Becoming-vegan as ethical transformation.

Adam Kotsko recently had a post over at his place, "Why am I not a vegetarian?". This will not be a direct response to all his concerns, excuses, and explanations. I will mostly be talking about vegetarianism and veganism here in its ethical dimensions. There are, of course, environmental reasons, labor reasons, etc. that one might want to be a vegetarian or a vegan. However, I do want to highlight a couple of his points:

Another reason: a distrust of ethical consumer choices. Yes, factory farming is an abomination. If there were laws proposing to outlaw it, I would support those laws, regardless of their effect on the cost or availability of meat. In the meantime, I purchase organic meat when possible. Yet I just don’t have it in me to make a big deal out of it or insist on it, just like I don’t have it in me to move heaven and earth to make sure my garbage is recycled. I make my token gesture, but systemic problems have systemic solutions. I’m part of the society in which I live, and no amount of ritualistic keeping my hands clean is going to change anything. [...] For me, it seems like becoming a vegetarian would mean changing into a different kind of person, and I don’t want to make that particular change. Maybe something will happen to make that change plausible and even urgent at a gut level, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I want to say that his rejection of personal responses to systemic issues is a legitimate critique. Though, of course I am not sure I want to go so far as Adam does in his rejection of the ability of personal decisions to change the conditions for other animals. But, in general, the factory farm is exactly the sort of thing that individual consumer choices will most likely not have dramatic effects. Indeed, it would be important, particularly in relation to abolitionist discourses, to consider the limitations of voluntarism and vanguardism. So, if the idea of vegetarianism and veganism as boycott is not functionally sound, why promote it? And I think this is where I also, even more strongly, agree with Adam, when he states that "becoming a vegetarian would mean changing into a different kind of person." Veganism and vegetarianism in this sense is a kind of askesis, a practice of self-production. This pretty clearly drawing upon the work of the later Foucault, and I am by far not the only one to make this argument (you might want to look at Tanke's "The Care of the Self and Environmental Politics," Taylor's "Foucault and the Ethics of Eating," my "Towards a Dark Animal Studies," and Dean's "You Are How You Eat?"). One of the things I find interesting in Foucault's argument is that the cartesian understanding of how a self changes is challenged. Under the usual, what we will call cartesian, view, first you understand the world correctly, and from that correct understanding, you will do what you should do. Right knowledge precedes right action. Under this view of the world, the biggest hurdle to societal arrangements and policy decisions is that people don't know what is true. In other words, the biggest reason we haven't confronted global warming is global warming deniers. Not, you know, that even if we somehow all agreed that global warming was happening and bad, we might still have right action. In Foucault's turn to classical philosophy, we get a different understanding against the cartesian view. In his view, we have to have certain practices that then produce the ability to access certain truths or understandings of the world. Action precedes knowledge, or at least understanding. So, if we want to mitigate the unthinkable suffering of the factory farm, if we want to divert the environmental global suicide pact that is being driven by the expropriation of animal labor and lives, then I think vegetarianism and veganism is going to be key. It will be key not just as an end reality (the end result of challenging the systemic violence to animals will probably be vegetarianism and veganism), but also as a way of producing the sorts of subjectivities that bring about systemic change in the first place. In other words, we need vegetarianism and veganism not because of a consumer boycott, but because we need a different kind of persons.

This gets to a different part of Adam's post:

I also don’t want to be a pain in the ass for hosts. I don’t want to constrain the choice of meal someone can prepare me in their home or the choice of restaurant. This is one key principle from Pauline Christianity on which I will not budge: always be a good guest, always accept what’s put before you. I don’t want them to experience my dietary preference as a moral judgment on them — which will likely happen at least sometimes, whether I intend it that way or not. It’s not as though they or I can do anything about the system of food production, so why create bad feelings?

While not a direct answer, it reminds me of Leela Gandhi's excellent book, Affective Communities. In her chapter "Meat"she recounts the story of Mahatma Gandhi's vegetarianism. When he left for England to study law, he made a promise to his mother to be vegetarian. He had not particularly been a vegetarian before that promise, and felt it was a superstition. He was often made fun of in England among his peers, but he kept his promise. In so doing he found himself in different communities than he would have otherwise. He became radicalized on issues of socialism and anti-colonialism. Along with being a different kind of person, there is always the chance that our vegetarianism and veganism will put us in different communities, perhaps produce different kinds of communities (I take it as a sort of given that host/guest relations are constitutive of community).

