Critical Animal

Inactive until after the New Year

2011-12-27T10:24:00.003-05:00

Sorry for not posting this sooner, as I kept hoping I would be able to get more online. However, this blog should start posting new content shortly after the start of the new year. I hope everyone is having a great winter break.

Danielewski's animal turn

2011-12-16T13:02:00.000-05:00

During a recent, and truly epic bout of procrastination/writers block, I decided to try to figure out what the writer Mark Z. Danielewski is up to these days. He's the author whose debut novel, House of Leaves, is one of my favorites. I once, only half-jokingly, called it my favorite translation of Heidegger's Being and Time. It seems he in the process of writing a 27-volume novel entitled The Familiar, which is about a 12 year old girl who discovers a kitten. The first five volumes seem to be completed. Familiars are, of course, the pets (often evil spirits or demons in the guise of an animal) of witches and sorcerers and the like. These days, the most common image of a familiar is the black cat. All of this goes back to my recent post on animals and witches.

So, during all of this, I also discovered this mp3 of a lecture that Danielewski gave in Cologne, Germany Sept. 30th, 2010. In it Danielewski tells a very sad story (I might have teared up near the end) about cats, death, dying, growing odd, and all sorts of other things. As a novelist, he has a weird relationship with philosophy, which so obviously informs his work and discussion (here are some of the people whose work he cited in the talk: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin), and I am not sure I would say his work on animals was original. But it was moving, smart, perhaps at time original, certainly worth the listen. It is long, and at times meanders. But I found it deeply satisfying and powerfully melancholic on some very fundamental level.

Rodopi Critical Animal Studies: Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde

2011-12-15T01:39:00.000-05:00

The Rodopi Critical Animal Studies book series has its first book coming out, and it looks awesome (I particularly like the cover. In particular the CAS1 on the side. If I could rename my blog, it would probably be CAS0). According to Amazon, it is in stock, and ready to ship (who says us anarchistic, anti-capitalist CAS people don't understand the importance of the holiday shopping period?). Who out there is planning on being CAS2? 3? 4? Infinity? (CAS is the other thing I would rename my blog).

Anyway, I haven't had a chance to read the book yet (review copy, anyone?), but I know several people who have, and by all accounts the first book is unique and exciting. Check it out.

Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation

By: Kim Socha
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2012, XIV, 258 pp.
Pb: 978-90-420-3423-5
€ 54 / US$ 81

____________

ABOUT THE BOOK

This interdisciplinary study fuses analysis of feminist literature and manifestos, radical political theory, critical vanguard studies, women’s performance art, and popular culture to argue for the animal liberation movement as successor to the liberationist visions of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, most especially the Surrealists. These vanguard groups are judiciously critiqued for their refusal to confront their own misogyny, a quandary that continues to plague animal activists, thereby disallowing for cohesion and full recognition of women’s value within a culturally marginalized cause.

This volume is of interest to anyone who is concerned about the continued—indeed, escalating—violence against nonhumans. More broadly, it will interest those seeking new pathways to challenge the dominant power constructions through which oppression of humans, nonhumans, and the environment thrives. Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde ultimately poses the animal liberation movement as having serious political and cultural implications for radical social change, destruction of hierarchy and for a world without shackles and cages, much as the Surrealists envisioned.

______________________________________________

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword – Helena Pedersen and Vasile Stanescu: Series Editor’s Introduction: What is “Critical” about Animal Studies? From the Animal “Question” to the Animal “Condition”

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Rooting for the Avant-Garde

I. Avant-Garde Women Writers and Destruction in the Flesh

II. Staring Back in the Flesh: Avant-Garde Performance as an ALM Paradigm

III. Convulsive Beauty, Infinite Spheres and Irrational Reasons: Reverie on a New Consciousness

Conclusion: Love and Laughter Now: Plucking at Stems or Uprooting Oppression?

Works Cited

Index

_____________________________________________
Kim Socha is an animal activist and sits on the board of the Animal Rights Coalition in Minneapolis, MN. Holding a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism, she works as a composition and literature instructor with publications in the areas of surrealism, Latino literature and pedagogy.

Some thoughts on Ethics and Affect

2011-11-30T15:31:00.001-05:00

Levi has an smart post, following up on some work from Bennett. Check it out. Levi is concerned here with the question of the how of ethics, rather than the why or what of ethics. In other words, not how do we figure out what is ethical, but rather how is it that we sometimes act in ways we know to be ethical, and sometimes we act in ways we know to be unethical. For Levi, this relates to the psychopath. The psychopath is interesting, but few of us are psychopaths. However, the failure to act in ways we find to be moral is a rather common failing. That we regularly fail to live up to what we believe is right is a rather mundane point, but one that has to haunt every ethical enterprise.

This question is, shall we say, more than a passing interest of mine. It follows from the belief that, as Colin McGinn argues, "vegetarianism is a won argument" (see his Minds and Bodies, pp. 207-214, h/t Bill Martin's Ethical Marxism). This was before the rise of the popular localvore movement, and McGinn is mostly focused on the industrial aspects of animal production. And in my general experience, I have met very few people ever willing to defend the industrialized production of animals and their flesh. I have, for example, never found an article on that defends industrial production of animals on ethical grounds. Jonathan Safran Foer is fond of explaining that he expected a large push back from agribusiness when Eating Animals came out, but all he got was silence. His conclusion, and one I agree with, is that animal agribusiness wishes to not draw attraction to the actual practices that go on.

That brings us to the recent comments by Laura Wright:

I was following Hal's lead, after he'd read from his book a particularly graphic passage about the lives of factory farmed hens. I stood up and started talking about my veganism and then realized that no one was listening to me at all. Everyone looked vaguely traumatized by what they'd just heard; indeed, they should have been traumatized. I backed up, and we talked about how the information that Hal had conveyed had made the students feel. One said, "kind of guilty about having just eaten Chick Fil A for lunch." Yeah. So we processed.

Yeah, who hasn't been there? Whenever I give a public talk about animals, I always try to limit the graphic nature of the talk. Mostly because if one nightmarish example is not enough, I really have no reason to believe that more will do anything. And while some of the students may honestly not know how terrible factory farms are, in general such an ignorance falls under the category of what the philosophical aphorist Donald Rumsfield referred to as "known unknowns". So, while many people are ignorant of what goes on in factory farms, frequently it is because of a willed ignorance. They fear that the horror of the factory farm will force changes on them they do not want to make. This brings us back, obviously, to affect.
As J.M. Coetzee notes:

We [...] are where we are today not because once upon a time we read a book that convinced us that there was a flaw in the thinking underlying the way that we, collectively, treat nonhuman animals, but because in each of us there took place something like a conversion experience, which, being educated people who place a premium on rationality, we then proceeded to seek backing for in the writings of thinkers and philosophers (Cavalieri's The Death of the Animal, p. 89).

I think there really is something here, and I want us to turn our attention, now, to David Hume. David Hume understood politics and ethics against other state of nature theorists of the early modern period. For Hobbes and Locke the fundamental political question is how to limit the egotistic, atomistic individual. However, for David Hume this completely misses the central political and ethical question. We are not fundamentally atomistic individuals, but fundamentally partial. We are born not into a state of nature, but rather into a series of partial sympathies, into a family for Hume. The problem is not one of limitation, but rather of “inequality of affection.” In this understanding justice is not finite because of the inherent nature of humanity, but rather provisionally finite based on our partial nature. Instead the ethical question is how do we transform ourselves and society to extend partial sympathies.

When Isabelle Stengers thinks of an example of the cosmopolitical question, it is about the gray areas of animal issues. "Apart from the multiple cases about which we could say 'there is abuse,' futile or blind cruelties or systematic reduction of farm animals to the status of meat on legs, what interests me are the 'difficult' cases where the refusal of the experimentation and a legitimate cause-- the struggle against an epidemic, for instance-- are 'balanced against each other' (Latour and Weibel (eds) Making Things Public, p. 996). I think an equal cosmopolitical question is about the cases that are not difficult. How is it that we can extend our partial sympathies? How can we combat the known unknows? How can we address, as William James put it, a certain blindness in human beings (also see Cary Wolfe's short essay of the same name in The Death of the Animal, pp. 123-133)? What are the institutions, practices, and artifices we can create to overcome these limitations? What are the affects and the abstractions, the precepts and the concepts, we can multiply and circulate? This is why rhetoric and aesthetics are as important philosophical fields as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. To alter what Ranciere refers to as the partition and distribution of the sensible is always a cosmopolitical question.

A Post of Links

2011-11-28T12:58:00.000-05:00

You know that claim that eating meat is what allowed humans to develop larger brains? Claims repeated in such places as, say, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Well, over at PaleoVeganology, is a presentation of the scientific evidence opposed to this position. I am obviously a little biased, but it sounds rather convincing.

Over at This Cage is Worms, CK has a wonderful review and criticism of Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken. Part One. Part Two. Part two also has a critique of McGonigal's anthropocentrism, which includes one of the worst versions of "this is what makes us humans" that I have seen in a while.

Adam Robbert has links to two wonderful Isabelle Stengers writing. Here and here. In the first one, Stengers introduces the idea of mesoscopic thinking and political action, as opposed to the D&G opposition between the molar and the molecular (this interview is also personally funny to me because my wife is trained as a chemist, as well. And she loves making the joke that D&G are chemists).

I recently ran across this interview with Diane Davis about her book Inessential Solidarity. One of the questions contain this:

That is, you asked why we are asking questions about the object and the animal at this moment. Clearly, these are not brand new questions, and all of this current work is rooted in a long philosophical tradition. But these questions are popping up with more urgency now.

It is always interesting to see the way others view the fragmented attack on anthropocentrism.

Hal Herzog and Laura Wright got into a little fight about if Hitler was a vegetarian. See here, and here. I think I have read all the works cited by both these thinkers on the issue. So, if I get some free time in the next few days, I might make my own post on this topic. But I suggest you go ahead and read these posts, regardless.

Here is an interview with Silvia Federici about Occupy Wall Street.

Speaking of interviews, two of them were posted recently on the Ranciere blog. First one, obviously, with Ranciere himself. The opening question concerns Ranciere's relationship with anarchism. The second interview is with Rey Chow, always worthwhile.

Lastly, check out these interesting opening thoughts on the space of the slaughterhouse.

My song today is from The Haunted Windchimes, with their "Ballad of Human Progress". I cannot tell you how addicted I have been with this band since I heard them.

Federici on witches and animals

2011-11-27T00:38:00.000-05:00

This is taken from Silvia Federici's "The Great Witch Hunt", a variation of this is also printed in Caliban and the Witch, p. 194.

Regardless of age (but not class), in the witch trials
there is a constant identification between female sexuality and bestiality. This is
suggested by copulation with the goat-god (one of the representations of the Devil),
the infamous kiss sub cauda, and the charge that the witches kept a variety of
animals, called "imps" or "familiars," with whom they entertained a particularly
intimate relation. These were cats, dogs, hares, frogs the witch cared for, presumably
suckling them from special teats; other animals, too, played a crucial part in her life
as instruments of the Devil: goats and (night)mares flew her to the Sabbath, toads
provided her with poisons for her concoctions – such was the presence of animals in
the witches’ world that one must conclude they too were being put on trial.35

This was possibly a response to the indiscriminating, "bestial" practices that
characterized the sexual life of rural Europe, which remained a capital offense long
after the witch-hunt was over. In an era that was beginning to worship reason and
draw a rigid divide between the physical and the spiritual, animals too were subject to
a drastic devaluation, and reduced to mere brute matter, the perennial symbol of the
worse human instincts. No crime, then, would inspire more horror than copulation
with a beast, a true attack on the ontological foundations of a human nature that
increasingly was identified with its most immaterial aspects.

But the continuity between female sexuality and animality postulated by the
imagery of the hunt also insinuated that women are at a (slippery) crossroad between
man and animals; for what in men appeared as a temporary fall, an eclipse of reason
produced by the orgasmic effects of the sexual act, in the case of women was
elevated to an inherent condition, as it was agreed that women are especially carnal
and weakminded. Thus the alter ego of the witch was the toad, the most frequently
cited familiar, which being a symbol of the vagina, perfectly synthesizes sex, bestiality, femaleness, and evil.

More on the Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon

2011-11-23T20:43:00.000-05:00

First, there is this essay, at times wonderful and other times horrible, on the Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon from Orion.
Wonkbook briefly discusses the Orion essay here.
Wonkbook also brings us this very funny McSweeney's piece. Which is a nice play on the perennial question: What have the turkeys done that they require a pardon?

The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon and sacriifical community

2011-11-23T16:34:00.001-05:00

Another thanksgiving pardon, another suggestion for you to read Magnus Fiskesjö's The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo (.pdf) from Prickly Paradigm Press. Like other PPP titles, it is short and accessible. Also, you should read his follow-up: Fiskesjö, Magnus "The reluctant sovereign: New adventures of the US presidential Thanksgiving turkey." Anthropology Today (October 2010), Volume 26, Issue 5, pages 13–17.

I also want to remind readers about this post I made about a Foer and Bourdain debate. The logic of sacrifice is one that the sacred structures the profane--that the exceptional structures the everyday and the common. Understanding within community, and understanding as being a part of community, is crisscrossed with sacrifice, with a shared sense of the sacred and the profane. This is, of course, easy for any vegetarian or vegan to understand this time of the year, when I have a dozen emails from semi-official sources wishing me a Happy Turkey Day. Over the years I have known many new vegetarians and vegans to falter during their exceptional family get togethers--during Thanksgiving and Christmas and Passover and Superbowl and many other times besides. How we eat and what we choose to eat is at the heart of communion and community, it is at the heart of host and hospitality, it is at the heart of all breaking bread and shared interpellation. Just as the exceptional pardon of the Executive (the one who executes) structures the everyday violence of the sovereign, the exceptional holiday structures the everyday community. Choosing not to eat flesh tomorrow will most certainly change or challenge many of your communities, but it will also open up new ones. New communions, new communities, new commons, new communications, new relations. And maybe one day we will find a time when we can come together outside of the dialectic of the sacred and the profane, maybe one day we will be able to sacrifice sacrifice. Until then, good luck everyone. May you find your communities as rich and rewarding as I find mine.

Expelling the slaughtering of animals from urban centers

2011-11-22T18:57:00.000-05:00

This post is in many ways a response and inspired by this post at Environmental Critique by Hugh Bartling. So, go read that first. Several provisos: (1) Bartling focuses on chickens, which is not at all my focus. (2) Bartling also is more concerned about policy issues, which will not be the focus of this post. (3) Clearly I think the idea of human chicken rearing as, at best, problematic. And in most cases clearly unethical. I probably won't get too much into that, because everyone knows where I stand on that. (4) Bartling is focused on animal rearing, whereas I will mostly be addressing animal slaughtering. Clearly one does have to entail the other, but there is a strong relationship between the two. On to the main part of the post.

Modern urbanism has, again and again, replicated a model of pushing animal slaughtering outside of the urban core. Some of you may find the history unnecessary, in which case you can skip to the bottom. To give a few examples:

New Amsterdam/New York City 1641-1865: According to the historian James Thompson, in 1641 "[t]he slaughterhouses and cattle pens in New Amsterdam were almost as conspicuous on the landscape as windmills in Holland. They straddled the ditch on the north side of the palisade, later Wall Street, the effluvia flowing down this streamlet [called Bloody Run] through the Water Poort or Water Gate into the East River. " [1] As Jimmy Skaggs reports, "[a]fter 1656, Manhattan officials required permits of anyone who wanted to slaughter or butcher animals on the island. Ten years later they ordered the the killing grounds out of the community, beyond the stockade fence along Wall Street, and erected a public facility on present Pearl Street, between Wall and Pine. All slaughtering, including that for private consumption, was restricted to the public house[.]" [2] He later concludes, "By the 1830s, New York City had banished slaughterhouses and their attendant meatpacking plants to beyond Forty-second Street, and by the time of the of the Civil War, to Eightieth Street and north. In time, hounded buisnessmen abandoned eastern cities entirely, especially after improved water and rail transportation became available, and the industry slowly shifted westward as the frontier receded before it."[3]

Paris 1806-1867: Émile Littré gave the definition of abattoir in his first edition of the Dictionary of the French Language, and maintained through all subsequent editions: "Place set aside for the slaughter of animals such as bullocks, calves, sheep, etc. that are used for human consumption. Abattoirs are located outside the surrounding walls of towns." [4] This definition seems odd at first glance, after all why would abattoir have, as part of its definition, its location as outside the walls of towns?
Well, Napoleon I engaged in a national regulation of slaughterhouses, and in 1807 ordered the building of five public slaughterhouses, all located outside the city walls, in Paris. The slaughterers were not allowed to kill animals anywhere else.[5] "In 1810 Napoleon issued a second degree, requiring that public slaughterhouses be built in every town in France, and--it was specified--outside the city limits."
It is also around this time we gain the word abattoir, appearing for the first time in 1806. A strange word, it comes abattre, which means to fell or bring down. It was a term mostly used in forestry, as in bringing down a tree. The abattoir was meant clearly as a euphemism, meant to replace the tuerie and the boucherie for the name of Napoleon's new public slaughterhouses.[6]
George Eugene Haussmann, as part of his reforms of Paris, also reformed Napoleon's slaughterhouses. In this case, from 1863-1867, Haussmann had built the Central Slaughterhouse of La Villette. It was a singular slaughterhouse, massive is scope and cost, that was the first one of its kind intended to service the desires of a city of millions for animal flesh.

Chicago Unfinished and Fragmented: Chicago is a different phenomenon in many ways than what we have discussed in New York and in Paris. Chicago was at the center all of sorts of changes--the raise of trains, the invention of refrigerator cars, monocultural agriculture, disciplinary techniques of worker management, new accounting methods, barbed wire, vertical monopolies, feedlots and early genetic manipulations of animals, new advertising techniques, etc.--that allowed it to exist primarily as a place to slaughter animals. I am going to skip a lot of that, and there are many excellent books on the topic (though, if you haven't read William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, you are really denying yourself), but I want to fastforward just a little bit. Okay, nevermind. I didn't bring the right books with me for this next section, and I won't get to them again until after the holidays. If there is interest, I will be more specific. But basically, slaughtering did not remain for long in Chicago's urban core. The Union Stockyards opened in 1865, and by sometime around the turn of the century, the slaughtering had already moved out of Chicago proper.

Why?: Vialles make the argument that the industrialization of slaughter cemented the desire for slaughter to exist in a "no-place." As she explains: "To sum up: from this point on, slaughtering was required to be industrial, that is to say large scale and anonymous; it must be non-violent (ideally: painless); and it must be invisible (ideally: non-existent). It must be as if it were not." [7] She continues: "We see now why the disjunctions are necessary: urbanisation and the consumption of large quantities of meat lead directly to the creation of abattoirs as places set apart, where the inevitable occurs. All these disjunctions invite and combine with one another to keep the mass killing of animals at a reasonable distance. [...] It is very much as if the initial separation between killing and meat had triggered a process of repeated fissions forming a kind of spiral of avoidance of a reality and a meaning that are too raw, the centre of the spiral and the force behind it being the very thing that it is trying to avoid--forever unsuccessfully, and for good reason."[8]
I would like to continue this thought and link it back up with Bartling's original post. The problem of farm animals is that they exist in a weird sort of middle ground for the urban dweller. They are neither wildlife, ie animals that are not directly owned and maintained by particular humans, and they are not pets, ie animals that are owned and maintained by paritcular humans for no specific purpose. Indeed, the term farm animal itself shows the confusion, these are animals whose definition includes the place they are suppose to be. The farm animal reasserts the unease, unravels our disjunctions, and returns us to the scene of the crime. Just as Bartling points out that: "In numerous cases, critics are concerned about such things as the pollution of the water supply, the spread of avian flu, and concerns for the animals’ safety. This line of argument is, of course, ironic, since these are similar reasons cited by proponents of urban chicken-keeping." The idea of urban farm animal raising both incites dread on those who want the disjunction maintained by keeping all of this at a distance, while at the same time those who want to raise chickens hope that in so doing, they will be able to overcome the disjunction.

