Katerina Kolozova "Solidarity in Suffering with the Non-Human"

Here is a recording of Katerina Kolozova's talk "Solidarity in Suffering with the Non-Human," delivered at D.U.S.T. on June 24th, 2013. In it, Kolozova uses the real of suffering as the basis of creating a non-colonizing and non-identarian universality, and that universality extends to the non-human. She engages the work of Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and François Laruelle in order to advance her argument. It's really good, and I highly suggest you take the time to listen to it.

One other note, I have not read much of Laruelle. And, I am sure many of you remember claims made a few years ago that there was really no there there with Laruelle. While I have not really read Laruelle, we are seeing an amazing production of works by people who have taken Laruelle seriously. If you look at Kolozova's new book, Cut of the Real, John Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy, and Anthony Paul Smith's A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature you see smart and groundbreaking work being thought seriously through, alongside, and against Laruelle. Also, interesting, all three of the people I just mentioned take seriously the non-human as well (including the non-human animal).

Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler

Recently, I and Joshua Miller got into a discussion over the importance of Judith Butler over at his blog (bonus, see what books and essays actually changed his mind about something. Which is a great meme that I would like to see reproduced). One of the points he made was that he felt that much of what Judith Butler has been arguing about with precarity is secondary literature on Agamben. I don't think so, and I think this is a great opportunity to clarify the relationship of these two thinkers.

I think it is pretty clear that Agamben has long been an influence on Butler's work. However, I doubt you could call her work on precariousness as secondary literature. First of all, it has none of the form of that (no long textual exegesis, etc.). But the more substantial point is to distinguish Agamben's notion of bare life from Butler's notion of precarious life.

Much of Giorgio Agamben's work is centered around identifying and explicating a series of metaphysical machines that produce modernity. Thus, we have the state of exception in law, we have the anthropological machine in anthropology broadly construed, and we have the providential machine in theology. All of these machines operate in zones of indecision, and all of these machines are fundamentally empty, kenotic. What this means is that each iteration of the decisions of these machines are completely up for grabs each time. There is always a chance that what I do is interpreted as criminal even if it was interpreted as legal last time. The mundane example here is a speeding ticket, where one cop might decide that going 12 over is legal, and the next time the cop might decide it is illegal. The importance is that the machines produce their own justifications in these zones of indecision as if by fiat. Therefore, we all potentially can be seen as killable, we all exist within the nomos of the camp. This is what is meant by bare life-- life that is fundamentally confused between bios and zoe. [1]

Judith Butler's work on precarious life is very different from Agamben's work on bare life. First of all, there are not these monolithic metaphysical machines populating the work of Butler. Partially this is because Butler is far more interested in the nuances of how certain lives are considered livable and mournable than Agamben is. For Agamben, we all live in the nomos of the camp, and therefore you see Agamben taking up the idea of the archeologist from Foucault, and not the genealogist. To take up the mundane example from before of speeding, you would not see in Agamben any detailed discussions of the types of car your drive, or your race, or the part of town you are in as mattering for how the cop determines to pull you over or not. His metaphysical machines never seem weighted down by history, and their decisions never seem overdetermined by identity. For Butler, the frames by which we determine what gets to count as human, what gets to count as livable life, are all explored with a remarkable specificity. Gender, race, sexuality, ability, etc. all seem to play key roles in figuring out the protocols by which we determine which lives we mourn, and which lives we don't mourn.
The more important distinction, however, is that Butler does not seem to believe in bare life. As she has argued, the tasks you do to reproduce your biological existence (eating and finding food, creating shelter, etc) are all politically and culturally relevant. These are never the tasks of zoe, or of mere existence. This is why Butler talks of the bios of the non-human animal, an insight that I doubt you would ever see from Agamben. Thus, for Butler precariousness is not a condition to be overcome or critiqued, in the way that bare life would be for Agamben, rather precariousness becomes a place to think and organize from. Agamben is never a thinker of vulnerability as enabling, as productive. So, precariousness is not an ahistorical and legal condition, and it is actually something foundational to ontology, ethics, and sociality as such.



[1] I have so far treated Agamben's earlier work in Homo Sacer and State of Exception as being consistent with his later work in The Kingdom and the Glory. I have done so for some conceptual ease. However, these various works exist in some tension. Peter Gratton makes this argument frequently on his blog, and will be part of his chapter on Agamben in his The State of Sovereignty (SUNY Sometime).

