the eye of the beholder? Does it belong solely to the image? Is color produced through some sort of interpretative community? The pragmatist, under the right conditions, could accept the as true that this image of the dress is white and gold, or blue and black, or even both. The condition for the answer requires us to first decide what processes of verification and validation we are engaging in. James again:<br /></p><blockquote>Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false?</blockquote><p></p><p>Now when we get to issues of verification, or what beliefs make different, we are no longer according to Huemer, really talking about truth. <br /></p><blockquote>Another possibility is that people confuse the idea of the meaning of “truth” with the idea of a criterion for telling when something is true. Hence you get coherence or ideal inquiry theories of truth.<br />I’m fine with asking these other questions. “What beliefs do you approve of?” and “How can you tell when something is true?” are better discussion questions than “What is truth?” But you shouldn’t just reinterpret the latter question as meaning one of the former. Making huge confusions like this just makes it hard to get the right answers to anything. If you want to answer one of the more profound questions, instead of claiming to be giving an account of truth, just say, “Look, the nature of truth is a boring question. Instead, let’s talk about what beliefs one should approve of …”</blockquote><p></p><p>But for the Jamesian pragmatist believes if you don't answer <i>what we are corresponding to</i> in the correspondence theory of truth, the whole thing is question begging. Let me give one of my favorite examples, <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2016/09/ontological-pluralism-in-placebo-and.html" target="_blank">the placebo</a>. Does a placebo work? As I argued in that previous post, if you are a patient, and you are given the placebo, and the placebo works, in what way can we say that the placebo didn't make you feel better? Did that not happen in reality? Is that not true? But what if you are working to create a drug trial, there is another mode and experience of the placebo. Another process of verification and validation. Then, of course, we can say the placebo does not work, it does not treat. So the mode within which you are engaging the placebo matters dramatically about whether it is true, or not. This why James says that truth happens to an idea, that it is an event. We can't simply say, is an idea true or false until we also say under which processes of verification. Let's take a different example. We are beset by various problems that large parts of both our country and the world are simply in denial about. And it is common in certain Democratic discusses of global warming or covid to say something like, we should do what the science tells us. This statement is baffling, because it basically combines at least two different processes of verification. Science, including perhaps social sciences, can tell us things like how big of a potential problem we are facing, what are some of the possible solutions, maybe what some of the solutions are. What science cannot do is to tell us what to do, how much risk we should take, what trade offs we are okay with. You can affirm these second set of questions are about truth without undermining the first set of truths (the scientific ones), because are just dealing with two different processes of verification and validation. This is why James might something like (though not exactly) usefulness matters to truth. Usefulness is one of the ways we can figure out what process of verification we are engaging in. James' committed pluralism is on full display here. This not a position where anything gets to be true, but there are as many truths as there are processes of verification. <i>The Truth Is Not Out There</i>. </p>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-82790424782675581922021-12-31T22:44:00.000-05:002021-12-31T22:44:27.570-05:00Best Albums of 2021<p>According to my admittedly sloppy records, I listened to 435 albums that were released in 2021. Here is my list. First my top 5, then the next 25, then the next 50, and as a bonus, my top ten EPs. Each category is internally organized alphabetically. I only had time to talk about the first five, but it was a great year for music (though again, when isn't it?). </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Best Albums 2021</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtykV8Snvo3dBch63O30ZWrscLLxdA5TqQYAaT9FHyFZxjda4VgPdtLcoqwYsbz8t8hsfJZGM2TRmavjITfiTLT4q9vBpYf0ZiiZPMojZrEB56_jiCwSX3TGYkpPx8V1L3XoEP9U-8ShV5iQWM3M3UXiXFQ8z_tLMBiDZTX-F-POY2tA1uipgQ6MCE=s1920" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1920" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjtykV8Snvo3dBch63O30ZWrscLLxdA5TqQYAaT9FHyFZxjda4VgPdtLcoqwYsbz8t8hsfJZGM2TRmavjITfiTLT4q9vBpYf0ZiiZPMojZrEB56_jiCwSX3TGYkpPx8V1L3XoEP9U-8ShV5iQWM3M3UXiXFQ8z_tLMBiDZTX-F-POY2tA1uipgQ6MCE=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /><b><br /></b><p></p><p><b>Top Five</b></p><p>1.Art D’Ecco—In Standard Definition</p><p>A glam rock and pop album from another time. Conceptually it is obsessed with celebrity, and also concerned with celebrity obsession. Sure, the influences are pretty obvious, but when you are doing your best to channel early Roxy Music and 70s Bowie, that might not be so bad. And sure, it doesn’t hit those immortal highs, but I found myself wanting to groove along from start to finish.</p><p><br /></p><p>2.Midnight Sister—Painting the Roses</p><p>Why just do one glam pop album? If Art D’Ecco wants to channel Roxy Music and Bowie, Midnight Sister is more T. Rex and Donna Summers, trying to give us some sort of glitter disco cabaret. And sure, it doesn’t always do that, but I found myself seduced by their vision and enthusiasm. Also, I don’t know much about music videos, but they direct their own music videos, and I really suggest watching them. It’s a different way to see the surrealistic soundscape they are seeking to create.</p><p><br /></p><p>3. Shungudzo—I Am Not a Mother, But I Have Children</p><p>Okay, this is clearly trying to produce a protest album. And has gotten some criticism for being too on the nose, too try hard. Which… sure. But sonically something is often working against the lyrics, winking subtly at the audience. I found myself caring less about the obviousness, and more often being impressed by the sheer audacity of the thing. Not to mention so many of the songs are dangerously catchy.</p><p><br /></p><p>4. St. Vincent—Daddy’s Home</p><p>I said on facebook that it was weird to choose this album to begin the inevitable St. Vincent backlash, because the whole thing is so good. It is a self-aware attempt to both change her sound, and try to maybe undermine her reputation as aloof while, you know, trying to actually cement that reputation. Okay, let’s backup. I was lukewarm when it was released. But I found myself listening to it again and again, liking it more and more. And well, here we are. The album, for the five of you who haven’t listened to it, is trying to reproduce a kind of 70s New York grimy sound (kind of like Nick Cave attempts on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!). But of course this meets St. Vincent’s trade mark precision and careful production values. I think that is why we have an artifact that doesn’t fully work on the first listen, but really captivated me by the end. </p><p><br /></p><p>5. Sarah Mary Chadwick—Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby.</p><p>This was a year in which many of the women musicians who wrote personal and haunting lyrics of my teenage years released albums. Including new work by Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, Aimee Mann, and Liz Phair. None of them were bad, but something was missing. Maybe they had changed, or I had, or probably both. But then I listened to this album by Sarah Mary Chadwick, and it captured a bit of that old feeling. It probably helps that Chadwick is close to my current age. Before I go further, I should say this album needs basically every kind of content warning, dealing with depression, death, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and lots of explicit lyrics. But it’s deeply confessional, and clever, and sad, and I listened to the whole thing with my eyes extra big. If you want 42 minutes of heartbreak and brilliance, you should give this a try. </p><p><b>Next 25</b></p><p>Amyl and The Sniffers—Comfort to Me</p><p>Amythyst Kiah—Wary + Strange</p><p>Arca—Kick ii-iiiii</p><p>Cassandra Jenkins--An Overview on Phenomenal Nature</p><p>Charley Crockett—Music City USA</p><p>Clever Girls—Constellations</p><p>The Coral—Coral Island</p><p>Curtis Harding—If Words Were Flowers</p><p>Death From Above 1979—Is 4 Lovers</p><p>Dominique Fils-Aime—Three Little Words</p><p>Faye Webster—I Know I’m Funny haha</p><p>Jupiter & Okwess—Na Kozonga </p><p>Lael Neale—Acquainted With Night</p><p>Lingua Ignota—Sinner Get Ready</p><p>Lord Huron—Long Lost</p><p>Melissa Carper—Daddy’s Country Gold</p><p>Mon Laferte--SEIS</p><p>Nancy—The Seven Foot Tall Post-Suicide Feel Good Blues</p><p>Nick Cave & Warren Ellis—Carnage</p><p>Nick Shoulders—Home on the Rage</p><p>No-No Boy—1975 </p><p>Shannon & The Clams—Year of the Spider</p><p>Tele Novella—Merlynn Belle</p><p>Valerie June—The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers</p><p>Viagra Boys—Welfare Jazz</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Next 50</b></p><p>Allison Russell—Outside Child</p><p>Anna B. Savage—A Common Turn</p><p>Arlo Parks—Collapsed in Sunbeams</p><p>Billie Eilish—Happier Than Ever</p><p>Black Country, New Road—For the First Time</p><p>Black Midi—Calvacade</p><p>Claire Rousay—A Softer Focus</p><p>Clio—L’amour Hélas</p><p>The Courettes—Back in Mono</p><p>Daniel Knox—Won’t You Take Me With You</p><p>Deap Vally—Marriage </p><p>Field Music—Flat White Moon</p><p>Gary Louris—Jump for Joy</p><p>Haiku Salut—The Hill, the Light, the Ghost</p><p>Hamish Hawk—Heavy Elevator</p><p>HTRK—Rhinestones</p><p>Illuminati Hotties—Let Me Do One More</p><p>Jack Ingram, Miranda Lambert, & John Randall—The Marfa Tapes</p><p>Jarvis Cocker—Chansons d’Eunni Tip-Top</p><p>Joy Crookes—Skin </p><p>John Hiatt & Jerry Douglas—Leftover Feelings</p><p>Jungle—Loving in Stereo</p><p>La Luz—La Luz</p><p>Lana Del Rey—Blue Bannisters </p><p>Le Ren—Leftovers </p><p>Lil Nas X—Montero </p><p>Little Simz--Sometimes I Might Be Introvert</p><p>Matthew E. White—K Bay</p><p>Maxwell Farrington & Le SuperHomard—Once </p><p>Mdou Moctar—Afrique Victime </p><p>Monophonics & Kelly Finnigan—It’s Only Us </p><p>Nick Waterhouse—Promenade Blues</p><p>Night Beats—Outlaw R&B</p><p>Parquet Courts—Sympathy for Life</p><p>The Peacers—Blexxed Rec</p><p>Pearl Charles—Magic Mirror</p><p>Pokey LaFarge—In the Blossom of Their Shade</p><p>Pom Pom Squad—Death of a Cheerleader</p><p>Riddy Arman—Riddy Arman</p><p>Riley Downing—Start It Over</p><p>Sault—Nine</p><p>She Drew the Gun—Behave Myself</p><p>Sierra Ferrell—Long Time Coming</p><p>Tamar Aphek—All Bets Are Off</p><p>Teke::Teke—Shirushi </p><p>Vincent Neil Emerson—Vincent Neil Emerson</p><p>The War on Drugs—I Don’t Live Here Anymore</p><p>William Doyle—Great Spans of Muddy Time</p><p>Willie Nelson—The Willie Nelson Family</p><p>Yola—Stand for Myself</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Top Ten EPs</b></p><p>Ber--I'm Not In Love</p><p>Billy Nomates--Emergency Telephone</p><p>Blood Red Shoes--Ø </p><p>Car Seat Headrest--Madlo</p><p>Dessa--I Already Like You</p><p>Gabriels--Bloodlines/Love and Hate in a Different Time</p><p>Molly Lewis--The Forgotten Edge</p><p>Near Tears--Get With the Program</p><p>Olivia Jean--Palladium </p><p>Pixey--Free to Live in Colour </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div><br /></div>Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-7018821915965561332020-06-30T09:40:00.001-04:002020-06-30T10:07:42.428-04:00Some Long Awaited For Philosophical TitlesThis is one of those times where it seems that several long awaited for academic books from France are coming out in English. Some of these are translations of works that have been in French for decades. Others are titles that have only have recently been released in French, but were in the archives of the authors instead.<br />
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1. <a href="https://amzn.to/2AlTLTy">Michel Foucault--History of Sexuality, Vol. 4: Confessions of the Flesh.</a><br />
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If you are interested in why the long delay of the fourth volume of the <i>History of Sexuality</i>, along with a good review of the book itself, I highly suggest reading <a href="https://theoryculturesociety.org/review-foucaults-confessions-flesh/">this review from Stuart Elden</a>.<br />
But here is the summary from the book:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Brought to light at last--the fourth volume in the famous History of Sexuality series by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, his final work, which he had completed, but not yet published, upon his death in 1984.<br />
Michel Foucault's philosophy has made an indelible impact on Western thought, and his History of Sexuality series--which traces cultural and intellectual notions of sexuality, arguing that it is profoundly shaped by the power structures applied to it--is one of his most influential works. At the time of his death in 1984, he had completed--but not yet edited or published--the fourth volume, which posits that the origins of totalitarian self-surveillance began with the Christian practice of confession. This is a text both sweeping and deeply personal, as Foucault--born into a French Catholic family--undoubtedly wrestled with these issues himself. Since he had stipulated "Pas de publication posthume," this text has long been secreted away. However, the sale of the Foucault archives in 2013--which made this text available to scholars--prompted his nephew to seek wider publication. This attitude was shared by Foucault's longtime partner, Daniel Defert, who said, "What is this privilege given to Ph.D students? I have adopted this principle: It is either everybody or nobody."</blockquote>
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2. Jacques Derrida--<a href="https://amzn.to/38efqcz">Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity</a>.<br />
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This is the third, out of four, Geschlecht works, and it was recently recovered in Derrida's archive. The first one, "Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference," and the second one, "Heidegger's Hand" (which is important for us animal scholars), can both be found in the <a href="https://amzn.to/2BPoKHS">second volume of Psyche</a>. Geschlecht IV, "Heidegger's Ear" can be found in the collection <a href="https://amzn.to/2YJ2RTF">Reading Heidegger</a>. (One more quick note is that the new set of Derrida lectures, <a href="https://amzn.to/3g9ZnPV">Life Death</a>, is also forthcoming).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A significant event in Derrida scholarship, this book marks the first publication of his long-lost philosophical text known only as “Geschlecht III.” The third, and arguably the most significant, piece in his four-part Geschlecht series, it fills a gap that has perplexed Derrida scholars. The series centers on Martin Heidegger and the enigmatic German word Geschlecht, which has several meanings pointing to race, sex, and lineage. Throughout the series, Derrida engages with Heidegger’s controversial oeuvre to tease out topics of sexual difference, nationalism, race, and humanity. In Geschlecht III, he calls attention to Heidegger’s problematic nationalism, his work’s political and sexual themes, and his promise of salvation through the coming of the “One Geschlecht,” a sentiment that Derrida found concerningly close to the racial ideology of the Nazi party.<br />