[1] Thompson, A History of Livestock Raising, p. 39. As originally cited in Jimmy Skaggs, Prime Cut, p. 34.
[2] Skaggs, p. 34.
[3] Skaggs, p. 36.
[4] As cited and discussed in Noelie Vialles' excellent Animal to Edible. See p. 15.
[5] This, and the immediate following discussion is drawn from Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command, pp. 209-213. It is a crime this book is out of print.
[6] Vialles discusses the euphemistic nature of abattoir, pp.22-28.
[7] Vialles p. 22.
[8] Vialles, pp. 31-32.

A Post of Links

2011-11-21T19:49:00.000-05:00

Peter and Devin continue my post on Levinas. No surprise, I have broad agreement with them. I would like to add, if you are interested a way of reading Levinas for animal others, you need to read Matt Calarco's Zoographies (if, for some reason, you haven't already).

Levi has a post extending my analysis of human exceptionalism, and circling squares riffs on it over at his blog.

There are two awesome looking events in the DC area on critical animal studies at the beginning of Dec. I cannot begin to tell you how jealous I am of anyone going.

My blog is just never going to be the place for finding up to the minute news and analysis on the Occupation. Not because I don't think it is important, it might be the most important news story in America these days, but because other people are doing it better and faster. Anyway, here is a good round-up by Stuart Elden on the UC police brutality. A nice place to go if you are out of touch.

Over at Knowledge Ecology, Adam Robbert has uploaded Donna Haraway's speech on animals and killing well that she gave at the AAR this weekend. I need to listen to it again (I was distracted this morning while listening to it) to give a better response. However, I continue to believe she is somehow articulating a position to vegan ecofeminists of innocence, which I think is clearly not at all what is at stake. Also, I continue to be confused if her position on killing well thinks through animal/critter sociality (outside of human-animal sociality) in any sort of semiotically and materially thick way. Worth a listen, though. Donna Haraway remains a remarkably bright and insightful thinker, and one whom comes across in a spirit of generosity so seldom seen in the academy these days.

MLA has an insightful and disturbing post on the justifications and views of distance learning, including linking it to his shitty early jobs at McDonalds.

Over at Environmental Critique is an interesting post on urban animal raising. If I get the chance tomorrow, I will make a post on the tendency of urban centers to exile animal slaughtering. Also, APS has a post up there, definitely worth checking out. The title, "A Necessary Fear of Chaos," should be more than enough to entice you to click.

I recently discovered the blog Animal Wise, which is about research into animal intelligence and capabilities (I believe from a link on Andrew Sullivan's blog).

It seems that modern humans once mated with other species. I've been meaning to do a post up about this and Ladelle McWhorter's smart essay, "Enemy of the Species", from the edited volume Queer Ecologies. It might still happen.

Peter Singer argues we should ban cigarettes.

Lastly, but not least, here are a few conferences that if I can make the time and funding work out, I would like to submit to, and hopefully present at: the 2012 Radical Philosophy Association Conference, 5th International Deleuze Studies conference, and the Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies.

Florence+ The Machine has a new album. Instead, here is her old song.

On hating humanity

2011-11-19T17:14:00.000-05:00

I went to a lecture yesterday on Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Locke. I asked the speaker a question about potential limits of the phenomenological basis of Levinas' ethics in regards to beings who are not yet (the ethics of fighting global warming for those who do not yet exist), and also I asked about what happens when there is a disagreement about being called by the face of the other, specifically about animals. The speaker began his response this way:

"A French philosopher, I don't remember whom, once said that loving nature is really hatred of humanity." And the answer went downhill from there. A few things: (1) I assumed the speaker was referring to Luc Ferry, but when I checked, I realized Luc Ferry is quoting Marcel Gauchet. (2) I am honestly shocked every time I run into an educated person who does not believe in global warming. (3) This seems like a good time to remind people about this post.

I really do wish I had been able to ask him something like, "So, to prove your love of humanity, do you try to destroy nature as much as possible?" Sadly, that seemed grossly inappropriate at the time.

The Archive of Critical Animal Studies

2011-11-14T00:27:00.000-05:00

This post is inspired by writing the lit review of my dissertation, and reading Barbara Noske's Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (which is sadly out of press).

In the anglophone world, particularly the North American anglophone world, Animal Studies as a major academic phenomena is distinctly a 2000s event, and comes about with the rise of continentalist attention toward animals. To give some dates, we have H. Peter Steeves (ed) Animal Others, a volume that was particularly unique when it came out in 1999. In 2000 we get Steve Baker's Postmodern Animal and Lippit's Electric Animal (and does it surprise anyone that it would get the paperback reprint treatment eight years late?), Critical Inquiry published the English translation of Derrida's "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" in Winter of 2002, Cary Wolfe's edited Zoontologies and his monograph Animal Rites both came out in 2003, Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto was also released in 2003, and finally Atterton and Calarco's edited volume of Animal Philosophy came out in 2004. Shortly after that Columbia UP starts a concentrated effort of publishing animal studies, and by 2008 Cary Wolfe has his Posthumanities series at Univ of Minnesota Press. During all of this we also see both the rise and support by the Institute of Critical Animal Studies, founded in 2001, and the foundation of the Journal of Critical Animal Studies in 2003. And while the work after the sudden and important attention toward animal studies is important, I want to turn our attention to the work done before this rise in animal studies.

There exists a vast literature of people who published on animals before the boom. I think it is important to honor that archive. Many of these published in a climate absolutely hostile to doing animal studies work. I have written many times about how the climate of doing animal studies has become increasingly friendly since I started. I believe I have told the story about how I once told another student that my work was on animals, and she laughed at me. She thought it was a joke. Well, a lot of things have changed since then. But for those who worked in animal studies before the boom, or in the earliest stages of the boom, they faced a lot of opposition to do both ethical and cutting edge work. Their books were frequently published in minor presses, or advertised in ways they wouldn't be today, and many of them have gone out of print. They faced attacks on their work. Noske describes near the end of her book: "[I]t turned out the continuity [between humans and other animals] question especially was a taboo subject among feminists. Behind my back doubts were expressed as to my political correctness...." (p. 171) Any number of other examples can be given, no doubt. Greta Gaard and Susan Fraiman have both worked on the ways that ecofeminism, particularly in regards to questions of animals, have faced serious troubles. Ecofeminists thinkers like Carol Adams, Lori Gruen, Greta Gaard, Chris Cuomo, Lyndia Birke, Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, and I am sure many more I will be embarrassed for not listing later on, are an invaluable resource for any critical animal studies scholar.
I think it is vitally important as we build our archive of critical animal studies that we pay attention to thinkers who were fighting the anthropocentrism of the academy years, even decades, before it was acceptable (to the degree that it is now). Their work has been frequently marginalized when it came out, so it up to us now to find it, read it, and engage with it.

Initial issues with the grad program listing.

2011-11-10T14:05:00.001-05:00

There are already a lot of issues to think through with the grad programs friendly to critical animal studies project.

(1) I have generally been very open with the idea of working on animals. I have included people who have published, people who are teaching, and people who are just beginning doing these things. The goal of the project is to try and identify programs where students would find an atmosphere that might allow them to do the sort of critical animal studies work they want to do, without feeling always intellectually alone.

(2) But I have already run into the problem about the ambiguity of critical animal studies. Usually I enjoy the ambiguity, taking it as a good coalitional term. But there are two problems I am faced with here.

(A) Does CAS just refer to animal studies that intersects on some level with theory (a poorly defined term itself!)? In this, I mean is there any reason, for example, to exclude the animal ethicists working in the analytical tradition? Or the people doing quantitative work on human-animal relationships (if, indeed, anyone is doing that work)? I honestly do see any reason to, say, not list Princeton with the work of Peter Singer.

(B) The other problem has to do with the level to which the work of people listed are for animal welfare, animal abolition, pro-veganism and/or pro-vegetarianism, etc. For example, Kathy Rudy is obviously not pro-vegan or pro-vegetarian, but still considers her work pro-animal welfare. Do we list her work? And what about all the more ambiguous cases? If someone is publishing on, say, Herman Melville and the animal, we might have no good sense of that person's position on vegetarianism/veganism, abolitionism vs. welfarism, etc etc etc. It would be terrible if this list turned into some sort of weird witch-hunt, in which people email into me that so-in-so actually was seen eating animal flesh or whatever. Anyone interested in critical animal studies knows that there is a constant stream of rumors and gossips if certain academics are vegetarians. Or if they are more than vegetarians, but also vegans. Lastly, there is a real limit to my knowledge. I just cannot possibly know everyone's work in every field and discipline, and I cannot know all their positions.

These two issues makes me wonder if a list about critical animal studies is at all possible. Perhaps, all I can do is a list about human-animal studies. I would really like some feedback on all of this.

(3) Should I continue to list graduate certificate programs along with MA and PhD programs? My gut feeling is yes, but I don't have a good reason for that one way or another.

(4) Eric pointed out that I need to add which professors are working on animals in this list. That strikes me as a good idea. Is there any reason that I should maybe avoid this?

Lastly, all of this is taking absurdly more time than I already thought it would. Which is fine. But I have a dissertation to finish (among other things). So the idea of even having a decent Beta list for this application season seems impossible. Still, the goal is to have a strong initial list, at least for North America, by the start of Fall 2012. And that will mean lots more working. I have only gotten a few suggestions so far. Please keep them coming.

Help me generate a list of graduate programs in Critical Animal Studies

2011-11-09T17:28:00.001-05:00

I tried to start this once before, but it didn't work out.

Since I made that post, I have gotten increasingly more hits of people interested in this material. I think this is information that will be important for many people. Here is what I am working for: Graduate programs, in any discipline and in any English speaking country, that would be seen as being friendly to critical animal studies. My guess is that we can determine two different levels of friendliness. First, programs that have some sort of specific or stated affinity toward animal studies. Second, programs that have at least one faculty member that is interested in critical animal studies. (If anyone has any objections to these, let me know. If anyone has any other ideas, let me know). Please either post in comments or send me an email. Furthermore, please let me know why you are including the programs you are suggesting. This year's graduate school hunt is already upon us, but I want to try and get some sort of Beta list up by the end of this month, if that is possible. Then hopefully before Fall 2012 begins, I would have a stronger list up, and then I would try to keep it updated as long as the list seems relevant.

Other relevant comments:
(1)This is in no way a ranking list, and I have no desire to start a ranking system.
(2) Critical Animal Studies here is meant in its broadest, most inclusive sense. We can work out if there are issues with this after we have gotten the data.
(3) I am open to any advice or criticism in all of this.
(4) As always, self-promotion is welcomed.

Here is the immediate data I have so far. All the programs listed have faculty that are working on the issues of animals. The schools offering programs in animal studies, are obviously offering programs in animal studies. Also, Colorado State also have an animal studies working group of some sort.
I will certainly have some obvious and embarrassing omissions in what follows. Help me fix those. These schools are being drawn from things other people have mentioned in the past, or I have written down for some reason. This current list is completely devoted to the United States, because that is what I have. I will try to do one on Canada tomorrow (I have a lot less for Canada). I have almost nothing for other countries outside of North America. Send in other stuff, and I will expand the list.

Tell me what I missed. Who has schools where people are teaching and/or publishing on animals, and have graduate departments.

United States

Animal Studies/Animal Public Policy

Humane Society University (MA only).

Michigan State University.

Tufts University (MA only).

Anthropology

Cornell University

Classics

Stanford University

English

Arizona State University

Brooklyn College (MA only)

Colorado State University (MA only)

Columbia University

Northwestern University

PennState

Portland State University (MA Only)

Rice University

Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville (MA only)

UC-Davis

University of Chicago

History

Cornell University

Northwestern University

Interdisciplinary Studies

Stanford University (Modern Thought and Literature)

UC-Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness)

Philosophy

Emory University

DePaul University

Penn State

University of Oregon

Vanderbilt University

Political Science

Colorado State University

Rhetoric

University of South Carolina (MA only)

University of Texas at Austin

Sociology

Colorado State University

University of Colorado at Boulder

Women's Studies

Duke University (Graduate Certificate Only)

UMass Amherst (Graduate Certificate Only)

On Anti-Nietzsche and Ontological Poverty

2011-11-09T10:52:00.002-05:00

Well, my copy of Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche came in, yesterday. I briefly talked about this book before. The TOC:

Forward

Acknowledgments

Ch 1: Philistinism

Ch 2: Anti-Nietzsche

Ch 3: Negative Ecologies

Ch 4: Subhumanism

Ch 5: Excommunication

Ch 6: Counter-Interest

Ch 7: The Great Beast

And then the usual back matter.

The first three chapters can basically be found in either the New Left Review, or in the links I gave earlier. But, besides sharing some information on the book, I wanted to share this wonderful paragraph:

The alignment of Durkheim and Heidegger here owes something to their shared debt to Leibniz, whose monadology provides a model not only for Durkheim's account of specialisation, but for Heidegger's account of captivation as well. But it is more than that. If to become poor in world is to become poor in common consciousness, Heidegger's attempt to exempt the human from the world-poverty of the animal is inextricably entwined with the desire to release humanity from the world-darkening of modernity. No wonder he uses the metaphor of darkness to describe both states. Nature provides us with a model of what social interaction is like without common consciousness. Becoming animal is becoming modern, perhaps, as Kojève suggests, the future of modernity. A negative ecology of value must eventually involve participating in a division of labour, a being plural plural. That is what an ecology is. Becoming world-poor opens up the possibility for a degree of anomie beyond that possible within purely human interaction. You cannot fully experience anomie within the species; you have to go outside. The human world is never dark enough. (p. 128)

This is obviously a dense paragraph, but also intense. It is only by accepting our ontological poverty that we can begin to think community and ecology.

CFP: 11th Annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies

2011-11-08T12:06:00.000-05:00

Call for Presentations: 11th Annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies

March 2 – 4, 2012
Canisius College
Buffalo, New York, USA

Host Sponsors:
Animal Allies Club of Canisius College

THEME:
From Greece to Wall St.: Global Economic Revolutions and Critical Animal Studies

As worldwide economies collapse and socio-political revolutions arise in response to education tuition increases, job losses, tax increases, land rights, and religious division, governments are collapsing only to be hijacked by corporations. In the US, national and transnational banks and financial institutions are being bailed out by the government, while common people are kicked out of their homes and fired from their jobs so corporations can save money. Simultaneously, global revolutionary fervor increases against corporations, banks, and corrupt financial institutions. People are demanding their rights and their nations back. The results of this backlash are police brutality and political repression toward activists worldwide. The theme of this year’s annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies is based on inquiry into how economic markets locally, regionally, nationally and globally affect nonhuman animals. Can these revolutions include a critical animal studies agenda? If not, why not? If they can, how would this agenda manifest both philosophically and strategically? How does the economy affect nonhuman animals? Are there alternative ethical and transformative economic systems that promote animal liberation? How are capitalism and transnational corporations affecting nonhuman animal exploitation? How do industrial complexes promote exploitive economic practices? What tactics and strategies can be used to resist economic exploitation? How do economic crises similarly oppress human and nonhuman animals and the environment? In what ways are the resulting oppressions intersectional? How are schooling, teaching, and education influenced by economic interests which promote exploitation?

We welcome proposals from community members including, but not limited to, nonprofit organizations, political leaders, activists, professors, staff, and students. We are especially interested in topics such as the history of social movements, spirituality and social movements, nonviolence, alliance politics, freedom, democracy, and notions of total inclusion. We are also interested in reaching across the disciplines and movements of environmentalism, education, poverty, feminism, LGBTQA, animal advocacy, globalization, prison abolition, prisoner support, labor rights, disability rights, anti-war activism, youth rights, indigenous rights/sovereignty, and other peace and social justice issues.

Areas of inquiry include:The Future of Critical Animal Studies
Revolution
Occupy Wall Street
Corporatization
Global Industrial Complex
Anarchist Studies
Feminism
Activism and Tactics for Social Change
Media
Social Networking
Critical Criminology
Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA)
Speciesism
Animals in Relation to Religion and Spirituality
Abolition as Theory or Strategy
Animals and Property
Challenges to Human Domination
Sexuality and Gender
Culture, Language, and Animals
Racism
Domesticated and Wild Animals
Capitalism
Deconstructing Human and Animal
Social Constructions
Re-Defining Nature
Bio Ethics and Universal Ethics
Post-Colonialism
Geography, Space and Place
Animal Epistemology
Education and Schooling

Presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes in length.

We are receptive to different and innovative formats including, but not limited to, roundtables, panels, community dialogues, theater, and workshops.

You may propose individual or group “panel” presentations, but please clearly specify the structure of your proposal.

Please stress in your paper/roundtable/panel/etc. how you will be focusing on the program theme and linking it to economics and critical animal studies.

Proposals or abstracts for panels, roundtables, workshops, or paper presentations should be no more than 500 words. Please send with each facilitator or presenter a 100 maximum word biography (speaking to your activism and scholarship) in third person paragraph form.

The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2012.

Accepted presenters will be notified via e-mail by January 25, 2012.

Please send proposals/abstracts and biographies electronically using MS Word and as an attachments in Times Roman 12 point font to:

Stephanie Jenkins
Co-Conference Chair
scjenkins@gmail.com

Logistics Contact:
Morgan Jamie Dunbar
dunbarm@my.canisius.edu

Conference Schedule Contact:
Sarat Colling

(h/t Lib Now)

On Human Exceptionalism and Ethical Abstractions

2011-11-03T15:52:00.001-04:00

(I am still interested in feedback about this job market question)

Alex Reid has a post up about human exceptionalism and the environment. So, that has prompted me to write some things about human exceptionalism, some of which directly responds to his points, some of which has nothing to do with what he wrote.

One of the reasons that I always find human exceptionalism problematic is that most people seem to skip the hard work of philosophical anthropology. Or to put it another way, most people take the human as given, without doing the conceptual work to draw a dividing line between all the variations of humanity on one side, and all manifestations of life on the other side. There is a sort of almost Supreme Court on obscenity feel to such discussions: we know humans when we see them. Of course, our track record of knowing humans is actually pretty bad. Slavery, sexism, colonialism and coloniality, racism, our treatment of the mentally disabled, peasantry and poor, the mad, physically disabled, and more and more. You get the picture, right? It was not uncommon in the histories of coloniality, for example, to believe that the languages of the colonized were not full languages, but existed somewhere between animal languages and full, human languages. Indeed, those colonized peoples were not seen as full people. As little back as the 1950s, it was fairly common to talk and think about people with autism as being not fully human, of not being capable of language, thought, and humanity. We have to have a certain level of hubris to believe that we have finally understood who are humans and who are not, when quite frankly this question of humanness is both old and recent. It haunts the boundaries of every project of philosophical anthropology, it haunts the boundaries of every claim of human exceptionalism.

To counter one example from Alex Reid, he writes:

Humans are unique (apologies to ET) in their symbolic behaviors, in our particular cognitive capacities and uses of technology, etc., etc

I mean, both yes and no, right? Most attempts to create a clear dividing line between human animals and other animals tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is to claim some trait and say only humans have it, when other animals clearly have it--like claiming only humans have self-consciousness. The second way is to claim some action that exists only for some humans as if it defines humanity--like saying that other animals may have language, but only humans have poetry. We know there are animals that use a great deal of symbolic behaviors (Great Apes, elephants, certain birds, etc), and we know that there are many animals that make tools, even some that make tools to make tools. Of course, we don't know if there are any animal poets, and I don't think there are any animal inventors of complex machines. Of course, most people aren't poets, and I have never invented or made a complex machine. There are certainly expressions of certain traits that seem to be found only in humans, but not for all of humanity. On the other hand, there are all sorts of traits that can be found within animals (tool-use, symbol use and language, mourning, getting high to relieve boredom, friendship, painting, sexual taboos, etc etc). To give an example from Reid's field, George Kennedy, in "A Hoot in the Dark", argues that rhetoric precedes the human (h/t Jim Brown). This is the shores that the projects of philosophical anthropology crash upon: Either characteristics include too many, or not enough. Which makes sense, because as Reid points out:

However not unique in a way that our development cannot be understood as part of the development of the rest of the world. No doubt, for a long time we had a belief (and most humans still believe) that human exceptionalism was not part of the life world but granted by an external divine force.

