Whose Joy? Whose Sadness? Building Livable Communities

How do we build inclusive, joyful communities? I believe that building communities where flourishing, livable lives are possible are important projects for us to undertake. But the ideas of joy and sadness are not given terms.

* * *

Todd May recently weighed in on L'Affaire Cogburn.  In his comments, Todd May wrote:

As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.

Sure, I remember that, from his preface to the english edition of Anti-Oedipus. But May's interpretation here (and perhaps in Foucault's original stance), this assumes we know what joy and sadness are, and that they might be the same thing for the same people.

Let's look at two quick footnotes from Steven Shaviro's excellent book, Without Criteria:

This implies that Whitehead rejects Spinoza’s basic principle of conatus, the claim that “each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being,” and that this striving is “the actual essence of the thing itself” (de Spinoza 1991, 108: Ethics, Part III, propositions 6 and 7). For Whitehead, things strive not to persist in their own being, but rather to become other than they were, to make some alteration in the “data” that they receive. An entity’s “satisfaction” consists not in persisting in its own being, but in achieving difference and novelty, in introducing something new into the world. (p. 19, n3)

And:

Whitehead’s rejection of Spinoza’s monism in favor of William James’s pluralism goes along with his rejection of Spinoza’s conatus in favor of James’s (and Bergson’s) sense of continual change, becoming or process, or what he also calls creativity. (p. 22, n6)

We could potentially affirm that both are true, that for some joy consists in preservation of the self, and for others joy (or satisfaction) consists in difference and becoming otherwise. And all of this, of course, will change what you see as sad, or joyful, militancy. If you see joy as persisting in your being, than anything that seeks to change how that being interacts and relates, and anyone who seeks to create new relationships, can only be perceived as killjoys.

* * * 

I have written before about Sara Ahmed's provocative and compelling essay, "Feminist Killjoys and other Willful Subjects" (the essay was expanded in The Promise of Happiness, and, Ahmed has just published a new book entitled Willful Subjects).  Ahmed wishes to "take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously." She goes on to argue:

The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, of how happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods (a social good is what causes happiness, given happiness is understood as what is good). As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely "it is always easy to describe as happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others]." [...] 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 inherit this horizon. [...] We can consider the relationship between the negativity of the figure of the feminist killjoy and how certain bodies are "encountered" as being negative. Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. As she puts it, "it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation." To be oppressed requires that you show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. For Frye "anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous."

You can see two currents here. The first is that the feminist killjoy, or more generally the activist killjoy, is the one who is constantly struggling against situations that are declared to be happy. The second current is that oppression often demands that the oppressed declare their happiness in their own oppression (we will return to this second current later). The first current allows us to examine May's original quotation in greater context. It comes as part of this whole paragraph:

To add another example, I know people whose general commitments I would call feminist reject that label because they see feminists as angry man-hating types who just want to make men feel bad. Now, of course, I don't lay all that at the doorstep of feminists. The right does an excellent job of slurring feminism. But I have had the experience of being language-policed when it seems to me inappropriate (ex. by people who would never have escorted women into abortion clinics, as I have). And I think this does not do us credit. As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.

The rather odd thing is the lack of transition that takes us from the discussion of feminism to the discussion of sad militants. He does not do the work to posit why someone challenging his discourse (even someone who lacks May's ethos), leads to sadness. But someone is sad here. Is it May? It is the feminist who "language-policed" him? There exists an ambiguity of where the sadness comes from, and who it is affecting. This leads us to this great blog post by Ahmed. In it, Ahmed argues that when someone points out a problem, it is often the person who perceives the problem who is then perceived by others as the problem. Another long quotation:

When you expose a problem you pose a problem.  I have been thinking more about this problem of how you become the problem because you notice a problem. For example, when you make an observation in public that all the speakers for an event are all white men, or all but one, or all the citations in an academic paper are to all white men, or all but a few, these observations are often treated as the problem with how you are perceiving things (you must be perceiving things!). A rebuttal is often implied: these are the speakers or writers would just happen to be there; they happen to be white men but to make this about that would be to assume that they are here because of that. And so: by describing a gathering as ‘white men,’ we are then assumed to be imposing certain categories on bodies, reducing the heterogeneity of an event; solidifying through our own description something that is fluid. For example: I pointed out recently on Facebook that all the speakers for a Gender Studies conference were white. Someone replied that my statement did not recognise the diversity of the speakers. When perceiving whiteness is a way of not perceiving diversity, then diversity became a way of not perceiving whiteness. [...]  This is why the feminist killjoy remains such a negative stereotype (we affirm her given this negation): as if feminists are speaking out because they are miserable; or if feminism is an obstacle to our own happiness, such that she is what is in the way (feminism: how women get in the way of ourselves). It is implied that you would become well-adjusted if you could just adjust yourself to this world. Smile! The task then becomes self-modification: you have to learn not to perceive a problem; you have to let things fall. 

