Vegan Feminist Killjoys (another willful subject)

Sara Ahmed has an important essay, "Feminist Killjoys and Other Willful Subjects", which is also part of her book, The Promise of Happiness.

The feminist killjoy is an "affect alien" who does feel happiness when it is socially enforced to feel happiness.[1]  "A killjoy: the one who gets in the way of other people's happiness. Or just the one who is in the way—you can be in the way of whatever, if you are already perceived as being in the way. Your very arrival into a room is a reminder of histories that  'get in the way' of the occupation of that room." The feminist killjoy cannot just take a joke, or is always going on again, as in, 'there she goes again, talking about sexism'. But this alienation from proper affect is also an insight, "To become alienated from a picture can allow you to see what that picture does not and will not reflect." And, as Ahmed goes on to explain, "The word "dissidence" for instance derives from the Latin dis—"apart" + sedere "to sit." The dissident is the one who sits apart. Or the dissident is the one would be unseated by taking up a place at the table: your seat is the site of disagreement." And Ahmed puts all of this in context of upsetting the dinner table. I think you already see where this is going, this being one of those blog posts that almost write themselves. The vegan (or indeed the vegetarian, or anyone whose diet seeks compassion or justice for other animals) is one of Ahmed's willful subjects, one of those whose very presence becomes a source of conflict and uncomfortableness.

As Ahmed points out:

To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. Even if we are struggling for different things, even if we have different worlds we want to create, we might share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus unhappy archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of "the happy housewife;" Black critiques of the myth of "the happy slave"; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as "domestic bliss." The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made.

We can add so easily in the vegan critique of the idyllic farm and happy meat. The vegan is expected to not make waves if some small parts of animal products end up their food, hell, the vegetarian is expected to be okay with chicken stock in their food. Not to eat food would be rude to the hosts. To not be rude is one of the major critiques against vegetarianism and veganism. As BR Myers points out:

One must never spoil a dinner party for mere religious or ethical reasons. Pollan says he sides with the French in regarding “any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.” (The American foodie is forever projecting his own barbarism onto France.) Bourdain writes, “Taking your belief system on the road—or to other people’s houses—makes me angry.” The sight of vegetarian tourists waving away a Vietnamese pho vendor fills him with “spluttering indignation.” That’s right: guests have a greater obligation to please their host—and passersby to please a vendor—than vice versa. (here). 

It is, indeed, the vegan's refusal to just get along that is justified for so much hatred. However, as any vegetarian or vegan will tell you, it matters little how polite you are. Your very being there disturbs everyone. "An attribution of willfulness involves the attribution of negative affect to those bodies that get in the way, those bodes that 'go against the flow' in the way they are going. The attribution of willfulness is thus effectively a charge of killing joy." (As a side note, you can see how this concept from Ahmed is a pretty effective critique of grounding our politics in spinozian conatus). As someone who became a vegetarian as a teenager in south Georgia, let me tell you, no one wants you over for dinner. It doesn't matter how much you apologize, how much you stammer that it is about environment and personal aesthetics and whatever, and it certainly doesn't matter how much you don't bring it up--it will be brought up for you, you will be challenged, and most likely made fun of. Years of dealing with such abuse is what politicized me. After all, if it really was a small personal affectation and minor environmental move, it certainly wasn't worth putting up with this much shit, and if it wasn't, that meant I needed to be more serious about it politically.

My experience as a feminist daughter in a conventional family taught me a great deal about rolling eyes. You already know this. However you speak, the one who speaks up as a feminist is usually viewed as "causing the argument," as the one who is disturbing the fragility of peace. To be willful is to provide a point of tension. Willfulness is stickiness: it is an accusation that sticks. If to be attributed as willful is to be the cause of the problem, then we can claim that willfulness as a political cause.

Every feminist, every anti-racist, every queer theorist, every animal scholar, every person who has ever seriously engaged with the vicissitudes of identity and justice are all sick and tired of being that woman. Trust me, I know I am sick of being that guy. The one at the seminar or conference, after an anthropocentric and unsupportable point is made (we are humans because we play, or write sonnets, or whatever the idiocy is), and I sigh and raise my hand and they don't want me to be that guy, but trust me, I don't want to be that guy even more. It gets so bad that other people make me into that guy even when I am not being. I was at a recent conference, and I was asking a question not at all about animals or anthropocentrism, and the speaker decided my question was setting her up about animals and started answering a question totally different than the one I asked. Of course, is that persistence, that constantly being that person even though no one, especially you, wants to be that person that makes you willful.

We can make sense of how willfulness comes up, if we consider a typical definition of willfulness: "asserting or disposed to assert one's own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one's own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse" (OED). To be called obstinate or perverse because you are not persuaded by the reason of others? Is this familiar to you? Have you heard this before? When you are charged with willfulness it is as if your being is an insistence on being, a refusal to give way, to give up, to give up your way.

