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.

Speciesism: Some Introductory Thoughts

Speciesism is a term that I mostly stay away from in my own work (more for rhetorical reasons rather than philosophical reasons), however it seems to be, I hate to say misunderstood but certainly understood in a very limited way. This post is to unpack this concept a bit and see if it useful. This post is in many ways inspired by this video featuring Kathy Rudy and Tim Morton:



The term itself was coined by Richard Ryder in 1970 in a privately published pamphlet of the same name, but for the most part was popularized by Peter Singer in his Animal Liberation. Speciesism clearly is supposed to be analogous to terms like racism and sexism (indeed, Singer is upfront that the title of the book is to put the animal movement as the next rational movement after something like Women's Liberation). But in what way is the word analogous? Is it that we don't treat people of color well, and we don't treat women well, and we don't treat animals well, so they are all in the same boat? It's a bit more complicated than that.
For Singer racism, sexism, and speciesism is the irrational exclusion of beings from the moral community, or beings that we do not have to give equal consideration of interests (I grant those aren't exactly the same thing). Speciesism isn't just the philosophical insight of Animal Liberation, but underpins the entire rhetorical economy of the book. It was (and continuous) to be the case that those who are concerned for the well being of animals are seen as sentimental and irrational fools while the good rationalist isn't concerned for animals. Look toward the descriptions of Descartes and his followers awful vivisection of animals, or remember your Spinoza, "The law against killing animals is based more on empty superstitions and unmanly sentiment than sound reason." (E4p37s1) Almost all of Animal Liberation can be read as flipping this traditional economy, with irrationality being put on the side of not caring about animals and sound reason being firmly on the side of an equal consideration of interests for animals. Now, sentimentality being connected with women in our culture construct, Singer's original preface has been rightly and largely panned for some sexist and ageist representations (by the way, the most recent edition of Animal Liberation has removed all the prefaces, including the original one, except for the current preface). I also happen to think that sentiment and affect are philosophically more important than Singer does, but that's not the point right now.
So first speciesism serves a certain rhetorical capacity. Moreover, it seeks to displace species as an ethically essential category. Singer performs this function by arguing from marginal cases. In general we have a series of capacities that we claim all and only humans have, and that all other beings do not have. The problem, of course, is that is not really true. First of all, all sorts of animals have amazing capacities (and honestly, the evidence on this one has only gotten more true in the 35 years since Animal Liberation was first published), the ability for tool use, prohibitions on incest, language, denial and disavowal, the ability to paint and dance to a beat, etc. This something I sort of get into in this post. Not only are other animals really incredible, but there is also a great deal of diversity among humans (this tends to be the so-called marginal cases), and that means most capacities that we want to say are definite traits of humans tend to find humans who either never have that power, or at some point in their life have not had these capacities. So, part of what speciesism does is began to contest the boundaries of species. So, species may be real, but they are hardly given and coherent categories, they are not exactly actual. In this sense it might be better to think of species as something like sex. I think we would all agree that there are real and even important differences among the sexes. At the same time, the duality of sexes is kinda bunk. So, there are a multiplicity of sexes, but the coherency of sex, particularly a coherent duality, is a constructed reality (basically see anything by Anne Fausto-Sterling).
In this sense, the critique of speciesism isn't at all about erasing or ignoring differences or about propping up the human/other duality as is implied in the video above, but rather explodes difference. It is actually because of the level of difference (for example, the differences internal to the category of human, and the differences internal to the category of animal). It is actually because of the proliferation of difference that the critique of speciesism has any steam at all. Even in a thinker like Singer we have an explicit discussion of difference in the formulation of equal consideration of interests. This is not a formulation for equal treatment, for the same treatment and the same laws and all of that, but rather the unique interests of beings should be taken account of equally. Of course for many people who espouse a critique of speciesism there emerges certain questions of what allows one in a moral community, and sometimes a support of animal rights in a formal and legal sense. But none of those discussions are necessary to the critique of speciesism (and in this I have a bit of sympathy for Cary Wolfe, who gets criticized in the above video for supporting animal rights--when he doesn't-- and he gets attacked by certain analytic people for not supporting animal rights-- see The Death of the Animal). A critique of speciesism often creates a certain new community, a certain new commonality, but it doesn't do so through a reduction of difference, but rather through an explosion of difference that undermines the coherency of the very category of species. One last thing I want to deal with here is the relationship of speciesism and racism, because that is a central question in Kathy Rudy and Tim Morton's comments above.
There are any number of thinkers that argue that racism's formulation is fundamentally a question of determining who gets to be human. Think here of Foucault in "Society Must Be Defended", Balibar's work on racism, and the decolonial critique of humanism to be found in Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Sylvia Wynter, among others. Now, none of these thinkers push their work toward including non-humans into the ethical and political community. Indeed, many of them go on to argue for a new and true and real humanism after just a few pages before calling humanism a hitlerism. But for those of us who critique speciesism, I think you can see a certain conclusion. If racism is deeply and obviously tied to a boundary maintenance of this incoherent category of THE human, why try to fight racism by getting the category of the human right? Empirically, we've not been very good at figuring out what gets to count as human (for a more recent example, are Great Apes and dolphins human?). And if a being gets miscounted, placed as an animal or hybrid or pseudo-human or fully human when they are not, what is the big deal? Unless, of course, some of those are beings we are able to exploit, kill, and violate at will and whim. So, why don't we work toward getting rid of speciesism instead of creating a new humanism?
And that last point is a good one, I think. But I want to move away from things I may have argued in the past. It strikes me that racism can still function even in a world without speciesism. I think such racism would be weakened (and vice versa), but I don't think it is as easy as saying that racism is an extension of the logic of speciesism (or vice versa). These ideologies are certainly entwined, but I think it is important to see them as still discrete.