No more OOPs?!

Graham Harman has purposed a new name for what he does, Ontography. Nice, but it might means I have to stop making my OOPs joke. Promise me, if you ever create an official group for what you do, to call it the object-oriented philosophy society, or OOPS, okay?

I am about to catch a plane, but there are at least two more blog posts I want to do (I'm telling you all about it so you can harass me to post them if you are interested).

One is that I read Shaviro's little research project, and it reminded me of the work he was doing about a year ago arguing that Hardt and Negri inverts Marx's metaphorics in regards to the monstrous. In the time since he wrote those posts, I've read a very interesting essay by Negri, "The Political Monster," that specifically addresses that charge.

The other post is exploring a bit of my problems with Heidegger, particularly with my problem of Heidegger's notion of philosophy, and his notion of being and doing philosophy. These things, more than any philosophical argument themselves, has been what has repulsed me from Heidegger.

See you all later.

PS on Marx and ecology

In my last post I quoted Netz accusing Marx of not understanding ecology, and therefore of not understanding history. I want to clarify that I don't think that Netz is saying that Marx never attempted to think ecology, merely that his thoughts were at least not enough, and at worst incorrect. As most know, Marx certainly advanced a thought of ecology in his concept of Stoffwechsel (metabolism). While Netz doesn't talk about this concept at all (and, in general, doesn't spend a lot of the book talking about Marx), I would certainly agree that Marx's notion of Stoffwechsel remains far too anthropocentric. Both in his earlier works (principally the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) and his later works (principally in Capital, vols one and three). I am not saying that from Marx we cannot work a strong thought of ecology (and therefore history). I am saying that the concept, in Marx, remains impossibly anthropocentric and woefully insufficient.

The Camp as the Nomos of the Earth.

I frequently want to write reviews of the books I have read on my blog, but almost never do. This post began as a much overdue review of Reviel Netz's book Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. This is simply the best book I've read in a long time (and like most of you, I read a lot of books in a short time). But as I read the book, and as I was trying to think how to review the book, I kept asking the same question: Why isn't this what Agamben wrote instead of Homo Sacer? Answering this question is fairly short, when I figured it out, but framing the question is slightly longer.

Netz's book (which I have to thank my brother for suggesting) is without a doubt a labor of love. He is a historian, trained in the classics, who writes about Archimedes. I don't think Archimedes was mentioned once in Barbed Wire. Barbed Wire's form is fairly simple, in a way. It is designed to give us a history (one might say a non-anthropocentric materialist genealogy, but Netz certainly would never say a phrase like that!) of barbed wire through its major historical usages: the American midwest, military applications during WWI, and the concentration camp. In this form, it resembles Olivier Razac's much shorter, Barbed Wire: A Political History. More overly, the book is concerned with a typology of control. Anything that moves is an actor in Netz's history, and anything that causes friction, changes motion, or stops motion is also an actor. This is, in short, what Netz refers to as ecology. This is what allows Netz to say that "Marxism was lacking not merely in the understanding of agriculture but in the understanding of ecology and therefore of history itself" (p. 180). Netz obviously means something strange both by the term ecology (usually not understand as history) and history (usually not understood as ecology). Netz work demands this thought of ecology and history together.
Netz's history of barbed wire is therefore firmly non-anthropocentric, being as concerned as about animals as about humans. And his understanding of interactions taking into account the possibility of interactions completely outside of the human sphere. It is also an amazing genealogy of the concentration camp (the camp being the not just the end of the book, but the fulfillment of the argument of the book). In exploring the camp Netz spends time looking at the materials used to make camps, the colonial history of the camp, the history of the prisoner of war camp and the 'enemy civilian' camp, the Gulag. The interactions of things like railroads, barbed wire fencing, machine guns, tractors and tanks, and more. Several diagrams of various Nazi death camps and gulags and early american midwest farms were supplied. And though Netz never mentions Agamben (and quite possibly might not have read Homo Sacer), in some ways his book is proving the argument that in modernity the camp is the nomos of the earth. Nomos here means something quite closer to what Schmitt means by the term then how it was ever deployed by Agamben: nomos as the concrete spatial organization of society. In Netz, we have a material understanding of how "[i]n the premodern world, control reached to points and to lines connecting them; there simply was not enough prevention of motion to go around to cover an entire plane and bring it all under control. In the modern world, this changed, and the typology was inverted: control reached everywhere, and only isolated points were left for motion, that is, not controlled from a center" (pp. 229-230, italics in original). In Agamben, we are given nothing like this. In reading Homo Sacer one would almost feel as if the Lager appeared out of nowhere (or if appeared out of anywhere, out of Roman jurisprudence and Greek etymologies). How, in Agamben, can the Lager both the most important and central reality of the present global catastrophe and at the same time have the reality of the Lager almost never talked about? This is what I meant by my question earlier, that started this post.
This post, in many ways inverts the popular criticism against Agamben's treatment of the camp. In you have read Durantaye's excellent book Giorgio Agamben (another book I have been meaning to write a review of) then you are well aware that the common criticism is that Agamben abstracts from the camp too much. He doesn't spend enough time following the specific lives of those in the camp. The camp is treated, in Agamben's terminology, as a paradigm (like the panopticon in a paradigm for Foucault). This leads Durantaye's claim that the English translation of Homo Sacer has the perfect cover, a diagram of Auschwitz. I would disagree, because a diagram of Auschwitz matters not at all for Agamben. It is not that a history of the Lager is never done, but rather that the history remains an intellectual history. It remains a history of law, theology, and philosophy. Agamben is concerned, not with a Schmittian notion of nomos as spatial organization, but with the camp as a paradigm of the legal and ontological present moment.