The vegan activist and the animal scholar are killjoys and affect aliens, ones who sit apart at tables. I have argued elsewhere that such sitting apart can allow us to build new communities and new commons. I still believe that. However, it is important to note that such communities often produce their own normalizations of affects that are suppose to make you happy. A feminist vegan, an anti-racist vegan, etc (and always most importantly the et cetera) can as easily disturb the normative happiness of the vegan community as they can other communities. Our willful subjects can be turned against others, to not hear for the thousandth time how our campaigns are sexist, racist, and exclusionary. We are affect aliens, and affect aliens walk among us. And our community, especially in its most public manifestations, are no better dealing with these affect aliens. I am sorry, really I am, to end on such a negative, killjoy note.

Some thoughts on Ethics and Affect

Levi has an smart post, following up on some work from Bennett. Check it out. Levi is concerned here with the question of the how of ethics, rather than the why or what of ethics. In other words, not how do we figure out what is ethical, but rather how is it that we sometimes act in ways we know to be ethical, and sometimes we act in ways we know to be unethical. For Levi, this relates to the psychopath. The psychopath is interesting, but few of us are psychopaths. However, the failure to act in ways we find to be moral is a rather common failing. That we regularly fail to live up to what we believe is right is a rather mundane point, but one that has to haunt every ethical enterprise.

This question is, shall we say, more than a passing interest of mine. It follows from the belief that, as Colin McGinn argues, "vegetarianism is a won argument" (see his Minds and Bodies, pp. 207-214, h/t Bill Martin's Ethical Marxism). This was before the rise of the popular localvore movement, and McGinn is mostly focused on the industrial aspects of animal production. And in my general experience, I have met very few people ever willing to defend the industrialized production of animals and their flesh. I have, for example, never found an article on that defends industrial production of animals on ethical grounds. Jonathan Safran Foer is fond of explaining that he expected a large push back from agribusiness when Eating Animals came out, but all he got was silence. His conclusion, and one I agree with, is that animal agribusiness wishes to not draw attraction to the actual practices that go on.

That brings us to the recent comments by Laura Wright:

I was following Hal's lead, after he'd read from his book a particularly graphic passage about the lives of factory farmed hens. I stood up and started talking about my veganism and then realized that no one was listening to me at all. Everyone looked vaguely traumatized by what they'd just heard; indeed, they should have been traumatized. I backed up, and we talked about how the information that Hal had conveyed had made the students feel. One said, "kind of guilty about having just eaten Chick Fil A for lunch." Yeah. So we processed.

Yeah, who hasn't been there? Whenever I give a public talk about animals, I always try to limit the graphic nature of the talk. Mostly because if one nightmarish example is not enough, I really have no reason to believe that more will do anything. And while some of the students may honestly not know how terrible factory farms are, in general such an ignorance falls under the category of what the philosophical aphorist Donald Rumsfield referred to as "known unknowns". So, while many people are ignorant of what goes on in factory farms, frequently it is because of a willed ignorance. They fear that the horror of the factory farm will force changes on them they do not want to make. This brings us back, obviously, to affect.
As J.M. Coetzee notes:

We [...] are where we are today not because once upon a time we read a book that convinced us that there was a flaw in the thinking underlying the way that we, collectively, treat nonhuman animals, but because in each of us there took place something like a conversion experience, which, being educated people who place a premium on rationality, we then proceeded to seek backing for in the writings of thinkers and philosophers (Cavalieri's The Death of the Animal, p. 89).

I think there really is something here, and I want us to turn our attention, now, to David Hume. David Hume understood politics and ethics against other state of nature theorists of the early modern period. For Hobbes and Locke the fundamental political question is how to limit the egotistic, atomistic individual. However, for David Hume this completely misses the central political and ethical question. We are not fundamentally atomistic individuals, but fundamentally partial. We are born not into a state of nature, but rather into a series of partial sympathies, into a family for Hume. The problem is not one of limitation, but rather of “inequality of affection.” In this understanding justice is not finite because of the inherent nature of humanity, but rather provisionally finite based on our partial nature. Instead the ethical question is how do we transform ourselves and society to extend partial sympathies.

When Isabelle Stengers thinks of an example of the cosmopolitical question, it is about the gray areas of animal issues. "Apart from the multiple cases about which we could say 'there is abuse,' futile or blind cruelties or systematic reduction of farm animals to the status of meat on legs, what interests me are the 'difficult' cases where the refusal of the experimentation and a legitimate cause-- the struggle against an epidemic, for instance-- are 'balanced against each other' (Latour and Weibel (eds) Making Things Public, p. 996). I think an equal cosmopolitical question is about the cases that are not difficult. How is it that we can extend our partial sympathies? How can we combat the known unknows? How can we address, as William James put it, a certain blindness in human beings (also see Cary Wolfe's short essay of the same name in The Death of the Animal, pp. 123-133)? 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? This is why rhetoric and aesthetics are as important philosophical fields as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. To alter what Ranciere refers to as the partition and distribution of the sensible is always a cosmopolitical question.