Amid new revelations about Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and the contemporary context of nationalist resurgence, this third piece of the Geschlecht series is timelier and more necessary than ever. Meticulously edited and expertly translated, this volume brings Derrida’s mysterious and much awaited text to light.</blockquote>
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3. Gilles Deleuze--<a href="https://amzn.to/2Vwgpjq">Letters and Other Texts</a><br />
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This is the third collection of shorter Deleuze works edited by David Lapoujade (following up <a href="https://amzn.to/31HAoQb">Desert Islands</a> and <a href="https://amzn.to/2NHRtB8">Two Regimes of Madness</a>).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A posthumous collection of writings by Deleuze, including letters, youthful essays, and an interview, many previously unpublished.<br />
Letters and Other Texts is the third and final volume of the posthumous texts of Gilles Deleuze, collected for publication in French on the twentieth anniversary of his death. It contains several letters addressed to his contemporaries (Michel Foucault, Pierre Klossowski, François Châtelet, and Clément Rosset, among others). Of particular importance are the letters addressed to Félix Guattari, which offer an irreplaceable account of their work as a duo from Anti-Oedipus to What is Philosophy? Later letters provide a new perspective on Deleuze's work as he responds to students' questions.<br />
This volume also offers a set of unpublished or hard-to-find texts, including some essays from Deleuze's youth, a few unusual drawings, and a long interview from 1973 on Anti-Oedipus with Guattari.</blockquote>
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4. Gilbert Simondon--<a href="https://amzn.to/2Vz1m8v">Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information</a>, and <a href="https://amzn.to/38f1grL">Volume II</a>.<br />
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5. Édouard Glissant--<a href="https://amzn.to/38pK82R">Treatise on the Whole-World</a> AND <a href="https://amzn.to/38pKvKN">Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity</a> AND <a href="https://amzn.to/2BTM9Yy">The Baton Rouge Interviews</a>.<br />
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6. And a German one, Theodor Adorno--<a href="https://amzn.to/2ZC6xWH">Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism</a><br />
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<br />Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-73674843725871401772020-06-01T19:07:00.000-04:002020-06-01T19:07:05.689-04:00Race and Animal StudiesThere are a few new books out on the intersections of Black Studies and Animal Studies, and joins a longer list of works on race and animal studies. I thought it could be helpful to put together this list.<br /><br />1. Just out now is Joshua Bennett's <a href="https://amzn.to/3eI4JB0">Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man</a>.<br />
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The summary for the book:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>A prize-winning poet argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal.</b>Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. <i>Being Property Once Myself</i> delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure―the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark―in the works of black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people―all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find black and animal life in fraught proximity.<br />Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.</blockquote>
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2. Also just out is Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's <a href="https://amzn.to/36S4mkS">Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu1rRSPEK_6ZIquVEmASUu1S2RZm7e7v94VFiew5RDJSmD0aytzcJKLUAuXT_J7bZj0oWywRDVxuJGy_DmV6TVr6pmmrmv85-bowIrxfPYPSobg4Q-I2gBCWJhSrHvRWrRoGRnTWRBu48/s1600/Becoming+Human.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu1rRSPEK_6ZIquVEmASUu1S2RZm7e7v94VFiew5RDJSmD0aytzcJKLUAuXT_J7bZj0oWywRDVxuJGy_DmV6TVr6pmmrmv85-bowIrxfPYPSobg4Q-I2gBCWJhSrHvRWrRoGRnTWRBu48/s320/Becoming+Human.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
The book summary:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Argues that blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human.</b>Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, <i>Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World</i> breaks open the rancorous debate between black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism.<br />Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of blackness―the process of imagining the black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero―and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."</blockquote>
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These two new books join several other monographs on the intersections of race and animal studies.<br />
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3. Aph Ko's 2019 <a href="https://amzn.to/3co4OZh">Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out</a>.<br />
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4. Also in 2019 we had Lindgren Johnson's <a href="https://amzn.to/3dB9Ovb">Race Matters, Animal Matters: Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1840-1930</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhReAsj2fhq0mEHv1trP4WZ3onu16ToY-Ntg9YogqxGYlmHTVLLj3TuuJ7nTar-aMS-RNsos6LBkFgpKH5yebw0ObePRMvxDd4fcCRumCKmg7h-rH2csootb8A5zD5y0uwat73ULmCtMQs/s1600/Race+matters+animal+matters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="648" data-original-width="426" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhReAsj2fhq0mEHv1trP4WZ3onu16ToY-Ntg9YogqxGYlmHTVLLj3TuuJ7nTar-aMS-RNsos6LBkFgpKH5yebw0ObePRMvxDd4fcCRumCKmg7h-rH2csootb8A5zD5y0uwat73ULmCtMQs/s320/Race+matters+animal+matters.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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5. Bénédicte Boisseron's 2018 <a href="https://amzn.to/2AyD7iY">Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjlsdERJ9I5AJac9P4DE5qRGCYrKqtlb4lybpgvVpjMIVgXLzPAuRR214MwQ3uq7EO97DFFOcDOJamL4YmOBl3KAhyOKaJGLbwJyL-RvwLKbeI83sBWV_t5arpIGbtZMxkAy16KY9Owys/s1600/Afro-dog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjlsdERJ9I5AJac9P4DE5qRGCYrKqtlb4lybpgvVpjMIVgXLzPAuRR214MwQ3uq7EO97DFFOcDOJamL4YmOBl3KAhyOKaJGLbwJyL-RvwLKbeI83sBWV_t5arpIGbtZMxkAy16KY9Owys/s320/Afro-dog.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>
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6. Julietta Singh's 2018 <a href="https://amzn.to/2zPfe6Q">Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW7ss8D85epCDqbxgKxjNGpjrkkTm42mYeXaIZD1wdUS6XMj3C4edr7poT3mt3e-7XISJ1H8AhK9XF9YWJ4ms5Pp1sLNYVC_BBNBSXVUo02Cj6g_Q9jZEbaMK1PAvz8XS2fSOXjV5zOKs/s1600/unthinking+mastery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW7ss8D85epCDqbxgKxjNGpjrkkTm42mYeXaIZD1wdUS6XMj3C4edr7poT3mt3e-7XISJ1H8AhK9XF9YWJ4ms5Pp1sLNYVC_BBNBSXVUo02Cj6g_Q9jZEbaMK1PAvz8XS2fSOXjV5zOKs/s320/unthinking+mastery.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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7. Aph and Sly Ko's 2017 <a href="https://amzn.to/2MlilX6">Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters </a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3EKB0bpqbawMHnrCh5cVuJ2Qe7CioVMoKTS_1sOWhaFkMn6U8mUR0_ticRTdnOQN2lsMZ40UeC0EeaRcjWCl1mPMVLjVtR0EKnth0Pwgq24rOkQoQZcoCJl5Q3C3Wmp4XDlD0cRcCkqc/s1600/aphro+ism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="331" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3EKB0bpqbawMHnrCh5cVuJ2Qe7CioVMoKTS_1sOWhaFkMn6U8mUR0_ticRTdnOQN2lsMZ40UeC0EeaRcjWCl1mPMVLjVtR0EKnth0Pwgq24rOkQoQZcoCJl5Q3C3Wmp4XDlD0cRcCkqc/s320/aphro+ism.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>
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8. And lastly, Claire Jean Kim's 2015 <a href="https://amzn.to/2XoIZEC">Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK3tyRzBY4wBqaNlk_LP8NhbFfSRLfJ1QJanWN4ZwLNaQTwpiFCoj8fc3TArVHM90t1pqsqK2qnft5IBDaSfYURHwmulrSUesP1D22uqP1XuQcCVjaLR5Hi85Qyzb0COY-L3uKkvdTwag/s1600/dangerous+crossings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK3tyRzBY4wBqaNlk_LP8NhbFfSRLfJ1QJanWN4ZwLNaQTwpiFCoj8fc3TArVHM90t1pqsqK2qnft5IBDaSfYURHwmulrSUesP1D22uqP1XuQcCVjaLR5Hi85Qyzb0COY-L3uKkvdTwag/s320/dangerous+crossings.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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In addition to these several monographs, there have also been more than a few edited volumes on these issues. These include:<br /><br />1. The 2020 collection, <a href="https://amzn.to/3gKgGIs">Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies </a>edited by Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgauT8Dlp-RllpiRumuWKgrmtcbqa4ig4eUbm6g4fCS3i6_lsaayeCVQP1oMelutEiorl0Qd-6Np8VkHyv1muRtw8HO4yLzOGIc4F5O0lbsPki9yuFOCHAkStiWxhGiKiQCxrE1d4oXEbM/s1600/colonialism+and+animality.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgauT8Dlp-RllpiRumuWKgrmtcbqa4ig4eUbm6g4fCS3i6_lsaayeCVQP1oMelutEiorl0Qd-6Np8VkHyv1muRtw8HO4yLzOGIc4F5O0lbsPki9yuFOCHAkStiWxhGiKiQCxrE1d4oXEbM/s320/colonialism+and+animality.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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2. The 2019 collection <a href="https://amzn.to/2ZZcKxq">Veganism of Color: Decentering Whiteness in Human and Nonhuman Liberation</a>, edited by Julia Feliz Brueck.<br />
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3. The 2017 collection, <a href="https://amzn.to/2yXTXaS">Veganism in an Oppressive World: A Vegans-of-Color Community Project, </a>also edited by Julia Felix Brueck.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-j4Ba7fSon4VWI790cBV1tqAfgy7e_ammSVvMsfrB6ZxzjR4PrWnTrqgPJ3R4cEZbf5Mtajf4EzsT1EkKDwO23KzpRb8YWvJDCM4VtK0rSilHnh1b2MkfGoTEapq-C9LR8F3xH3Cd-m8/s1600/veganism+in+an+oppressive+world.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-j4Ba7fSon4VWI790cBV1tqAfgy7e_ammSVvMsfrB6ZxzjR4PrWnTrqgPJ3R4cEZbf5Mtajf4EzsT1EkKDwO23KzpRb8YWvJDCM4VtK0rSilHnh1b2MkfGoTEapq-C9LR8F3xH3Cd-m8/s320/veganism+in+an+oppressive+world.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>
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4. And of course, A. Breeze Harper's 2009 collection, <a href="https://amzn.to/2XlgnMq">Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society</a>.<br />
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And of course, these are only books (and probably not all of the books), there are plenty more chapters and articles that address these issues. Hopefully, as animal scholars, this work will challenge a tendency in the field to simply engage in what Alexander Weheliye, in <a href="https://amzn.to/3dqyp5s">Habeas Viscus</a>, correctly pointed out as "the not so dreaded comparison."Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-47146150227384333462020-05-15T15:20:00.001-04:002020-05-15T15:20:19.101-04:00Vasile Stanescu On Why Vegans Should Not Support Lab-Grown Meat<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifYL4k_p0oQB-5d6UX-J3BDTBOF5eUPi3QrVI5OZezhZjaTEzaJTSnFy3q_jrzVnoruGokqGu4EwynEQ2nxpKSw4V5sMbSJNAmiomgtL8ghpXs5DobKXMIaMCumeLbeYQSoL9kbRiFGG0/s1600/Vegans+lab+grown+meat.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1024" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifYL4k_p0oQB-5d6UX-J3BDTBOF5eUPi3QrVI5OZezhZjaTEzaJTSnFy3q_jrzVnoruGokqGu4EwynEQ2nxpKSw4V5sMbSJNAmiomgtL8ghpXs5DobKXMIaMCumeLbeYQSoL9kbRiFGG0/s320/Vegans+lab+grown+meat.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Vasile Stanescu, and John Sanbonmatsu, recently appeared on the <a href="https://alwaysforanimalrights.blogspot.com/2020/05/episode-25-why-vegans-and-animal-rights.html?fbclid=IwAR0cQw56khP6UbRDQxQF92VSFGJXBuB4F2m-N_17Mdc05d1VcgxTUtFFb8c">Always for Animal Rights podcast/radio show</a>, in order to discuss animal right and vegan support of lab-grown meat (sometimes called clean meat, or in virto meat, or cultured meat). Vasile's discussion here extends many of his arguments from his <a href="https://www.criticalanimal.com/2019/07/guest-post-response-to-claim-that-only.html">earlier blog post</a>, arguing against the idea that vegan advocacy has failed and against the idea there are 2% of Americans who are vegetarian and vegan.<br />
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<br />Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-27272714708252504412019-07-01T16:19:00.000-04:002019-07-02T19:18:33.281-04:00Guest Post: Response to the claim that only 2% (or less) of people in the United States are vegetarian<br />
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<b> “Fake News” of Animal Advocacy:</b></div>
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<b><b>Response to the claim that only 2%(or less) of people in the United States are vegetarian</b></b></div>
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<b><b>Guest Post By<br />Vasile Stanescu</b></b></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">“Groups and advocates have been at this [vegan advocacy] for
decades and yet the percentage of people in the United States who are
vegetarian has basically not changed at all”<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">--Matt Ball; Co-founder of Vegan Outreach<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Summary: <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<ol>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> About 1 out of 10 Americans identify as either vegetarian or
vegan (between 8 to 13 percent). </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">This percent is consistent across several different studies</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">This percent is growing (with higher percentages for those
under 50.)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">It is inaccurate to believe that a large number of people
falsely claim to be vegetarian (although some people who are transitioning to a
vegetarian diet and some pescetarians may claim to be vegetarian). </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">However, half the people who strictly follow a vegetarian or vegan diet may choose not to identify with the labels. This is, in part,
because of a fear of negative stigma around the labels “vegetarian” or “vegan.” </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">The failure of studies and the media to accurately report the
number of vegetarians and vegans may harm the animal rights movement. Likewise,
inaccurate stereotypes of vegans (including by animal rights activists
themselves), may also be harmful. </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Therefore, as activists, we should strive to let people know
the comparatively high rates of people transitioning to a vegetarian and vegan
diet and combat those suggesting inaccurate stereotypes of vegetarians and vegans.</span></li>
</ol>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Part I: “Absolute
Fanatics” <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Why are some of the most well-known and most influential vegans
and animal rights activists telling people that animal rights activism is
inherently useless and that calls for veganism may be hurting animal activism?