Evolution is a blind system of forces and relations. It tends to work by repeating adaptive strategies. To believe in evolution as opposed to divine intervention, is to believe that there is a chance that nothing about humans, as such, that does exist in the expressions and manifestations, to some degree, in other species. There is a possibility that we are hopelessly non-unique. Humanity is an abstraction. Abstraction here used in the sense that Pierce, Whitehead, and Deleuze all (differently) use the term. And because humanity is not given, but abstracted, it means that the political and ethical questions of relations are based upon such abstractions. How we attend and care for our abstractions will necessitate different forms of relations. This is probably a good way of thinking through Jane Bennett's claim about necessary anthropomorphism. For a long time (and still is in many places) the way people knew you were purely constructing your abstractions is that they suffered from anthropomorphism--they discovered within non-human categories traits that only belonged to humans. Bennett argues that thinking certain types of relations will require anthropomorphism. And I agree. But I agree, partially, that it will be necessary as a corrective of what primatologist Frans de Waal calls anthropodenial. Anthropodenial is when we refuse to characterize expressions of non-humans by what they are, because they are characteristics we have tautologically assigned to only humans. If we say, for example, that apes do not engage in prostitution because prostitution is an uniquely human activity, that would be anthropodenial. While we have long been wary of abstractions that engaged in anthropomorphism, we are almost never worried about abstractions that engage in anthropodenial. It seems you can never go far enough in your claims about human exceptionalism, you can never been seen as absurd for assuming there are activities and thoughts that belong uniquely to humanity. Anthropomorphism is necessary to counter our millennia long history of anthropodenial.

I want to end, however, with the challenge that Reid ends his post with:

What would a non-humanocentric humanities look like? What would it mean to read literature or examine rhetoric or study philsophy or history or whatever without this exceptionalist view of humans? These are the kinds of changes that Bennett suggests for environmentalism, so perhaps they are not as modest as I suggested at the outset.

Back when we had the group blog of The Inhumanities going on, that was part of the desire. The desire, also, of Cary Wolfe's posthumanism and posthumanities. It is certainly important to note that the humanities, originally and historically, were very much about the domination of a certain expression of the human against other groups that we also consider human. The humanities, of course, have often lead the charge against such colonial impulses, as well. I have high hopes for a posthumanities or an inhumanities. This is also to say, quite simply, that I think the humanities are often great ways of changing our abstractions. Whitehead contented that "You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction" (Science and the Modern World, p.73). Time for a revision. One after the abstraction of human exceptionalism.

Interdisciplinary Teaching and the Job Market

2011-11-03T09:55:00.000-04:00

This is a question mostly for those of you who have been on hiring committees, or are fairly familiar with thought processes of people on hiring committees. Any discipline or type of university welcomed to respond (though please let me know your background if I don't already).

What is the reigning thought on interdisciplinary teaching? To be a bit more specific, if you have a candidate with a home discipline, but has done extensive teaching in all sorts of different disciplines, how do you weigh that? What are the factors that go into examining such a background? Does it help or hurt if this is seen as a larger aspect of interdisciplinary publishing, conference attending, and education?

If anyone feels more comfortable with just shooting me an email, feel free. Or if anyone wants to post anonymous, go ahead, just give us some idea what discipline you are talking from, and the type of university (SLAC, Research, etc.) that you are coming from.

A Post of Links

2011-10-25T16:07:00.000-04:00

I am planning on trying to update the look and functionality of blog in the near-ish future. I used my blogroll, originally, instead of an RSS reader. Now I use google reader, and I only add blogs to that reader, not to my blog roll. My plan is to fix that, but I was curious if anyone would have problems with just a list, rather than auto-updating blogs? I know that a while back at least a few of you used my blog roll as your reader, as well. Okay, time to the links.

Peter Gratton, who helped write that SPEP resolution (you know which one I mean) posts the full resolution and his thoughts on it. The really short version: He believes the proposal was carefully written, and is meant mostly as a push back against people who attacked SPEP and SPEP-'style' philosophy. Other interpretations requires ignoring carefully crafted and purposeful language.

Leon at After Nature has a post up on animals grieving, de-anthropocentrism, and OOO (and a follow up post here). From the first post:

I think that being decentered means that realizing that animals, too, are objects of importance - albeit a unique but in no way superior importance. [...] It seems to me that an animal's own non-human form of aesthetic communication (and for me this is both semiotic and phenomenological, to be prehended fundamentally as *feeling*) should count just as much as any other persistent semiotic communicative object in withdrawal. In other words, in matters of context, animals, then, would count equally to humans. Their manners of communication could (and perhaps should) be taken into consideration when caring for the network - that is, for objects-felt-as-subjects, unique and distinctive center points of feeling with an infinite worth and value of their own. As I've stated, empathy is crucial in feeling out a "Jamesian speculative exploration of a non-human consciousness" (HT Steven Shaviro).

Good stuff, more there. I have occasionally been accused of doing OOO and critical animal studies. And despite my interests in dialogue on such subjects, it has never been true. But Leon seems to be trying to develop some interesting stuff with ethics, animals, OOO, and communication systems theory.

Speaking of OOO, I am sure you have heard there is now a Object-Oriented Studies journal? The announcement and first cfp is here. (An awesome editorial board) Does this mean the correct term is OOS? Because that will ruin my Adventure Time jokes. First they take away my OOPs jokes, and now my Adventure Time jokes. What will be next? Oh yeah, go look at the cfp.

Here is a recent issue of Foucault Studies on the topic of Race.

Speaking of Foucault, Clare (on her other blog) has a great post up on blogging in terms of promotion. The Scientific American blog post she links to is very interesting, as well. The proper place for blogging in the academy is something I often wonder about. For example, how many of you put your blog links in author bios or CVs?

Here is an abstract for an upcoming Geology conference arguing that a Triassic Kraken arranged bones as self-portrait. I have no clue if this is serious or a joke. (h/t TCiW)

John Protevi has an interesting post on the human microphone of The Occupation and political affect. It also begins with Judith Butler's talk at OWS. So, you know, even more reason to go check it out. This reminds me of something I don't really know about for sure, but have been thinking about in terms of the idea of the infrapolitical within The Occupation (the idea of the infrapolitical comes from the work of James C. Scott, but is also heavily developed in Robin D. G. Kelley's Race Rebels). It seems that this is less about any sort of habermasian counter-public, and more about a way of radicalizing each other outside of normal overt political channels. I mean, sure, The Occupation is clearly overtly political, but a lot of the power of the various Occupied places is there developing methods of radicalizing each other through infra-political scripts and dialogues.

Ike Sharpless has an worthwhile post on labels and food politics. When you hear me talk about the need for animal advocates to move away from the economies of the pure and the polluted, the sacred and the profane, the saved and the damned, etc., this is partially the sort of thing I am talking about.

I'm putting this at the bottom because it is old, not because it isn't important. Here is an article about a year old by Richard Twine that I am just now coming across on the animal industrial complex. I don't think I need to say more, but if do, go read it.

I've been enjoying listening to The Head and the Heart. The whole album is great, but here they are performing "Down in the Valley" live.

Really? (UPDATED)

2011-10-22T12:50:00.002-04:00

So, it's Saturday. I went to a recruitment fair. I am alternating working on changing the debate budget in response to across the board budget cuts here, and at the same time editing a chapter. Frustrated with both, I made the mistake to check my google reader.

The SPEP resolution passed. Jon Cogburn, in response to Peter, had this to say:

[...]will prove to be concretely harmful [...] to graduates of SPEP programs trying to get jobs in non SPEP dominated departments (do not underestimate how destructive this will be). [...] And now they have sacrificed job prospects of their own students.

Really? Really? (side note, I am not reading this as Professor Cogburn as advocating such a position as a good idea. I know from reading his blog is that he wouldn't adopt such a position personally).

Now, I can't say exactly what Professor Cogburn means here, but I really cannot understand it outside of some of the claims of some outrageous behavior (again, not on Professor Cogburn's part). Namely, that schools will decide to blacklist graduates from certain schools, for things these students/graduates probably had nothing to do with. Can we all slow down a bit and recognize how anti-intellectual, insulting, and plain stupid such a response would be? Can we also admit that such a reaction really only goes to further a view that a certain strand of analytic philosophers (as opposed to analytic philosophy) uses their clear and obvious institutional strength to act as childish bullies? Can we all take a deep breath, and admit all of that?

Look, most of this blew up over the summer, when I was on my honeymoon, or moving, or whatever. So, I have never followed this issue to the degree I feel I have a good sense of what is going on. But even if the Pluralist Guide is the Devil herself, a blacklisting on hiring from people not involved is absurd, more than absurd.

Okay?

UPDATE: I somehow missed this post by Jon Cogburn over at the APPS. He clarifies his position, somewhat. I have very little doubt he is right that this will make people getting hired from so-called SPEP affiliated institutions at other places harder. Of course, it is already pretty hard. And despite the truth of this that anyone who engages in such blacklisting (either overtly or covertly), is simply engaging in anti-philosophical practices.

The Impossibility of PIC

2011-10-20T14:46:00.002-04:00

For reasons that I have never fully grasped, PIC seems to have always been under attack since I first joined the program. The particular reasons the program is under trouble has changed each time, but there is always some new excuse for trying to close down PIC after the program addresses these issues. Over the years we have had our funding lines (once up to 12) completely slashed, so that now PIC doesn't have a single funding line not connected to outside grants and funding. While the slashing was originally justified due the economic situation, no other program was so effected. Recently PIC had some very good news in terms of our ranking by the National Research Council (in it the program was ranked number one in terms of diversity, for example). But that hasn't helped, as the newest issue is an over a decade old filing error that suddenly threatens the entire program's continued existence.

I could go on. It is ridiculous. I will probably make further posts on this issue as I know more, and probably do some begging of letter writing and petition signing on behalf of PIC.

Bull's Anti-Nietzsche is out

2011-10-19T16:27:00.002-04:00

Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche is out (while I knew it was coming, h/t to Tim for posting it is out).

I haven't read the book yet, or even been able to find a table of contents online. However, one assumes it follows up his justly infamous article in the New Left Review, "Where is the Anti-Nietzsche?". That article itself gets fleshed out a bit more in some lectures he delivered at Berkeley, which can be found in the book Nietzsche's Negative Ecologies.

Bull's argument is explicitly pro-egalitarian, and challenges the reader to read Nietzsche is a different way. According to Bull, we normally read Nietzsche as if we are one of the victors, one of the nobles, one of the predatory animals, one of the supermen. What if we read him as if we are one of the losers? What happens when we read not as a carnivore, but as a herbivore and herd animal? What happens when we read not as one who finds the difference between humans and apes as a laughable gap, but rather one who reads as closer to the ape? What happens when we read Nietzsche not as a superman, but as a subhuman?

Anyway, I can't wait to get and read the book.

UPDATE: More over here.

Communication Studies and Animal Studies: A request

2011-10-18T10:24:00.000-04:00

As most of you know, I am mostly housed in a department of communication studies these days. Anyway, I have been looking around at animal studies within the world of communication studies, rhetoric, etc. I have found some things, but do any of you have suggestions for things for me to look into, syllabi, people who are doing work at these intersections, etc. Also, if any of you are doing the work at these intersections, let me know.

One more.

2011-10-17T13:12:00.001-04:00

Right after I hit publish on my last post, I check my reader. Graham Harman has a further reflection on the discussion here. He then goes on to lay this out: "Ultimately, I think there are two kinds of pro-anthro philosophy floating around these days".

Anyway, go check it out.

One more try, Pro-anthropocentric backlash.

2011-10-17T13:02:00.001-04:00

So, last night I made this short post on the idea of a pro-anthropocentric backlash. I think this is a perfect example of the downfalls of blogging. Articulating something off the top of your head, doing it very quickly right before bed, while I am also chatting with my wife. And so, Joshua Miller (in the comments of that post) and Mike Burns make some very good points. They are well taken. So, let me try this again.

First, the good news. When I first started working on animals, not only were there very few critical animal scholars, but in general anthropocentrism was the reigning ideology. While there were plenty of people who would say they were oppose to humanism, but it certainly was a very strongly anthropocentric humanism. But these days, every time I turn around I run into someone who is critiquing anthropocentrism. And of course, there are all sorts of different oppositions, and many of us disagree with each other. Still, I feel that the anti-anthro crowd is on a rising tide. We are forcing people to answer our positions, getting more institutional support, convincing people, etc. This is all good news.

And I would say this is also part of a movement. I said it is always cutting edge to be opposed to the cutting edge. Hipster logic, but still true. And being part of the cutting edge matters. It attracts attention, gets people talking, etc. This is not to say that people do not legitimately believe their positions.

Second, I agree with Mike Burns that there really is nothing new about this anthropocentrism (I can't speak to Meillassoux’s position, Harman's book is having to wait until winter break). However, because anthropocentrism was the default before, the anti-anthropocentrism crowd is forcing the pro-anthro crowd to articulate their position and defend their viewpoints. Hell, the very fact that I can talk about a pro-anthropocentric crowd is a change in the ground from when anthropocentrism was the default position that needed no overt adherents. So, maybe I don't mean backlash, as much as the rising pro-anthropocentric response.

My hope wasn't to create "a weird kind of pre-ad hominem", but I certainly understand why my post came across that way. Rather, I want to point out that the lay of the land is changing.

The pro-anthropocentric backlash

2011-10-16T23:48:00.000-04:00

I haven't read the interview yet (I plan to), but I want to highlight Graham Harman's post on Andrian Johnston's interview, here.

I've been telling people for the past few months that I feel the anti-anthro crowd, in all various and contradictory forms, is gaining ground within the academy. And because the cutting edge is always to be opposed to whatever the cutting edge is, I assume to see a pro-anthro backlash. I'm not blaming Johnston of any of this. I've never meet him, and everyone I know who knows him says he is a great guy and a sincere intellectual. However, I really do assume that the pro-humanism or pro-anthropocentrism conference is on the horizon. The special issue for anthropocentrism will be coming out in journals soon, In Defense of Humans or whatever will be a title forthcoming book. You know it's coming.

A Post of Links

2011-10-13T12:35:00.000-04:00

I have waited too long to do this one, which means that I will inevitably miss far more than I normally do. There is a lot of cool and interesting things that have happened since I did the last one, and if I forget to add something you did, it is not at all an indication of the importance I give to your work. With that said...

HJM has an essay up at 7S webzine on drinking.

Jason Wirth reviews Devin Shaw's book on Schelling. Hopefully one day his book will get into paperback so the rest of us will need to read it.

Over at Critical Legal Thinking is an interesting post on Sovereignty & its Ground. From the beginning: "Metaphysics was meant to have died a long time ago, to have been awarded an esteemed position in the philosophical cannon but ushered off the stage of world-history with the King’s head. But it is still to be found lurking persistently in the most public of places, hiding in the broad daylight of everyday speech and accepted ideas, in court rooms and the great offices of State."

I suggest this from Harman, and this follow up from Peter Gratton. Here is the key quotation from Harman:

The other strategy that I disagree with is the Leiteresque strategy of saying that analytic philosophy doesn’t exist, which is kind of like Darth Vader saying that “the Empire doesn’t exist.” It’s simply an attempt to deny that there is any rebellion, and to try to dismiss the rebellion as nothing but a low-quality version of something the Empire already does better. In other words, “continental philosophy done in continental departments is crap, and you need to go to study with analytic philosophers who happen to work on Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc.”

Here are the videos of the CUNY Speculative Realism talks.

Jason Read has an interesting (rather old, now) post on Contagion.

Speaking of Jason Read, here is him doing a teach-in at Occupy Main.

Speaking of the occupation, here are some other posts.

Here is a collection of links put together by MLA. I'm not going to repeat any of those links, so go read it.

Ben Woodard has an interesting and useful post on OWS over here. Different than a lot of other stuff being said, worth reading.

Sometimes I feel I should be writing on the Occupation, but I don't have a lot new or interesting to say. Right now, the occupation is something to root for, support, participate in. And at some point, I am sure I will theorize more about it. But not right now.

I don't have anything really interesting to share about this, but here is an article that argues that Utilitarians have some sort of sociopath tendencies.

Lastly, here is your safety tip reminder of the day. Figure out some basic cloud security and do it.

Tapes 'n Tapes with Badaboom. I can't seem to stop listening.

RIP Derrick Bell

2011-10-06T14:24:00.000-04:00

I think we have all heard that Steve Jobs passed away yesterday, but significantly less attention has been directed to the passing away of Derrick Bell. I first ran across Bell's work when I was a freshman in high school (in debate, naturally). As a 14 year old white liberal, Bell's work was breathtaking. Damning, intriguing, controversial, and moving all at once. Long before I heard of Foucault or read a book of Marx's, I learned about the central reality of power from the Critical Race Theory file I had. I never developed more than a debater's knowledge of Bell's personal work, but he started me along a path that me read and engage materials relating to racism, domination, power, privilege, colonialism, intersectionality, multidimensionality, different forms of academic expression, etc. I am sure I am among one of the least affected by his work and life, and I still consider myself profoundly changed from an early exposure to critical race theory and the work of Derrick Bell.

Forms of Life Conference CFP

2011-10-05T14:04:00.001-04:00

Forms of Life: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics

The Department of Comparative Literature

Binghamton University

March 2^nd-3^rd 2012

What comprises the matrix within which a given language has meaning? How is meaning constructed and how is it operative across social, cultural, and linguistic impasses? How is conflict and antagonism orchestrated both across and within disparate forms of life? To interrogate the emergence of sense as well as the conflicts that arise as a result of making sense, we welcome submissions that theorize the concerns outlined above with a particular eye toward their theorization as forms of life. In this way, we seek submissions that span disciplinary boundaries and topics, broadly speaking, related to literature, linguistics, politics, alternative and utopian imaginaries, aesthetics, and tactics of resistance.

The form of life, but even more broadly, the theorization of sense and meaning, have historically been thought and inhabited in and through a variety of frameworks and styles of thought. Linguistically, forms of life have been theorized as the condition of possibility for sense itself. Ecologically, thinking the operation and function of alternative forms of life offer a means of thinking against and beyond anthropocentrism. Forms of life have been theorized in relation to global biopolitical regimes and concomitant forms of resistance. The very practices of making sense and meaning come to be interrogated within and across a variety of disciplines, often at the expense of disciplining knowledge itself. The question of forms of life, but even more broadly, the question of making sense, is one around which the work of many scholars has revolved: Ludwig Wittgenstein on language games, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work on the multitude, Giorgio Agamben on bare life, Chantal Mouffe on liberal democratic projects, Michel Foucault on biopolitics and securitization, Sylvia Federici on feminism and a politics of the commons. We also see these questions to stand in relation to Jasbir Puar’s work on terrorism and homonationalism, Deleuze and Guattari’s work on signification and assemblage, and Judith Butler’s work on the politics of gender and frames of war. While this is by no means an exhaustive theoretical list, it does hint at the depth of the theme our conference seeks to interrogate.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary emphasis of Binghamton University’s Department of Comparative Literature, we seek work that engages in the conjunction of multiple frames of epistemological inquiry, from fields including, but not limited to: critical theory, translation, postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, queer and gender studies, psychoanalytic theory, critical animal studies, ethnic studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, media and visual culture studies, continental philosophy, and historiography.