Butler, animals, mourning

I'm working on this paper (with another academic blogger, more on this as appropriate) about Judith Butler and her anti-anthropocentrism. And it caused me to try and remember when I got interested in thinking Butler's work alongside the question of the animal. Because, her explicit comments about animals seems to have occurred mostly after I started looking toward her work. And I remember it started because of mourning. Butler has long insisted that questions over who gets to mourn whom is at the heart of the political, at the heart of social intelligibility. This makes a lot of sense, historically, because of issues of mourning were very much at the heart of queer identity and the AIDS crisis. I still remember a playwright that I knew in high school, who had a moving one man show about the death of his partner. The show centered around less the death itself, but all the problems of mourning his lover. From institutional problems of not being family and being unrecognized to stay after visiting hours, to a family that refused to recognize his relationship. He therefore was constantly grieving, but denied all the socially recognizable paths and protocols to mourn. And at the funeral, his relationship to his partner was completely whitewashed over, as if it never existed. Mourning is a way of making connections, of establishing kinship, and of recognizing the vulnerability and finitude of the other. The protocols that refuse to recognize our mourning refuse all sorts of tangible, social intelligibility. This brings me to animals.
Sometimes we are allowed to mourn animals. Particularly (perhaps even only) pets. Sometimes we are allowed to mourn species that go extinct. But to mourn particular nameless animals, to mourn the animals who cut flesh is on display, to mourn the lobster with the cracked and bound claws in the tank, to mourn the dead animals on the side of the road. To mourn, in other words, the pain and death we dish out, is something that profoundly refused. It is one thing, controversial enough, to become a vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons, to fight for animal welfare and rights. People don't like it, but to some degree it is understood. But to be in the grocery store and to suddenly be overcome by the reality that exists behind the animal flesh on display, to be able to see their muscles and fat and bones for what they are: the cut up pieces of a being, and to mourn. To tear up, or have trouble functioning, to feel that moment of utter suffocation of being in a hall of death is completely unintelligible. Most people's response is that you need therapy, or you can't be sincere. And so most of us work hard to not mourn. We do it to function, to get by. But that means for most of us, even those of us who are absolutely committed to fighting for animals, have to also and regularly engage in disavowal. Butler's insistence that mourning is political, and it is bound up in a matrix of norms, subjectivity, and relationships is important. I am glad that her work has moved to an increasingly anti-anthropocentric place, and that she understands that at the heart of grief is also the question of what gets to count as a life, or an intelligible life.

A certain fragility of the infinite

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while knows that questions of vulnerability, finitude, and precariousness are returning philosophical questions for my work. (See here and here for a couple of examples). Several other thinkers have used the idea of finitude to think us outside of an anthropocentric ontology, ethics, and politics (see Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Cora Diamond, and Cary Wolfe). Now, in one sense of this thinking vulnerability is just a fact, an almost unfortunate fact, that has to be taken into account. In more positive accounts, Butler's for one, precariousness isn't just a passive fact demanding to be taken into account. Rather, the reality of shared vulnerability produces important facts-- like sociality and plasticity, like the common and contingency. (As a side note here, when Wolfe writes on vulnerability he focuses on Diamond and Derrida, which is certainly interesting. But I wish in that chapter he had spent more time with Luhmann, I think a strong second-order systems account of vulnerability would be wonderful).
So, on the one hand, finitude is simply fragility, and as such needs to be paid attention to in the same way we stamp "Caution: Fragile" on boxes. On the other hand, finitude isn't fragility or simply fragility, it is also a productive power upon which all sorts of adaptive strengths come from (indeed, adaptation and evolution are entirely bound up with the notions of finitude). What happens, though, when we start flipping this around? In a real way, it is hard to say, because life seems to need some measure of death, but there are several literary resources at hand. For example, the vampire here enters the scene as a being defined by certain finitudes (the Hunger, fear of sunlight, etc), but also a belief that one day, the might not die. Many authors seem unsure if the great age of vampires make them powerfully devious, or if their very immortality makes them more predictable, more rigid. I started thinking about this while reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (don't hate). Butcher himself can't seem to make up his mind, attributing both realities to his vampires depending on what he wants done in his text. In another example, we can think of the Highlander tv series. In it Duncan MacLeod is always is always running into other immortals that he has known through his 400 plus years of existence. And almost all of them seem like pure trauma cases from psychoanalysis, constantly repeating the same traits again and again throughout the centuries. Immortals seem to almost never change, and all of them seem completely predictable. I am actually curious what other vampire stories and stories of immortal beings (including gods) have come down on in this idea of if immortality tends to produce a certain asociality and rigidity. A certain fragility of the infinite.

Animal Capacity and Vulnerability.