For example, I recently </span><a href="https://www.cleanmeat-hoax.com/debate-video.html"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">engaged in a public debate</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> with Bruce Friedrich, the president of the Good Food
Institute and the former Vice President of PETA, on the topic of <i>in
vitro </i>meat. The debate was wide-ranging; however, Bruce's most commonly
repeated argument--both during the debate and in the dinner afterward--was his
belief that animal advocacy does not work and that his lifetime of advocacy had, in fact, been a failure. After that debate, Bruce made similar claims in a feature
article in the </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/bruce-friedrich-animal-activist.html"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">New York Times </span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">: “[w]e've tried to convince the world to go
vegan, and it has not worked;” “[a]ll the education and all the awareness of the
problem, and concern about the problem, doesn't solve the problem;” and
even “[w]e need to change the meat, because we aren't going to change human
nature [<i>i.e.</i> eating meat is a fundamental part of human nature].” Similar
claims have been forwarded by people such as Matt Ball, Senior Media Relations
Specialist for the Good Food Institute and the original co-founder of Vegan Outreach,
also a well-known vegan and animal rights advocate. For example, in 2017, he
published </span><a href="https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/5/27/15701168/save-animal-lives-eat-beef-not-chicken"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">a video for Vox</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> in which he claimed that people should
shift from eating chicken to cows or pigs (based on the number of animals
killed to produce meat.) In this video, he also claims that many vegans and
animal rights activists are “absolute fanatics,” and seems to support Anthony
Bourdin's odd claims that vegans should be viewed like “Hezbollah.” Uniquely,
Ball claims that when animal rights activists encourage people to eat vegan,
they are “driving people back to eating meat.” These are remarkable claims as
both Friedrich and Ball are long-time vegans, former leaders of animal rights
organizations, and well-known animal rights activists.<br />
<br />
The main motivation for these shifts seems to be repeated claims that only a
very small percentage of the population is either vegetarian or vegan. For
example, Matt Ball in the video claims, “[o]nly 2% of the population is
vegetarian and only half a percent is vegan. Now, this is after decades of
advocacy.” Likewise, Bruce repeated similar statistics as the major reason why
he has shifted his own views on animal advocacy.<br />
<br />
I have tried to track down the source for these claims: My best guess is that it is, in
part, based on an article on the website Animal Charity navigator entitled: “</span><a href="https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/is-the-percentage-of-vegetarians-and-vegans-in-the-u-s-increasing/"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Is the Percentage of Vegetarians and Vegans in
the U.S. Increasing? | Animal Charity Evaluators</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">.” This article claims that there has
been very little increase in the number of vegetarians and vegans, leading the
researcher to endorse a possible shift towards <i>in vitro</i> meat
and/or humane meat as a more effective strategy for change. Before I examine
the claim in detail, it is important to note that the article on Animal Charity
Navigator is not a study itself; it is a guest blog post. The main
qualification I can locate for the person writing the post--Saulius Šimčikas--
is a master’s degree in mathematics; it appears he may have written it while he
was a part-time research intern. Of course, this does not mean that this is not
a thoughtful or well-done guest blog post; however, it is to argue that a guest
blog post is fundamentally not the same as a peer-reviewed study.<br />
<br />
In contrast, I would argue that the majority of evidence we have available
would seem to suggest that a. approximately 1 out of 10 Americans identifies as
vegetarian or vegans b. the number of those under 50 is about 12% and, most importantly,
c. <i>the number is growing.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Part II: About 9% of Americans identify as vegetarian or vegan</b><br />
<b><br />
</b>The actual number of vegetarians and vegans in the United States—based on
the best evidence we have—is between 8-13 percent with a pretty good “ballpark” estimate of 9% or about one in ten Americans. Let me break down a few of
the actual studies.<br />
<br />
The best is the one done by </span><a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/12/01/the-new-food-fights/ps_2016-12-01_food-science_1-07/"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">PEW in 2016</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> (which I can't find cited in the post from Animal Charity
Evaluators—I'm not sure why). The overall take away is that 9% of the population are vegetarian and vegan. The research is even more encouraging; the 9% is
heavily skewed by a low number of vegetarians and vegans in older populations:
for ages 18-49, the percentage is 12%.<br />
<br />
Likewise, here is the link to the frequently cited </span><a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/238328/snapshot-few-americans-vegetarian-vegan.aspx"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Gallup Poll</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">. This is a great example of how perfectly fine research can be
misrepresented. The study found 5 percent were vegetarian, which became the
headline of the study, the only way it was reported, and the number used in the
post of Animal Charity Evaluator. However, that is not what the study found.
What they actually found is that 3 percent of people consider themselves vegan
---in addition to the 5% who considered themselves a vegetarian. The most
recent press release does not make this clear; however, it is clearly explained
in a press release of </span><a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/156215/consider-themselves-vegetarians.aspx"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">an earlier version of the same study</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Vegans apparently view themselves as different from, rather
than a subset of, vegetarians; most of the small number of respondents in the
survey who said "yes" to the vegan question had said "no"
to the vegetarian question.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">So the number is not 5% including 3% vegans—it is 5% plus 3%
vegans—<i>i.e.</i> 8% of the population (consistent with the 9% PEW found). If we
think about it, this claim makes intuitive sense. If I was answering a poll and
they asked me if I was vegetarian I would say “no,” by which I would only mean
that I do not consume eggs or dairy, not that I eat meat. Again, the research
is even more positive because the numbers among 18-49-year-olds were between
10-12 percent; the same percentages PEW found. And, that number—the under 50 number—is the main number we need to focus on. The main reason these numbers
are not larger is not that people aren't going vegetarian, but that “baby
boomers” are not, as an aggregate, going vegetarian (and there are a significant number of "baby boomers.")<br />
<br />
However, the point is not only the research itself: it is the fact that no one
reports the information in this way. For example, here is the headline of how
the </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/08/03/you-might-think-there-are-more-vegetarians-than-ever-youd-be-wrong/?utm_term=.9de0c2beafa1"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Washington Post</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> reported on the Gallup Poll: “You might
think there are more vegetarians than ever. You'd be wrong.” Even though the
study <i>does</i> claim there are more vegetarians than ever.<br />
<br />
Likewise, the </span><a href="http://agecon.okstate.edu/files/May%202018.pdf"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">FooDS survey</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> (administered
by the University of Oklahoma) found a similar percentage: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>8.8% of respondents reported being vegetarian
or vegan. (This is the most recent data. If you look long term the
precise percent varies over time; however, there is an overall upward trend).<br />
<br />
Finally, while not as reliable as either Pew or Gallup, Public Policy Polling
also found the same percent: 9%, of Americans are vegetarians or vegans in
two </span><a href="https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/polls/americans-on-their-pets"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">different</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><a href="https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/polls/voters-much-prefer-obama-to-republicans/"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">polls</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">. Indeed, Public Policy Polling has a third</span><a href="https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_NationalFOOD_022613.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2YTk"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> study</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> which found the rate of vegetarians and vegans at 13%,
though my guess is that this study was a bit of an outliner.<br />
<br />
Let me also highlight that all of this research is recent. One of the major
problems with some of the research on the post from Animal Charity Evaluator was
how old the data was (it included data from 1978). However, the trend is
towards younger people becoming vegetarian or vegan. So, for example, if you
use a study from 2000, everyone who is in the 18-29 demographic (which runs
12%) would not be included in the study [in 2000 the oldest person in this
demographic would have been 10 to 11 years old; the cut off for these
studies is 18.] We do not need to know how many vegetarians there were in 2000;
we need to know how many vegetarians there are now (and will be in the future).<br />
<br />
So, based on five of the most recent opinion polls from four different polling
organizations, there is no question that the rate of self-reported vegetarians
and vegans is a. around one in ten Americans b. consistent c. increasing
and—most importantly—d. skewing towards higher rates (12%) for those under 50.<br />
<br />
Of course, we want these numbers to be higher; these are still remarkable
numbers.<br />
.<br />
</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Part III: “</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Assume They're Lying<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">” <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"><br />
One other point: What about the supposed “closet” meat eaters’ rate, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">i.e</i>., the supposedly high percentage of
vegetarians and vegans that still “secretly” eat meat or dairy? The argument
seems to be that while people “self-report” high rates of being vegetarian or
vegan, these numbers are misleading because—in essence—these people are lying
and they are still “really” meat eaters. However, the data is a little more complicated
than this narrative: The first survey to comment on this supposed trend was the
Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals (CSFII) conducted from
1994-1998. What they found was a percentage of those who they polled both said
they were vegetarian and later recalled eating meat, which led to the
idea that vegetarians are “secretly” eating meat. For example, here is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Business Insider</i> article from 2013
entitled “</span><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/survey-60-of-self-proclaimed-vegetarians-ate-meat-yesterday-2013-6"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">SURVEY: 60% Of Self-Proclaimed Vegetarians Ate
Meat Yesterday</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">” and begins with this
opening paragraph:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Pretty much every vegetarian has been accused of eating meat on
the sly — which makes sense, since most meat eaters can't picture life without
steak (or hamburgers, or hot dogs, or bacon). But if you accuse a vegetarian of
pounding down veal burgers during their off hours, chances are you'll be met
with some serious kale-fueled rage that'll take a bucketful of bacon to forget.</span><span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Pro tip: Next time, just skip the fuss and assume they're lying.
In fact, go ahead and assume that they ate meat yesterday. You'd probably be
right.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Let's set aside for a second why <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Business
Insider</i> is writing about a study from 1994---<i>in 2013</i>. This is not what
the study found: First off, the study's manual prevented the interview (it was
a telephone interview) from answering any questions about what “vegetarian”
meant; all they were allowed to do was repeat the question. So, for example, if
the person interviewed asked: “I do occasionally eat seafood, should I
consider myself a vegetarian?” or if they asked: “I am just now transitioning into
a vegetarian diet. Should I consider myself a vegetarian?” All they would have
heard in response was the same question (here is </span><a href="https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400530/pdf/csfii9496inter.pdf"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">the link </span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">to the manual used). And, unsurprisingly, that
is exactly what the results show: the people who claimed to be vegetarian and
were still recorded as eating meat ate significantly less meat then the
nonvegetarians and almost all of it was fish or seafood. So, what the study
shows is not that vegetarians are “lying” about being vegetarian but that there
exists confusion about whether eating fish or seafood “counts” as a vegetarian (or that
people may be transitioning into a vegetarian diet). This confusion is not
surprising: The very first “vegetarian” cookbook I ever owned--<i>The Moosewood Cookbook</i>—included
recipes for seafood.<br />
<br />
The same is true for the data from the </span><a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/index.htm"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">, (NHANES) 2007-2010. Furthermore, </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211601X15000759"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">a 2015 study</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> looked, in part, at the number of people identified as
vegetarian and then looked at what they recalled eating in two 24-hour periods.