This last point from Ahmed is interesting and useful. Namely, there is something strangely perverse about the demand that people be joyful in intolerable situations. Of course, such demands for resilience are rather commonplace these days.

* * *

Resilience is rapidly becoming one of the key ways of understanding present ways of governing the world. Robin James has taken up the concept of resilience in understanding how feminism and anti-racism on social media is seen as 'toxic' and 'vampiric.'

A similar claim has been (in)famously leveled against “feminism,” especially “intersectional feminism”: it vampirically drains the lifeblood of the progressive, radical left. [...] Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction. [...] In both essays, feminists, especially feminists of color, are tasked with manufacturing the raw materials–negative affects like guilt or anxiety–on which “good” subjects labor, and, through that labor, generate human capital (e.g., radical cred, moral/political goodness, proper femininity, and so on). They bring us down so we can then perform our upworthiness for liking, favoriting, clicking, sharing audiences. Resilience is part of the means of production, and the “toxicity” of WOC feminists is the first step in this supply chain. Black women do the labor of generating the toxicity that then becomes the raw material upon which white women work; white women do the affective/emotional labor of overcoming, which then translates into tangible employment (writing gigs, etc.)

This narrative of overcoming can be seen in the way that those who are concerned with inclusive language are labeled as policing language, engaging in newspeak, score-keeping, and political correctness. This posits those who are attacking inclusive language as being rebels, truth tellers, concerned about the issues and philosophy. And the failure of social justice movements get laid at the feet of those who want inclusivity. Yet, I really do believe both groups want to create joyful communities.

* * *

The struggle to build communities that create livable lives is not an easy one. And I do believe that many complicated questions about how to go about building such communities are ahead of us. But, a lot of this discussion is centered around the notion of calling out. Let us look at Todd May's last paragraph:

This last bit should not be taken to mean that we should never confront people on their language. My point is rather that in the question of whether to confront, a little judgment is called for, and perhaps a little fellow feeling for people whose behavior actually puts them in the right (i.e. left) camp. It's one thing to call out a racist who uses an offensive racial stereotype. It's quite another to call out someone who aligns her behavior with a sensitivity to LGBT issues and, among a set of like-minded friends, calls something "gay." We are none of us moral saints (thank goodness), and, if our politics are in the right place, I think we can afford to let some things go. (To be sure, language can shape perception. But not all instances of it do.) And alternatively, we need to be aware that not letting certain things go is no substitute for committed political work.

I want to address the last point, first. I am not sure how many people confine their only work to not letting things go on the internet. I am sure there are some. But because many of us primarily only meet each other in our words (I have only briefly met in person only one person I have cited or talked about in this post), it can seem like all we do is reflect on language. Building communities can never be about just getting the language right. I agree with May on this point. But I do believe if we are going to create the sort of inclusive and joyful communities we want, we have to affirm the right to be to those we include. And for people that society has systemically learned to unhear, unsee, and unknow (or to only hear, see, and know in particular pregiven narratives), creating spaces where different narratives can be understood is not a given. And sometimes it is going to require getting the language right. But let us look at May's other point, that we shouldn't call out people whose politics are in the right place, maybe the dialectic is not one of either calling people out or letting things go.

A comment on the original blog post by Cogburn written by "anonladygrad" suggested an article, "Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable," written by Ngọc Loan Trần and published on Black Girl Dangerous. They write:

Because when I see problematic behavior from someone who is connected to me, who is committed to some of the things I am, I want to believe that it’s possible for us to move through and beyond whatever mistake was committed. I picture “calling in” as a practice of pulling folks back in who have strayed from us. It means extending to ourselves the reality that we will and do fuck up, we stray and there will always be a chance for us to return. Calling in as a practice of loving each other enough to allow each other to make mistakes; a practice of loving ourselves enough to know that what we’re trying to do here is a radical unlearning of everything we have been configured to believe is normal. And yes, we have been configured to believe it’s normal to punish each other and ourselves without a way to reconcile hurt. We support this belief by shutting each other out, partly through justified anger and often because some parts of us believe that we can do this without people who fuck up. But, holy shit! We fuck up. All of us. 