First an announcement: The interblog reading group on Bennett's Vibrant Matter is putting together the finishing touches on the schedule, but the key thing is that the discussion is likely to begin the week of the 22nd-29th. So, if you want to be following along at home --and you know you want to-- that should give you enough time to pick up the book. Now on to the post:

When it is time to write about the changing attitudes towards animals that is emerging, I think special attention will have to be paid to youtube (and online videos in general). It is one thing for science to talk about the capacities of certain animals, and even for you to know about it, and another to see an elephant painting a picture. As a matter of fact, watching youtube videos of animals have even become a methodology of scientific research (and oh yeah, some animals can dance to a beat as well). In short, what the constant stream of animal videos are doing is affectively proving to many us that everything we thought we knew about what divided the human from all other living beings-- THE animal-- is wrong. We are learning that the multiplicity of other animals are both more alien from us and more alike to us than we had originally believed. That is why it is always so interesting when we find out beavers have created a structure big enough to be seen from space or that chimps make and use tools (sorry Stiegler), and there is of course an youtube video of those chimps as well. All of this goes to support what Derrida claimed in Rogues, namely:

Although I cannot demonstrate this here, I believe– and the stakes are becoming more and more urgent– that none of the conventionally accepted limits between the so-called human living being and the so-called animal one, none of the oppositions, none of the supposedly linear and indivisible boundaries, resist a rational deconstruction– whether we are talking about language, culture, social symbolic networks, technicity or work, even the relationship to death and to mourning, and even the prohibition against or avoidance of incest– so many ‘capacities’ of which the ‘animal’ (a general singular noun!) is said so dogmatically to be bereft, impoverished (p. 151).

What is at stake here is what Derrida has frequently called the 'propers of Man', those capacities that Man believed she alone had access to. It is a system of anthropocentrism that is destabilized by all of these animal capacities. This focus on animal capacity or generally anti-anthropocentric capacity, however, seems to contradict another important theoretical development in the political, ethical, and ontological domains of animal philosophy: namely the focused on a shared sense of vulnerability.

This notion of vulnerability is found in thinkers as similar yet diverse as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, and to some degree in Jean-Luc Nancy and his notion of exposure. It is a concept I have found particularly useful (you can see some of my public work on this here and here), and I am sure many other young scholars have as well. The concept of vulnerability seeks to reorient our philosophical commitments away from what we can do and more to our sense of precariousness or finitude (as an aside, in the back of my mind has been the thought that thinking vulnerability alongside Bruno Latour's notion of trial by strength, but it hasn't gone anywhere yet). Therefore, a focus on animal capacity seems to contradict (or at least is rendered to a mere curiosity by) the commitment to vulnerability. Indeed, Cora Diamond has remarked that the moral basis of vegetarianism is endangered by arguments that seek to confuse the boundary lines between the human animal and the non-human animal.

Now, I haven't been able to work through this seeming contradiction, but my gut impulse is that it isn't a contradiction, of if it is, it is a necessary one. Regardless, my thoughts are that both projects are important, and it is only by being brought in explicit dialogue with each other that either stand a chance of being more successfully forwarded.

Update:
Peter definitely puts my aside on Latour far more clearly than I did:

He has an aside on Latour and I think it’s a telling remark: the “trials of strength” aspect really is all about vulnerability, not a hyperconfident will to power.

Vulnerability and animal experimentation.

(It has been suggested to me that I post a disclaimer at the top. This post involves graphic sad things. Really messed up and sad. I would put it under a fold, but I've never bothered to figure that one out, before).

Recently Leigh Johnson, whose work on 'weak humanism' is certainly interesting and I've taken it up before here, had an interesting post on the genetic science behind how what has traditionally been taken as vulnerability is really plasticity. This obviously dovetails in nicely with how I've dealing with vulnerability in my own work, and also how Johnson has been dealing with the concept in her own work on weak humanism. I suggest you read her post here, and I suggest you read the article here.
A major part of the article has to deal with a researcher on rhesus monkeys, Stephen Suomi, who was a student of Harry Harlow. This is what the article says about Harlow:

Suomi learned his trade as a student and protégé of, and then a direct successor to, Harry Harlow, one of the 20th century’s most influential and problematic behavioral scientists. When Harlow started his work, in the 1930s, the study of childhood development was dominated by a ruthlessly mechanistic behavioralism. The movement’s leading figure in the United States, John Watson, considered mother love “a dangerous instrument.” He urged parents to leave crying babies alone; to never hold them to give pleasure or comfort; and to kiss them only occasionally, on the forehead. Mothers were important less for their affection than as conditioners of behavior.

With a series of ingenious but sometimes disturbingly cruel experiments on monkeys, Harlow broke with this cool behavioralism. His most famous experiment showed that baby rhesus monkeys, raised alone or with same-age peers, preferred a foodless but fuzzy terrycloth surrogate “mother” over a wire-mesh version that freely dispensed meals. He showed that these infants desperately wanted to bond, and that depriving them of physical, emotional, and social attachment could create a near-paralyzing dysfunction. In the 1950s this work provided critical evidence for the emerging theory of infant attachment: a theory that, with its emphasis on rich, warm parent-child bonds and happy early experiences, still dominates child-development theory (and parenting books) today.