What they found roughly “mirrors” the finding from CSFII: All of the
self-described vegetarians who self-recorded eating some animal products
consumed— substantially —less meat than non-vegetarians; they all consumed
substantially more plant-based food; most of the meat they consumed was
seafood. As the study itself explains (in the abstract):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Compared to non-vegetarians, vegetarians consumed
…significantly less meat, poultry, solid fats and added sugars, and more soy,
legumes, and whole grains than non-vegetarians. Both groups consumed about the
same amounts of eggs, dairy, seafood, fruits, and vegetables. After energy adjustment,
vegetarians consumed significantly more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and
total grains than non-vegetarians per 1000 kcal. Although a large proportion of
self-identified vegetarians report consuming some type of animal products, such
as meat, poultry and/or seafood, their dietary patterns contain more
plant-based foods and whole grains with less solid fats and added sugars.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"><br />
Likewise, this study did no better at defining what a “vegetarian” was—or was
not—than the previous CSFII. The take away is not that vegetarians are “lying,”
but that many pescatarians and transitional vegetarians consider themselves to
be vegetarians. The study itself even makes this exact point (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">i.e.</i> that many of the people may be
transitioning into a vegetarian diet):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">However, since this is a cross-sectional study, it is
impossible to know whether individuals who reported consuming animal proteins
were trending towards eliminating those protein sources from their diet. The
duration of practicing vegetarianism may be an important factor to consider in
examining the dietary patterns of individuals. (90) </span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">One other quick point on these studies: They only asked about
“vegetarians.” As earlier noted, in surveys, vegans do not always identify as
vegetarians (although researchers often assume they will). I have not been able
to locate any studies that show that vegans do not self-report correctly. This,
again, makes intuitive sense: While some people are confused as to the meaning
of “vegetarian,” most people have a more definite meaning for “vegan.” So, when
Gallup (for example), tells us that 3 percent of the population is vegan, that
number certainly may be incorrect, however, I can't find any evidence to
suggest that it is.<br />
<br />
On a deeper level: I still do not entirely understand the focus on this
objection. Some animal rights advocates argue for a very limited definition of either vegetarian or vegan and suggest that people should immediately
transition into full veganism. For example, Gary Francione could be read as
making these type of arguments. I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with this
position. However, most of the animal rights groups that making these arguments
about the low number of vegans and vegetarians—including Animal Charity
Evaluators, Faunlytics, Bruce Friedrich, Matt Ball, <i>etc.-- </i>believe
in and support the idea of “harm reduction” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">e.g.</i>
eating sustainably less meat is the goal, not dietary “purity.” If so, why do
they seem to agree with Francione's' definition of who does, or does not,
constitute a vegetarian or a vegan? Even if most vegetarians or vegans are
“imperfect” vegetarians and vegans (which has not actually been proven), it
doesn't mean that the terms do not have a meaning and that animal activism is
not successful. As long as they are eating substantially less meat (which every
study has found), it is still a meaningful term. For example, Debs, my partner,
for the first year she was “vegetarian” would still eat salmon when she went
home (as her parents worried over her.) Perhaps she was not “vegetarian.”
However, it is also incorrect to suppose that the term did not mean anything;
she was avoiding all other animal products the rest of the time and she was
literally spending virtually every weekend on animal advocacy (and, over time,
she stopped eating the “parent-worry-salmon” as well). If it helps people to
call themselves “vegetarian”--in the sense of that being their goal, if not yet
a full reality--I am unclear why that use of the term is viewed as such a problem.<br />
<br />
<b>Part IV: The Vegan Police</b><br />
<br />Let me give you the best example I know of researchers using the
absolutist views of vegetarians and veganism to (heavily) skew the results. In
2014, the Humane Research Council/Faunaltyics published </span><a href="https://faunalytics.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/HRC-Study-of-Current-Former-Vegetarians-Vegans-Dec-2014-Tables-Methodology-1.pdf"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">a study</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> that found that only 2% of the population was vegetarian.
In addition to the post of Animal Charity Navigator, this seems to be the most
common source for the supposedly small number of vegetarians or vegans.<br />
<br />
The problem with this study is that the definition of being a vegetarian or
vegan was so narrow it inevitably excluded a large number of vegetarians,
vegans, and people who did not eat meat or animal products (but simply did not
care for the term). Let me explain: The first part of the study was a series of
questions asking if the person consumed—any—amount of any animal product. If the
person answered affirmative to consuming any amount of any meat product, they
were automatically excluded from being a vegetarian; if they recorded
consuming any animal product at all, they were automatically excluded from
being a vegan. There was nothing the respondent could do. There was no way they
could explain why it happened, how rare it was, anything. They were simply
prevented from identifying as either a vegetarian or a vegan. For example, Debs,
in her first year of being a vegetarian, would have been excluded because of
the salmon she ate a couple of times a year when she visited home. In other
words, even if a person ate 99% less meat, the study would still classify the
person in the same category as, say, Jordan Peterson (who claims to only eat
beef, water, and salt.)<br />
<br />
How about those who did record eating zero animal products of any kind? One
would presume they, at least, would be recorded as either vegetarians or
vegans. This is not what happened. The study then asked them if they identified
as vegetarian or vegans. If they did not—even though the study had recorded
that they consume no animal products at all—the study still did not count them
as either vegetarians or vegans. To be clear, this was not a small number—over
half the people who recorded as vegetarian and vegans were excluded because
they did not self “identify” as vegetarians or vegans (here is </span><a href="https://faunalytics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Faunalytics-Current-Former-Veg-Study-Survey-Instrument.pdf"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">a link</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> to the study methodology). Even taking the most stringent
measure possible for vegetarian or vegan (perfect adherence to a diet free of
animal products), the number of Faunlytics found was not 2%; it was 4%. This, in
turn, match what others have found: In 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2016 the Vegetarian
Resource Group (VRG) polled people about their dietary practices in a similar
manner to the Faunylicts study; however, there was one important difference: they
did not also ask if people identified as a vegetarian or a vegan. VRG
consistently found that the number of strict “vegetarians in practice” ranged
from 3.3%-5% (Here is the </span><a href="https://www.vrg.org/nutshell/Polls/2016_adults_veg.htm"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">most recent survey</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">). In other words, the same percentages Faunalytics
/HRC would have found if they had not asked if people “identified” as a
vegetarian or vegan.<br />
<br />
What is fascinating is that in the same study vegetarians and vegans seemed to
operate as both a practice and as a belief system. If someone agreed with the
belief system but were still imperfect in practice (i.e. transitioning to
veganism), they were excluded. Likewise, even if someone followed the practice
perfectly (i.e. consumed zero animal products of any kind), if they did not
also choose to identify as a vegetarian or vegan, they were also excluded. In
their defense, Faunalytics itself has admitted these limitations to the
study. </span><a href="https://faunalytics.org/who-are-the-vegetarians/"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">For example</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">It also estimated that 2% of the U.S. population are
vegetarian. However, we should be wary of thinking that this agreement in
estimates means the 2% figure is accurate. The Faunalytics survey was careful
to check whether respondents said that they consumed any meat or fish items as
well as whether they regarded themselves as vegetarian. This should lead to a
lower estimate of the number of vegetarians.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">However, this still raises the question: Why did they design a
study guaranteed to produce as low as possible a number of vegetarians or
vegans? What was the purpose of excluding everyone who was either—even
slightly—imperfect in their diet or, even if perfect, chose not to simply call
themselves a vegetarian or vegan?<br />
<br />
In any case, what the study seems to highlight is not that there are a lot of
vegetarians that are “closeted' meat-eaters but that there may well be a large
number of people who are actually “closeted” vegetarians or vegans (i.e. people
who do not consume animal products but still do not chose to use the label). As
a letter to </span><a href="https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/71/5/1211/4729313"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> phrased this concern over the use of the
label:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Although an increasing number of people are now avoiding meat,
the label vegetarian carries with it various, and varying, connotations about
beliefs and practices that are unrelated to diet and health and that appear to
be based in part on societal norms and expectations.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"><br />
I agree with my friend Matthew Cole that veganism is not about diet; it is an
ideology against speciesism for which diet is simply one outward manifestation.
So it might make sense for Matthew to formulate the study in this way. However,
I can't figure out why the makers of this study (all of whom argue against
“purity” and for harm reduction) would craft the survey in this way. Why do
they care if someone “says” they are vegan or not?<br />
<br />
These results may also help to explain one of the odder trends in polling about
vegetarians and vegans: people consistently report higher rates of being
vegetarian or vegan on online polling versus “face-to-face.” This tendency
towards different rates in online and “in person” polling has been well
established; however, it usually exists because people are embarrassed or
uncomfortable to admit something and, therefore, are less likely to tell an
actual person and more likely to record it in the seeming privacy of an
online poll. As </span><a href="https://news.gallup.com/opinion/methodology/233291/why-phone-web-survey-results-aren.aspx"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Gallup</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> phrases this discrepancy:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">[W]hen respondents answer questions that an interviewer reads
aloud to them, research has consistently shown that respondents tend to give
…more socially desirable responses than when the same questions are
administered to the same population via web or mail.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">For example, </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/upshot/online-polls-are-rising-so-are-concerns-about-their-results.html"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">online polling was consistently a better measure </span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">of the actual support for Trump than telephone
polling, presumably because some voters felt uncomfortable admitting they were
voting for Trump. If, as earlier suggested, people were not actually vegetarian
but were, in essence, “lying” to say that they were, we should expect to see
high rates of people saying they were vegetarian via in-person polling and
lower rates online; instead, we see the exact opposite. This suggests the people
may actually feel embarrassed to “admit” being vegetarian or vegan (even when
they follow the diet exactly). Indeed, a growing body of data has found exactly
these results: social stigma is one of the major reasons precluding people from
switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet and refusing the “identity” even if
they do follow the diet. As a </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666318313874"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">peer-reviewed paper</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"> on the topic phrased this tendency:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">By definition, stigma is undesirable, and individuals want to
avoid it. Due to the fear of experiencing stigmatized treatment, vegans report
altering how they behave around non-vegans (e.g., discussing veganism only when
prompted, actively trying to distance themselves from the characteristics
associated with vegan stereotypes) …Thus, adding social distance between
oneself and stigmatized others keeps one safe from ‘catching’ a courtesy
stigma.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Furthermore, formulating these studies in this way, producing as low a number
as possible, can cause real harm. The Faunalytics study was – universally—covered
as saying that only 2 percent of the population was vegetarian. However, that
is not actually what the survey proved. However, the fact that an “animal rights
organization” had come up with these numbers became proof of their credibility
and the supposed failure of all vegan or vegetarian advocacy.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">For example, consider some the press coverage of the study
from </span><a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-reveals-84-of-vegetarians-return-to-meat"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">ScienceAlert</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Thanks to the extreme actions of a select few, animal advocate
groups have at times struggled to maintain a favourable reputation with the
public, particularly in the US, where PETA continues to embarrass itself. It's
great to see efforts like this [study by Faunalytics] to understand the
motivations and challenges that come with a significant diet change, and the
acknowledgement that giving up meat is not the only way to address both the
health, animal welfare, and environmental concerns that come from farming
animals to the degree that we are now.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">
Likewise, the study directly led to the headline in </span><a href="https://www.popsci.com/how-to-stop-climate-change#page-3"><span style="color: #7c93a1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Popular Science</span></a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">: “Stop pretending that all Americans could
ever go vegan: There are more realistic ways to combat climate change.” In
turn, the article argued that environmentalist should not focus on decreasing
animal consumption as a way to combat climate change (despite the science suggesting that we should). It ends with the conclusion:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Let's stop the charade. Most Americans are meat-eaters, and no
study is going to change their minds. Instead of fighting the inexorable march
toward ever-more beef and poultry, let's invest in realistic solutions to our
problems. Climate change is quite possibly the biggest challenge we'll ever
face as a species, and we'll never tackle it with such impractical goals
[decreasing meat consumption].</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">
And, as earlier mentioned, several vegans and prominent animal rights activists
have publicly made similar claims. In other words, I worry that a combination
of misreporting and ill-designed studies could help to produce a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Animal advocacy is working. However, if the media
keeps telling everyone (animal rights advocates included) that is it is failing,
has never worked, and will never work, it is logical to suppose that people
will both stop trying to promote vegan advocacy and, those of us who do promote
it, may find people less responsive (after all, “people will never go vegan” is
already the number one argument I hear against vegan advocacy). Indeed, it is
important to consider not only the data itself but also the biases around the
data that is being reported. It seems clear that the data is universally being
reported in the most negative way possible against vegetarians and vegans.
Gallup data actually shows 8% vegetarians and vegans and a growing number of
vegetarians and vegans year after year; all the reporting on the survey claims
that there are few vegetarians now and that there is either no change or the
number is decreasing. PEW, unequivocally, shows a large number of vegetarians
and vegan; however, unlike with the reporting on Gallup, I cannot locate any
articles on the report. And <i>Business Insider </i>reports on a
deeply flawed study from 1994, in 2013, as though it was “breaking news.”
However, imagine the opposite. What would happen if instead, news media reports
were accurate and positive? For example, what if the headlines proclaimed:
“Nearly one in ten Americans now identities as vegetarian or vegan;” or “A
growing number of Americans are going vegetarians and vegan” or “Is
Vegetarianism the future? 12% of Americans under fifty now identify as
vegetarian and vegan” Here is the point: All of those headlines are actually
more accurate than the headlines that are being produced. However, the way a
problem is defined will define the solution. As long as people “believe” that
no one will ever go vegan, why try to convince anyone to change their minds?
Why support governmental programs to support vegan options or decrease meat
consumption? What seems to happen instead is that even vegans and animal rights
activists start to support the twin fantasies of “humane meat” and “in <i>vitro
meat</i>,” neither of which are scalable options to a global scale. In short,
because of incorrect data, they are abandoning actually viable options that do
work, as well as brainstorming new ideas that might work better, for ideas that
will, in fact, never work.<br />
<br />
Perhaps even more importantly, if the emerging research on social stigma and
veganism is correct, every time animal rights activist stigmatize veganism or
animal activism, they are not only (incorrectly) describing a world with few
vegans; they are actively helping to create it. In other words, when Matt Ball
tells people that most people think that vegans are rude, fanatical, and viewed
like “Hezbollah;” he is, in fact, directly causing fewer people to go vegan in
the first place or “identify” as vegan even if they do eat “plant-based foods.”