Now, none of this is given as a good transformation.  Along with her story of M.K. Gandhi, Leela Gandhi also replays another story happening at the same time, the story of the first animal welfare law passed in the West, and the animal welfare support of James and John Stuart Mill. Gandhi shows how both the Mills and the animal welfare laws come deeply from places of colonialism, and the policing of of the underclasses (I address some of this in a little more detail in this old blog post). Even with those risks, I still feel we need changes.  I do think we need new kinds of persons, we need new relations to other animals, we need new communities. And all of this means that the issues of veganism and vegetarianism are sorts of attempts at Humeian political problems, that is to say, they are attempts at extending partial sympathies.

Accelerationism, animal ethics, and the factory farm

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

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

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

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

Okay, back to Maureen Ogle. She has argued:

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

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

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

Winning the already won argument: Purity in vegan social movements

Bill Martin, in his Ethical Marxism, has called vegetarianism an already won argument. I take this as broadly given. The philosophical argument, made from Aristotle to Hegel, that animals exist only for humans, is largely routed these days. The evils of the factory farm are so apparent and indefensible that no one today seriously tries to defend the factory farm, with the industry simply supporting ag-gag laws and calling (and treating) animal rights activists as terrorists. This is not to say that veganism has really won. Fights over smaller scale raising and killing animals, various medical expropriations of animals, treatment of non-native animal species, and other issues are still major topics. However, the central apparatuses for the most horrible treatments of animals is mostly won. And yet, despite having won the argument, we are living the age of the most intense and inventive cruelty to the largest number of animals.

So, what to make of this? There are still those who are beefing up arguments around non-native species, for example. And there are those who are repacking and rebranding the already won arguments (Veganism--Now in an all new constructivism flavor!). Actually, both those examples are just me. And I do think it is important work. However, I know, and I am sure my compatriots know, that if the argument is already won, simply reframing the argument is not going to have major impacts. The why the already won argument is not working is one that is addressed by various thinkers-- Carol Adams' absent referent, Barbara Noske's/Richard Twine's/David Nibert's animal-industrial complex, Jacques Derrida's disavowal and the global production of forgetting, Bill Martin's carnivorism, and Melanie Joy's carnism.  I am sure there are many more I have forgotten. Despite their differences, what all of these thinkers are trying to get at is some sort of material and/or ideological system that perpetuates our violence against other animals in the face of the already won argument. And as John Sanbonmatsu points out, many of the arguments against a vegan world are made in Sartrian bad faith.

Now, there are those that believe because we have an already won argument, and we seem to be losing instead of winning, that the failure is one of the animal activist community not agreeing 100% on the correct tactic. Whatever that tactic is: non-violent vegan education, direct action, violence against humans, gradual animal welfare reform, etc. In other words, if we are failing to win, the reason is not with my arguments (whatever they are, they are all correct), it is must be because of the activism of other vegans. They are the ones I need to argue with, they are the ones letting the factory farms and labs and hunting seasons still exist. What emerges here is a purity around tactics and the tendency of vegan policing. I clearly think those are bad things. (1) Because I don't really know what tactics are going to work. But also, (2) I think a certain amount of vegan in-fighting tends to come from our own necessary continued imbibing of the disavowal of the absent carn(ivor)ism-complex (or whatever). This two is a harder thing to articulate, and something that makes me glad this is a blog post, and not an article. However, if there really is a material and/or ideological system out there, it is nuts to assume we have escaped it just because we are vegans, or are becoming-vegan. So, the purity of tactics and vegan policing reassures us that we have escaped. But also, in trying to escape, we have often be warped by those systems. We see those we love and care for munching on corpses, we remember ourselves doing the same thing. We are ridiculed, and demeaned. These sorts of traumas become powerful shaping influences. We learn to believe in our rightness, but also our righteousness. We learn to not listen, to be strident, to become distrustful or contemptuous of others, and to even become distrustful and contemptuous of our desires and instincts. It doesn't, of course, have to be this way. And many people are working to not make it this way.

Ecofeminism (and here I am thinking particularly of Chris Cuomo) has often promoted an ethic of flourishing. And we need that. Not just for the other animals we fight for, but for ourselves and communities. pattrice jones has written about the ways activists can use their trauma to transform themselves and their activism. And there is more, of course. The poststructuralist tradition that tries to think a community without sacrifice, or alternatively, a politics of friendship, is certainly important. Such communities are going to struggle with the normalizing and policing priorities and purities we bring with us. Though I am betting that the work of building such communities are every bit as important for the success of vegan social movements as picking up the bullhorn, and certainly as writing another blog post.

On that note, here is more of my schtick about the rebranding and repacking of vegan arguments (and remember, I am laughing with, not at).