Workers, writers, and thinkers of all different disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and non-disciplinary affiliations are welcome, whether academically affiliated or not. Submissions may be textual, performative, and/or visual. Please submit an abstract of approximately 200 words to Matt Applegate at formoflife2012@gmail.com by December 15th, 2011.

Interview with David Graeber about Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-03T14:15:00.003-04:00

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.

A Post of Links

2011-09-28T12:49:00.000-04:00

First up is an argument between John Sanbonmatsu and Derrick Jensen on the issues of localvorism. First, Sanbonmatsu reviews Keith's The Vegetarian Myth. Jensen responds here, and finally Sanbonmatsu responds here. All of the posts here are long, sustained, and worth reading. I hope to make a longer post about these exchanges later. Right now I just want to add a note about the issues of plants that becomes a major bone (fiber?) of contention. The idea that plants are fully sentient beings is an increasingly popular opinion, but continues to not really be backed up by science. I want to thank Sanbonmatsu for doing some of the legwork on this issue. What we have is the gut feeling of a lead researcher, and a whole bunch of people who want an excuse to not change their behavior. What we don't have is any sort of major scientific work to back up this claim of plant sentience. I think this is something where Matt Calarco's ethical agnosticism is pretty useful. We need to be open to the changes here. But being open doesn't mean automatically accepting, either. And as I have said before, even if comes that plants are sentient, I find it highly doubtful that will change the need for vegetarianism or veganism. It will certainly complicate things, and will shift our ethical relations. However, just because it is impossible to live your life without violence, doesn't mean you get to be indiscriminately violent. We might as well say that the logical conclusion of plant sentience is cannibalism as we could say that plant sentience would mean flesh eating. Put simply, the radical ethical implications of plant sentience is far from being thought out by those who advocate it as an excuse for eating animal flesh.

The phlyo jobs info updated site is really moving at a fast clip. I was just telling someone I felt there were more TT jobs posting for continental philosophy this year. Like, at least three of them.

Clare O’Farrell has an excellent post on Foucault, scientific knowledge, and climate change. Issues of climate change are frequently forcing us to decide how we relate to scientific knowledge and authority, slow violence, and our subjectivity in relationship to the environment.

Speaking of slow violence, I missed this interview (now almost a month old) with Rob Nixon about slow violence. I agree with Nixon that part of the problem is basically an aesthetic one (aesthetics here meant in the political sense that Ranciere uses the term, one of the partition of the sensible). Slow violence covers so many things: ecological devastation, poverty, the destruction of social institutions and public works, etc. In a way this is what the Zapatistas meant every time they claimed that before they fired the first shot, they were already at war. Or likewise, whenever Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that the civil war wasn't an interruption of peace, but merely the war becoming real for white bodies as well as black bodies.

It seems there is a recent study that argues that whenever slaughterhouse work goes up in a community, so does the crime rate. The study controlled for other sorts of boring and repetitive jobs. Clearly, there needs to be further studies before one can make much use of this, but it is a fascinating find. (h/t Eccentric Vegan).

The Wall Street Journal had a recent op-ed against the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and how the AETA "has emerged as a central example of how Congress has eroded the legal concept of mens rea, which is Latin for "guilty mind"—a long-held protection that says a defendant must know they've done something wrong to be found guilty of it."

The Rosebuds have a new album out. A solid, mellow, and spooky album. And because we are about animals here, I present "The Second Bird of Paradise"

This blog is banned for hate speech

2011-09-27T18:18:00.002-04:00

I was talking to the debate coach at a certain Mass. public school, and she informed me that my blog is banned by her school's internet for 'hate speech'. I understand that such internet censoring software is relatively crude and oversensitive. So, I wouldn't be surprised if this blog was banned for obscenity or whatever. But hate speech? I've been trying to figure that one out all day.

What does Critical Animal Studies have to offer?

2011-09-27T00:22:00.000-04:00

The very short answer is obvious: A lot.

As I am writing this paper on CAS and queer theory, I keep thinking about this. My paper is very much about how certain aspects of queer theory help us think through certain issues in CAS. Queer theory does more than simply make visible an abject subject (though it certainly would do enough if it was all that it did), it also provides insights, tools, and methodologies for other fields of research and inquiry. So, I am trying to think through some of the things that CAS can offer to other lines of inquiry, besides simply bringing forth and giving weight to a repressed subject (that of course never being a 'simple task'). For example, I think CAS has allowed me to think through the questions of the biopolitical. The many problems I have with Agamben aside, I think he gets right that the biopolitical is rooted in an anthropological machine. Critical animal studies gives us tools for understanding that anthropological machine, and hopefully tools for dismantling it, as well. Moreover, CAS has given me the ability to understand the central importance of the issue of opacity. I think I have often talked about how wonderful I think Glissant's book, The Poetics of Relation, is. One of the major themes in the book is the political affirmation of opacity. CAS gives us ways to begin to think of ethics and politics with beings who obviously maintain their opacity.

There are many other areas (I am pretty tired right now), but I think we will shortly be seeing more and more research projects that uses CAS to think through and extend projects in other fields, at the same time those fields will continue to influence critical animal studies.

A Post of Links

2011-09-21T12:23:00.000-04:00

There is a new issue of the Journal of Critical Animal Studies out. It includes a review by Adam of HEALTH has a review of the film To Love or Kill: Man vs Animal. HJM of Prodigies and Monsters has a review of Carol Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat. And Stephanie Jenkins has a review of Nussbaum's The Frontiers of Justice. There is also all sorts of other interesting stuff in the issue, go and read.

Over at New APPS is an important post on Gender and Philosophy Book Series. It's really bad, and deserves attention.

There is also an excellent and riveting interview with Ladelle McWhorter. I have enjoyed her books on Foucault, and I saw her speak at the PhiloSophia conference. An amazing and generous scholar.

Carol Adams brings our attention to some shady practices by Amazon and print-on-demand books. I had no idea.

Karl Steel (of In the Middle) new book: How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages, is finally out. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Lastly, I am not really a huge Wilco fan. I find them a fine, usually solid band. But not one of the most amazing bands of all time, as so many others find them. Still, when I saw their new album was on NPR's First Listen, I decided to listen to it. I was blown away. It is like the new album is as good as all the hype they have gotten over the years. Anyway, our music for today comes from that album.

Would you like to be born knowing you would be murdered?

2011-09-18T22:29:00.000-04:00

In the recent Kathy Rudy post against veganism, there are lots of issues I would like to address. But most of them are of a factual nature, and not as terribly interesting to respond to point-by-point (however, if you have any particular questions, let me know). I do, however, want to address and think through one point.

At one point in her post, Rudy argues:

The question of killing gets more complex, but if you could have a good life on pasture for many years and enjoyed the gifts of the world, only to be killed as you reached middle age, would you choose that? Or would you choose no life at all to begin with?

Before we get to these questions that Rudy raises, I want to address this absurdity that any animal, even those who live on family farms as opposed to factory farms, reach middle age. I know that historically, before cows were fed on corn in the US but were raised on grass, they were usually slaughtered between 5-7 years of age (except breeder cows and cows used for milk). Now, the average lifespan of a cow not killed is about 20-25 years. The oldest cow recorded lived to somewhere in her mid-40s. To compare to humans, based on the life expectancy in the US, it would be as if you were slaughtered at the age of 19 and a half. Still a teenager, if just barely. But far, far away from middle-age. And while this is talking about the average age that cows were killed in the United States from about the mid-19th century and before, it doesn't necessarily talk about the practices of family farms here currently. I will say that I know a lot of family farmers, and I don't know any that let their animals live into middle-age. The chickens on polyface farms, for example, are allowed to live 42 days.
So, if Rudy's question was reflecting reality, it would be something like this: If you could have a life that includes being ripped away from your family, friends, and children on a whim; if you could have a life that included castration, partial removal of other parts of your body, potentially being branded; if you could have that life and know you will be slaughtered from childhood to late adolescence, would you take it? Rather than having no life at all? Because that is the question that Rudy should be asking. And this is from the conditions from some of the better farms for animals. This is as good as animal production gets. And that is why something like veganism remains essential.

But let us return to Rudy's original question, again. What if we were to get things really a lot better for animals. What if we allowed animals to live to middle age, and what if we didn't engage in so much torture and obvious disavowal of animal sociality, would that be okay? First, let's bracket that we tend to always go back to the worse way to treat beings we plan on eating. Let us pretend this fiction is possible: Would you choose that life as opposed to no life at all? Would you choose to bring a child into this world knowing they will be slaughtered after living only half their life? I don't have answers, but I am seriously curious.

High school debaters talking about animal rights

2011-09-17T23:07:00.000-04:00

The current Lincoln-Douglas debate topic for Sept-Oct is "Resolved: Justice requires the recognition of animal rights"

That means thousands (okay, maybe only hundreds, but my guess is thousands) of High Schoolers will be spending two months discussing the ethics and effects of animal rights. If you have any questions about what this means, ask me in comments. However, if any of you philosophers, theorists, or simply animal rights activists know any school debate teams, now is a time to reach out and help.

Also, any of you with blogs (or if you want to post on my blog) short entries on the idea of the topic justice requires recognition of animal rights would be welcomed, as well.

Just thought I should put this out there. Sorry I am behind on bringing this up, but for whatever reason I didn't know about this until today.

A micro-picture of what is wrong with out health system

2011-09-17T18:45:00.000-04:00

So, my wife has been sick, and she was kinda worried it could be strep, so we took her took a local medstop yesterday. She went in, got tested. It wasn't strep, instead this is what was written on her Patient Education Form:

VIRAL PHARYNGITIS (Sore Throat)
Your throat pain is due to an infection called 'Viral Pharyngitis', commonly known as 'Sore Throat'. This is a contagious illness. It is spread through the air by coughing, kissing, or by touching others after touching your mouth or nose. Symptoms include throat pain worse with swallowing, aching all over, headache and fever. This illness does not require treatment with an antibiotic. [Emphasis added]

So, the doctor gave her two prescriptions, one of which was for Amoxicillin (an antibiotic). Why? No real reason. It won't treat the sickness. It merely adds to the costs of health care in this country. If taken, it stands the chance of creating antibiotic resistant bacteria. It will certainly decrease the taker's antibiotic effectiveness for the next six months. And, there is also the slim chance of a major health consequences.

Why do I write about this? Because when we talk about the health care system, we usually are talking about the major actors: insurance companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and the various governmental agencies and laws. And all of those are tied in together, but we also need to start changing the way that cost-benefit analysis of individual doctors. On some level we can say this requires patient knowledge (knowledge to know when to ignore a prescription), but that is obviously unrealistic. Anyway, this is another example that we have two problems with our health care system. One is that we are usually underinsured, and underprotected. The other is that people who are insured are frequently given too much care. If you want to know more, read Jonathan Cohn's Sick as a good place to start.

A Post of Links

2011-09-16T16:24:00.000-04:00

Haven't done one of these in a while. I feel behind. Remember, share anything with me you think I may be missing. Self-promotion is always encouraged.

CK has a post up about cooking shows, and the meat that is featured in them. I highly suggest going and reading it. Basically, he sums up my own ability to dissociate myself from the flesh in cooking shows that I cannot do in the case of the flesh of the grocery store. Perhaps an interesting extension of this would be to figure out why there are times I cannot keep that dissociation going with even a cooking show.

Levi's book, The Democracy of Objects, is finally out (at least the html version). Check it out.

Over the summer, HJM of Prodigies and Monsters got an article published in Rhizomes entitled, "The Becoming-Woman of the Young-Girls:Revisiting Riot Grrrl, Rethinking Girlhood." I think this article continues HJM's trademark ability to combine complex political and identity theory (in this case, particularly the work of French anarcho-communist collective Tiqqun) with the lived theory of punks, queers, misfits, outcasts, artists, monsters, and everyday existence. In other words, go read it.

Adam has a long interview/post up at his blog on trying to rethink vegan praxis. I hope to write some thoughts on it in the future, but until then you should go check it out.

APS has an excellent post on academic translations.

Speaking of monsters (and aren't we always speaking of that?), over at Pop Matters is a short article on our cultural obsession with vampires, zombies, and viruses. (h/t This Cage is Worms)

Jean Kazez has an interesting post on the ethics of lying and misleading people in order to get them to act in ethical ways. It is worth reading.

Over at Kdebate is an interview with Bill Spanos on policy debate the activity, but also on the very existence of policy debate in our political reality. Worth reading even if you don't engage with academic policy debate. And of course, if you do debate, you have to read it. Mandatory.

Did you know they found new fossils that changes a lot of what we believe about humans, ancestry, and all of that? Yeah? Cool. Paleontology basically continues to disturb the fundamental and existential uniqueness of homo sapiens.

This post from David Graeber is worth reading. This is on his theory about the invention of money, and it is really smart.

Lastly, Kathy Rudy (promoting her new book Loving Animals [which continues to believe we can eat those we love]) has made a post on the Univ. of Minnesota's Press blog. I am planning a longer response later, but Carol Adams and Erik Marcus already have responses up.

Wild Flag, a new band including ex-members of the bands Sleater-Kinney, Helium and The Minders, has their first single out. Not only is a great song, but I am a big fan of the music video.

More on using your mac for long-form writing

2011-09-15T15:01:00.000-04:00

This is following up my last post on this topic, mostly by copying and pasting comments. First, I want to especially thank Craig and M.Allen for their helpful suggestions. Also, I had some people ask me if there were any similar program suggestions for a windows based computer. Particularly for citation management. Any suggestions, let me know.

First, one category I left of were things to stop time waste (you know, like reading blogs). I have used LeechBlock. Craig makes this suggestion:

I also recommend Freedom. It turns off network connectivity for a designated period of time thus preventing you from wasting your life reading blogs and Twitter. (As I am doing now.)

Which is a good suggestion. I think I might try using this one. I have found that I am just too skilled at getting distracted on the internet, that LeechBlock is sometimes too nuanced of a tool for my work.

On the issue of what to use for word processing and citation management, this is what Craig suggested:

I write in plain text in TextWrangler, where I also markup the text in LaTeX. Marking it up as such allows to easily identify what should be bolded, italicized, and the like should I want to output the text to Word or RTF instead. Unlike proprietary document formats (e.g., Word, Mellel, etc), plain text will most likely always be readable by all computers at all times. Will come in handy when you are editing your complete works on your deathbed in fifty years.For citation management, I use BibDesk, which integrates very well into LaTeX. If you loved the aesthetic features of Mellel (which I had used at the start of my dissertation), you'll die for LaTeX.

I've never used Scrivener, but I understand it can fulfill the same functions as TextWrangler. The advantage of TextWrangler (and LaTeX and BibDesk) is that it is professional quality and free. LaTeX and BibDesk also have the advantage of being open source.

M. Allen also made these comments on LaTeX:

Since I do some technical work, I had trained myself in LaTeX. Thankfully, LaTeX is incredibly flexible in compiling documents, lists of tables, list of figures, and is built with its own bibliography package. TeXShop for mac is free, so my bibliography and writing packages are free altogether.

When compiling the document, I can specify what I want if I don't want the whole document. So, for the job market, just telling it to return "Chapter 4", makes life easy for that (or having people read it).

If you do not do any mathematical work, then learning LaTeX is not really ideal. However, if you do (logic, or in my case, game theory), then this combination made it a great tool for compiling my dissertation.

Lastly, JonEP suggested this for citation management, a browser based solution:

I'd strongly urge you to consider Zotero, not only for bibliography management, but especially if you are girding yourself for the long haul of a dissertation (I just finished one). Zotero is particularly useful for acquiring articles -- as you do research on your computer, you are constantly pulling down articles that are useful to you. Without Zotero, the task of entering bibliographic information about each article is so onerous that it soon overwhelms you. With Zotero, you are able to rapidly integrate new material into your collection and keep it organized and relevant.

I'd also strongly recommend checking out NVIVO, a program that helps you code and analyze your notes. [Nvivo is for windows, and I haven't used it. --Scu]

Now, I haven't used any of these programs, but I figure I would put this out there. And I generally agree about using open source tech. So, there you have it. Any other suggestions? Comments?

The NOT Derrida Wars

2011-09-14T22:16:00.001-04:00

I'm back blogging, and we already have a small, low-level fight about Derrida. I think most of us really don't want this to become another chapter in the Derrida Wars. However, the current discussion has provoked some comments from me.

First, Graham Harman began this round with this post here, arguing that Derrida refuses to ever be responsible for his claims. This prompted this extension of that argument by Job Cogburn over at APPS. And it also prompted this defense by Eric Schliesser. And I made this comment, basically saying I think their particular passage doesn't do the work they think it does. But I wanted to expand on some of these thoughts.

First, I think this very strong, affective hatred that Cogburn talks about is interesting. It is one I feel for, say, Heidegger (okay, maybe only Heidegger). What interests me about such an anger is what it can do, how it can be intellectually and productively useful. I sometimes think it can only be useful if the person who gets you so angry is herself an amazing philosopher. Heidegger, his many faults aside, is certainly an amazing philosopher. And therefore, I have learned as much in my articulating my disagreements with Heidegger, than I have from many thinkers I generally agree with. This anger is also a really different feeling from the dislike, apathy, or simple disagreement I might have with other thinkers. Those feelings tend to simply make me not interested in reading those thinkers' books, rather than that intellectually useful. Anyway, I think that Cogburn and Harman have it wrong in their criticisms of Derrida. My hope, though, is that their hostility is philosophically useful for them.

Second, the more important note on the idea of Derrida, and political and ethical engagement. First, let us just say that personally, Derrida was involved in quite a few political and ethical stances on specific and concrete things (I was about to make a list of some, when I realized that Wikipedia beat me to it). That's not the important part. Derrida's philosophy in many places is a direct refutations of Heidegger's own beautiful soulism. I am thinking here particularly of "Force of Law" and Rogues, texts in which Derrida argues for the necessity of calculation in any ethical and political act. Rather than continue in a certain strain of Continental philosophy that refuses any sort of consequentialist politics, and therefore refuses any policy action that cannot be perfect, Derrida challenges us to commit to the need of calculation. This is huge. If we are to follow Jane Bennett's suggestion in Vibrant Matter that what we need are "enabling instrumentalizations", this will mean a some sort of calculative relationship, but an ethical one. I definitely think Derrida helps push into such directions, which certainly means into accountability (literally).

monstrosity, normalizing, authenticity

2011-09-13T10:20:00.000-04:00

So, there is a cool looking conference (I don't have any real travel funds, so I will not submitting an abstract) on monstrosity. Anyway, seems like a good place as any to say something I have been thinking of.

Monstrosity is basically a really good way of thinking all sorts of things that seem opposed to what Foucault called "the normalizing society". Sometimes this is specific to the entire terrain of monsters as opposed to the creation of the category of the abnormals. Sometimes this refers in generic to something monstrous that rebels or resists the normalizing order. Sometimes this refers to all sorts of specific introductions of the monster that we use as metaphors (or whatever) in order to think all sorts of theory: werewolves, vampires (vegetarian and otherwise), ghosts, the weird, the blob, zombies, Frankenstein's Monster, etc. And really, I don't have anything against any of this. I know it is always fashionable to oppose whatever is fashionable in contemporary philosophy/theory, but this is a fashion that I both do work in and lots of people I respect do work in. But I briefly want to talk about something else.