As the earlier referenced article phrased this same concern of vegan stigma:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">[W]e believe our results to be especially telling regarding an
aspect of vegan stigma that had not been previously examined: how vegan stigma
impacts how non-vegans think and behave... Since we find evidence for stigma
functioning as a social deterrent in this context, the outcome of stigma
anticipation and social distancing is that non-vegans will behaviorally
distance themselves from vegans by continuing to eat how they currently do—in a
non-vegan fashion—and this is at least partially due to the possibility of
social stigma.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Indeed, if vegan social stigma theory is true, is might also
help to explain why a growing number of vegans try to distance themselves from
the “other” vegans who are posited as “extremists” or “fanatics.” It might have
less to do with the poorly designed studies and more to do with a desire to
“fit in” by critiquing “fanatic” vegans. For example, Matt Ball could have
presented the identical argument (the utilitarian need to shift from eating
chickens to cows) without stigmatizes vegans; such comments would seem to have
nothing to do with utilitarian calculus or even his beliefs in the small
numbers of vegans. Why then, we must ask, did he choose to include them? And
how can we explain the odd tension in the earlier mentioned <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vox </i>video: Matt cites data that
critiques vegans as, in a sense, not being extreme enough (not having perfect
diets; not always identify as vegans) and, in the identical video, also
criticize them being too extreme, as both fanatical and “rude.” One must ask:
What level of commitment/extremism towards veganism is appropriate? Who
could meet this Venn diagram of contradictory impulses towards animal advocacy?
In other words, part of, although certainly not all, of the reason why former
well-known animal rights activists and long term vegans are now stigmatizing
fellow vegans may be because of fear of social stigma, or as the researchers
phrased it “actively trying to distance themselves from the characteristics associated
with vegan stereotypes.” In any case, those of us who are concerned with
increasing the number of vegans should not view public statements (by anyone)
who stigmatize veganism or animal advocacy in a neutral light: each comment
that stigmatizes animal rights advocates or veganism may, in fact, directly
hurt the cause of either. To summarize my fears of this article in one
sentence: It may be the case that people describing a world with few
vegetarians or vegans are, in fact, helping to create one.<br />
<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Conclusion: Don't Believe Me</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"><br />
<br />
However, my point is not that you believe me in any of this. I have probably
made mistakes. This is not a peer-reviewed article; I am not an expert on
opinion polls. However, perhaps, also be more skeptical of information you are
hearing from others. If animal activists want to use evidence-based research
(and I think we should); it is very important that we get correct information.
And, to do that, we need to use published peer-reviewed studies in established
journals by experts in their respective fields. This is not to disagree with
the work others are doing—all research can be helpful. It is to argue that
official peer-review does matter: it catches errors and assumptions that might
otherwise be missed in what is, in essence, “self-published” data (as I have
highlighted here.) I tried to find out why HRC/ Faunalytics did not publish
their research in a peer-reviewed journal; here is the explanation from their
Facebook page:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">3) PEER-REVIEW Some have expressed concern that we did not
subject the study to the peer-review process. HRC has planned to submit our
work for publication in a peer-reviewed journal since the beginning of this
project. However, knowing this can take several years and given that HRC's
primary responsibility is to inform advocates, we opted to release early
findings to the movement…</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">It is true that it can take a while for peer-reviewed
publications to come out in print (although not—normally—“several years.”)
However, what is happening in the period of time –at least theoretically--is
that experts in the field are evaluating the work. Published peer-reviewed
information certainly is not perfect; however, it is the best system we
currently have for determining what is actually occurring and would actually
work to help animals. While I—strongly—support evidence-based changes to animal
advocacy, I worry that is not happening. And, I worry that believing we are
getting evidence-based advice (when we may not be) could be more dangerous than
nothing at all. As Alexender Pope famously phrased it: “A little learning can
be a dangerous thing.” In any case, before decades-long vegan and animal rights
activists give up their views and tell others that animal rights activism will
inherently fail, they should, I would argue, make sure that these statements are
true. Until this happens, perhaps we should believe the growing number of vegan
and vegetarian restaurants and food options that we see opening all around us
as a suggestion that the number of vegans and vegetarians really is increasing
--even if some of them are still imperfect in their diets or chose not to use
the labels. In short: while imperfect, and open to improvement, the majority of
evidence does suggest that our animal advocacy works.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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-->Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-43200152440097535552019-03-08T15:03:00.002-05:002019-03-08T15:03:40.714-05:00How to think the eradication of animal cultures.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBs9PnH77uDwwqHkA6zfA8BetO-WqCpSNP-G39ETXjZjo4YXckAmvyjU7v91KiKihYrXriMEUcrLKCoQPJD76LAR4BBrhEhm_iXMh26Q3xJ4H5zeyk-SGOIzI629ANLi0PsZPeN1_zHKM/s1600/Animal+cutlture.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1024" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBs9PnH77uDwwqHkA6zfA8BetO-WqCpSNP-G39ETXjZjo4YXckAmvyjU7v91KiKihYrXriMEUcrLKCoQPJD76LAR4BBrhEhm_iXMh26Q3xJ4H5zeyk-SGOIzI629ANLi0PsZPeN1_zHKM/s320/Animal+cutlture.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /><br />So for years now, I have been trying to figure out how to talk about these issues, and I am still trying to figure it out. Maybe you can help. First, I'm going to quote from <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/we-are-destroying-chimpanzee-cultures/584146/">a recent Atlantic article</a> that has me thinking about these issues again, and then talk about the problem.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Sometimes in the rush to conserve the species, I think we forget about the individuals,” says Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews. “Each population, each community, even each generation of chimpanzees is unique. An event might only have a small impact on the total population of chimpanzees, but it may wipe out an entire community—an entire culture. No matter what we do to restore habitat or support population growth, we may never be able to restore that culture.”<br />[...]<br />Other animals are also likely losing their ancestral knowledge at our hands. When poachers kill an elephant matriarch, they also kill her memories of hidden water sources and anti-lion tactics, leaving her family in a more precarious place. When moose and bighorn sheep were exterminated from parts of the U.S., their generations-old awareness of the best migration routes died with them. Relocated individuals, who were meant to replenish the once-lost populations, didn’t know where to go, and so failed to migrate. These discoveries mean that conservationists need to think about saving species in a completely new way—by preserving animal traditions as well as bodies and genes.</blockquote>
<br />
So, for years now I have been using the language of culture (and cultures) to talk about other animals. They do, indeed, have cultures, if by that we mean traditions and habits that are unique to particular groups and get taught and passed down over time. While controversial, I think the rejection that many nonhuman animals have culture is simply an example of Frans de Waal has called anthropodenial, the tendency to deny characteristics we associate with only humans to other beings. My question is, how do we talk about the sorts of things I quoted above?<br />
<br />
On the one hand, if this was something humans were doing to other humans, the language of colonialism and genocide seem to be in order. This was my intuition when I first started trying to talk about these things. It did not go well. And now I generally think I was in the wrong. Partially because it is too divisive, and terminology that begs to be misunderstood is probably bad terminology. And concepts that seem to offend the very people who you might hope to convince is bad at persuasion, no matter how personally satisfying. But also, as I tried to explain in my article "<a href="https://phaenex.uwindsor.ca/index.php/phaenex/article/view/4090">Beyond Biopolitics</a>" a few years ago, I find these analogies to be insufficient at doing the conceptual work. In my article I linked to above, I explained some of the issues I have with comparing the term genocide or murder to what happens to animals in the factory farm. But here, with the destruction of cultures of other animals, is colonialism the right term?<br /><br />It is clear that there is a link between colonialism and anthropocentrism. One need only look at the work of, say, <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51630">Sylvia Wynter</a>, to begin to understand how the construction of "Man" is meant to make disposable or trainable large swaths of the human population. And there is the rhetoric of colonizers, the way they deploy a language of hunting or culling nonhuman animals to justify their world historical crimes against those they sought to colonize. Then there are the material connections between colonialism and other animals. There is the history of "exotic" animals being forcibly relocated to the metropole, often as a way to glorify the power of the colonial center, and as entertainment to the colonizing people. There is the long history zoos displaying both nonhuman animals and humans from other cultures. There is <a href="https://amzn.to/2EWMn04">the history of game hunting</a> as being an element of the expansion of imperialism, and <a href="https://amzn.to/2tX5IYY">as I have argued</a> there is a continued logic of hunting power and xenophobia that guides our policy to non-native species. And this leads one to agree with Dinesh Wadiwel that there is <a href="https://amzn.to/2Tn48i9">a war against animals</a>. So I am not saying that there is no relationship between colonialism and our treatment of other animals. Indeed, any animal scholar would be greatly enriched by studying decolonial philosophy. And if for some reason you have to choose between reading Agamben and Wynter, read Wynter.<br /><br />However, it is hard to argue that colonialism fully captures what is going on here. If nothing else, it is unlikely that the theoretical insights produced by decolonial scholars will easily map onto how we are to respond to this eradication of animal cultures (even if, <a href="https://amzn.to/2XOhGBF">as Juno Salazar Parreñas shows</a>, there is much to be learned from decolonial insights into the conservation of other animals). What we need to do, and what I am sure some of you are already doing, is to develop a vocabulary and conceptual apparatuses that draw insights from scholarship on colonialism and genocide studies, while doing the work that is unique to animal studies. We need something that exists between the language individual animal rights and suffering and the language of extinction. And from there, we can begin to navigate not only better conservation practices toward other animals, but also one that begin thinking and responding to the cosmopolitical struggles of when animal cultures run up against human cultural practices.<br />
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Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-57539550055603417322019-03-07T13:48:00.003-05:002019-03-07T13:52:48.319-05:00The Decarbon Turn: On the Green New Deal and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways.For the last several years in response to questions of if I am a liberal or a lefty, a moderate or a radical, a capitalist or a socialist, I have taken to responding that I am an environmentalist. It is an annoying answer, but I think it is important to reorient my political goals and strategies. Furthermore, it conforms to my intuition that no matter how still important the political philosophy of the 19th century is, it perhaps only awkwardly reflects the battle lines of the 21st century. It is with this in mind that I want to talk about the Green New Deal (GND).<br />
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The Green New Deal promises to wed together social justice with environmental progress. It seeks to support a more economically egalitarian society with one that is rapidly decarbonizing. Such a move is already facing the usual objections. This <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-green-new-deal-heres-a-better-one/2019/02/24/2d7e491c-36d2-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html?utm_term=.2c45f5172364">recent editorial</a> from the editorial board of the <i>Washington Post </i>is one example, where the claim is that all the social policy aspects of the Green New Deal are distractions from the more important environmental aspects. Others have defended the GND by pointing out <a href="https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/23/18228142/green-new-deal-critics">this is an emergency</a>, and that the GND seeks to shake up the political landscape by exciting people with social policy so they support the environmental policy. And that is not a bad argument. But what seems to be missing from this debate is that the social policy of the GND might actually be good environmental policy, and not just good politics.<br />
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In the most recent IPCC Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, we were introduced to the idea of <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-shared-socioeconomic-pathways-explore-future-climate-change">Shared Socioeconomic Pathways</a> (SSPs). SSPs were not part of the executive summary of the IPCC report, and therefore have mostly not been talked about. However, they are an increasingly important form of <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-integrated-assessment-models-are-used-to-study-climate-change">complex integrated assessment models</a>, which allow researchers to pose what if questions and determine how policy or societal changes might effect global warming. As Daniel Aldana Cohen <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/mainstream-media-un-climate-report-analysis/">explains</a>:<br />
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Prior to the latest report, the IPCC projected future scenarios based on skeletal, technocratic models of energy, land use, and climate. They represented climate politics as being like a dashboard with a few dials that engineers could turn—a little more renewable energy here, a touch less deforestation there. In contrast, the SSPs imagine different possible climate futures in terms of realistic clusters of policy decisions, which in turn affect emissions, land use, and how the impacts of extreme weather are felt.</blockquote>
This feels obvious, but needs to be underlined. It is not simply policies targeted toward reducing Greenhouse emissions or increasing renewable energy that matter, but also larger questions about how we organize society also matter for global warming. Shared Socioeconomic Pathways tries to capture how societal decisions change global warming and resiliency.<br />
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In the most recent IPCC report, there are five SSP scenarios (future reports will probably feature more). <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378016300681">Here they are in some detail</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>SSP1</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sustainability – Taking the Green Road (Low challenges to mitigation and adaptation)<br />
<i>The world shifts gradually, but pervasively, toward a more sustainable path, emphasizing more inclusive development that respects perceived environmental boundaries. Management of the global commons slowly improves, educational and health investments accelerate the demographic transition, and the emphasis on economic growth shifts toward a broader emphasis on human well-being. Driven by an increasing commitment to achieving development goals, inequality is reduced both across and within countries. Consumption is oriented toward low material growth and lower resource and energy intensity.</i><b>SSP2</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Middle of the Road (Medium challenges to mitigation and adaptation)<br />
<i>The world follows a path in which social, economic, and technological trends do not shift markedly from historical patterns. Development and income growth proceeds unevenly, with some countries making relatively good progress while others fall short of expectations. Global and national institutions work toward but make slow progress in achieving sustainable development goals. Environmental systems experience degradation, although there are some improvements and overall the intensity of resource and energy use declines. Global population growth is moderate and levels off in the second half of the century. Income inequality persists or improves only slowly and challenges to reducing vulnerability to societal and environmental changes remain.</i><b>SSP3</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Regional Rivalry – A Rocky Road (High challenges to mitigation and adaptation)<br />