Veganism--Try it any of these wonderful ethical flavors!

Mmm, mmm deontological.

Utilitarian-licious

Feminist Ethic of Yummy!

Or try the new veganism-lite -- Now with a sliding scale of Morality!

Or poststructuralist veganism -- now not just for Derrida's soul!

(none of these vegan ethical claims are approved by the dead philosophers associated with them, your vegan experience may vary, void where prohibited, and remember, always vegan responsibly).

Reproduction and Veganism in the Age of the Anthropocene

This is going to be a blog post about overpopulation and having children in the age of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene, as I am sure you know, is the geological epoch we live in, the one where the earth itself has been shaped by humans. This is, like most claims about humans, kinda a lie. Depending on when you want to start dating the Anthropocene from will determine how much of a lie. But clearly not all humans are equal members in this geological formations (for better and for worse). Claims about the anthropos are never really about only and fully the anthropos. But that is fine, we know that we are living in an age where some humans have managed to create geological and climate realities. This reality has brought heighten feelings that humans have a moral duty to decrease their population. Fears about overpopulation, of course, are in no way new, and are not only caused by knowledge of the Anthropocene. One of the things that is new to me is the particular ways certain vegans are taking up the fears of overpopulation.

If you look at this blog post entitled "Liberation, not procreation" for one example. This powerful post is from a vegan mother and moves within the animal liberation community to shame her (or even make her justify) having had a child. Before I go any further, I want to make a few statements: Pro-natalism is almost always sexist, heterosexist, and often fascist (at the least). And while I might have some disagreements, I agree with Lee Edelmen that there are certain problems with reproductive futurism. But just because I oppose pro-natalism does not mean I think we need to advocate a politics of anti-natalism. Nevertheless, a politics of anti-natalism seems increasingly common in vegan community, and I want to focus on the arguments against overpopulation in anti-natalism arguments.

It was helpful that while I was figuring out how to respond, we got these two articles in the NY Times about the carrying capacity of earth (see here and here). What Ellis is arguing is both fairly simple and rather convincing. The short version is that there are many times that humans would have been projected to hit the carrying capacity of earth at the time, and every time the carrying capacity of earth increased. There is, according to Ellis, no predetermined amount of humans that will exceed the carrying capacity of earth. Does this mean we will never hit a carrying capacity? No, but if we do it will almost certainly be through a failure of social systems, not through an absolute limit in carrying capacity. I agree with Tim Morton that Ellis' framing is anthropocentric, but I see no reason this rules out the basic principles of Ellis' argument.

I also know these sorts of arguments are often put forth by conservatives, many of whom use these arguments as part of their kettle logic on global warming. You know the one I mean, (1) there is no such thing as global warming, (2) global warming is happening, but not anthropogenic, and (3) global warming is happening, but it now so badly advanced only unfettered capitalism can produce the technology needed to save us all. Conservative denial about global warming is part of a broader denial of the Anthropocene, and the solutions we have to the problems that the age of the Anthropocene are raising. So, when Ellis argues that advances in social systems and technology means we cannot know the absolute carrying capacity of the earth, many conservative hear that as saying "FREE MARKET CAPITALISM TO THE RESCUE", which is bunk. While Ellis is a little cagey in those articles about what the social system changes will require, we know it will include many of them that look nothing like the conservative agenda. And indeed, veganism strikes me as one of the most likely social system changes we can take on to increase the carrying capacity of the earth and to fight many of the threats produced by the Anthropocene.

As with factory farming, our inability to stop global warming is mostly what Peter Hallward, in his best Green Lantern Corp moments, would call a failure of the will (see here and here). We know what needs to be done, but we somehow lack the popular will to make it happen. There is no reason to believe that children will have to live in the same world we were brought into. There is no reason to believe we will live in the same world we live in today. The bad news of the Anthropocene is that certain humans have made the ability of living on this planet harder for so many types of beings. The good news of the Anthropocene is that it means that certain beings would therefore have the power to reshape the earth in different ways--the earth is not done becoming. Vegans worry that another life would be another murderer, speaking to our own great guilt on never actually being able to be vegan, just becoming-vegan. The challenge, then, is to create a world that is different. I don't know why we would then encourage vegans to be uniquely the ones to stop having children?

Ursula Heise has recently written a beautiful essay on literature trying to come to grips with the environment in the age of the Anthropocene. In it Heise starts mapping out the possibilities of hybrid ecologies and natures for the future. And one gets the feeling that the anti-natalism of certain vegans come not from a radicalism, but from a profound conservatism, a conservatism that is based on conservationism. Perhaps what we need is less conservationism, and more constructivism for thriving ecologies for nonhumans and humans-- a constructivist ecofeminism, if you will. Perhaps we need less Heidegger, and more Arendt.  Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy, wrote about the importance of producing a new people and a new earth. Perhaps it is time we focus on both of those terms.