So, I come out of the traditions of goth, glam, and punk when I was in HS. All of them are pretty big fans of monstrosity, excess, the profane, that sort of thing. And while monstrosity, in those circles, might be opposed to normality, but is often used as an indicator of authenticity. Authenticity is another way of thinking specific forms of domination, of thinking specific models of normalizing. Anyway, Adorno wrote an excellent little book, The Jargon of Authenticity, that should be read on this point. I don't have much to say on this point, really (yay, blogging. Throw something out there without fully forming the idea). I certainly don't think that all forms of valorization of monstrosity suffers from the problems of authenticity. But I do think there is a possibility to turn the issues of monstrosity into an existential politics, into something specifically avoids the anonymous, the production of alterity, existing outside economies of the sacred and the profane, bizarre co-mingling, etc. It is not that we need to be opposed to recent academic interest in monsters, but that any new trend requires proper caution in places it can end up.

Tricking out your Mac for long-form academic writing (especially a dissertation)

2011-09-12T14:27:00.000-04:00

So, many of you are in the process of writing your dissertation, and those of you who aren't, do other long academic writing. Anyway, there are lots of products to help you write with a Mac, and most people I talk to don't seem to use many different products to help with their productivity. A quick note here: If you are being highly productive, besides making sure you back-up your work, there is no real reason to play with other systems. But many of you come here because you are goofing off from your work. So, if you are goofing off anyway, you might as well goof off in ways that can help your long-term productivity. So, some products to help you work.

(1) ALWAYS BACK-UP YOUR WORK! I don't have a lot of smart or specific suggestions here. For example, there are pros and cons to backing up on the cloud or not. I would welcome suggestions in comments for specific back-up strategies for macs. But all of you should be backing up in some form or another.

(2) Word Processing:
The main option is, of course, Scrivener. Fairly cheap at $38.25 (that is the educational license version cost), it is versatile, and also allows you to make documents into formats that other people will actually look at. What makes Scrivener such a fun product to work with, is that it allows you to have total control of writing in many different points throughout a long work. It also is great for giving you control at the changing of different parts of the document. Want to experiment how splitting up a paragraph and turning in two will look? You can type it out and easily switch different views to get a good sense of it. Also, the writing mode is perfect for just writing, shutting out the rest of the computer and everything but a surface for putting words onto.

I haven't had a chance to use MS Office 2011 for Macs, but I have only heard good things. The one I have is pretty terrible in lots of ways, and is mostly used because the world uses MS Office.

I have used openoffice for Macs, and I have to say I was distinctly underimpressed. It is regularly slow, and causes more pinwheel action than most things I do on a Mac. The price is nice, for you grad students, but there are some other really good options.

I have tried two other word processors, and I want to briefly discuss them. One is Apple's iWork's Pages. I enjoyed using pages primarily for making fliers and image heavy texts. I don't do a lot of work with images in my academic writing, so I haven't really used it for that. However, I hear good things. As a standard word processor, it was pretty strong. But not amazing, and I had a lot of compatibility issues.

The other one is Mellel, which I only played around with long enough to expire the free trial. I really liked it a lot. Fast to load, and really controllable writing experience. I definitely felt like I had more control over the aesthetics of my document. But its lack of compatibility (it doesn't support docx, and only supports doc partially) made it not a good investment for me.

There are plenty of other word processors I haven't tried, like Bean and Nisus Writer. I recently was talking with someone who uses Scrivener for all of her long-form writing, and uses bean for all of her note taking and shorter word processing needs. If anyone has any experiance with other word processors I would like to hear them.

(3) Bibliography/Digital Library: I use Bookends. That is also the only one I have any experience with. It is fairly affordable at $99 or $69 (student), and I really like it. Anyone out there with experience with EndNote, Papers, or Sente? I can say that I found Bookends fairly easy to work with, and have never had the sort of problems to make me go and play around with the others. I have heard good things about Papers, but never really used it.

(4) Spelling and Grammar Check: Most of your word processing software will have some sort of spelling and grammar checks (MS Word's Grammar check is pretty decent these days, honestly). However, I suggest Grammarian Pro2. I know some people who cannot stand it, and it requires some active work in the beginning to get it synced to your particular problems and needs, but I think it is worth the effort.

Okay, what did I forget? Other suggestions or reviews? If I get enough of them I will make a follow-up post. Also, I guess I should say I have gotten no money, or even free products, for this post. But if anyone wants to give me free products to review for them, let me know.

I hope all the people in Binghamton are doing well

2011-09-10T00:40:00.001-04:00

If you are reading this, let me know if you are alright.

Some thoughts on Beautiful Soul Syndrome

2011-09-08T15:19:00.000-04:00

I'm working on a paper about vegetarian vampires, and I am engaging with what Tim Morton calls Beautiful Soul Syndrome (following, of course, Hegel). So, some of you have seen some of my arguments here before about how vegans and vegetarians are constantly being accused of suffering from beautiful soul syndrome (not, obviously, in those words), and that for the most part the accusation is bunk. But, I begin to think more about the critique of beautiful soul syndrome, and I realized there is a real threat in the critique as well. Let's detour quickly through Harman on Zizek, and then we will get back to animals.

Recently Harman commented on the absurd comments by Zizek on the Roma. Specifically, Harman wrote that:

However, some (though not Lenin’s Tomb) have suggested that Žižek is simply trying to be a contrarian. I don’t think so at all. I think there’s a fairly sturdy common thread running through all his most controversial political statements (both this one and some of his more controversial statements at the leftmost end of the spectrum), and that is his hatred of “the beautiful soul.” What Žižek despises more than anything else (and this is to his credit) is the assumption of cost-free moral superiority, even when it comes from the Left. He is deeply attracted to those who are willing to pay the price for their views, and that’s why we find him praising Stalin’s forced collectivization and, in the remarks now at hand, apparently praising locals who “fear” the Roma over distant city dwellers making bourgeois multicultural remarks for the Roma against the locals, and so forth.
[...]
I hate the defense of Stalin and shudder at any opening of inquests against the Roma, but what I do always respect about Žižek’s remarks on politics is that they’re never actually clownish at all.

Right, so there is something right on at that. And I agree, that being a beautiful soul is really problematic, especially from a political and ethical standpoint (also consider this a beginning of an answer to this question over at AUFS). However, being critical of being a beautiful soul is often what someone does right before they, you know, say or do something horribly violent and messed up. Zizek's frankly racist remarks about the Roma is a good example. But this also happens all the time in discussions of vegans and vegetarians. When someone critiques vegans and vegetarians of engaging in beautiful soul syndrome, of just desiring to be pure (like Pollan often does), they almost always are saying their willingness to accept the world as a violent place means they can now slaughter and eat the flesh of animals.

In other words, we cannot have a critique of the beautiful soul leading us into a worse world. This sort of political and ethical 'realism' cannot be an excuse for racism and needless violence. Deleuze was often fond of saying that doing philosophy required a sort of stutter or a sort of stammer. A way of making language do something it wasn't really designed to do. I often think that political and ethical action requires a type of shambling, a type of shuffling. A way of walking that both rejects the beautiful soul while at the same time not allowing that to become an excuse for us to not have ethical commitments.

I'm back

2011-09-08T00:33:00.000-04:00

So, I know it has been almost exactly 4 months since I updated this. Sorry about that. It was a very whirlwind time for me, and I will get to that in a moment. However, some maintenance issues first.

(1) I know I missed responding to several emails. It wasn't personal (more on that below!), but if you have an outstanding email from me, let me know. I will get back to you this time (promise!).

(2) At some point I stopped reading other blogs, as well (sorry!). When I checked it again I had over a thousand blog posts unread, so I just told it to restart. What did I miss? Any great new blogs to read? Anybody release new books or important articles? Anybody got new jobs? Any massive wars? As always, self-promotion is encouraged.

Now, what I have been up to. I got married. I went on a honeymoon. I dealt with some serious family existential crises. I dealt with some family health issues. I moved. Three times. Seriously, I did three moves since I last updated this blog. Okay, I am not going to expand upon the wedding and other such things. It will be pretty saccharine and self-indulgent. So, if that isn't your thing, if maybe you decided to watch the Republican Presidential debate tonight and are afraid for our future, you might want to stop reading now. For the rest of you, don't say I didn't warn you!

The wedding was wonderful. It was held in the Cuban Club in Ybor City in Tampa, FL. The Cuban Club is a gorgeous building, which a rich and interesting historical past. Also, even more importantly, according to Ghost Hunters, it is haunted. I saw no personal signs of this, but I was a little distracted. The ceremony was presided and written by HJM from Prodigies and Monsters. It was beautiful, and included readings from Judy Grahn and Audre Lorde. To give you a taste, here are our vows:

SCU: I, James K. Stanescu, take you, Sarah Wright, to be my best friend, my most trusted confidante, my favorite being, my love, from this day forward. I promise to always be kind, patient, attentive, caring, gracious, and mostly good-humored, even in the midst of grading finals. I promise to never take our relationship for granted, and to daily renew the commitment we make today, straight into the hereafter.

SARAH: I, Sarah Wright, take you, James K. Stanescu, to be my best friend, my most trusted confidante, my favorite being, my love, from this day forward. I promise to always be kind, patient, attentive, caring, gracious, and mostly good-humored, even in the midst of my residency. I promise to never take our relationship for granted, and to daily renew the commitment we make today, straight into the hereafter.

Yeah, pretty awesome.

Also, Sarah's younger brother is a professional actor, and he performed Mike Birbiglia's hilarious D-U-Why?! from This American Life. You can hear the original here.

The reception was all vegan Latin inspired menu, with a 17 piece big band, the Cigar City Big Band. The groom's cake (that's a thing, just in case you didn't know. Grooms get their own cakes, it seems) was a chocolate, peanut butter, and banana mousse. It was decorated to look like Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Click here to see a picture of it. MLA of P+M set up a twitter account as if I was live tweeting my own wedding, and several of the people involved with the wedding added their own mock tweets. Feel free to go laugh at me over here. Actually I am thinking of using it as my own twitter account now.

The honeymoon was awesome (except for some weird drama some of you know about), and I don't really feel like going into all the other stuff. But, my new plan is to return to regular schedule blogging. Hope you all have been well.

I'm happy to be back, back again.

A Post of Links

2011-05-11T14:16:00.000-04:00

I get married a month from today, craziness.

Sometimes I give thought to what order to post these links, but today I will simply be doing it in order of the tabs I have up (so no order at all).

Here are some interesting thoughts on the idea of the education 'bubble'. I highly suggest reading it. I continue to feel that the use of the word bubble is provocative, but ultimately inaccurate. Bubbles need to be fueled by speculative capital, which isn't the case with much of the educational system in the US. However, higher ed is both increasingly a major web of the economy, while at the same time is financially unstable over the mid- to long-term.

Speculations II is out. Obviously awesome, both on the inside and the outside. Go and look.

Maybe you don't know, but the blog about What It Is Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy has a sister blog, What We Are Doing About What It Is Like. Go look, and hopefully contribute. If you are interested in making comments about how to improve the blog experience, go contribute over here.

Researchers discover 66 communicative gestures that chimps use in the wild. (h/t MLA)

Here is Mark Bittman on the 'ag-gag' laws. For those of you not keeping up, several state legislators are considering making undercover videos of cruelty to animals in slaughterhouses and factory farms illegal. Thankfully Florida's measure has failed, but several more states are still considering their bills.

JCAS has a new issue, this one focused on Continental philosophy and critical animal studies. The collection seems excellent, and I highly suggest taking a look.

Speaking of CAS, here is the cfp for the second annual European Conference for Critical Animal Studies.

I heard about this when I was at the conference, but I didn't have all the details. However, it seems that PhiloSophia is now a journal, as well!

This is very cool, a list of works of Paolo Virno in English!

Levi has been interviewed over at the New APPS, as always these are wonderful and smart interviews.

The American Values project has its own website. Go take a look, and maybe contribute!

I can't remember if I linked to this beautiful and powerful look at Diamond Ring's "It's Not My Party", and more generally on queer trauma. Go read, and take a look at the official music video. I, however, prefer the song in acoustic mode, so here is Diamond Rings playing "It's Not My Party,"

PhiloSophia Conference wrap up

2011-05-08T12:05:00.000-04:00

I think it was a splendid conference, and I think all the conference organizers should be proud of a job well done. I saw a lot of great papers, sat on an excellent Judith Butler panel, and many wonderful conversations. I am also firmly of the belief that more conferences need to end in margaritas, veggie tacos, and a dance party. I treated the conference like a secret animal conference, and I think it says a lot about changes in the field that I can go to a conference not on animals and still manage to see about a paper a panel on animals. Though a lot of that, no doubt, is do to the influence of Kelly Oliver, whom I wished I had a chance to speak to. And all the Vanderbilt students I meet were considerably friendly and I think a lot of smart things are going on with those students. I did get to meet Dr. J, though sadly briefly. Though I just heard about potential flooding in Memphis, so I hope everything is all right. Lastly, I did get to meet Cindy Willett, who is remarkably nice person and doing very interesting work. Indeed, all the Emory students I meet and talked with generous and intelligent.

I know that because of change in geography the make up of the conference will be different next year, if I can find the funds to go, I will certainly plan to try and attend next year's PhiloSophia.

Will I see you at PhiloSophia?

2011-05-05T09:41:00.002-04:00

I will be at PhiloSophia hosted this year at Vanderbilt all day on Friday and Saturday. I am really looking forward to it. If any of you are going to be there, let me know. I will also be presenting on Judith Butler and non-anthropocentric ethics.

Isabelle Stengers' books

2011-05-03T16:08:00.000-04:00

Following up on my last post, MLA let me know of more Stengers' books coming out in English translation. I have been really excited by what I see as Stengers new popularity in the Anglophone world. Along with Latour, she is a brilliant and eclectic philosopher who has too long been regulated to exclusively the STS world, and seems to only recently discovered as a thinker in her own right.

Volume two of Cosmopolitics is coming out. This is great to see this series fully translated, even if Stengers is moving a bit beyond it in her more recent work.

Also, her book Thinking with Whitehead will be out shortly. I haven't read it, and am very excited to do so.

In this discussion, I told MLA that I wanted her co-authored book on capitalism and sorcery. Then, I looked and it is already in translation! It is also very expensive (so if anyone wants someone to review it for them for a copy of the book, let me know!). Nevertheless, her book on Capitalist Sorcery is already out!

Holy pre-ordering, Batman!

2011-05-03T14:42:00.003-04:00

Well, three major books are finally coming out in English translation, all now available for pre-ordering off of Amazon.

The second volume of Derrida's lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign are set to come out. Excitement.

Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory is up for pre-order. I get a lot of emails and search hits of people looking for news on the English translation, so here you go.

And lastly, Foucault's The Courage of Truth. I haven't been able to pick up a French version of this yet, so when I get the book will be my first time reading these lectures in any language.

In the case of Derrida and Foucault, these are the last lectures of their life.

A Post of Links

2011-03-30T11:11:00.000-04:00

Remember, I've missed a lot, so send useful things from the last month my way. But here are some recent, interesting links.

First up: Dr. J has an interesting project, and she is asking for more volunteers! It is called "American Values", and you can see the results of the first photographs being used this video. I think this is an great project, and I suggest going and being a part of it.

If " Gastronomic Solutions to Imperial Problems: Oswaldo de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto" is not the best title for a blog post ever, than I don't know what a good one is. But if you click the link, you will go over to Prodigies & Monsters, where Matt has great post up with that very title. The "Cannibal Manifesto" has been one both Matt and I have been obsessed with since we first discovered it, with lines like: "Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically." In this blog post Matt begins to highlight some of the reasons it is such a profound and powerful manifesto, go check it out.

After keynoting at the PIC Conference, Peter Gratton went on to deliver a talk at Cornell on Agamben. He has some of the details up. I can't wait to read the talk, and I am very sorry I had the miss that whole event.

There has been a recent interesting and important discussion on dealing with sexual harassment in philosophy over at The New APPS. Reading the comments is a must. Well, today Inside Higher Ed has taken this recent post to follow the entire trajectory of discussion (including the What is it like to be a Woman in Philosophy? Blog). I thinking about preparing a longer post on this issue, but this is basically where I am: The situation is far ranging, and obviously terrible. There aren't many 'solutions' that I am not willing to try at this point.

The NY Times has a graph up demonstrating American consumption of meat over the last century. It is staggering.

I am sure you have all heard about the insanity that is surround William Cronon, if not Stuart Elden has posted an email that tracks down important links and ways to show support. With the sort of work I do, I can't overemphasize how important Nature's Metropolis has been for my own work.

I am about to take some advice from the band Cults, and "Go Outside"

PIC Conference Thank Yous!

2011-03-28T16:35:00.000-04:00

The PIC Conference is now over, and I am safely back in GA writing up exams and editing papers. The conference itself seemed to go well from my perspective. It was my first time organizing a conference, and there are changes I would make, but I think it went well regardless.

There are many, many thanks I need to give out:

First of all, a huge thank you to Cecile Lawrence, who was called a conference co-organizer but who actually took on the lion's share of work for the conference. It would have been nothing but a CFP without her tireless work at the conference.

Matt Applegate, who gave me a place to crash, drove me around, picked up Peter Gratton when my flight got canceled, help set up everything, and generally kept me sane and grounded.

Gabriel Piser, who became a tech support person for the conference, with zero warning or official training.

The various PIC students who came, asked questions, moderated panels, and generally helped make the conference run.

Peter Gratton, who was an excellent choice for a keynote. He wrote a very smart address for the conference. He looked over the abstracts accepted before hand, and tailored his address to take up themes from various papers that were given. He helped promote the conference on his blog, in person, and over emails. He came to panels, asked questions, socialized with presenters, and treated everyone in an egalitarian fashion. He was also remarkably nice about all issues concerning payments and what have you. So, think about asking him to keynote at your conferences.

Besides those thank you, I met lots of people I really enjoyed. Glad to meet you (and I hope you know who you are if you are reading my blog). In general, the blogging community was really great in person. Devin Shaw was a delight to meet and hang out with, though he encouraged my drinking more than I should! Ben Woodard gave an excellent presentation, and my only regret was not getting to talk to him more. Dan Barber was remarkably fun to spend time with, and has convinced me to the virtues of the phrase "buying back in" as opposed to "doubling down".

Anyway, now that it is over, I hope to get back to my regularly scheduled blogging. Email if there are important posts I have missed, and also email if I have forgotten to respond to your comments or emails!

Two Links, a Note, and a Video

2011-03-24T12:22:00.000-04:00

This blog has been basically on hiatus as March has been rather time intensive for me.

Link 1) The Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution: A Conference starts tomorrow. I flew out yesterday 9 am, but got stuck over night in Dulles, where I am still am. So, I won't be in until later this evening.
For those who follow the academic blogosphere, there will be many people from that virtual place gathered together actually. Including myself and one-half of Prodigies + Monsters, Peter Gratton is the keynote. Devin Shaw of The Notes Taken, Ben Woodward, David Kishik, Dan Barber of AUFS, and I am sure other people I don't know or have forgotten. It should be a blast.

Link 2)
Eileen Joy just sent me an email telling me that the awesome journal postmedieval has a special issue on the Animal Turn with free pdf and html access through the end of March. So, go look.

Note: That brings me to my note. I thank Eileen Joy for her email because March has been a terrible month for in terms of keeping up with other blogs. So, let me know about the most important posts out there, things I should know about but haven't noticed.

Video: The Kills have a new album coming out. The first single is beyond amazing!

On Blogging: Philosophical Stephen Colbert or Sarah Palin?

2011-03-07T11:55:00.000-05:00

There has been a whole host of commentary about academic blogging since my last post. I am sure to miss at least a few, but here are the links I have: Tim Morton's brief commentary on my original post, Place Hacking has a both insightful and visually stunning response, Stuart Elden on why he blogs (pt 2), Craig on blogging as a way extracting surplus-value from academics (I might counter that blogging is a way of overcoming the alienation inherent in many modes of academic publishing), Alex Reid, Tim's Commentary on Alex Reid's post, Adrian has been trying to curb what he sees as excessive reactions or over reaction at his place (here and here), and lastly P+M has some links to various blogger manifestos.