<i>A resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security, and regional conflicts push countries to increasingly focus on domestic or, at most, regional issues. Policies shift over time to become increasingly oriented toward national and regional security issues. Countries focus on achieving energy and food security goals within their own regions at the expense of broader-based development. Investments in education and technological development decline. Economic development is slow, consumption is material-intensive, and inequalities persist or worsen over time. Population growth is low in industrialized and high in developing countries. A low international priority for addressing environmental concerns leads to strong environmental degradation in some regions.</i><b>SSP4</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Inequality – A Road Divided (Low challenges to mitigation, high challenges to adaptation)<br />
<i>Highly unequal investments in human capital, combined with increasing disparities in economic opportunity and political power, lead to increasing inequalities and stratification both across and within countries. Over time, a gap widens between an internationally-connected society that contributes to knowledge- and capital-intensive sectors of the global economy, and a fragmented collection of lower-income, poorly educated societies that work in a labor intensive, low-tech economy. Social cohesion degrades and conflict and unrest become increasingly common. Technology development is high in the high-tech economy and sectors. The globally connected energy sector diversifies, with investments in both carbon-intensive fuels like coal and unconventional oil, but also low-carbon energy sources. Environmental policies focus on local issues around middle and high income areas.</i><b>SSP5</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fossil-fueled Development – Taking the Highway (High challenges to mitigation, low challenges to adaptation)<br />
<i>This world places increasing faith in competitive markets, innovation and participatory societies to produce rapid technological progress and development of human capital as the path to sustainable development. Global markets are increasingly integrated. There are also strong investments in health, education, and institutions to enhance human and social capital. At the same time, the push for economic and social development is coupled with the exploitation of abundant fossil fuel resources and the adoption of resource and energy intensive lifestyles around the world. All these factors lead to rapid growth of the global economy, while global population peaks and declines in the 21st century. Local environmental problems like air pollution are successfully managed. There is faith in the ability to effectively manage social and ecological systems, including by geo-engineering if necessary.</i></blockquote>
We worryingly seem to be headed toward the worst of all possible worlds, SSP3, or the regional rivalry. But let's bracket that concern, and focus instead on both SSP1.<br />
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SSP1, or Sustainability, is pretty heartening. It paints the picture of both a more economically egalitarian world and a more environmentally sustainable world. Sound familiar? And this pathway is the one that currently the social scientists working on climate change think would be the best for fighting global warming. And this shouldn't be surprising. We know that, for example, increase in women's education and access to healthcare are often key drivers for decreasing population growth. We know that <a href="https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/1/16718844/green-consumers-climate-change">rich people produce more greenhouse gases</a>, regardless of their environmental commitments. And not only do these social policies make mitigation easier (that is, decreasing how much the planet will warm), it also improves adaptation (that is, how well we can respond to warming. Cohen again:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For instance, at two degrees Celsius warming, in an SSP 3 world, between 750 million and 1.2 billion people would be severely exposed to climate-linked extreme weather, according to a 2018 study discussed in the IPCC report. In contrast, the IPCC reports, under the SSP 1 scenario, well under 100 million people would be hard hit by extreme weather at the same level of warming.</blockquote>
That's a pretty big difference!<br />
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So, in short, the Green New Deal has the chance to not just be good environmental politics and good social policy, but to also have social policy that is good environmental policy. But there are, of course, still worries. Look now as SSP5. It describes a world of economic egalitarianism based fossil fuel development. Not all good social policies are going to be good environmental policies. It is important, as the Green New Deal becomes fleshed out, that the environmental realities guides, as much as politically possible, the social policies. We need to probably <a href="https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/1/15/18181678/green-new-deal-100-percent-renewable-energy-nuclear-ccs">be agnostic on what kinds of zero-emission energy to invest in</a>, and we have to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/first-fight-about-democrats-climate-green-new-deal/580543/">be serious about carbon capture</a>. We need to avoid being overly nationalistic in our economic growth, and think of how to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212096318300469">adapt SSPs for national and local decisions</a>. There is no reason to believe, though, that any of these missteps have to take place in finalizing the Green New Deal. Right now, the important thing is pushing for its reality. And with that, arguing fully that the social policy is part and parcel of the environmental policy, and vice versa. The Washington Post Editorial Board is not just wrong politically, they are wrong on policy grounds. They are wrong because they have not kept up with the mainstream developments of what are the best policies for fighting global warming. And the Green New Deal, rather intentionally are not, is exactly where we need to be.Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-15206743984347976782018-08-15T12:42:00.001-04:002018-08-15T12:42:32.706-04:00Three New Books in Critical Animal StudiesThere are three important books coming out in Critical Animal Studies that I have pieces in, and they are all awesome collections. There is a chance that later on I might promote each of them more.<div>
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The first is <a href="https://amzn.to/2MkZYE3">Critical Terms in Animal Studies</a>, edited by Lori Gruen (Chicago, forthcoming in November). I have an essay on the concept of <i>matter</i> in animal studies. Exploring both the idea of materialism (including new materialism) in animal studies, as well as how we go about performing what matters to us. Here is the rest of the contributors and table of contents.</div>
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Introduction • Lori Gruen</div>
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1 Abolition • Claire Jean Kim</div>
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2 Activism • Jeff Sebo and Peter Singer</div>
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3 Anthropocentrism • Fiona Probyn-Rapsey</div>
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4 Behavior • Alexandra Horowitz</div>
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5 Biopolitics • Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel</div>
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6 Captivity • Lori Marino</div>
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7 Difference • Kari Weil</div>
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8 Emotion • Barbara J. King</div>
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9 Empathy • Lori Gruen</div>
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10 Ethics • Alice Crary</div>
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11 Extinction • Thom van Dooren</div>
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12 Kinship • Agustín Fuentes and Natalie Porter</div>
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13 Law • Kristen Stilt</div>
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14 Life • Eduardo Kohn</div>
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15 Matter • James K. Stanescu</div>
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16 Mind • Kristin Andrews</div>
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17 Pain • Victoria A. Braithwaite</div>
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18 Personhood • Colin Dayan</div>
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19 Postcolonial • Maneesha Deckha</div>
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20 Rationality • Christine M. Korsgaard</div>
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21 Representation • Robert R. McKay</div>
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22 Rights • Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson</div>
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23 Sanctuary • Timothy Pachirat</div>
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24 Sentience • Gary Varner</div>
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25 Sociality • Cynthia Willett and Malini Suchak</div>
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26 Species • Harriet Ritvo</div>
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27 Vegan • Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong</div>
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28 Vulnerability • Anat Pick</div>
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29 Welfare • Clare Palmer and Peter Sandøe</div>
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The second volume marks the first official appearance of the Stanescu Brothers! In other words, there is an essay in here co-authored by Vasile and myself. It is a rhetorical genealogy of the concept of orthorexia, and an exploration of the pathologization of veganism. The volume is <a href="https://amzn.to/2OFwtto">Animaladies: Gender, Animal and Madness</a>, edited by Lori Gruen and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (Bloomsbury, forthcoming in November). Here is the table of contents:</div>
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Distillations</div>
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Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA) and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (University of Wollongong, Australia)</div>
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Part I: Dismember</div>
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1. Just Say No to Lobotomy</div>
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Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA)</div>
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2. Making and Unmaking Mammalian Bodies: Sculptural Practice as Traumatic Testimony</div>
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lynn mowson (University of Melbourne, Australia)</div>
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3. There's Something About the Blood…: Tactics of Evasion within Narratives of Violence</div>
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Nekeisha Alayna Alexis (Independent Scholar, USA)</div>
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4. Erupt the Silence</div>
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Hayley Singer (University of Melbourne, Australia)</div>
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5. The Loneliness and Madness of Witnessing: Reflections from a Vegan Feminist Killjoy</div>
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Katie Gillespie (Wesleyan University, USA)</div>
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Part II: Disability</div>
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6. Ableism, Speciesism, Animals, and Autism: The Devaluation of Interspecies Friendships</div>
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Hannah Monroe (Brock University, Canada)</div>
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7. Maladies and Metaphors: Against Psychologising Speciesism</div>
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Guy Scotton (Independent Scholar, Australia)</div>
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8. The Horrific History of Comparisons between Cognitive Disability and Animality (and How to Move Past It)</div>
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Alice Crary (New School for Social Research, USA)</div>
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9. The Personal Is Political: Orthorexia Nervosa, the Pathogenization of Veganism, and Grief as a Political Act</div>
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Vasile Stanescu (Mercer University, USA) and James Stanescu (American University, USA)</div>
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10. Women, Anxiety and Companion Animals: Toward a Feminist Animal Studies of Interspecies Care and Solidarity</div>
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Heather Fraser (Flinders University, Australia) and Nik Taylor (Flinders University, Australia)</div>
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Part III: Dysfunction</div>
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11. The 'Crazy Cat Lady'</div>
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Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (University of Wollongong, Australia)</div>
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12. The Role of Dammed and Damned Desire in Animal Exploitation and Liberation</div>
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pattrice jones (VINE Sanctuary, USA) and Cheryl Wylie (VINE Sanctuary, USA)</div>
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13. Duck Lake Project: Art Meets Activism in an Anti-hide, Anti-bloke, Antidote to Duck Shooting</div>
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Yvette Watt (University of Tasmania, Australia)</div>
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14. On Outcast Women, Dog Love, and Abjection between Species</div>
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Liz Bowen (Columbia University, USA)</div>
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Afterword: Discussion<br />Carol J. Adams</div>
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<br />Lastly, the volume on <a href="https://amzn.to/2nD3xGC">The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology</a>, that I co-edited with Kevin Cummings, has been released in a paperback version. With that, the digital list price has also decreased, so that is a little over $19 on amazon right now. While I am obviously biased, this is a great collection of essays.<br />Table of Contents:<br /><div>
Introduction: When Species Invade</div>
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James K. Stanescu and Kevin Cummings</div>
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1.Beyond the Management of Pe(s)ts: Zoomimicry in an Age of Catastrophic Environmental Change</div>
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Matthew Calarco</div>
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2.Alien Ecology, Or, How to Make Ontological Pluralism</div>
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James K. Stanescu</div>
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3.Guests, Pests, or Terrorists? Speciesed Ethics and the Colonial Intelligibility of “Invasive” Others</div>
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Rebekah Sinclair and Anna Pringle</div>
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4.The Judas Pig: How we Kill “Invasive Species” on the Excuse of “Protecting Nature”</div>
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Vasile Stanescu</div>
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5.Spectacles of Belonging: (Un)documenting Citizenship in a Multispecies World</div>
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Banu Subramaniam</div>
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6.Welcoming the Stranger: Coercive Reproduction and Invasive Species</div>
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Kelsey Cummings and Kevin Cummings</div>
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7.Paradise and Warfare: Aldo Leopold and the Rhetorical Origins of Restoration Ecology</div>
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Casey Schmitt</div>
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8.Rooting for the Unrooted: Invasive Species and Uncanny Ecosystems in Peter Carey’s “Exotic Pleasures”</div>
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Mica Hilson</div>
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And the Reviews!</div>
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This theoretically nuanced, scientifically informed, and historically and culturally sensitive collection delves into the logics of extermination at a crucial time. As our activities create more and more refugees, both human and nonhuman, the rhetoric of invasion has unprecedented power that calls us to ask critical questions. The essays in this volume, written by philosophers, geographers, environmental humanities scholars and others, provide a necessary intervention that will help us grapple with the complexities of ecological and social harms created by the eradication of individuals and species deemed non-native.</div>
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— Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University and author of "Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Other Animals"</div>
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This collection refreshingly approaches the issue of invasion ecology from the urgently needed perspectives of ethics and rhetoric. Each of these essays questions the received idea of an "invasive species" as a morally compromised destroyer of a privileged "ecosystem," a category with an inherent moral and aesthetic stamp of approval. The essays expose the rhetorical stances of invasion, migration, and reproductive futurism across species boundaries, indicting the nativist and colonialist discourses that sustain the oppression and abuse of human and nonhuman animals alike. The stories we tell when we separate invaders from the ecology they supposedly invade draw on deeply ingrained discourses of nativism and colonialism. These essays do not simply take those stories apart: each one tells new, more inclusive stories that can structure more inclusive, generous, and ethically engaged ecosystems.</div>
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— Robert Stanton, Boston College</div>
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This volume introduces a broad set of valuable, insightful and critical interventions into the field of ‘invasion ecology’ that one hopes will be engaged with by both conservation biologists and the wider policy sphere in order to provoke debate and contest current practice.</div>