Gary Francione tends to end his emails and blog messages with the announcement that the world is vegan, if we want it. I'd only make a small, but important correction-- The world is vegan, if we make it so. Here is to the constructivists ecofeminists, and to all the vegans (parents and nonparents, bioparents and nonbioparents) who are working to make it so.

Dark Animal (Studies)

I recently received a rather odd email from someone who came across my blog, and the response to this email is something I feel the need to post here, as well. Mainly because it deals with some misconceptions of vegetarianism and veganism that seem very common. So, here's the response:

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It seems to me that your email misunderstands what is at stake with trying to create ethical relationships with non-human beings (in particular here, those beings we call animals). There is an indictment against vegetarianism and veganism that it is motivated by a naive escapism and utopianism. In this argument, vegetarianism and veganism are conceived not as ethical responses to violence, but rather as a way of being unable to think through violence. The ethical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalalala over and over again. Under this view vegetarianism and veganism is about keeping our hands clean, about purity and innocence and the sacred. This is the mistake that Derrida makes in his interview with Nancy, "Eating Well." In it he argues that vegetarians have yet to sacrifice sacrifice. Well, no duh. Now, I've hung out with plenty of vegetarians and vegans, and in general they are crowd less congratulatory on their innocence as consumed by their own guilt. The blame they lay at the feet of those who still consume animal flesh and products is meet by an almost Newtonian response of equal and opposite blame upon themselves. This is the guilt that Adorno describes as a "guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life". Indeed, the escapist and utopian drive that seeks to ward off this guilt is to be found just as often (if not more so!) among those who deride vegetarianism as utopian. If you look at Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Jose Ortega y Gasset you see again and again a desire to expiate this guilt by sublimating their violence into a sacred ritual. It's like something straight out of Durkheim or Mauss.
Vegetarians and vegans are seldom Hegel's beautiful soul who faces the "silent fusion of the pithless unsubstantial elements of evaporated life," but are instead the other side of the dialectal coin, a damaged soul who has seen the face of the gorgon. This is exactly what I have tried to address in my discussion of vegetarian vampires and vampiric vegetarians. The vegetarian vampire is the liminal figure that exists on both sides, both beautiful soul and damaged soul. On the one hand the vegetarian vampire uses vegetarianism as a marker of innocence (this is one way to understand Hitler's propaganda around his non-existent vegetarianism, and also a way to understand the British National Party's Land and People campaign for animal welfare). On the other hand, the vegetarian vampire is a brooding, reflective creature; a guilt-ridden being. We need to escape these economies of innocence and guilt, of purity and pollution, of the sacred and the profane (this is a difference between myself and Agamben, who embraces the profane as a way out). What we need might be less of a critical animal studies, and more of a dark animal studies.
The critique, as Kant explains to us from the very beginning, has a policing and tribunal function. The critique distances and judges. I think that ground has very little to offer us, at least now. So, a dark animal studies repeats Tim Morton's move towards a dark ecology. The point isn't for innocence, the sacred, or distance. At the same time, it isn't for guilt, the profane, or redemption. It is, rather, to exit from these economies entirely. This is the point of ethics -- it is only because innocence and purity cannot exist that ethics can. As I have said elsewhere: Ethics is not about finding innocence, but about living after innocence. Ethics is about thinking and living in our postlapsarian world without alibi. It is from this position that we can begin to think about vegetarianism and veganism, or at least the vegetarianism and veganism of dark animal studies-- a becoming-vegetarian, a becoming-vegan.
As with all becomings what is at stake are alliances, packs, relations. Vegetarianism and veganism are practices of the self (a la late Foucault). As Foucault teaches us; following the return to certain Classical philosophical schools like the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Cynics; we need to reverse the Cartesian moment by which right knowledge produces right action (this is, in some ways, most explicit in Badiou's theory of revolution). Rather, certain practices allow us to access certain truths. These practices and productions of the self are not simply of the self. Rather, they open us to alliances with other beings, beings that may have existed for us before these practices as "sub-ontological" (to borrow a phrase from Nelson Maldonado-Torres). The navigation of these alliances; the force and diplomacy involved; are not automatic or always obvious. There are complex and rigorous philosophical questions involved. This is another reason to think of a dark animal studies, as an invocation of a double sense of opacity against comprehension. We need to both recognize the opacity of other beings, but also the greyness, the opacity from ever knowing fully ahead of time how such relations are going to play out. Becoming-vegetarian, becoming-vegan, are practices of self and other, pacts we make to packs.