And I was ready to let that be that. However, Ray Brassier did an interview with Kronos, where he said the following:

The ‘speculative realist movement’ exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity.

APPS already responded here. Brassier's comments are, of course, completely over the top. To the degree that I don't know what is going on here. If I was to write a caricature of the anti-blogging position, I don't think I could have done a better job. Is Brassier engaging in some sort of mockery or satire? Or is he, Sarah Palin-esque, making statements that self-caricature without meaning too? I don't know Brassier, so this is a sincere question.

On Blogging

2011-03-03T17:15:00.000-05:00

So, there seems to be a lot of discussion recently about blogging within the theory academic blogosphere (Theoryosphere?).

Two places in particular to look at. The first is from Tim Morton, the second from Stuart Elden. In both we see strange objections being raised against the very reality of academic blogging. In Tim's case, we have an audio recording of a talk he gave at a recent conference. In the response to his paper, Ed Cohen (whose works I have found very useful and interesting), gives a strange and very ungenerous response to Tim's talk. I highly suggest readers follow my first link, and read the comments from Eileen Joy which I heartily endorse. Cohen doesn't really advance an argument, but instead simply puts down blogging and by association Speculative Realism (I've been teaching fallacies to my Argumentation class, and the technical term for what Cohen engaged in is an appeal to ridicule). Meanwhile, Stuart reports on a discussion over at the crit-geog-forum on blogging, in which it was argued:

[T]he question [was] raised as to why anyone bothered with blogs? The commentator said that “it seems to add nothing, but gears and joys itself on self-serving romance”

I don't have a strong sense if these are isolated opinions, or if they are merely the tip of an anti-blogger sentiment within the academy. However, this is not the only time I have come across dismissive and condescending attitudes toward blogging among other academics. There seems to be a cluster of 'arguments', (1) It trades off with doing the 'real' work of being a scholar. (2) It is too vague, too hasty, too half-formed, too unpolished. (3) It is time consuming. (4) It will trip me/you up in getting hired/tenured/published/loved/respected/etc. (5) People and movements use blogging in order to get hired/tenured/published/loved/respected/etc. that are fundamentally inauthentic or ephemeral.

There are probably other arguments, and I am interested in those, but these five sort of defines the parameters. Excepting number four*, which is more pragmatic, I think we can take these various objections to chart the anxiety people feel in regards to blogging. To wit:

Blogging is not legitimate academic work, at the same time it requires a lot of work to keep up with a blog (both writing it and reading other blogs). However, these 'bloggers' are increasing making blogging seem as legitimate academic work. And in so doing are getting access to legitimate academic resources and prestige -- invitations to conferences, publications (including a series of 'upstart' journals and book publishers that is tapping into academic bloggers and their work), attention from grad students and junior academics (and sometimes senior ones), and the ability to speak for movements/schools of thought. This puts non-bloggers into a bind: either they are forced to engage with blogging (which requires more work), or they stand a chance that blogging might become increasingly more legitimate and bloggers will be taken increasingly serious.

To be honest, I sort of understand that fear. Blogging fits very well with the ways I like to think and communicate. It provides a wonderful sounding board, it is unofficial enough that I can just treat first drafts as important enough to hit the publish post, and I can see lots of other projects as they develop. I also get to be part of far flung academic communities. Whereas I am the sort of academic that enjoys hours and days of just researching in a library, I don't enjoy the isolation that such work can cause. Blogging is a way of thinking as part of a community. But what if that wasn't true? Academics are already asked to do all sorts of things, another time drain that doesn't even help you do your other work sounds like a nightmare.

Of course, I could be wrong. These objections might really be more about blog and bloggers, and less about the people making the objections. That is hard to really believe, though. When Cohen says that it is hard to imagine that SR bloggers have time for anything else, and he is doing this in direction to Tim Morton, one figures this is more about the way Cohen works and thinks than about SR bloggers. After all, it is quite clear that Tim Morton has an amazing academic output, and indeed many academic bloggers do (Stuart Elden being another example, of course Graham Harman, and Adam Kotsko is pretty intense for someone that junior in the academy).

I don't have any solutions or final thoughts. A blogger backlash is annoying, but ultimately I think digital, open, and on-going productions of knowledge will win out. It is cheap, easy, and many of the emerging scholars are openly embracing these changes. (Kunzelman reminds I have to read Jodi Dean's Blog Theory. He is write).

* Considering the state of the job market, and the academic program I have come from, I am more free than many of my colleagues to put myself out there. True, it is the freedom that Janis Joplin sang about, but I still get to have my blog.

More on Sex, Gender, Species Conference

2011-03-01T16:03:00.000-05:00

I've been really busy since I got back from the SGS conference, but I wanted to expand on the awesomeness, and give out some much needed thank yous.

First, thank you to my Judith Butler panel mates: Eric Jonas and Stephanie Jenkins. They were amazing to work with and plan with. Stephanie also deserves a special thank you for helping me with logistics, picking me up from airports, letting me crash at her place, etc. Eric deserves a special thank you for getting himself there in the face of opposition and adversity.

Also, a big thank you to the two organizers: Lori Gruen (who has a new book out), and Kari Weil, who will shortly have a new book out via Columbia UP. I am gaining new and profound respect for conference organizers, and this one was particularly well done.

I also want to thank all of the participants. Missing were all of the carefully practiced put downs and ego-centric 'questions' that do nothing to advance the other person's project. Instead, there was a real generosity of thought. The type you wished you saw at conferences but so frequently don't find. The conference, really displayed the robust and rigorous depth of animal studies (critical and otherwise).

All that, and excellent vegan food.

Awesome conference

2011-02-25T21:27:00.003-05:00

I am currently at the SGS conference, and it, simply put, amazing. I am sure I will have more later. Two weird/cool things: Tim flew into the same airport on the same day I did. Also, someone asked about OOO during the very first q&a period.

More later.

A Post of Links

2011-02-22T23:19:00.002-05:00

Well, my browser isn't functioning anymore due to the numbers of tabs I have open.

First, Peter talks to a debater about Continental philosophy in policy debate (for you debaters out there, that means they talked about kritiks). I plan to respond later, but hey, debate people, go read. Peter is curious how an organization like SPEP might be able to help encourage or help understanding such philosophy. If you can think of concrete and feasible suggestions, let him know. Make sure to read the comments, where Cameron Kunzelman weighs in with some discussion of how debate utilizes critical literature.

Prodigies and Monsters has been kicking so much ass recently. First up, I cannot over suggest this post on feminist autonomists. Honestly, go over there now. Here is a take away line: "This is, perhaps, just a long way of saying I’m entirely on board when James and Dalla Costa establish as a proper autonomist feminist task the refusal of the night shift so folks can make love." Also, check out this post on the It Gets Better. Here is a paper on Howard Zinn. And lastly, they have their own post of links. They make me feel better for slacking off, because wow, just go read them.

Thursday morning I am flying out to the Sex, Gender, Species conference. Eric has a post up with a preview of his paper that he is presenting there. I look forward to this whole conference.

Speaking of Judith Butler, check out this post by Tim Morton on Butler and OOO. Maybe that isn't your thing for some strange reason. BUT! Tim Morton also links to an article on Queer Ecology. Don't miss that.

In what I can only call important news, it seems that we are beginning to get some data on if pro-animal welfare campaigns actually decreases meat consumption. The answer seems to be yes, they do (h/t vegan.com). Now, unlike the people I link to, I don't think this is a full response to Gary Francione's arguments. There are two important arguments this doesn't respond to: (a) Are people decreasing animal products in general, or just meat? In other words, are they decreasing eating animals, but increasing dairy and eggs? (b) Are these reforms actually more effective than an abolitionist stance? That these reforms are effective doesn't actually answer back issues of comparative effectiveness.
With that said, I think the pro-animal welfare position, with hopes of leading to an abolitionist society, is gaining ground. More data, please!

Speaking of data, here is a test that indicates that monkeys display self-doubt, just like humans. (h/t Graham's blog). The article is interesting, and I suggest reading it. Tests like these are always weird. The more the we prove animals have capacities we think were unique to us, the more I feel even non-violent tests like this one are, at best, creepy. I am thinking of J.M. Coetzee's depiction of primate testing in The Lives of Animals.

Here is an interesting post on how legal scholarship turned toward Carl Schmitt and Agamben following 9/11 (h/t Craig).

Lastly, Levi lets the cat out of the bag: SR has been nothing more than a publicity stunt. Expect to be able to buy a blue coffee mug with an OOO logo in a store near you. (Actually, that is kinda a cool idea. Do I see a cafepress shop in the near future?).

I have a lot of videos to try and choose from this week. But how could I post anything besides the new Radiohead video? (btw, I expect Adam Kotsko to post some funny and insightful take on this video any day now. He is on notice).

They're not errors, they're invitations

2011-02-22T01:19:00.001-05:00

You might think I make a lot of errors in my posts. Typos, misspellings, grammatical snafus, etc. You might think I should rethink my belief in hitting the publish post button before any editing on a post. But as Peter Gratton proves-- they're not errors, they're invitations.

And yes, that is exactly what I meant to say. Even the metaphysically confusing parts of the first person actions I might not have done. I meant to say all of it.

Marx, Machines, New Materialisms

2011-02-22T00:20:00.000-05:00

Tim Morton has a recent post on marxism and new materialism (that jives well with Levi's post on OOO and humanism).

Tim's post, like many of his, is a concentrated bundle of ideas and connections. In this case, I both deeply agree with parts of it, and also disagree with others.

(1) Marx on machines is pretty essential for those trying to think through non-humanist understanding of relations. Switches from one mode of production to another mode of production comes not through some sort of economism, but rather as a way in which material processes are both shaped and simultaneously shaped by humans. In other words, humans are one part in the creation of history (in Marx a particularly privileged part still, but maybe not a necessarily privileged part), but so are tools, technology, machines, and the inorganic body of nature (sometimes in Marx's writing the natural world seems passive and inert, a mere resource to be used by humans. At other times nature is depicted as a fully engaged process and producer itself, one which is fully enmeshed with the artificial world. In other words, in some nature exists, in others we have a view of ecology).

(2) This is why Marx claims, in a footnote in Capital, that "Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and the mental conceptions that flow from those relations". This is one my agreements with Tim, who writes:

Marx says that when you have enough machines, in particular machines operated by other machines and making machines, you get a jump from a quantitative increase in machinery into the realm of the qualitative, into fully fledged industrial capitalism. Some kind of jump occurs.

Yes, and all of that is important. This new type of capitalism emerges because we have a new mode of production. Not just a production of economics and things, but an entirely new mode or relation, a new mode of life and the reproduction of life in the full ecological understanding of all of that. This is why it is important to grasp a history of these machines. Or at Marx clarifies earlier in the footnote I cited: "A critical history of technology would show how little of the inventions of the eighteenth century are the world of a single individual. As yet such a book does not exist. Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention?"

(3) For Marx, individualism in humanism has been displaced, but a certain human causation continues, one he doesn't seem entirely willing to break free of. However, at the same time his writing also freely identifies non-human actants as being full actors. For 'the machine' reaches a certain point where it no longer is run by humans, but rather uses humans as appendages to the machine. Thus, in my dissertation, I explore how we become appendages to the machine. How the birth of a disciplinary subjectivity arises within the assembly line (understood both technologically and managerially) of the Chicago meat-packers. And how a whole complex of forces bring us to that moment (barbed wire fences, monopoly capital, railroads, refrigerator cars, mono-culture agriculture, specially breed animals, etc.). Marx's view of modes of production is absolutely essential for me to think all of this. At the same time, it is also essential that accelerate Marx's posthumanist tendencies, rather than his humanist ones.

(4) Time mentions that it is surprising that we don't have more Marxists engaging with speculative realism and new materialisms, but I think he is doubly incorrect in this part. First, I think we have a lot of Marxists dealing within those terrains, but not particularly older and more established Marxists (though Levi might be the only OOO Marxist out there). Second, it isn't that surprising that so many Marxists would be turned off when so many of those people engaging in speculative realism and new materialism seem specifically anti-Marxist (like Ian's position, Tim's own recent aside about how he isn't a Marxist, Delanda's strong rejection of Marxism, etc). But I don't think Tim really means Marxists in general here, he probably has certain Marxists in mind.

In the end, I think we will probably see increasingly larger number of Marxists engaging new materialisms, and new materialists and realists of all stripes also engaging Marxism. Or at least that is how all of this has always worked within my head.

(4)

Tim Morton's interview

2011-02-16T12:36:00.000-05:00

Normally I would save this for another post of links, but the interview was too delightful and interesting of a read. John Protevi is doing great work in these interviews, and Tim is a wonderfully disinhibited and thoughtful subject.

A take away point for people who read this blog:

I remember one meal—I was a heavy vegetarian at the time, and I was invited to do an interview, which included a meal at High Table. All these Oxford types sitting there telling me how ridiculous vegetarianism is. And I write about it, and I am one! It was like being eviscerated by intelligent insects. They are in eternal attack mode. In the USA I realized that some humans had endoskeletons and soft skin, as it were. Now when I go back I feel like Gulliver among the Lilliputians—“Why are you stinging me? That's really annoying! Do you think you're being clever? What is that?” Schivelbusch was important but it was also a lot of Deleuze and Guattari combined with Braudel. When you look at capitalism as forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization you start to see food not simply as symbolic or “meaningful” or whatever but as an actual material substance that circulates around. I was also fascinated by Žižek as he had just produced The Sublime Object of Ideology, and it seemed to me that food directly was ideology. In other words, a McDonalds Happy Meal doesn't signify comfort: it is comfort, directly. “The Truth Is Out There.” This was very clear to me and very boring for everyone else, who wanted food to fill the gap left by the “death of the Author.” University of California Press flat refused to publish my stuff because it had philosophy in it—that was their actual stated reason! They wanted to replace The Fascinating Story of Charles Dickens with The Fascinating Story of the Potato. Kind of like that movie The Red Violin. After a while I stopped writing about food because I just ran into a lot of walls with my demystification approach. Instead, I started writing about ecology. Vegetarianism is obviously about ecology and all food involves thinking about ecological stuff. That was woven quite explicitly into the first projects.

A Post of Links

2011-02-15T21:45:00.000-05:00

First up, The Time of Revolution and the Revolution of Time has an official conference blog. Not much there yet, but check it out.

Graham Harman announces a new Speculative Realism book series. Check his blog out for the details. His book on Meillassoux is set to be the first book of the series, and I am pretty excited for it. Speaking of first books, Levi's The Democracy of Objects is soon to be released by the OHP's New Metaphysics series. What is the difference between those two series, you ask? Well, Graham has the distinction as well.

Speaking of books I am totally psyched to read when they come out, Stuart Elden has a final draft of the The Birth of Territory.

Do you have any talented philosophical undergraduated from under represented groups? Well, encourage them to apply to the PISKI summer program. (h/t Feminist Philosophers)

Richard Twine & co recently set up a list of works dealing with Foucault & Animals. While not entirely complete, it is still remarkably thorough. Eric says he wants to do the same with Derrida at some point. I feel that will be a much bigger job.

Speaking of Eric and Foucault, he has an essay of some of his recent work with Foucault. Check it out.

In a similar vein, you have to read MLA's post on Thinking through Sovereignty and Governmentality.

A new journal of critical history, entitled History of the Present, has details up for potential submitters. It seems really exciting. (h/t Elden)

I have been on a huge glam rock kick since I posted my last video of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. So, here is Butch Walker performing "Ladies and Gentlemen... The Let Go Out Tonites!"
It's live, because that is the only way to listen to Butch Walker:

Not sure if I mentioned this before, but...

2011-02-11T15:47:00.001-05:00

... I have ridiculously amazing colleagues. If any of you follow this blog, thank you.

A Post of Links

2011-02-10T16:45:00.000-05:00

Hey, my birthday is coming up this Saturday. I will be at GA Tech coaching and judging for the debate team. On to the links:

HJM of Prodigies & Monsters has this powerful and moving post on the need for those of us who consider ourselves radical thinkers to also be committed to trans/gender non-conforming rights. I cannot agree more. Few things feel me with as much disgust as radical thinkers who reject such concern as Bourgeois multiculturalism. Also, those thinkers who simply ignore such people are in some ways no better. After summarizing some of the shocking conditions for existence that trans people deal with, HJM concludes:

In short: you can’t just not write about this, folks, even if you don’t ‘do’ queer and/or feminist theory, no matter how much you love the Situationists, no matter what your dissertation is on or what your next article is about, whatever courses you’ve been assigned this semester. If you don’t feel you have whatever knowledge-base you need to think about resistance and the amelioration of certain of these modes of thoroughly naturalized and normalized brutalities, better ask somebody.

Fuck yes.

Speaking of the rights of transgendered, there is both good and bad news out of Canada, both of which come out of Feminist Philosophers. The good news is that the lower house in the Canadian parliament passed legislation protecting trans people. The bad news is that the legislation seems in danger in the upper house.

Tim Morton and Zachery Price have been discussing OOO and politics. Morton's take home point is in favor of anarchism. Tim is here, and Zachery's follow up is here.

Also, Adam Kotsko and Tim have been discussing OOO and negative theology (in relationship to Derrida and Hagglund's work on Derrida). Adam is here. Tim is here, and here, and here. Make sure to read the comments as well, to get the full discussion.

Also, I know this getting Tim heavy, but he has some discussion on internet types and women in blogging over at Arcade. Since my blog has started to attract its own trolls, I've been thinking a bit more on this issue. I don't have much to say. I don't publish troll comments, and yet trolls keep making them knowing this. Turning their comments into a one-way message to me. It is a weird impulse. One of my debaters referred to as pure art. Not sure if I agree with that, but libidinal economy that certain trolls engage in is one I do not understand. (I will, I presume, get trolled on this post having brought this up. It will continue to amuse and mystify me).

Over at APPS is a wonderful and insightful interview with Cynthia Willett. Check this out, as well:

Now I am working on how the same basis for sociality in the preverbal eros between infants and their caregivers also accounts for ethical relations across species.

Totally awesome, I cannot wait.

Lastly, you have to read this amazing polemic against foodies. Not only is there the enjoyment one gets from reading any good polemic, but it is also very insightful. Some of the quotations are long, but here is a short one that summarizes both joys:

That’s right: guests have a greater obligation to please their host—and passersby to please a vendor—than vice versa. Is there any civilized value that foodies cannot turn on its head?

It is one of the truths of the foodie world that guests are obligated to take on the role of host, and thus hospitality is turned on its head. Maybe so, maybe so. But it is certainly a philosophical insight.

I recently finished teaching Plato's Symposium to my Intro to Philosophy class. I should have thought through how a book that deals with homoeroticism and pederasty might cause a bit of a stir in my Baptist university located in the middle of GA. But, I didn't, really. Anyway, I am going to be showing them Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and I cannot wait for that discussion. In honor of that, here is Hedwig and Angry Inch's The Origin of Love. If you haven't seen the movie/play and are curious how it relates to the Symposium, this is one of the overt parts. You have to see it if you teach this work by Plato. Or, if you like awesome movies.

A Post of Links

2011-02-07T12:08:00.000-05:00

The problem about not doing updates very often, is that I lose a lot for my Post of Links. So, feel free to promote links in the comments.

There is a new blog to add to your readers: Lines of Fracture. Among academic blogging, this blog is somewhat unique. It is a group blog composed primarily of debaters, and features many high schoolers and undergraduates engaging heavily with continental philosophy and radical politics. You should check it out.

Graham Harman has been an amazing resource on what is going on in Egypt. So, check out his blog regularly.

Mark Bittman has given up his old column as The Minimalist, and is now focusing full time on food politics. Here is his first column. And here is his blog post reflecting on reactions to that shift.