Which subtitle should I use?

Still doing my pre-move prep in finding a place, etc. There are really few places more dissimilar than Ithaca, NY and Boca Raton, FL. So, sorry I haven't been posting or responding to comments like I should, I will fix that, I promise.

In the meanwhile, I am still trying to title this paper/chapter. I still haven't figured out if I should use Becoming-vegetarian or becoming-vegan (another post on all of that should be coming soon), so below I will write becoming-veg*n, which for now will stand in for both terms. I don't plan on keeping that phrase (unless you think I should, sound off in comments). Right now I am more curious about which subtitle you like better:

Becoming-veg*n: The euporia of eating well.

OR

Becoming-veg*n, Or, Why I eat so well.

Being gone, and a couple of links.

I had meant to be able to post more from the interesting comments from my becoming-vegan/vegetarian post, but that is going to have to be put on hold for a couple of days. I'm traveling to Boca Rotan, FL to find a place there to move to (if anyone has any suggestions of what I should do there or where I should eat, let me know). I should have internet at the hotel room, so some blogging should still get done. However, between searching for a place, and actually moving later this month, I am going to be gone a lot. If anyone is interested in posting blogs from here, you should drop me an email. I don't keep track of hits, and have no clue how many people actually read my blog. But, if you are interested (or just want to drop me an email anyway) thescu[at]gmail[dot]com

Before I forget, Levi made a post responding to my earlier post. Also, Greg has a post, responding to my post. Both of their posts are great, so if you haven't already, check them out.

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?

Species Trouble

First, Greg, over at his new digs Animal Obscura (make sure to add it to your RSS feed/blogroll/whatever if you haven't already) makes an interesting post, that in fine Greg style manages to move from some thoughts about the movie Rachel Getting Married to Agamben to the proper way to historicize vegetarian/vegan politics. It is the last part of his argument I want to engage with this post.

To quote Greg:

That is: removed from the class of animals where carnivorism might make sense for humans qua their animality.

This is in no way an apology for blue collar workers, or workers of any stripe, rolling out the hot dog and hamburger parade (this is the 4th of July). I am saying that if we can imagine a condition in which humans are on par with real animals, then we can imagine, as a subset of that, a social condition in which eating meat makes sense. The condition of humans among the rest of the animals is the starting point from which a non-negative ethos toward animals must emerge. Reconciling this with sumptuary politics is not impossible but it does require a proper understanding of historical method.

This is not an unfamiliar argument, that if we are to destroy the anthropocentrism that justifies so much violence against animals we might have to allow humans to eat flesh because many animals eat flesh. I clearly don't agree with this position, and I believe this disagreement has some broader theoretical implications I want to explore now.
Species may be real, but they are not actual. That is to say the construction of species has obvious material consequences, and the policing of the boundaries of species are all very real. Species are therefore real, the effects of this reality is felt from animals in factory farms to the transatlantic slave trade, but this reality is virtual. That is to say, it doesn't exist even if it is real. As Craig likes to point out "According to Grene and Depew's textbook on the philosophy of biology, there are at least twenty-three distinct concepts of species presently being discussed in the literature." So, just as Derrida in The Animal that Therefore I Am points out that the problem with a term like the animal because it makes it seem as if all animals exist generically on one side, and that humans exist completely outside of the animal, arguments that privilege the coherence of "species" are certainly problematic. The result is that critical animal scholars are put in a similar position of earlier critical gender and race theorists (hence, the title of this post).
We cannot reduce difference. We cannot simply reject the constructed nature of species in return for some sort of generic animal. There are a wide variety of differences and commonalities among all animals (humans certainly included) and difference cannot be subordinated. As always we have to struggle for an egalitarianism that also doesn't reduce difference. So, while it is true that some animals eat flesh, it is also true that some animals don't. It is also true that some animals, like the gorilla, are fairly vegetarian (and I mean that word, not herbivore). There is obviously among other animals a strong degree of difference when it comes to flesh eating, and that certainly does not mean that a rejection of anthropocentrism means we have to act like certain other animals and eat flesh. I think that path follows a certain reductionism that we also need to struggle to avoid.