Vampire Animal Studies: The Figure of the Vegetarian Vampire

I recently came across an article in n+1 entitled "Vampire Studies". In the concluding paragraph, the author includes this part of a sentence, "So when Vampire Studies replaces Animal Studies as the latest academic vogue" the author goes on to make some rather vague claims and nothing is really ever given why vampire studies is suddenly juxtaposed with animal studies. But what this really gives me is an excuse to return to the figure of the vegetarian vampire. I talked about this before in one of the more popular posts on this blog, and this is a slightly different and slightly longer version of that post.

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For those of you lucky enough to not be familiar with the phrase vegetarian vampire, it comes from the novels and movies of Twilight. Recently everywhere I look I see references to vegetarian vampires. T-shirts reading ‘I heart vegetarian vampires,’ and chapters of pop culture philosophy books. Within the world of Twilight, the ‘good’ vampires are a family of the Cullens, who refer to themselves as vegetarians.

When I first heard about a vegetarian vampire I wondered if we were dealing with another comedic adaptation, like the early 90s cartoon Count Duckula. But no, oh no. The vegetarian vampire of Twilight is suppose to be anything but comedic. Edward Cullen, the romantic interest, represents another in the line of both emotive and guilt-ridden vampires. Moreover, these vegetarian vampires of Twilight kill and drink the blood of other animals, they just don't kill and drink the blood of humans. This begs the question: What does vegetarianism mean, if it does not actually mean abstaining from the flesh of other animals?

This question allows us to see a way that vegetarianism, and I would say veganism as well, enters into an economy of the sacred and the profane, the innocent and guilty, the pure and the contaminated. In this case the word vegetarianism has obviously no real meaning, except for one -- to demarcate that the present vampire is 'good'. The concept of vegetarian is wielded in such a style as to make the vampire not a vampire. I mean this in two registers. The first is in the way that vegetarianism is stereotyped as essentially anti-masculine. The vampire that does not drink the blood of humans is a fundamentally 'defanged' vampire. Why, after all, do you think Bill, in the HBO series True Blood, only drinks human blood while having sex, or when he is committing an act of violence? This 'defanged' vampire is the sensitive and brooding vampire. To take another example, in Joss Whedon's Buffy and Angel universe, the vampire Angel also lives only on animal blood. He exclusively drinks animal blood because of a curse that gave him back his soul. If he ever has a true moment of happiness, a repeated euphemism for sex, he will turn back into an evil vampire.

But these tropes of vegetarian vampires are not just used to connect vegetarianism to a lack of virility. Vegetarianism is used in another way, too. The vegetarian is also a trope of a split within vampiric being. Not only is this split connected to the questions of virility mentioned above, but there always remains a yearning for human blood. What is referred to again and again, as The Hunger. As a quotation from the movie of Twilight illustrates: ‘Drinking only animal blood is like a human only eating tofu. It's filling but never quite satisfies.’ Vegetarianism is presented as paralyzed being rather than becoming. The vegetarian vampire is never satisfied with his or her vegetarianism. Rather, this vegetarianism is seen as denial of their true nature, They really are fun filled blood thirsty monsters, but go around saying “woe is me, woe is me” because they don’t kill humans. And the danger, the excitement, of these vampires is that at any moment they may snap. Their vegetarianism maintained only through the greatest will power. Instead of being a creature whose existence symbolizes an impure and con-fused nature, a transgressive nature in thrall of all that is profane —which is what the vampire has classically been used to represent-- this vegetarian vampire seeks after purity and redemption, a Vampyr Sacer. These sacred vampires are fundamentally brooding creatures, racked by guilt and shame. The vampire traditionally has no reflection—they cannot see themselves in mirrors—but all these vegetarian vampires are able to do is reflect upon their lives. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari declared in A Thousand Plateaus that ‘thought is a vampire.’ By which they meant that thought in its most intense manifestations is never a reflection, never a Cartesian moment, but always a creation of something new. Descartes himself, who denied that animals could feel pain or pleasure and carried out horrible vivisections, but at the same time loved his dog and did not eat the flesh of animals was something of a vegetarian vampire as well. These vegetarian vampires reassert reflection as the core of being, and therefore deny the intensity of existence whose impure blood allows multiple becomings. Vegetarianism here seems to indicate nothing other than morality, but a morality of the most incoherent and sickly variety. An anemic morality of a demon who has found religion.