Moral schizophrenia and the power of affect in US v Stevens

I just got through reading the oral arguments (.pdf) in US v. Stevens. It was very interesting, to say the least. If you don't want to take the time to read around 70 pages of oral arguments, you can check out this summary from slate here (which is biased on the side opposite of mine, but entertaining to read). The oral arguments are certainly all over the place, but I wanted to highlight two interesting points from them.

(1) Gary Francione has often pointed out that most of us relate to animals in a mode of what he calls moral schizophrenia. We are willing to treat the family pet as a member of the family, while at the same time eating animal flesh on our dinner table. This moral schizophrenia is, in many ways, at the heart of the arguments made by the Justices against the law. Because we have a culture that has no real coherent way by which we determine something cruel or not (hunting, even the most vicious kind, in. Killing a cat though in the same way, probably illegal to sell images of that. Dog fighting and cockfighting, out! But bullfighting, specifically let in!). I have a lot of sympathy with the Justices on this one, it clearly is something very different from laws against depicting child pornography, which the present law is explicitly based off of. In child pornography we have an action whose exceptions are both narrow and fairly uncommon. Also, those exceptions have a certain degree of seeming coherency to them. In the case of the law about showing violence towards animals we have a law that is necessary has broad exceptions that are quite incoherent. I am not saying that the law should be overturned on this point (I really am not taking a stance on this issue), but I am pointing out that I think that advancing animal welfare legally will continue to face such issues.

(2) Another interesting part of the back and forth included two different times where there were discussions of banning speech that was not communicative. That rather than communicating to anything, appeal to something. Such as obscenity appealing to lust, or these images potentially appealing to sadism. While the term 'affect' was never used in these discussions, that is certainly what was under consideration. To what degree does the first amendment cover affect? What these backs and forths seemed to imply was that the State must not intervene on the question of content, but anything that simply advances affect can be regulated by the State.


The whole thing is pretty weird. For example, both lawyers seemed to agree that if there was a channel dedicated to broadcasting human sacrifices that were taking place outside of the US, Congress couldn't make such a channel illegal. The justices seemed all very bemused and confused by this stance, particularly this mutual stance.

affective contamination/communication

I think animals are completely capable of communication. I know that most studies show that animals learn (as opposed to some sort of mechanistic pure instinct, rather animals seem to have a power of life as well). Furthermore, many different types of animals have shown a great deal of skill at working together (most of those studies deal with types of primates, but still...). I think that animals communicate, not at the level of phone/logos (the separation of which concerned Aristotle so much, and in many ways whose separation continues to dominate western metaphysics and ontology), but at the level of the affect. Vitalistic power (so, life, but perhaps both more broadly and more narrowly understood) involves "affective contamination" (Guattari, Choasmosis). Affective contamination involves a lot of things. (1) It is a necessary pre-condition for all becomings (or as Haraway puts it, becoming-with). There is no becoming without being caught up in affects (indeed, D&G worry that animals-as-pets create modes of oedipalizations. I think you can see this when people go around and refer to themselves as mothers or fathers of animals. They never mean this as some sort of monstrosity "Who am I to have birthed this creature!?" but always a domestication. Mama-Papa-Me. In this sense D&G actually push against Haraway's criticisms that they are not concerned with animals themselves. They are very worried that the animal itself will become nothing more than a child. However, they also admit that pets can also create becomings. And that indeed pets can be sites of both oedipializations and becomings). (2) Affective contamination, rather than logos, is at the heart of social bonds (of community, operative and inoperative). Words so seldom convey content, but affects do. Think about funerals. Nothing profound is every said at a funeral (I'm sorry for your lose. He was a really great human. et cetera). Nothing profound is said, but community is created, a common is created. Or think about this one: I love you. The words themselves are totally vacuous, but yet they are so often seen as the most important words. Indeed, also all performative magics are not based upon words but upon affective contamination (it is not the content of "you are now husband and wife" it is rather the affect of it). Perhaps all communication is affective. That's a thesis I like, but I have no clue how to support that one. (3) All histories of productive power are really histories of how productive power takes affective contamination as their objects. They are histories of immunizations, and in this sense the work of Roberto Esposito is essential. Foucault very much seemed to make this point with his understanding of power relating to disease control (sovereign power is based upon leporsy, disciplinary upon plague [see both of these in Discipline and Punish and Abnormal], bio-power is based upon both polio and stopping racial contaminations [Security, Territory, Population and Society Must Be Defended, respectively]).