Now, I'm glad that the article at least hints at what Harlow (and indeed Suomi) did. But it mostly glosses over what happened. Let me explain (and before we go any further, I am pulling most of this information from Peter Singer's Animal Liberation. He, in turn, pulls most of this information directly from scientific periodicals. Whatever you think of his philosophy, the information seems fairly legit and straightforward to me). Now, what the article describes certainly does represent the early work of Harlow, but his work didn't stop there. Let me quote another phase of their work, in which they decided they need to construct 'monster mothers':

The first of these monsters was a cloth monkey mother who, upon schedule or demand, would eject high-pressure compressed air. It would blow the animal's skin practically off its body. What did the baby monkey do? It simply clung tighter and tighter to the mother, because a frightened infant clings to its mother at all costs. We did not achieve any pyschopathology (op. cit. p. 33, from the 3rd edition).

Harlow and Suomi go on to explain the series of tortures they devised to try and make an infant stop clinging to its mother. Monster mothers that would rock so violently "that the baby's head and teeth would rattle", another monster mother would forcibly spring the infant from itself, another one would suddenly shoot out brass spikes. In all cases the baby fought to stay with these monster mothers, and would come back as soon as, for example, the spikes went away. But for whatever reason this wasn't enough for Harlow and Suomi, they needed to produce actual monster mothers, not mechanical ones. So they took infant female monkeys, and raised them in utter isolation. However, this meant that these monkeys didn't develop natural sexual urges. What to do? Never fear, Harlow and Suomi came up with a solution, what they themselves referred to as a "rape rake." These mothers, raised in utter isolation, now forced to care for their offspring produced by rape.
And these are not the only experiments, I could tell you about the experiments they did whose goal was to "induce psychological death in rhesus monkeys." And while this work maybe, as the author of the original article contends, controversial, it has not kept Harlow from being considered a pioneer and his work being talked about in almost every introduction to psychology book. It hasn't produced strict standards against making sure this type of thing doesn't keep happening, indeed the students of Harlow have gone on to be the giants in their field (none so much as Suomi himself, who has received massive amounts of money from the NIH to build his own custom laboratories). So you can understand my double outrage when the article describes an experiment in which infant monkeys were ripped from their mothers and raised with other mothers (including abusive ones). Not only am I outraged by this experiment, I am also worried about what was done to produce these abusive mothers.
But this isn't just a litany of the horrors done by someone still revered and respected. This isn't just because I don't think you can read this article and have your only reaction be, "Wow, this science is so cool and interesting," and implore you to think about what is done to animals in such research. Actually, if you are still reading, I have a philosophical point about vulnerability I wanted to get to. But before I get there, we need a short detour.
A while ago I asked in a blog post if it was true that only humans could dance to a beat. Greg responded that it wasn't, and posted this NPR article in support of this claim. After talking about how we recently discovered humans were not the only creatures to dance to a beat, the article ends on this note:

And what would happen if a bird never heard any music for the first few years of its life? Could it still dance later on? That would be an interesting study, Fitch says, and one that could never be done on people.

And while the science might indeed be interesting, I think it takes a perverse outlook on life to discover that we are less unique than was thought, and immediately go to what strange and perhaps horrific experiments we can do on animals because of this discovery. The same thing happens in the Dobbs article. He writes:

But so far, among all primates, only rhesus monkeys and human beings seem to have multiple polymorphisms in genes heavily associated with behavior. “It’s just us and the rhesus,” Suomi says.

This is, of course, the dirty secret of animal experimentation. As Peter Singer pointed out, either animals are enough like us that this data actually does shed light on us, in which case how can you justify to do this, or the animals are not like us, which again begs the question how you can justify doing these experiments.
The basic premise of all behaviorist ethology is that animals are enough like us that studying them allows us to know something of ourselves. That within responses to fear, pleasure, pain, desires, cooperation and competition, that we can then derive understandings of how we all interact. It is upon the needs and drives and sensations of our embodied, vulnerable, finite, animal selves that both the psyche and sociality are based. Under the illusion of teaching us about our humanity, it is teaching us about our shared animality. Just as Ranciere demonstrated that at the same moment the master tries to prove their superiority by ordering the slave, really the master proves the fundamental equality of the two in that moment, the brutality and degradation of animal experimentation proves the fundamental equality of other animals and ourselves. The equality of flesh, of fear, and of fidelity.