This brings us back, at least briefly, to the philosophy of Antiquity. These practices of the self were referred to as askesis. This term, askesis, became translated by the Christian monks into the idea of asceticism. Indeed, many of the practices you’d find among the stoics and epicureans you’d find transposed with subtle but important differences by the early monastic orders. To give one example […]. Asceticism is therefore rooted deeply in the denial of the self. You deny your human, read animal, nature in order to affirm your higher, divine nature. Therefore, Christian asceticism is a dualism, the same dualism we see in Cartesianism and the figure of the vegetarian vampire. And in all of these dualism we see an extreme bias against the animal. Askesis, on the other hand, is not rooted in denying the self. It doesn’t begin with the idea that we are inherently split, and indeed such a dualism would seem quite alien. Rather, askesis is conceived as a set of practices of self-production, of a form of metamorphosis. Veganism, or better, becoming-vegan, when conceived as a type of askesis is not about self-denial, it isn’t about refusing some primal instinct that is essential to who we are. Which isn’t to say that becoming-vegan isn’t sometimes hard, or that it doesn’t require work. However, it also have a great deal of pride and joy involved. You know, if we lived be several centuries old I don’t think we’d go around being like, [vampire accent] “I am so uptight because I want to suck your blood, but I can’t.” So, becoming-vegan is an askesis, a practice of changing our being.

[...]

Now, most of the vegans/vegetarians I know in the animal emancipation movement do not believe they are innocent. But, and this is important, they too are seeking redemption. We need a way becoming-vegetarian that means both we are never innocent, but it also means that we don't have to be trapped by guilt or rituals of purity. However, those of us in the animal emancipation movement see these rituals of purity everywhere we go. Welfarists vs. Abolitionists. Pacifists vs. Militants. A movement that has trouble moving because of all its fractures. A movement that has trouble moving because the question of tactics is always raised to the level of the pure and the impure. Vegetarianism has become a symbol for putting the vampire back into the play of the sacred and the profane, however we desperately have to revert this process. If the animal emancipation movement is to have a chance at changing both our relationships with other animals, and our relationship with the animal that we are, we are going to have to find ways to escape these protocols of guilt and innocence. We need less vegetarian vampires and more vampiric vegetarians.

***

For long time readers of this blog this will have been mostly repetitive, but I after reading that partial line I couldn't resist.

Reasons for vegetarianism/veganism besides...

... economic boycott? Or, I guess I should rephrase that: What are some reasons for vegetarianism/veganism besides economic boycott? I think a lot of people spend time explaining why we shouldn't (or should!) kill animals and/or treat them as property. But where are explanations on the justification for vegetarianism/veganism as a necessary component of opposition, besides arguments about economic boycott?

Thanks for any and all help.

Vegetarian Vampires

So, I've never seen the movie or read any of the books of Twilight. However, it seems there is a new pop culture philosophy book about Twilight, and from it I learned that the main good guy vampire from Twilight is referred to as a vegetarian vampire. It seems there are even t-shirts that say "I heart vegetarian vampires."

Now, I know nothing about Twilight, so when I first heard about a vegetarian vampire I wondered if we were dealing with another Count Duckula. However, it seems that these vegetarian vampires kill and drink the blood of other animals, they just don't kill and drink the blood of humans. I don't honestly know what to do with this information. First of all, it seems everyone that says the world vegetarian is pretty meaningless these days might have a good point.

The other point is that this shows another way that vegetarianism enters into an economy of the sacred and the profane, the innocent and guilty, the pure and the impure. In this case the vegetarianism has obviously no real meaning, except for one -- to demarcate that the present vampire as 'good'. The concept of vegetarian is wielded in such a way as to make the vampire not a vampire. I mean this in two ways. The first is in the way that vegetarianism is stereotyped as fundamentally anti-masculine. The vampire that drinks animal blood (or the vampire that drinks true blood) is a fundamentally 'defanged' vampire (why, after all, do you think Bill drinks the blood of Sookie in True Blood when they are having sex, or when he is committing acts of violence?). This 'defanged' vampire is the sensitive, dark, brooding, vampire. (To take another example, in Joss Whedon's Angel, he is the only vampire to live on the blood of animals instead of humans, which is connected to a curse which gives him a soul. This curse, however, also prevents Angel from having sex. If he ever has sex, he'll become evil again).