I fully admit to having been called out (and called in) on all sorts of statements, beliefs, and behaviors in my life. Sometimes it has been over stuff that I still passionately think I was right on. Sometimes it has been stuff that was incredibly awful for to have said or done, and I have mumbled excuses and apologies, and felt more than a little shame. And sometimes, I have been called out on stuff, and been sure of my rightness, that I got very defensive. And it wasn't until later that I realized I was in the wrong. In general, I have been gifted with friends, colleagues, and mentors who have been incredibly generous to me. They have understood my mistakes, and have often called me in. They have put up with my bullshit, or confusion, or the sort of epistemic parallax that does not let me understand the weight and scars of certain histories, words, and knowledges. And because they are truly generous, they didn't just put up with, but worked to change me, and in so doing gave me the sort of joy and satisfaction that comes from difference and becoming otherwise. They didn't have to do that. Far too often we expect the most marginalized members of our society to have to constantly explain and justify the necessity of their existence. And I hope we can fumble together, to build different worlds, different futures, and different narratives.

Feminist, Toxic, Vampiric, Killjoys to the Rescue: Resilience and Perception in James and Ahmed

Two blog posts today that work well together, and I suggest you read them.

The first, from Robin James, "Toxic: on race, gender, and resilient labor on social media." (h/t Peter). The excerpts I am going to post from James and Ahmed do not excuse from actually reading the original posts. Okay, as Robin James argues in her post:

A similar claim has been (in)famously leveled against “feminism,” especially “intersectional feminism”: it vampirically drains the lifeblood of the progressive, radical left. [...] Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction. [...] In both essays, feminists, especially feminists of color, are tasked with manufacturing the raw materials–negative affects like guilt or anxiety–on which “good” subjects labor, and, through that labor, generate human capital (e.g., radical cred, moral/political goodness, proper femininity, and so on). They bring us down so we can then perform our upworthiness for liking, favoriting, clicking, sharing audiences. Resilience is part of the means of production, and the “toxicity” of WOC feminists is the first step in this supply chain. Black women do the labor of generating the toxicity that then becomes the raw material upon which white women work; white women do the affective/emotional labor of overcoming, which then translates into tangible employment (writing gigs, etc.). [...] Social media is, at least in part, an affective economy of upworthiness. Resilience generates both human capital and capital capital (often in the form of data that’s sold to third parties or targeted advertising). It distributes gendered, racialized labor in very specific ways: white women overcome the damage produced by women of color, thus cleansing teh interwebs and making it a sparkly, feel-good place for everyone else…just like moms always do. This also produces a hell of a lot of money and privilege for white women and MRWaSP capitalism in general.

Now, as Sara Ahmed argues in "The Problems of Perception":

When you expose a problem you pose a problem.  I have been thinking more about this problem of how you become the problem because you notice a problem. For example, when you make an observation in public that all the speakers for an event are all white men, or all but one, or all the citations in an academic paper are to all white men, or all but a few, these observations are often treated as the problem with how you are perceiving things (you must be perceiving things!). A rebuttal is often implied: these are the speakers or writers would just happen to be there; they happen to be white men but to make this about that would be to assume that they are here because of that. And so: by describing a gathering as ‘white men,’ we are then assumed to be imposing certain categories on bodies, reducing the heterogeneity of an event; solidifying through our own description something that is fluid. For example: I pointed out recently on Facebook that all the speakers for a Gender Studies conference were white. Someone replied that my statement did not recognise the diversity of the speakers. When perceiving whiteness is a way of not perceiving diversity, then diversity became a way of not perceiving whiteness. [...]  When you perceive a problem your perception becomes the problem. [...]  This is why the feminist killjoy remains such a negative stereotype (we affirm her given this negation): as if feminists are speaking out because they are miserable; or if feminism is an obstacle to our own happiness, such that she is what is in the way (feminism: how women get in the way of ourselves). It is implied that you would become well-adjusted if you could just adjust yourself to this world. Smile! The task then becomes self-modification: you have to learn not to perceive a problem; you have to let things fall. [...]  What organizes this shock is the presumption that the perception is problem: that the perception is wrong. According to this logic, people have the ‘wrong perception’ when they see the organization as white, elite, male, old-fashioned. In other words, what is behind the shock is a belief that that the organization does not have these qualities: that whiteness is ‘in the image’ rather than ‘in the organization’ as an effect of what it does. Note the phrase ‘issues of perception’ again suggests that perception is the issue. Diversity becomes about changing perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the whiteness of organizations.  I think the final comment ‘there are issues of perception amongst certain communities, which are stopping them from reaching us’ is particularly suggestive. The implication is thus that the institution does not reach such communities – that it does not include them – because they perceive the institution as excluding them. The problem of whiteness is implicitly described here not so much as an institutional problem but as a problem with those who are not included by it.