Many of you have read here and elsewhere arguments that violence towards other animals leads to violence against other humans. Or at least there are connections. In ways that can only be described as weird, Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-CA) has combined those thoughts with a thorough-going xenophobia. Check out this Mother Jones article.

Bruno Latour was interviewed in The Hindu. Highly worth reading. (h/t Anthem).

This posts song is from Amanda Palmer, remixed by Peaches and the Young Punx. If that wasn't warning enough, this video might be what they call not safe for work (though I watched it at work, so who knows). Also, Amanda Palmer and Peaches should let you know how awesome this video is. Here is the "Map of Tasmania".

RIP Edouard Glissant

2011-02-03T10:21:00.000-05:00

News on his death (in French, h/t John Protevi).

Glissant was an amazing writer and thinker. I have many times suggested a larger readership for his book, Poetics of Relations. "Death is the outcome of the opacities, and this is why the idea of death never leaves us." (p. 194)

Is Egypt another Iranian Revolution?

2011-01-30T15:26:00.000-05:00

One of the places I've been keeping up with news about Egypt is The Daily Dish. Over there they have received this letter from a reader. In it the reader concludes on this point:

It seems likely to me that if the Dish and the internet had been around during the Iranian revolution, your coverage of the early days of that event would have fit in to the pattern of coverage typified by your response to the events in Egypt. The Shah was worse than a dictator, he was a monster. And the people who stood up to him were brave. They wanted to be free. But in hindsight, we know that the Iranian Revolution was a lot more complicated than that.

This is actually something I have been thinking about, particularly given Foucault's somewhat infamous support of the Iranian revolution. That Foucault would have supported the revolution has never surprised me, and much of his analysis from the time still strikes me as right on. For example, "The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred." And anyone who has dipped even their big toe into the writing of Ali Shariati knows that there existed in Iran at that time a powerful, coherent, and beautiful leftist Islamic strand of thought. That strand was betrayed and outmaneuvered in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, and what they ended up with was the Ayatollah. All of this reminds me of the distinction between a demonstration and an experiment in science as explained by Isabelle Stengers.
A demonstration is when you know the outcome, and you are merely showing that outcome. Think here of Galileo dropping two different weights from the Tower of Pisa. An experiment, on the other hand, is where the outcome is not known beforehand. You might have some idea, certainly some expectations, but ultimately the outcome is indeterminate until the experiment is run. Think here of the first time the atomic bomb was set off. There were a lot of ideas about what would happen, but there was a possibility that the atomic bomb might set the whole world on fire. Or it might not have worked at all. That's the nature of an experiment.

Revolution isn't ever a demonstration, it is always an experiment. The results are always indeterminate until the experiment has run. There is always the chance that a revolution just might set the world aflame.

On Blogging while in Grad School

2011-01-30T13:12:00.000-05:00

MLA over at Prodigies & Monsters has a post up about blogging while still being in grad school. As his post indicates, this is a conversation I've had with him in the past. I highly suggest reading it. I plan to write more on it later, but right now am finishing a public talk entitled, "Philosophy in the Age of the Factory Farm: Ethics and Animals", and I very well might get sidetracked. So, go ahead and read his post, and hopefully I will have more to say later.

Philosophers who have become famous after their deaths?

2011-01-29T19:52:00.000-05:00

Still following the situation in Egypt closely (probably too closely, as I have a public talk to give this Friday that needs to be finished). But I don't have much coherent to say at this point, so a thought I have been mulling over.

Are there philosophers that were not considered important in their own lifetime, that have become major sometime after they died?

In art to become famous after you have died is almost a cliche, the most famous example being, of course, Van Gogh. In literature there are any number of examples. Emily Dickinson, for one. Or Franz Kafka, whose obituary referenced him as a writer of the Max Brod school. In math, I can think of at least one major example, Georg Cantor.

In philosophy I haven't been able to come up with any examples. I have come up with plenty that have become more famous, they were already pretty well-known in their lifetime. I can come up with any number who were famous in their lifetime, but fairly ignored now. I am sure there is probably some obvious example that I will feel like an idiot when someone points it out to me.

Egypt and Ranciere

2011-01-28T12:09:00.000-05:00

Like many of you, I've been glued to Al Jazeera English live all morning. It is hard to describe. The NPD HQ is one fire, a curfew has been issued and the protesters don't seem to have gone away. The police seem to have completely left Cairo. The army has been called in, but no one knows what will happen next. I also agree with Marc Lynch that the US needs to get in front of all of this.

Yesterday I started teaching Ranciere's On the Shores of Politics to my Argumentation class. I talked about the events in Tunisia and in Egypt, and I used it as a way to talk about Ranciere's comments on the hatred of democracy, on the fear of democracy that seems to come from those places that most claim to support democracy. That indeed, few of us are for democracy, but rather for stability, terra firma, rather than the sea that is democracy. The sea, that as Schmitt remarked in his Nomos of the Earth, that is res Nullius and res Ominium, that the sea belongs to nobody because it belongs to everybody.

A Post of Links

2011-01-26T16:28:00.000-05:00

This is going to be far less comprehensive than previous posts, and I know I am missing a lot of good stuff (apologies in advance).

First up, the deadline for abstract submissions for the conference, The Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution, is Feb. 1st. Get them in, people. The conference itself is really coming together. Many of the submissions so far are simply wonderful looking. As well as strong traditional submissions, we also have a few performative or artistic submissions that also seem quite amazing. Come join what is sure to be a great conference.

As you know, Peter Gratton is the keynote speaker at The Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution, and he also has a review of Nancy's The Truth of Democracy.

Levi has responded on the issue of Derrida, here. I have two quick comments, for now (and this might exhaust all I have to say on the subject at the time). (1) Levi's response treats Derrida as a serious and important thinker, whose philosophical system is one he has particular disagreements with. That's fair. Whether one agrees with Levi's assement of what Derrida says, or agrees with that critique of that position, Derrida is not being treated as a caricature. (2) Levi seems to indicate in his post that I had treated some of Derrida's critics in the form of a caricature. I don't think so. I think at times during the so-called 'Derrida Wars', there have been statements (perhaps purposefully hyperbolic) that have claimed that Derrida only writes about books or is only a destructive thinker. But I'm not invested in who said what or anything. And not all critics of Derrida have been reductive in the ways they have treated him.

I also want to suggest this post on relations, from Levi.

Awhile back I talked about humane-washing:

Zamir doesn't confront what I call, following the term greenwashing, humane-washing. Because, for the most part, increasing the humane conditions of animals decrease profits market logic dictates that people don't increase humane conditions. But, one might object, isn't this why it is important that we demand more humanely raised animal products? Well, just as with greenwashing, humane-washing involves selling the image and myth of more humanely raised animals while not fulfilling this promise. Which makes far more market sense really. And we have seen this, over and over again. We have seen this with so-called cage free eggs, and we have seen this with humanely raised meat. Increased demand in both these cases didn't lead to better conditions, it frequently led to companies decreasing standards in order to gather the profits of higher demand.

Well, this was clearly the sort of term that was bound to be invented by a lot of people, and here is an interesting Grist article on the issue of humane-washing. Definitely worth a read.

Almost everyone has linked to this post by Jason Read on the dialogue between Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou on Hegel. And for good reason, go check it out.

Tim Morton takes up the issue if computer programming languages should count as a foreign language requirement. Ian Bogost follows up here. There is an interesting history over at PIC on that very issue. A while back PIC required three languages. Then it became three languages, but logic could count as a language. Then, it wasn't just logic, it was also things like computer languages. And then, it wasn't just logic and computer languages, it was a skill that would be helpful toward working on your dissertation. So, one woman did a dissertation on the way that women constitute their sociality during sewing and quilting, and she had to learn to sew and quilt for her dissertation. However, it was determined there was no real way to evaluate if someone had attained a skill, and so that requirement was eventually just booted. Leaving us still with a two language requirement. I'm not sure if any of this answers the question of if a computer language counts as a foreign language.

PACT is having a conference on "The Political Animal", in the broad sense of that term. I almost named my blog the political animal, but it was the name of the blog over at the Washington Monthly (at that time Kevin Drum blogged there), and so I decided on Critical Animal instead.

This is an annoyingly punned article on how a rooster in a cock fight killed the owner forcing him to fight. I link to this because so often people talk about animals in such passive terms, as if there is not constant and regular resistance.

I know I missed stuff, but Peter has been doing a good job at catching a lot more stuff that I have been missing, so start at this post and work your way through his recent blog posts.

This time is a song from Delta Spirit, "People C'mon". The music video has everything: Murder, Art, Intrigue, and a kick-ass song.

Derrida, Again

2011-01-25T10:37:00.000-05:00

Some discussions won't go away. Here is one of them.

See Peter, Chris, and Eric.

Look, if one needed to resist Derrida in order to speak and think, I am on record as having nothing against that. There was certainly a time in my own philosophical life where that was true. Where a certain Derridaism prevented a certain set of philosophical questions that I was involved in, and I needed to reject Derrida (personally, if nowhere else) in order to think them.

But still, this idea that Derrida was never invested in creating his own philosophical positions seem to either come from too narrow of a reading of Derrida, or too narrow of an idea of philosophy, or both. If you look at the 'late' Derrida, he is clearly trying to work out ideas of cosmopolitanism, friendship/fraternity, and hospitality. Frequently in a non-anthropocentric register. He did so both through recourse to other texts, but also through a profound number of insights of his own that were not mere textual glosses. And these are far from his only philosophical productions in his some 40 odd year career as a philosopher.

Also, none of this should be taken as an attack on Laurelle, on whom I know relatively little. Just wanted to clarify.

Some thoughts on writing the dissertation

2011-01-24T18:23:00.000-05:00

You might have noticed that my blogging has fallen off of late. I am still trying to adjust to my new schedule this semester, and blogging has been the first causality. As I organize my life in better ways, I am sure that my blogging will pick up. Now, to the post.

Tim Morton has been doing a series of advice posts on writing the dissertation. You can find them here, and they are worth reading. I wanted to add in some things from a current dissertation writer.
So far, so true from what Tim has been saying. Getting over the idea that you are writing your first book has been the hardest thing for me. Not only has my adviser been telling me this since almost the first day I ever met him (he didn't realize he was my adviser at that time). It also helped reading some dissertations that became books I also read (for reasons that include legitimate academic ones, I read both Jason Wirth's dissertation and Matt Calarco's. I've also read the books they eventually informed. While similar enough to understand their filiation, they were also different enough to really hammer in that these are two different products). With all of that, on some level I still had been thinking of my dissertation as my book-to-be. It was until about a month ago, when the tension between the first part of the dissertation and the second part of the dissertation (for those who are interested in some details, read this) was too much conceptually for me. Not too much for the same dissertation, but two much to be one book. What will almost certainly happen is that the dissertation will provide the framework and raw research for two different book projects, rather than the one.
Another issue of the dissertation is the balance between writing and researching. I'm the sort of scholar who happily spends many hours in archives, who enjoys taking a weekend to track down the origins of a particular phrase, etc. I've always been the sort of intellectual who befriends the small, marginal, asides in work. The dissertation really allows me to wallow in mode. Switching to a writing mode, and at some point ending the perpetual research has been hard. Focus on exactly what the dissertation looks like, and the goals I want to accomplish has been the biggest helps in this regard.
Marketability is the last thing I want to talk about, here. One of the weird things that emerges for anyone who engages in interdisciplinary work is that despite the tendency of your work to often generate excitement among diverse people, is that it is often hard to translate that excitement in proving you are engaged in a disciplinary intellectual adventure. There is a desire, at times, to put your dissertation in a sort of disciplinary drag. I don't have much to say here, I am bad at that. On some level, a dissertation has got to be thought of as a vehicle to help you get a job, and ignoring that seems like a bad idea. On the other hand, the degree of how to do that and in what ways are not something I can speak to.

I should probably take the time to break off a few chapters and try to get them published.

All my biases confirmed: Education Issue

2011-01-19T23:51:00.001-05:00

I'm sure all of you have heard about the new book, Academically Adrift. Using a large longitudinal study, 45% of students made no gains on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) during their first two years in college, and 36% made no gains over four years. That basically means colleges are not reaching a little over a third of our students (the ones who don't drop out) at all. But the study also points out exactly whom we are not reaching:

After controlling for demographics, parental education, SAT scores, and myriad other factors, students who were assigned more books to read and more papers to write learned more. Students who spent more hours studying alone learned more. Students taught by approachable faculty who enforced high expectations learned more. "What students do in higher education matters," the authors note. "But what faculty members do matters too." The study also found significant differences by field of study. Students majoring in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and math—again, controlling for their background—did relatively well. Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not. Our future teachers aren't learning much in college, apparently, which goes a long way toward explaining why students arrive in college unprepared in the first place. Financial aid also matters. The study found that students whose financial aid came primarily in the form of grants learned more than those who were paying mostly with loans. Debt burdens can be psychological and temporal as well as financial, with students substituting work for education in order to manage their future obligations. Learning was also negatively correlated with—surprise—time spent in fraternities and sororities.

Well, glad to know there is now hard data to back up all my biases. I am also with Tom, we need to stop cutting programs that teach critical thinking.

As far as the suggestions for federal government mandating loan money to schools that do well on the CLA, such as Kevin Carey (the first link) seem to be suggesting. From what I can tell from discussion with colleagues at schools that have implemented internal CLA testing in the past, the stats are pretty easy to juke. For example, you can open the initial assessment to the general population, but only test your students enrolled in your honors program in the senior year. You can require the test, offer no incentives (positive or negative) the first time, which will frequently produce students hurrying to get through it. And give strong incentives for the taking it the last time, creating a climate where students will take it more seriously. You can teach classes to the test. Indeed, you can make it common that professors provide in-class evaluations that are somewhat similar to the methodology of the test itself (questions in which students exam in-class pieces of evidence, and are able to explain and evaluate the arguments of those pieces of evidence). I'm not saying that the CLA is a bad metric. It can be, but as first blush, the way it was used here seems to have been honest and up-front. I am saying that the CLA is a bad metric for figuring out which schools should get money. Unless I am wrong (and I could be, I would love to hear from some readers with experience dealing with the CLA), it seems that it is pretty easily manipulable if schools have a strong financial incentive.

Some Thoughts on Ontology

2011-01-18T16:26:00.000-05:00

Recently, there was another throw down between the relationists and the OOO. And almost predictably, it also became annoyingly personal between many of the participants. For various reasons (including that I had too much to do this weekend to actually keep up), I'm not going to respond to any of it. Instead, it merely encouraged me to make a rare post on ontology proper. What is going to follow are a series of relatively unsupported theses on ontology that I sometimes, on occasion, subscribe to. I welcome responses, but I have no real desire to defend current thoughts. So, feel free to disagree. I'll read and think about it. I probably won't defend anything. Though I might, if the spirit moves me.

(1) I don't believe in first philosophy. Instead, philosophy is filled with semi-discreet, enmeshing sub-disciplines. Ethics and ontology are two different things, but not wholly different. And more importantly, one doesn't come before the other. (And of course, it could also be aesthetics, epistemology, etc.).

(2) Obviously, I am anti-anthropocentric. In ethics and other things this might be a weak anti-anthropocentrism. I am convinced that we need to extend our ethical duties and obligations to other animals, I am not convinced we do so to my desk. I am, however, completely convinced that my desk is a full ontological being. That is to say, I am a strong anti-anthropocentrist in ontology. For example, in order to open up the desk, I have to first open up the drawer above my lap, and only then am I allowed to open up the drawers to my side. That seems to me that I am dealing with a real ontological interaction. Meanwhile, the conductive elements in the microchips in my computer interact with electricity, and random bits of information occasionally get lost or moved around without my ever telling my computer to do those things. In other words, it is obvious to me that things interact with each other, and humans never have to be on site for this to happen (this is so obvious to me, I wonder how anyone can disagree with it).

(3) I'm not sure about withdrawal. I am sure about opacity. Any system of relation (both internal systems and external systems) has to deal with opacity. This is basically an anti-anthropocentric reading of Glissant's brilliant text, Poetics of Relation. I highly suggest it for anyone who hasn't read it. Opacity means that beings are never given over to another being. This is both true for beings outside of my self, but also beings internal to my self. Now, opacity is not an empirical part of relations to be overcome, but a constitutive part of relations that is both essential and important. As Wittgenstein famously put it, "We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!"

There are a lot more, but I suddenly have to run. If I don't hit the publish button, I know I won't come back to this post anytime soon.

Haunted Conception

2011-01-13T22:40:00.000-05:00

Sure, you can spend all of your time talking about lava lamps, goo, fishes, whom you can't talk to, personalities, and etc.

Or, you can talk about how awesome the speculative realism blog name generator is. Really, I don't know why anyone else is talking about anything else (hat tip to Stuart Elden, who might need cheering up that most people went to see his blog for someone else's post).

The Monopoly of Monopoly

2011-01-12T10:25:00.000-05:00

The title sounds better than the actual post will be. Yesterday was the start of classes, which is always exciting. I am teaching an Intro to Philo class (in the Philosophy department), and Argumentation (in the Communication Studies department). Every year I pass out notecards and get basic information from the students, but and every time I also add in one random, silly question. Like, What is your favorite arctic animal?, What is your least favorite place to visit?, etc. This year, inspired by philosophy monopoly I linked to before, I asked them for their favorite board game.

Monopoly won, hands down. Many students admitted to picking the game randomly, as it was one of the few games that came to them. In second place was Scrabble, followed in third by Apples to Apples. Those were the only games to reach double digits. I don't really have a profound point to make with all this, just sharing.

Also, isn't it great how students work very hard to make unfunny professors seem rather witty? I am always surprised at the things students are willing to laugh at. I think it is rather nice of them to take such pity on me.

A Post of Links

2011-01-10T11:21:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone had a good weekend, I know I did.

Remember, get those abstracts in for The Time of Revolution and the Revolution of Time, featuring Peter Gratton as the keynote speaker.

Speaking of Peter Gratton, I am happy to see he is one of the new editors of Society & Space.

This philosophy version of Monopoly seems awesome. For example, it features a picture of Foucault, telling you to go straight to the Panopticon. (h/t Foucault News)

Speaking of design work, Thomas Gokey has a post up beginning to work out his plan for a project GutenbAAAAARG. Looks pretty cool, doesn't it?

EJ is dissatisfied with ethical work that merely justifies what we already intuit to be true.

Tim Morton has been posting some interesting clips from this trippy old british children's show, Mr. Been. I suggest watching this clip.

MR Sheffield, one of the geniuses behind the band Zombies! Organize!! has a new blog, Why is my cat so sad?, which just has to be seen. I particularly like Luco the Cat's on-going interest in Buddhism. It does make me wonder what Morton will think of it, with his work on buddhophobia. (h/t and interesting commentary from Prodigies & Monsters).

Speaking of P+M, I got to hang out with them this weekend in Augusta, which was a blast. Though we kept having weird flashbacks to our time in Binghamton, including finding an used book in a bookstore that originally belonged to another PIC student. Augusta turned out to be pretty cool itself, like a very, very small slice of Portlandia. To get the reference, check out this song.

A Post of Links

2011-01-07T11:50:00.000-05:00

First up, over at Adam's blog, we have excellent resource guide to critical animal studies. I know many of you probably know a lot of those things, but for anyone trying to get an handle on critical animal studies, you might want to go and take a look. Plus, some of you more experienced types might still find resources you didn't know existed.

I don't mean to turn this into an Adam themed post, but when someone delivers, they deliver. If you remember my post on plants, well Adam has two links worth resharing. The first is a call for papers from PAN about an issue on "Plant Ethics". I don't think I have the time to write something more publishable for them, but I think some of you might be interested. Also, Adam shared this TED talk on the roots of plant intelligence. If you want to see my thoughts on it, read the comment section of my plant post.