But these tropes of vegetarian vampires are not just used to connect vegetarianism to virility. Vegetarianism is used in another way, too. The vegetarian is also a trope of a split within their vampirism. Not only is this connected to the questions of virility mentioned above, but there always remains a yearning for human blood. A quotation from Twilight (the movie or the book or both, I have no clue): "Drinking only animal blood is like a human only eating tofu. It's filling but never quite satisfies." Vegetarianism in this world is asceticism rather than askesis, a paralyzed being rather than becoming. Rather than being a creature whose nature symbolizes an impure and con-fused nature in thrall of all that is profane, this vegetarian vampire seeks after purity and redemption, a Vampyr Sacer. A fundamentally brooding creature, unable to embrace it's lack of reflection with all that implies (see D&G, ATP p. 416). Vegetarianism here seems to indicate nothing other than morality, but a morality of the most incoherent and sickly variety. A demon who has found religion.

Now, most of the vegans/vegetarians I know in the animal emancipation movements do not believe they are innocent. But, and this is important, they too are seeking redemption. A becoming-vegan means both that we are never innocent, but it also means that we don't have to be trapped by guilt or rituals of purity. Indeed, those of us in the animal emancipation movement see these rituals of purity everywhere we go. Welfarists vs. Abolitionists. Pacifists vs. Militants. A movement that has trouble moving because of all its fractures. A movement that has trouble moving because the question of tactics is always raised to the level of the pure and the impure. We need less vegetarian vampires and more vampiric vegetarians.

Why Care About Animals: A response to some questions by Paul Ennis

In my last post on becoming-vegan/vegetarian, Paul raised some pertinent questions that I have not really bothered to answer. I'll attempt to address them, if not exactly answer them, here.

I also think it would be cool, although maybe boring to you, to express why one should engage in animal criticism. I say this geniunely from an outside perspective, but it is not immediately clear why one should have an ethical obligation to animals beyond the casual one we tend to have with pets and not being cruel.

One of the focuses of my own work, and indeed a focus of much of the current work in critical animal studies, is to show how the violence done against other animals connects to violence done against the human animal. This is done in a wide variety of ways, and the literature base of people arguing from this perspective in the last five years has grown in vast amounts. Though a common feature in almost all of these diverse arguments is the impossibility to draw a single (philosophically relevant) line with all humans on one side and all nonhuman animals on the other side. My analytic brethren often refer to this as the species overlap problem. This means the ethicist is left with one of three choices: (1) Include animals (even if not all) based upon whatever criteria they care about. (2) Exclude some human animals from ethical concern. (3) Simply have an irrational ethics.
What has emerged in my work and in so many others is a strong argument for caring about other animals that means someone can support that without, you know, actually caring about other animals. And in some ways this is really useful. If I am talking to someone who cares about rights, or the violence of biopolitics and coloniality, or fighting for the common; I have an entire language and sharp theoretical tools at my disposal to try and make them care about other animals, too. The problem, of course, is that I think we should care about other animals regardless of the fact that our well-being is bound up together. To put it another way, if by some miracle someone was finally able to draw the line between The Human and The Animal, and where able to convince me that we could do violence towards animals without having that violence crossing over to The Human, I would still think we shouldn't do violence towards other animals.
At that moment I lose a lot of my fancy philosophical tools. I really don't know how to make you believe that a factory farm or the vivisection laboratory is evil. I become almost levinasian in those moments, feeling that the other calls out for an ethical response. I have zero reason why the suffering of other animals should not matter to me.

Paul continues his question:

I suppose a big issue from my perspective revolves around the following fact: humans are horrible to other humans. We have never been able to resolve this, but we must keep trying. It is a constant battle etc.

...and how then one can ethically take the stance that we need to extend this to animals (thereby over-extending the already limited sympathy humans seem to possess). Yes pessimistic I know, but I ask only because I'm actually impressed that you guys are willing to take such a radical (and it is radical when you step outside the academy) stance.

This is certainly a question I/we get a lot. And I can understand it. If you don't already believe that other animals are ethically equivalent the human animal, and if you believe that justice is a finite category (which we all know we shouldn't believe, but after years of working with various activist groups I can tell you most people do believe there is not enough justice to go around), than why are we wasting ourselves "on such boutique issues as animal rights." (I think Paul is being far more respectful than this, I just wanted an excuse to make that link. Forgive me).
This is where the earlier analysis of the connection of violence between other animals and human animals is very useful. I am not sure it is possible to create a successful theory to help humans that does not include other animals. Moreover, I think I have a fairly strong historical ground to make this claim. If you look at the historical Vegetarian Society, you can see they were at the forefront of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles in England. All over the Western world I can find that pioneers in fighting for the rights of women and children were also fighters for the rights of animals. This continues to today when so many of the vegans I meet are radicals invested in all sorts of social justice movements.
Though this question of limited sympathies is certainly an interesting question. I think I am on the side of Hume (at least at the level of the framing of the question). We are already social beings, born by definition into a sociality. So the question is not, like Hobbes and Locke would propose, what is the best way to limit the atomistic individual so that we may have a civil society. The question is instead how do extend limited sympathies. So, the artifices we need are not ways of limiting people, but ways of extending people. When I talk about becoming-vegan/vegetarian as a resistant subjectivity, I do mean it as a praxis that is intended to produce such an extension. We need bodies, thinking, and relations that are capable of responding to the demands of the wholly other. We don't need a revolution in the distribution of the goodies of the world, we need a revolution in being.