Again, read both the blog posts in the full, but I am sure you see how these are working together. In both cases we see an explanation about how those who bring up problems are seen as the one who actually have the problems. Somehow the problems do not inhere in the institutions, the movements, the organizations and organizers (never the organizers!), but rather they inhere in those who notice and bring up the problems. At the same time, those who oppose 'the negativity' get to adopt an attitude. They get to be the ones who are free of ressentiment, they are the ones who get to be cool, who get to truly radical (or liberal, where that is not a dirty word). And I am in no way saying I am free of ressentiment, or cool, or truly radical. Indeed, are any of us? Are these the things you get to individually? And at the same time, you get such good scapegoats out those killjoys. Is the fact that you are exhausted because the movement/revolution/institution did not succeed in the way you would like? Well, that failure is because the killjoys are creating stumbling blocks. They aren't forwarding their criticisms privately or appropriately (constructively?). I have written about this before in vegan movements. The failure of the movements become excuses for purging ourselves of those who are not true believers. Who are not thoroughly in revolutionary solidarity and/or universal sisterhood/fraternity. And suddenly those vampiric killjoys become the reason that our will/desire is not strong enough to reshape the world. Is there really anything more fucked up than thinking it is women and/or people of color who are keeping you from having your revolution?

EDIT: I meant to link to this as well, but I just forgot. In addition to Robin James on resilience, you should make sure to to check out this post from Jeremy Crampton, which includes several citations and commentary. Very helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

The Right of Obscurity Must Be Respected

Chela Sandoval, in her book Methodology of the Oppressed, points out that the problems of the postmodern world--problems of fragmented identities and diffusions of self--are problems that have been confronted and theorized by Women of Color. I think about this as I read about California having passed a bill that will give minors the right to delete, or erase, their online history. This seems to be a small step of our own, American version of the le droit à l’oubli, the right to oblivion or the right to be forgotten. But just like fragmented identities were already being theorized by Women of Color, the right to oblivion already has a theoretical history in minoritarian thought.

Perhaps ground zero for such thinking is Edouard Glissant's amazing book, The Poetics of Relation. In that book, Glissant develops the theoretical concept that you can find throughout his work, namely, the right of opacity. The right of opacity is more foundational than the right to difference (because, indeed, the right of opacity is foundational for the right of difference). As Glissant makes clear, the right of opacity is first a right against the slave master's push of transparency against the enslaved people. It is also a right of the dominated not to replicate the colonial people's displays of ostentation. But the right of opacity goes further. It becomes a right of language and culture, and it goes further still. The right of opacity becomes the right not the be understood, not to be reduced to epistemic violence of comprehension and judgement. Or, colloquially, "You don't know me; don't pretend that you know me".
As Saidiya Hartman furthers this analysis, and provides the title of this blog post, in Scenes of Subjection:

Rather than consider black song as an index or mirror of the slave condition, this examination emphasizes the significance of opacity as precisely that which enables something in excess of the orchestrated amusements of the enslaved and which similarly troubles distinctions between joy and sorrow and toil and leisure. For this opacity, the subterranean and veiled character of slave song must be considered in relation to the dominative imposition of transparency and the degrading hypervisibility of the enslaved, and therefore, by the same token, such concealment should be considered a form of resistance. Furthermore, as Glissant advises, "the attempt to approach a reality so hidden from view cannot be organized in terms of a series of clarifications. " The right to obscurity must be respected, for the "accumulated hurt," the "rasping whispers deep in the throat," the wild notes, and the screams lodged deep within confound simple expression and, likewise, withstand the prevailing ascriptions of black enjoyment. (p. 36)