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— Richard Twine, Edge Hill University</div>
Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-91003738508299136002018-05-13T12:59:00.002-04:002018-05-13T12:59:41.927-04:00Minding Minds: Motivated reasoning and the limits of reason and persuasion<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Have you ever had an argument with someone about an issue that you cared deeply about, and you just <i>knew</i> you were right? But the other person kept citing statistics and studies and factual claims that felt suspect to you, but you couldn't prove it on the spot. So you went and studied it. <i>And you discovered you were right all along! </i>The statistics they cited didn't assume all the factors, the studies they cited were either biased or not strong enough for their claims, and the factual claims have been disproven in many places. How could your debating opponent have been so wrong? Maybe it was because they were so invested in their side of their argument they were willing to believe cranks, read only a few things that proved their side, and accept less rigorous work that supported their pre-existing beliefs. Or maybe you're the one so invested you ended up believing in false things?<br />
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I know I have been in the above situation, and I assume most of you have as well. And this is a traditional situation of motivated reasoning, in which our desired outcome for a situation shapes how we reason and evaluate evidence. As Ziva Kunda argues in <a href="http://pages.ucsd.edu/~cmckenzie/Kunda1990PsychBulletin.pdf">her foundational paper</a> on the subject, "motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes: strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs" (480). She continues:<br />
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I propose that people motivated to arrive at a particular conclusion attempt to be rational and to construct a justification of their desired conclusion that would persuade a dispassionate observer. [...] In other words, they maintain an "illusion of objectivity" (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987 ; cf. Kruglanski, 1980). To this end, they search memory for those beliefs and rules that could support their desired conclusion. They may also creatively combine accessed knowledge to construct new beliefs that could logically support the desired conclusion.[...] The objectivity of this justification construction process is illusory because people do not realize that the process is biased by their goals, that they are accessing only a subset of their relevant knowledge, that they would probably access different beliefs and rules in the presence of different directional goals, and that they might even be capable of justifying opposite conclusions on different occasions. (482-483)</blockquote>
Motivated reasoning <a href="http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2011/05/04/what-is-motivated-reasoning-and-how-does-it-work/">helps us understand</a> why people are not convinced by the overwhelming evidence of human caused global warming, evolution, or the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. It is also useful to help us understand a <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6b1e/eab3927d5e35f1a86f7758eea2948282f979.pdf">variety of issues in political science</a>, such as the tendency of people to often support their candidate even more when exposed to negative information about their candidate. If vegetarianism is, <a href="http://www.criticalanimal.com/2013/10/winning-already-won-argument-purity-in.html">as Bill Martin has argued</a>, an already won argument, perhaps motivated reasoning can help us understand why we seem to still have such trouble winning the already won argument<br />
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As I argued in <a href="http://www.criticalanimal.com/2018/05/eating-animals-and-motivated-reasoning.html">my last post</a>, one of the ways we can understand so many of the bad and factually incorrect arguments about eating other animals and the environment is because of motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is a way we help solve what is called cognitive dissonance, the problem of putting together two contradictory elements in our lives. Let me give you an example from <a href="http://houdekpetr.cz/%21data/papers/Brock%20Balloun%201967.pdf">a classic 1967 study</a>. In it, participants were required to listen to recordings that produced information about cigarettes and cancer. But the recordings had a lot of a static, which could be solved by pushing an "anti-static" button. Smokers tended to let the static play over the parts that talked about cigarettes linking to cancer, and decreased the static when the recording talked about smoking not being linked to cancer. Non-smokers usually did the opposite. We have a lot of the elements here of motivated reasoning and cognitive dissonance. Say you smoke, and you want to keep smoking, but you also don't want to be at a higher risk of ill health. So you do two things: you tune out information explaining why smoking is bad for you, and seek out information explaining why smoking is not so bad for you. But this doesn't even fully capture how motivated reasoning changes your perceptions.<br />
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In my last post, I included a graph about how different foods affected the environment. On a discussion on social media about my post, I saw someone say they were pleased that milk didn't cause that much environmental harm--that it was comparative to plants we eat--and that she could get it humanely from her local farm. If you <a href="http://www.criticalanimal.com/2018/05/eating-animals-and-motivated-reasoning.html">go back</a>, that's clearly not what the graph says. What occurred is what<a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992"> Kahan et al. refer to as motivated innumeracy</a>. In the study, participants were given information about a new skin-rash treatment. The information was a little complicated, and not everyone was able to understand it, but people who had high levels of numeracy were able to follow. However, when given information in the same format about the relationships of gun ownership and violence, those same people were often unable to correctly understand the information if it went against their pre-existing political beliefs. That is to say, liberal democrats had trouble processing information that gun ownership decreased violence, and conservative republicans had trouble processing information that gun ownership increased violence. Numeracy didn't protect people from these false readings of the data, indeed, the higher the numeracy, the more likely the person was to make a mistake when it came to the data about guns. Motivated reasoning doesn't just guide what information you remember, or seek out, it shapes your very ability to process information. Let's take an example from our (the pro-animal) side. The documentary <a href="http://www.cowspiracy.com/">Cowspiracy </a>claims that at least 51% of all greenhouse gases (GHG) comes from animal agriculture. They get this number from <a href="http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf">an article</a> by Goodland and Anhang, and those numbers have been attacked by <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/doug-boucher/cowspiracy-movie-review">a writer for The Union of Concerned Scientists</a>, and <a href="http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/banr/AnimalProductionMaterials/HerreroLivestockGreenhouseGasEmissions.pdf">several academics</a>. <a href="https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anifeedsci.2011.12.028">Goodland and Anhang have responded</a>. But if you don't want to do a lot of homework, I will break it down for you. Most studies put the numbers at about 15-20% of GHGs are from animal agriculture. There is a lot of fights about what numbers are appropriate to include, and how accurate certain counterfactuals are. If you are wanting, as Kunda puts it, to engage in an illusion of objectivity, the Goodland and Anhang will allow animal advocates that illusion while also claiming that stopping animal agriculture is the single most important environmental issue (as opposed to simply among the most important environmental issues). But how often do you believe a single analysis that produces significantly different numbers than most of the other people working the field? Normally this is not evidence we would find completely credible in situations where we are not interested in the outcome. Goodland and Anhang may be right, and I am persuaded by many of their particular arguments, but our tendency to believe them is almost certainly shaped by our desire for them to be right. This leads us to the second worrying conclusion about research in motivated reasoning.<br />
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In psychology there is a theory, going back in some form to William James, known as the dual process theory. Essentially we all think in two ways, one mostly unconsciously and emotionally, and another consciously and carefully. These two ways are often known as either implicit and explicit thinking, or System 1 and System 2 thinking (I'm drawing this story from Kahneman's enjoyable <a href="https://amzn.to/2jW5Gvo">Thinking, Fast and Slow</a>). So when it comes to motivated reasoning, the usual understanding is that our System 1 thinking--our fast, emotional, heuristic thinking--is impeding our rational and slower System 2 thinking. A possible solution to motivated reasoning might be, then, to get people to engage in more System 2 thinking. But increasingly that doesn't seem workable. Remember from the Kahan study above, people with higher levels of numeracy were more likely to get the gun ownership problem wrong. This follows <a href="http://journal.sjdm.org/13/13313/jdm13313.html#text1">previous </a>work from Kahan that indicates "the experimental component of the study demonstrated that the disposition to engage in conscious and effortful System 2 information processing—as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT)—actually <i>magnifies</i> the impact of motivated reasoning." In other words, the more careful we are, the smarter we are, the more rational we are, the better our motivated reasoning. We are just better able to research to find things that support our biases, or better able to think of reasons why we are right. And this has implications for persuasion in animal rights.<br />
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As Kahan explains in his innumeracy study, the problem is not that people just don't have the correct information, or actively avoid the correct information (though those both might be true), it is also that they actively distort the information they are given. This is part of the identity-protection cognition thesis. We engage cognitive processes that seek to protect our identities, and our sense of goodness and correctness. This is why Kant, in the <i>Groundwork</i>, was so afraid of utilitarianism. Because he believed we could use it to justify any action as moral. So the eating of animals, which is central to so many people's identities, would be something we could expect to see a lot of identity protection around. This <a href="http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/Shifting_Diets_for_a_Sustainable_Food_Future.pdf">might explain why</a> people, when eating out, are more likely to eat vegetarian food if it is not labeled as such and put in a separate vegetarian section of a menu. Furthermore, one of the key reasons people state for why some animals are allowed to be eaten, and others are not, is the quality of intelligence. But as <a href="https://www.academia.edu/12268550/Don_t_mind_meat_The_denial_of_mind_to_animals_used_for_human_consumption">Bastian et al have demonstrated</a>, people routinely undervalue the minds of animals they eat, even if they are willing to think animals they don't eat have complex minds. Think here of how Americans believe in the hyper intelligence of dogs, but routinely undermine the minds of pigs, and especially cows. Expanding on this work, Piazza and Loughnan conducted <a href="http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/80041/1/When_meat_gets_personal_Author_preprint_.pdf">a study</a> that tests people's perceptions of minds in a fictional alien animal species, a real species we don't eat, and pigs. The study gave participants information about a fictional alien animal species. When they described the species in ways that showed clear intelligence, people felt they shouldn't be eaten. When they described the species in ways without clear intelligence, meat eaters believed they should be eaten. They then presented the same information showing clear intelligence about the alien species, tapirs, and pigs to the participants. Meat eaters felt that the alien species and the tapirs were clearly intelligent, but discredited the minds of the pigs even with the information in front of them. The problem here is clear, presenting clear information and engaging people in rational argumentation is not likely to change many minds and actions because they are trying to protect their identities.<br />
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So, if rational argumentation doesn't work, what are we supposed to do? Assuming I get my act together, that will be the third part of this blog series, where I plan to take up Kwame Anthony Appiah on honor worlds and Cristina Bicchieri on norms to explain how moral revolutions and social change can occur.<br />
<br />Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-83582925037557143572018-05-03T17:52:00.004-04:002018-05-03T17:52:42.736-04:00Eating Animals and Motivated Reasoning <div>
One of the common questions I get asked is from people who want to remove part of the meat from their diet, but not all of it. They ask what animals they should give up eating. My usual response is that they are best of all not eating any animals, second best is to reduce eating animals. Promise to not eat any animals during, say, breakfast, and go from there. But usually there is a desire to remove eating a kind of animal, rather than meat reduction. And so I ask, "Well, do you care about reducing suffering to animals, or about reducing environmental destruction?" </div>
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That is because the more concentrated and industrial the treatment of other animals, the less environmental destruction. And also because the animals that spend the least amount of time in factory farms are cows, which are also, by far, the most environmentally destructive form of livestock we produce (<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283528658_Livestock_and_the_Environment_What_Have_We_Learned_in_the_Past_Decade">somewhere between 15% and 20% of greenhouse gases are produced by animal agriculture</a>, of which cows take the, err, lions share of greenhouse gases). So if you care about the environment, and you still insist on eating other animals, eat chickens and fish from aquaculture.</div>
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( From J. Raganthan et al. 2016. “Shifting Diets for a Sustainable Food Future.” Working Paper, Installment 11 of Creating a Sustainable Food Future. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute; Figure ES-2. <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/doug-boucher/beef-and-the-paris-agreement-changing-what-we-eat-to-stop-causing-climate-change">Which I took from this blog post</a>). </div>
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Of course, those lives are the ones that are the most horribly, and graphically, awful. As some of you know, most male chickens are killed at birth, and most female chickens are separated into two groups: broilers, which are the chickens we eat, and layers, which are the chickens that lay eggs (Foer's <a href="https://amzn.to/2rih74t">Eating Animals</a> is still probably the best on what it means to live as a chicken in the modern factory farm system, and <a href="https://www.iatp.org/blog/201303/how-the-chicken-of-tomorrow-became-the-chicken-of-the-world">this article</a> is interesting if you want to just know more about how the chicken came to be so central in our diet). Both lives are terrible beyond imagination.</div>
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So, eating as much as possible a plant-based diet solves both of these problems. You manage to both reduce, often significantly, your greenhouse gas emissions, while also decreasing the amount of animal cruelty in this world. But there are a lot of people who have made themselves very rich and famous by arguing the exact opposite, that by eating the least industrially produced animals, we also decrease global warming. Often even more than if we ate a plant-based diet. People like Michael Pollan and Nicolette Hahn Niman fall into this later category. </div>
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Here is the thing, I don't think either are particularly liars or bullshit artist (cowshit artist?). Harry Frankfurt, in his <a href="https://amzn.to/2KAlikb">On Bullshit</a>, famously distinguishes between the two. Liars are interested in hiding the truth, bullshitters just don't care about the truth, and are interested in persuasion regardless of the truth. And there are plenty of bullshit artists in the humane meat movement. I think at this point it is hard to believe that Allan Savory, who argues that his holistic cattle management system restores dead land, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/04/allan_savory_s_ted_talk_is_wrong_and_the_benefits_of_holistic_grazing_have.html">is almost certainly a bullshitter</a>. But I am less sure about some of the other. My brother famously took down Michael Pollan years ago in his "<a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/2-JCAS-Vol-VIII-Issue-I-and-II-2010-Essay-GREEN-EGGS-AND-HAM-pp-8-32.pdf">Green Eggs and Ham</a>," and Hahn Niman's book gets a more sympathetic, but still thorough debunking, <a href="https://blog.ucsusa.org/doug-boucher/book-review-the-global-climate-and-a-defense-of-beef">in this blog post from the Union of Concerned Scientists</a>. What seems clear to me about both Pollan and Hahn Niman is that they are involved in bullshitting themselves as much as they are bullshitting the audience. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-article-wont-change-your-mind/519093/">They are involved in motivated reasoning</a>. Being smart does not protect you from motivated reasoning, because the smarter you are, the better you are at coming up with believable accounts for your opinions, and researching people who agree with you. This is why we must learn to cultivate fallibilism. It is not easy to practice the Socratic Wisdom, or knowing what you do not know. So Pollan and Hahn Niman and others engaged in journeys to convince themselves as much as the reader. They believe the bullshit artists. They come up with just so theories. They figure out why the dominate scientific consensus on animal agriculture and climate change is fundamentally wrong. And because they are smart, and good writers, and the world is filled with people who also want the same excuses to forgive their own behavior, their books become huge bestsellers and they become important "thought leaders." Motivated reasoning and disavowal are solid terms, but I think we need something even better to describe the desire to bullshit yourself, first and most of all. This great disavowal is what continues to be so central is so many articles and books. A desire to simply refuse to confront the basic fact that we make millions of animals suffer, and we contribute significantly to the destruction of our own planet, and the only solution is to stop doing that. </div>