More on becoming-vegan vs. becoming-vegetarian

Craig recently had an excellent post up about the distinction between veganism and vegetarianism, please take the time to read it, if you haven't already. This has inspired me to return to my earlier posts on becoming-vegan vs. becoming-vegetarian.

One of the reasons I have liked to stick with vegetarian is simply I enjoy the history of the word. That means I enjoy the putative etymology of the word, but I also enjoy the way the word was early used. The Vegetarian Society was notorious for their political involvements in anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles. They were fiercely anti-racist and anti-sexist. Furthermore, vegetarian meant the same as vegan does now. That means they did not eat any animal products. Now, clearly that is not how the word vegetarian is used these days. Not only does vegetarian seem to have little clear indications of what these people eat (Fish? Chicken? Eggs? Dairy? What?), but also tends to only indicate a dietary movement rather than a political movement (though, I have to say that the term veganism is slowly moving in the same direction). The word vegan was created because vegetarian had stopped meaning, well, vegetarian. I recognize that, but I still like the history of the word.

Though obviously another reason was rhetorical. Veganism has a much stronger stigma in our culture than vegetarian. If I want to address my work to those that aren't even vegetarian, and break the relatively strong taboo among continental animal ethicists and suggest that if you care about critical animal arguments than you should, you know, probably withdraw yourself from the wholesale slaughter of other animals in our culture, than having a little less stigma seems like a good idea. Furthermore, while there aren't many vegans in the academy, vegetarians are far more common (even if not as common as some people seem to think). I have often thought about the becoming-vegetarian terminology as a way of making alliance with those vegetarians, and having them see that choice in political, ethical, and ontopoetic terms. With the twinned aspirations of having more support out there, and of course of convincing vegetarians to take more steps in animal liberation and abolition. Hopefully also by becoming vegan.

Though another fear is that while vegetarian may carry less of a stigma than vegan with the non-vegan population, among vegans vegetarianism often carries a pretty high stigma. When I want my work to be taken seriously by other vegans, the last thing I want is for my work to be dismissed for being dilettantish and fundamentally unserious to a commitment to radically transforming our relationships with other animals.

So, rhetorically I have felt somewhat trapped. Though, there is another whole level of this debate I had not really foreseen until some recent arguments from Gary L. Francione. If you check his blog, you can hear a podcast and read some follow-up comments to his belief that vegetarianism should never be advocated, not even as a gateway to veganism. Francione argues that vegetarianism (as is currently understood) is ethically meaningless. And if you accept that proposition, than vegetarianism is becomes misleading and confusing, allowing people to feel they have made a significant change while doing nothing. I really don't know yet how I feel about these arguments. I think they have some merit, but I have all my hesitant feelings. I'll have to give it more thought. Anyone that wants to suggest more thoughts for me to have, please sound off in comments (as always).

Becoming-Vegetarian or Becoming-Vegan?

I have been unable to decide if I should call it becoming-vegetarian or becoming-vegan. For me, the term would technically mean the same thing: a process of subjectivity that would at the same time be an ethical relationship with other animals. That would mean, at the minimum, that we probably didn't eat their flesh, put them in cages, take away their young, conduct violent and invasive tests, etc. But with that said, which term?
I like the term vegetarian a lot. I like the history of the term, that the vegetarian society claims it comes from the latin for lively. And, originally with the vegetarian society, vegetarian meant pretty much what vegan means today. But, the term vegetarian nowadays has some pretty specific eating criteria. You avoid flesh, but remain okay with eggs and milk. Furthermore, in general it is seen as a non-political term. You seldom meet a vegan whose primary concern is not an ethical relationship to other animals. The same cannot be said for vegetarians.
But my understanding about the history of the term vegan is the people who coined simply took the first and last parts of vegetarian, and they simply made the world because it felt right. Which is fine, but lacks the same sort of wordpoetry that vegetarian conjures up for me.
So, thoughts?