Fred Moten, in an interview published in his B. Jenkins, riffs on Hartman's analysis:

In the end, however, as Saidiya Hartman says, “the right to obscurity must be respected.” This is a political imperative that infuses the unfinished project of emancipation as well as any number of other transitions or crossings in progress. It corresponds to the need for the fugitive, the immigrant and the new (and newly constrained) citizen to hold something in reserve, to keep a secret. The history of Afro-diasporic art, especially music, is, it seems to me, the history of the keeping of this secret even in the midst of its intensely public and highly commodified dissemination. These secrets are relayed and miscommunicated, misheard, and overheard, often all at once, in words and in the bending of words, in whispers and screams, in broken sentences, in the names of people you’ll never know. (p. 105). 

The issues that we presently face ourselves with, surveillance in the age of the internet of things, NSA spying and the secret holders that believe only they have a right to secrets, are not fundamentally new issues, but rather new manifestations of very old issues. The right to opacity is, without a doubt, a right to see a stranger as a stranger, and the right to have secrets (the right to all be Geheimnisträger). Thus, Hartman quotes Paul Gilroy, from his The Black Atlantic, there exists "politics ... on a lower frequency." This politics exists because words will never be enough to "communicate its unsayable claims to truth" (p. 37).

Therefore, as James C. Scott and Robin D. G. Kelley have shown, there exists an infra-politics of hidden transcripts.  As Maria Lugones has argued, these infra-politics should be understood in opposition to the Habermasian notion of the counter-public. The politics and ethics of these unsayable claims to truth cannot be understood through more transparency, publicity, and comprehension. Rather, we have to conceive of a networked world of relations that take seriously the right of opacity.

Before I go
I’m supposed to get a last wish:
Generous reader
burn this book
It’s not at all what I wanted to say
Though it was written in blood
It’s not what I wanted to say.
No lot could be sadder than mine
I was defeated by my own shadow:
My words took vengeance on me.
Forgive me, reader, good reader
If I cannot leave you
With a warm embrace, I leave you
With a forced and sad smile.
Maybe that’s all I am
But listen to my last word:
I take back everything I’ve said.
With the greatest bitterness in the world
I take back everything I’ve said.
- Nicanor Parra

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.

Interview with David Graeber about Occupy Wall Street

Here. What makes this interesting is first of all, it is simply a smart interview. But more importantly, I have been impressed by the ways that the Occupy Wall Street movement is beginning to garner some serious attention by more mainstream lefty policy wonkish blogs. I am curious what will ultimately come of this cross-pollination. Maybe nothing. However, I really am interested and committed to things like good policy. But I am also a radical, and I tend to find there is a natural tension between those two poles. I think that ultimately the liberal desire to turn radical movements into simple policy disagreements will probably mean that long-term the radical prospects of the Occupy Wall Street movement will be unthinkable for these blogs, but it is still interesting.

Coda on my last post on biopolitics in Pollan and Haraway

My last post was rather harsh in many ways. And I stand beside the analysis, completely. However, it is sometimes hard advancing critiques against people who are partial allies. Donna Haraway obviously feels a great deal of emotional confusion over her flesh eating practices. What is odd to me is that she feels we all should feel equally confused, and call that confusion political practice. I have trouble buying that.
Michael Pollan's justifications for meat eating rubs me to wrong way because he not only is trying to make meat-eating practices ethically okay, but also ethically superior to vegan/vegetarian practices. That requires some obvious push back. Also, I have frequently meet people who are former vegetarians and cite Pollan's work as the intellectual justification for their switching to flesh eating. That also bothers me. However, Pollan's work has re-invigorated arguments over the treatment of animals, government subsidies towards CAFOs, et cetera. And just as there are former vegetarians who now eat flesh, there are people who try to avoid factory farmed animal flesh who wouldn't otherwise. And I believe that the factory farm is a unique evil (even if that word is out of fashion). So, if there are people who wish to fight the factory farm I welcome them, even if I don't understand or share Haraway's moral confusion or Pollan's strange psycho-sexual desire for flesh eating*. I recognize that in the hard work of coalition building, they are allies more than opponents.

* I know that calling Pollan's arguments psycho-sexual may seem a little off, but I present this strange paragraph from "An Animal's Place"

Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.'' We might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere ''recreational preference.'' Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.