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Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-58473848277972839092017-10-25T13:32:00.000-04:002017-10-25T13:32:04.491-04:00Why So Many Human Rights Advocates are into Vegetarianism and Veganism: Or, Fascism and Veganism, an only kinda complicated history. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Even worse was that all societies formed for the protection of the Rights of Man, all attempts to arrive at a new bill of human rights were sponsored by marginal figures-- by a few international jurists without political experience or professional philanthropists supported by uncertain sentiments of professional idealists. The groups they formed, the declarations they issued, showed an uncanny similarity in language and composition to that of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. No statesman, no political figure of any importance could possibly take them seriously. --Hannah Arendt,<i> </i><a href="http://amzn.to/2y0t6UU" style="font-style: italic;">The Origins of Totalitarianism</a>, p. 292<i>.</i> </blockquote>
<br />There is a Vice article going around. One I hesitate to link to, because it is so obviously clickbait. Meant to both troll those who are vegans and vegetarians, while also causing us who are to defend ourselves against it, and share it again. These kinds of articles are frequent for this very reason. And it remains one of the reasons your vegan and vegetarian friends are, perhaps, a little touchy (<a href="http://www.criticalanimal.com/2015/02/soy-calculus-hypocrisy-and-ethics.html">remember</a>). <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evb4zw/why-so-many-white-supremacists-are-into-veganism?utm_campaign=sharebutton">But here's a link anyway</a>. The Vice article, written by Alexis de Coning, argues that there is a strange history of white supremacists being vegan or vegetarian. To which I say, that's true, sometimes. She also ends by arguing, "To combat these racist movements, we must understand them, including how they can incorporate beliefs we usually associate with liberal or leftist politics. The diversity of this movement should not be underestimated." To which I fully agree. However, the history here is far more complicated than de Coning presents in this article, and certainly more so than the clickbaity title and blurb.<br />
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Let's begin with what should we even do if it turns out that vegetarianism and veganism are central to fascism. As Derrida responded to such a claim in <a href="http://amzn.to/2y0FiVF">For What Tomorrow...</a>:<br />
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The caricature of an indictment goes more or less like this: "Oh, you're forgetting that the Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were in a way zoophiles! So loving animal animals means hating or humiliating humans! Compassion for animals doesn't exclude Nazi cruelty; it's even its first symptom!" The argument strikes me as crudely fallacious. Who can take this parody of a syllogism seriously even for a second? And where would it lead us? To redouble our cruelty to animals in order to prove our irreproachable humanism? (68).</blockquote>
It does seem silly, as I put it once, to go punch an animal in the face to prove you love humanity. Perhaps this argument is only useful to combat the people who claim that veganism magically makes you into a saint. But I think anyone who has belonged to the community for a while knows that basically every kind of person can become vegans. Assholes, saints, misogynists, feminists, racist, humanists, etc. It is, almost certainly, interesting to see why different people are drawn to veganism. As I argued in my <a href="http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Volume-10-Issue-3-2012.pdf#page=26">Dark Animal Studies</a> paper (a title I wish I could change), the draw of veganism for many people is the promise of purity, for many ethical purity. <a href="http://amzn.to/2zyhbPn">Boria Sax famously argues </a>that the obsession with animal protection laws and vegetarians among the Nazis was a way of reducing everything to the biological and the natural. After all, the Nazis outlawed the hunting of wolves even though there were no wild wolves left in Germany. Such an action is purely symbolic. But this explains why the Nazis were also supporters of environmentalism. They were invested in a movement of blood and soil, so animals and the environment were to be protected as an extension of the hypernaturalization of the Nazi world. And while there does continue to be some neo-nazis who advocate veganism, there is no real sense in the Vice article about how much of the White Supremacy movement today is promoting veganism. Is this a fringe within the fringe? There is no proof that this is centralized, or a major part of the right trying to co-opt liberal or leftist discourses. Furthermore, there is as much as history, if not more so, of Nazis supporting environmental issues, and still occasionally doing so, especially through discussions of population controls. And no one thinks that environmentalists need to really argue that environmentalism is not thoroughly Nazi ideology. And while the headline talks about white supremacy, that is certainly overstating things. While there were some high profile members of the Nazi party who supported animal protections (including, arguably, Hitler himself), you don't see similar things going on with Italian, Japanese, or Spanish fascisms. And while you continue to see pro-animal support in Nazi inspired mysticism and occasionally neo-nazi movements, you don't see this as being a part of the rhetoric of, say, the KKK. This seems to be an issue with exactly one (horrifying) historical moment, rather than something connected to either fascism or white supremacy as a whole. And if that's how we are playing the game, then the pro-human rights people being pro-animal rights is far more common trope.<br />
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As the epigraph from Hannah Arendt attests to, this remains a long history between those fighting for human liberation, and those fighting for animal liberation. Gandhi, famously, became interested in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialism through his time spent eating at Vegetarian Society meetings (as Leela Gandhi explains in her book <a href="http://amzn.to/2zFa5IV">Affective Communities</a>). <a href="http://amzn.to/2xmh4pp">Carol Adams reminds us that early feminism and vegetarianism were often put together</a>.<br />
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We can follow the historic alliance of feminism and vegetarianism in Utopian writings and societies, antivivisection activism, the temperance and suffrage movements, and twentieth century pacifism. Hydropathic institutes in the nineteenth century, which featured vegetarian regimens, were frequented by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and others. At a vegetarian banquet in 1853, the gathered guests lifted their alcohol-free glasses to toast: "Total Abstinence, Women's Rights, and Vegetarianism."(156, but see all of Chapter Nine). </blockquote>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bergh">Henry Bergh founded</a> both the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Toward Animals, and a similarly named organization to advocate on behalf of children. And I could name any number of other examples. Let me go google antifa and veganism. One second, stay around. Oh shit, <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/348893-trevor-noah-calls-antifa-vegan-isis">Trevor Noah called antifa "vegan ISIS.</a>" I didn't even know that, but that's how much the movement is associated with veganism.<br /><br />Look, the issue is not that veganism will magically make you against fascism and white supremacy. I wish it would. But there is a long history of people promoting human rights, and being opposed to fascism, who were also supporters of animal liberation. That is as much of our history as the Nazi stuff is. We do, of course, always need to be sure our veganism is intersectional, and opposed to these white supremacists. But the idea that there is something anti-human well-being at the heart of animal rights and environmentalism has got to end. <a href="http://www.criticalanimal.com/2016/08/against-grief-shaming-hume-and-making.html">As I have said before</a>, the issue is that we all engage in partial sympathies. So rather than see sympathy as a fundamentally limited resource that decreases the more one uses it, we should see it as something that can be expanded, and become more powerful. The challenge still remains, what institutions, what practices, and what aesthetics can we create to extend our partial sympathies. This is the task that remains to all of us.Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-3790273920040908492017-10-10T09:49:00.001-04:002017-10-10T09:49:59.431-04:00Isonomia Appendix and IntroductionAs Marx tells us in the first volume of <i>Capital</i>, every beginning is difficult. And I've been having a devil of a time trying to figure out how to start us out with Kōjin Karatani's <a href="http://amzn.to/2yUagzI">Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy</a> (Duke 2017, originally Iwanami Shoten 2012). For one, Karatani is something of an ambitious generalist, writing bold (and underdeveloped and under backed up) claims about anthropology, religious studies, philosophy, and political economy and statecraft in ways that we don't see as much anymore. For me, I am constantly going from being intrigued by his exciting schematization and insight, to going, "Uh, buddy, I don't think that's right." For another, <i>Isonomia</i> is something of a sequel to Karatani's even more ambitious, previous work, <a href="http://amzn.to/2gqklO7">The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange</a> (Duke 2014, which is a substainally modified version of a book published originally Iwanami Shoten 2010). Well, less a sequel, and more that <i>Isonomia</i> was originally conceived as part of that book, but it became so long and involved it ended up becoming it's own book. I, of course, have not already read <i>The Structure of World History</i> (SWH), and I think if I had realized that <i>Isonomia</i> was based on that work, I might not have suggested we do a public blogging event. However, I have picked it up, and started reading it somewhat alongside <i>Isonomia</i>, and also Karatani provides a very short, and actually helpful, appendix of the theoretical argument in SWH so that you can jump into <i>Isonomia</i> by itself. Okay, so <i>Isonomia</i> tries to answer the following question, why is it that "around the sixth century BCE, Ezekiel and the bibical prophets emerged from among exiles in Babylon; Thales emerged in Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor; Gautama Buddha and the Jain founder Mahavira appeared in India, and Laozi and Confucius emerged in China" (1)? How can we understand this explosion of world wide philosophical thought?<br />
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So against the normal narrative of the so-called Athenian Miracle, Karatani argues correctly that there are several different, and disconnected, strands of philosophy. So, why are all these things happening at once? It's certainly not because of a single intellectual tradition, or an emergent thinker who changes everything. It is also not, as Karatani points out, "straightforwardly based on socioeconomic history" (1). Now this brings us to Karatani's appendix.<br />
In SWH Karatani challenges Marx's model of world history as being based on modes of production (this is not from a place of hostility toward Marx. Indeed, if you know of Karatani before these works, it was almost certainly from his work <a href="http://amzn.to/2xsYK26">Transcritique</a>, where he tries to synthesize Marx and Kant). Instead of seeing society defined by its mode of production, Karatani believes the controlling feature of a society is its mode of exchange. Karatani points out that when we hear mode of exchange, we tend to think of a capitalist commodity exchange. However, Karatani argues there are four different modes of exchange, of which the commodity exchange is but one mode. He labels them Mode A, B, C, and D. They work out this way: <br />
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Mode A Reciprocity by gift and countergift<br />Mode B Domination and protection<br />Mode C Commodity exchange<br />Mode D Mode that transcends A, B, and C (135)</blockquote>
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Yeah, I like the specificity of Mode D too. In his defense, though, it's about as a good of a definition as Marx ever gave communism. The dominate mode of exchange ends up mapping onto all sorts of other features of society, such as the political structure of society. So mode A is the nation, mode B is the state, mode C is capital, and mode D is "X (Yet to Be Realized)" (137), though in SWH he also identifies Mode D with Kant's idea of the World Republic. And here in <i>Isonomia</i>, Mode D is also identified with the Dao. Why? Honestly not sure. BUT! it has something to do with each mode of exchange also mapping onto different structures of religion.<br />
So Karatani goes on to identify animism and magic with Mode A (gift giving), transcendent gods and king-priests are associated with Mode B (domination and protection), in Mode C (commodity exchange) we get "a world god that transcends the old tribal gods and tutelary deities" (4). However, none of these represent a truly universal religion. Even the world god fails, because "the god would be abandoned if the empire were to be defeated" (4). A truly universal religion would be one that, unsurprisingly, would transcend the religions of of A, B, and C. As Karatani puts it, "universal religion is an attempt to recuperate mode of exchange A at a higher level, after it has been dissolved by modes B and C" (4). In other words, mode A of gift and countergift have a principle of "reciprocity and mutual support" that gets dissolved by Modes B and C. The question is, how do we go back to that part of A, while keeping all the universal parts of B and C? How do we get the mutual support, without the tribalism and the debt bonds of A? Or as Karatani asks, how do you get the religion of A without the magical phase of A? Karatani identifies in Confucius and Laozi two different responses to the dissolving of A. Confucius wants to just go back to Mode A, but the Dao represents an attempt to understand A on a higher level.<br />
There are several points of this long discussion of universal religion, but the most immediate one is that it seeks to do away with the religion and philosophy divide. The idea that you have on one hand religious thinkers, and on the other, rational philosophers, just isn't there. And once you get rid of the notion of the divide between philosophy and religion, so many of the philosophers are seen as prophets of example. They seek to produce a way of living that calls forth, to use a Deleuzian expression not in Karatani, a new people and a new earth.<br />
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The prophet does not know how to talk, God puts the words in his mouth: word-ingestion, a new form of semiophagy. Unlike the seer, the prophet interprets nothing:<i> his delusion is active rather than ideational or imaginative</i>, his relation to God is passional and authoritative rather than despotic and signifying; he anticipates and detects the powers (<i>puissances</i>) of the future rather than applying past and present powers (<i>pouvoirs</i>). (<a href="http://amzn.to/2ydOABf">ATP</a> 124, emphasis in original). </blockquote>
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Universal religion, therefore, is a task of the philosophical project that seeks to produce Mode D of exchange. <i>The mode that is yet to be realized</i>. And with that, philosophy is not birthed in Athens as the foundation of the West, but rather in a global context of people responding to shifts in modes of exchange.<br />
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Further thoughts. I really like the argument against the Greek Miracle, which will be one of the central conceits of the rest of the book, and I am sure I will have more to say. But it seems odd that he ignores here, for example, Egyptian philosophy and thought, which we know was relatively advanced centuries before Plato. Joseph, who I know teaches a bit of Egyptian philosophy in his Ancient Philosophy class might have more to say here. Also, so much of what I have written is produced by assertion with very little argument or examples by Karatani, which is terribly frustrating. Hopefully as I read more of SWH I will know if he just does the arguments there, or if this is part of a broader style of writing. But, for example, when I posted the above graph on facebook a couple of weeks ago, a few people pointed out the dates for some people were, at best, idiomatic, and at worse flat out wrong. It's this sort of lack of attention to detail that bothers me for some of his boldest and biggest claims.<br />The next official post will be on Thursday over chapter one, and will be at <a href="http://www.anotherpanacea.com/">AnotherPanacea</a>. Though Joseph and Josh might respond to the intro and appendix as the spirit moves them. If they do, or I see another blog doing so, I will make a post linking to that work.Scuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17156611887819008603noreply@blogger.com