Jason Read has an excellent review of Benjamin Noys' The Persistence of the Negative. Noys has a short response up here. I want to say more. I come out of a similar intellectual tradition as Jason Read, so I definitely want to check out Noys' book.

This a reminder that the deadline for Speculations II is tomorrow.

Mike Konczal has an interesting post on why we saw an explosion in the prison population in the 1970s, a trend that has only continued. Most of the stuff I have read on this subject has tended to focus on things like the creation of the War on Crime and the War on Drugs. And while that is no doubt correct, that is less of an explanation than another symptom. Konczal took a look at a lot of 70s conservative criminology recently, and what emerges is an economic and policy-oriented belief in what I would call the ontological production of the criminal. That is to say, there strongly emerges a belief that there is a distinct being that is a criminal, and the only appropriate response is to lock that person away. Anyway, read the link to find out what the criminologists were actually saying.

Graham Harman has had a couple of posts on the success of open-source publishing. See here, here, and most importantly here. Stuart Elden has an important follow-up here (also read the comment there). Two thoughts. The first is that I largely agree with the need for more academic open source publishing. The problem is that those of us who are most junior have the most pressure to not engage in open source. And the more senior the person, the more often they have developed consistent channels of publications that tend to not want to break from. The second point about getting away from issues is something that Adam Kotsko promoted before, and that Peter disagreed with before. That Stuart and Peter would be on the same side surprises absolutely nobody. That Adam and Graham are on the same side, well, all I can say is Awkward (Sorry, sometimes I think I am funny).

The guy who runs this blog suggested I post this song. It's been a long time since I sat down and just listened to Elliot Smith. Probably time to do so again, I think I am immune to his angst these days.

Some thoughts on plants

2011-01-05T17:25:00.001-05:00

I probably need better blog post titles.

Anyone who has been a vegetarian for any length of time has heard some variation of the argument, "What about plants?". As Jonathan Safran Foer points out in the video I just linked to, it usually occurs in rather insulting and idiotic formulations, "Haven't you heard the carrots crying?". Much like Thomas Taylor's Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, which sought not to support animal rights but to mock women's rights, these declarations have not sought to promote concern for the welfare of plants, but simply to belittle the welfare of other animals. Taylor, however, shows that sometimes the opponents of liberation have clearer sight. Much like people opposed to interracial marriages who argued such a destabilization would lead same sex marriages, we are currently in the midst of the fights for the rights of brutes. Maybe fighting for rights for other animals will give us a chance to see clearly if plants too deserve rights (or, at the least, ethical duties and obligations). Taylor ends his pamphlet with this closing paragraph:

And thus much may suffice, for an historical proof, that brutes are equal to men. It only now remains (and this must be the province of some able hand) to demonstrate the same great truth in a similar manner, of vegetable, minerals, and even the most apparently contemptible clod of earth; that thus this sublime theory being copiously and accurately discussed, and its truth established by an indisputable series of facts, government may be entirely subverted, subordination abolished, and all things every where, and in every respect, be common to all.

Though pure satire on the part of Taylor, don't tell me there isn't a part of you that cheers along, playing those lines straight.
I think the time is coming where serious concerns with plants are arising. Tom Sparrow runs down several places where people are moving in this direction (and I have heard of a few other instances). And we have even more from Tim Morton, including talking about slime molds and bacteria. Now, exactly a year ago I made a post about plants (okay, so I wrote this post a couple of days ago, but I could resist making these posts exactly a year apart when I noticed that), and I still stand behind it. I won't repeat it here, but I clearly need a more serious response if people are seriously engaging the ethical issues of plants without merely seeking to destroy our ethical commitments (which is how this argument has traditionally functioned). Are plants our next project for the expansion of our ethical sphere? Maybe beyond plants as well? Maybe until everything, everywhere is in common to all. In other words, flat ethics.
I want to begin by stating that many ethicists who have rejected speciesism does not logically extend to plants. If you are a devotee of Tom Regan or Peter Singer, there is nothing from their standpoint to extend their theories toward plants. The reason is they are working with some fairly precise criteria for who gets to be included in the moral community, and who gets excluded. And while there are plenty of gray areas for their theories, it doesn't mean there are some criteria from which they are extrapolating from. Meanwhile, few Continental ethicists have invested in these questions of who gets to count. If anything, there are frequent and explicit rejections of such discourses. Matt Calarco's wonderful book Zoographies, for example, is in many ways an extended argument for political, ontological, and ethical agnosticism. As he writes:

If this is indeed the case, that is, if it is the case that we do not know where the face begins and ends, where moral considerability begins and ends, then we are obliged to proceed from the possibility that anything might take on a face. And we are further obliged to hold this possibility permanently open. At this point, most reasonable readers will likely see the argument I have been making as having absurd consequences. While it might not be unreasonable to consider the possibility that "higher" animals who are "like" us, animals who have sophisticated cognitive and emotive functions, could have a moral claim on us, are we also to believe that "lower" animals, insects, dirt, hair, fingernails, ecosystems, and so on could also have a claim on us? Any argument that leads to this possibility is surely a reductio ad absurdum. In response to such a charge, I would suggest affirming and embracing what the critic sees as an absurdity. (p. 71, emphasis added)

How do you like that Calarco litany? Anyway, for those that do not engage in issues of moral considerability, or specifically reject such issues, the way forward gets more complicated. If you are a classical utilitarian, the way forward is to figure out if plants have the capacity for suffering. So far that seems highly unlikely, so you can just move on. But what if you don't know what gives a being a face (to use Calarco's Levinasian language), how can you say if you plants have faces? Julia Butterfly definitely felt that the tree Luna had a face. And while many of us might feel that a 1500 redwood does have a face or at least understand where she was coming from, few of us believe that the weeds in our garden have a face. As I said in my last post about plants, I find it hard to believe that breeding clementines to be seedless is the same sort of violence of breeding turkeys so they can no longer mate with each other, or enjoy basic sexual relations. Am I simply engaging in the same sort of 'moral schizophrenia' that people who eat animals and love their pets engage in?
This gets to the heart of much of my unease when talking about issues of plants. It is hard to at all be critical without having your arguments parallel those arguments made against animals. If you say plants do not suffer, do you not just repeat the moves of the Descartes and his disciples? If you wonder if plants actually have sociality just because they release chemicals that other plants respond to, are you not simply repeating all of those people who screamed anthropomorphism every time animals engaged in obvious modes of sociality? I think when arguments parallel the structures of obviously wrong arguments it is certainly time to be suspicious. However, saying, "Well, that is exactly like when x argues y" is not, in and of itself, an argument. For example, if someone said to you, "I know you believe that all the planets in the solar system orbit the Sun, but really they orbit as yet unknown black hole." Rejecting that claim until actual evidence is proffered does not make you the freaking Inquisition talking to Copernicus.
All of this isn't to say that plants are not beings worthy of our moral respect on the highest levels. But I remain far from convinced on these issues. Plants are awesome and cool. Like any being subject to evolutionary forces, they engage in active processes that resist them dying before reproductive. These processes in animals, both human and otherwise, have tended toward the abilities for suffering and joy, for sociality, for desire and and yearning, for senses of embodiment, etc. I have yet to see indications that plants responses to evolutionary pressures have really been the same. But I could be wrong, and am interested in hearing more on this issue.

Does the philosophical divide really need to be deepened?

2011-01-05T11:40:00.000-05:00

Michael Marder has a new post on the weird brush up that occured over at the Leiter blog a while back. A couple of quick thoughts:

(1) It is kinda weird how he makes a whole post about the Leiter situation without mentioning Leiter once. On the one hand, I guess I understand that impulse. On the other hand, the desire to read the situation as being somehow deeply symptomatic of philosophy as a whole seems fairly problematic.
(2) Most of my interactions with younger academics (the recently tenured, junior faculty, and everyone below that) seem relatively uninterested in continuing any sort of active hostilities. Now, I am sure there is a major sampling bias going on in those experiences, but I've never felt that what I need is less interactions with my brethren on the analytic side of things. Even with that said, it is true that a good number of biases and prejudices continue on both sides of the fence. As usual, I am not sure more segregation is the best way of getting rid of those biases and prejudices. Marder solution seems to not be a solution at all, and more of a way of just not having to deal with each other. Coming out of an institution with two philosophy programs (probably one of the few in the States that has more than one), I'm not sure it is best solution to the situation, either. Though the divide between PIC and SPEL is hardly a simple one of between Continental and Analytic, considering neither program offers a lot in traditional analytical philosophy.
(3) I guess this gets me into another problem with Marder's post, which is the way the whole conflict seems constituted around one linear divide in philosophy. I almost want to say something like there are more philosophies in heaven and earth, Marder, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. My training in non-western and decolonial philosophy is as likely to make me seem like a stranger among readers of Deleuze and Agamben, as my training in Deleuze and Agamben is to make me seem like a stranger among those who were trained in Russell and Quine. Moreover, if you spend some time talking to people who practice ethics in the Analytic tradition, more than a few of them will regale you with stories about they way they are often treated as ugly step children among their cohort in Analytic philosophy. Meanwhile, while I often engage in a history of philosophy, I don't tend to think of what I do as a history of philosophy. And I am somewhat unsettled by Marder's elision between Continental philosophy and a history of philosophy. I know plenty historians of philosophy who are not Continentalists, and I know plenty of Continentalists who are not primarily historians of philosophy. I know in some way in seems I am picking on Marder for engaging in simple heuristics necessary for a blog post, but I am trying to highlight one of things that makes me most uneasy with his solution of deepening the divide. I don't think there is the divide, and if we seek to deepen along the fault lines of only a linear and singular divide than those of us who have so many other differences is going to find it all the harder to find their places. With a little recourse to Ranciere, the problem with a place for everyone and everyone in their place is you are always going to have a remainder, a part that has no part.

Anyway, I am feeling fairly sympathetic to Marder in all of this. And it is true that Leiter et al seem to have fairly strong unofficial institutional influence, and that the tendency of many of them to act in such a strongly and absurdly anachronistic fashion, tilting at the 'postmodernists' and feeling superior over groups they clearly know little to nothing about is disturbing. But with all of that, I have no desire to confuse what is going on over there with philosophy in general. Or, maybe I just hope it doesn't reflect philosophy in general.

A Post of Links

2011-01-03T12:15:00.000-05:00

During the holidays I thought up a lot of posts I wanted to make, but never got around to writing. Hopefully I can get them written and up, though some of their timeliness has been effected. I was also pretty terrible at keeping up with what other people have been writing, and with emails. So, if I owe you an email, remind me. Also, if I missed something interesting, let me know.

I am pleased to see Nathan of Prologus producing posts again, and I would like to draw attention to his essay "Recognition Theory and the Question of the Animal". Not only is it interesting, but he is also looking toward submitting it to a journal very shortly, and would enjoy some feedback on it. Why do you practice some of that intellectual generosity that Harman and Elden have been talking about, and go read and comment on that essay.

The deadline for submitting abstracts to the Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution conference is drawing near. So, get on it. (Expect more of these sorts of posts).

Jonathan Safran Foer recently spoke at Google. It is an interesting video, particularly the question and answer section. Hopefully I will be writing more on what he has to say, later.

Jodi Dean has a new article in Krisis entitled Drive as the Structure of Biopolitics. Here is what she says the article is about:

I argue that biopolitics is best understood not as a mode of governance that takes life as its object but rather as the unintended byproduct of the clash between sovereign power and capitalist economics. Biopolitics is an effect of the capture of popular sovereignty in a kind of loop around the absence of political sovereignty in the economy. To make this argument, I draw from Foucault’s discussion of liberalism and neoliberalism and Lacan’s account of drive.

And if that sounds interesting to you (and it should), let me say the whole article is worth reading.

Speaking of capitalist economics, this Slate article on the etymology and economic history of the word austerity is entirely appropriate.

I am sure you all know already, but The Speculative Turn has finally been released. Details and free pdf download can be found here.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops was one of my favorite discoveries of 2010. Check out their amazing cover of "Hit 'em Up Style". And then maybe go get their whole album.

Animals get high in order to relieve boredom.

2010-12-24T02:51:00.001-05:00

As most of you know, I remain fundamentally suspicious of philosophical anthropologies. That is to say, I have trouble believing there is a single trait shared by all beings we want to call human, that does not exist for any of those plenitude of beings we don't want to call human. Most attempts to create a clear dividing line between human animals and other animals tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is to claim some trait and say only humans have it, when other animals clearly have it, like claiming only humans have self-consciousness. The second way is to claim some action that exists only for some humans as if it defines humanity, like saying that other animals may have language, but only humans have poetry. There is a third way, of course, claiming that the inability to define the human is the special definition of the human. But as Adorno put it in Negative Dialectics, "That we cannot tell what man is does not establish a peculiarly majestic anthropology; it vetoes any anthropology." Lastly, the inability to establish a proper philosophical anthropology should come as no surprise to any of us. Evolutionary patterns tend to repeat themselves, and it seems unlikely that in all of the rest of beings subject to evolution, that we would be special and unique. Humanism always reeks of transcendentalism.

Anyway, I end up collecting information on all the stuff various other animals do that we usually only think of humans doing. Mostly other people give me this, but I always appreciate it. Well, it makes perfect sense, but it seems that some animals consume hallucinogenic fungi in order to relieve boredom (also, animals get bored, take that Heidegger). What I link to mostly talks about reindeer, but other animals do so as well.

A Post of Links

2010-12-22T18:07:00.000-05:00

I am clearly lowering the blog production for the holidays. However, many people seem to be double-downing on blogging during the holidays. Here are some of the important things you might have missed (and always, let me know what I missed).

Here is the full program for the Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Conference.

Here is some advice for PhD students from one. I think it is fairly sound, and replicates much of a post I have been meaning to write (which was to be entitled, stuff I wish I had known).

Benoit Dillet has a review of Esposito Communitas (and to some degree Bios), here. (h/t Peter with some other links to check out).

Vegan Skeptic takes on some of the arguments that veganism is somehow worse for the environment than flesh eating (h/t vegan.com).

Richard Seymor manages to capture much of my feelings on the Assange Allegations.

Levi has had a string of interesting posts: The Domestication of Humans, with some follow-up here, a post on Uexkull (with a follow-up from Tim), and a guest post up on OOMarxism.

Adrian has a list of the books up of the decade in ecocultural theory. Remember, new blog address, reset the readers as appropriate.

It seems that, according to Google, Critical Animal is 13% Basic, 47% Intermediate, and 39% Advanced. (h/t AnPac).

Here is the Avett Brothers, performing "I and Love and You". You'll like it.

What GPS should I get?

2010-12-15T13:06:00.001-05:00

I am thinking about getting a gps, but I am not sure which one I should get. Any suggestions?

A Post of Links

2010-12-12T20:54:00.000-05:00

Here it is, another post of links.

We actually have audio from the Claremont conference of Stengers' keynote and Haraway's response. Thanks to whomever did this.

Tim Morton has added more of his short (I assume twitter length) job advice posts. Read them if you hope to be getting an interview.

I am embarrassed that this slipped through earlier roundups, but here are all of Stuart Elden's chapter updates for The Birth of Territory. Have I told you all how much I am looking forward to this book?

James McWilliams has a wonderful article in The Atlantic's food section on his problems with localvorism. I hope he doesn't give up on mapping out the honest and real environmental impacts of how we eat, though. We need that information, regardless.

Interested in the changing dynamics of what type of animal flesh we are consuming? Of course you are.

A commentator named Jake gave me a wonderful link in regards to my Philip K. Dick and Wikileaks post, the link is to an interesting article on reading wikileaks as a literary production.

These Lovecraft playing cards look totally awesome. Anyone looking to give me a holiday gift, here is a big ol' hint.

Another William Gibson interview. Because this is his world, we merely live in it.

The really big thing I am leaving off is the really large recent dust up between the OOOs and the relationists. There were a ton of posts at a ton of blogs, and I lost track. Some of it was new and awesome, some of it repeated things we had seen a million times. However, in all that was both awesome and boring, there is this really wonderful paragraph from Adrian (remember, he has a new blog address, update accordingly). Namely:

For Whitehead this is still centrally a metaphysical exercise, an attempt to describe the universe. But when we turn to other process-relational thinkers — and here I will insist on a genealogy that Graham Harman may not like, the same “beatnik conspiracy” (as he has called it) that runs from (in my rendition ) Heraclitus and Chuang Tzu and Nagarjuna to Bergson and James and Deleuze and Latour — it becomes clear that the central task of philosophy, for these thinkers, has always been not the task of accurately describing the world, but, rather, the task of better living for living. They are existential, intended as aids to a way of life that enriches the universe instead of impoverishing it. They start with the fact that we are always already involved in things, caught up in processes, wound up in matters of concern, facing decisions, navigating currents, moving with and in worlds, and they aim to help us with that. it. Their philosophies are accounts of living,

Now, I'm not sure about this being something specific to process-relational, but for me it wonderfully sums up what it means to do philosophy, or for me to do philosophy. It is a beautiful explanation of why I am drawn to some thinkers more than others (though my genealogy may be different).

If I missed anything, let me know. This week's music comes from the debut album of the band The Like. And even though their name sounds like something tailor made for the facebook generation, their sound is total mod pop from the 60s.

Wikileaks and Philip K. Dick

2010-12-10T23:51:00.000-05:00

I don't have much to say about wikileaks, actually. Here are some thoughts, that are not definite and generally jumbled.

One of the common objections to wikileaks is that the approach is random. The documents leaked seem scattered, unconnected, leaked without any sort of thought as to why or for what reason. Maybe, but that all seems a better description of our current national security culture, one which is obsessed with creating more and more things top secret. Often without rhyme or reason. I think we can agree that such an attitude is dangerous and problematic.
This also reminds me of the novel by Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra. The Simulacra tells the story of a totalitarian society ruled and centralized around a secret. As is described in the novel:

Any failure would have betrayed to the Bes [the underclass] the secret, the Geheimnis, which distinguished the elite, the establishment of the United States of Europe and America; their possession of one or more secrets made them into Geheimnisträger, bearers of the secret, rather than Befehlsträger, mere carry-outers of instruction. (p. 34)

One of the reasons that national security culture of making everything top secret is so problematic is that divides our society, those who get to know the secrets, and those who don't. Those who do get to be the ones who set our policy, get listened to, have opinions that manage to shape and influence our foreign policy. Those who don't know the secrets, don't get to do that. We can't even be listened to, because we those who know the secrets know we don't, and therefore know we cannot know enough to be listened to. This splits foreign policy off from democracy, off from reasoned debate and input of the demos. The obvious example here would be the Iraq war, which was authorized based on all the secrets that Congress knew, all the secrets we didn't know and therefore we could not be listened on (though in fine Philip K. Dick fashion, those secrets turned out to be false, as well. And there was a secret within the secret, the secret that there was no secret). I am not sure yet entirely how I feel on wikileaks. I am not sure if I yet believe it is the right way to go about pushing back on these issues, but I certainly understand it and am sympathetic.

On Forced Genital Mutilation

2010-12-10T15:04:00.000-05:00

This post will inevitably lead to a spike in creepy search terms for my blog.

First up, the really, really good news. It seems there has been substantial progress made on combating female genital mutilation in the region of Afar. This is amazing news, particularly because combating fgm has become one of those seemingly intractable problems. Also particularly amazing because the type of fgm primarily practiced in Afar is infibulation, or Pharaonic circumcision, which is a particularly gruesome and extreme form of fgm. As Monkey of Feminist Philosophers describes, "which involves removing the clitoris, the labia minora, and then scraping the labia majora to create raw surfaces, which are then sewn together, leaving just a tiny hole for urination and menstruating." I think we can all agree that this is an important step forward, that both needs to be celebrated and supported.

Originally this was all I had to say on the issue, and had saved this for my next Post of Links, but another post on this post has caused me to want to take this discussion in some other directions, now. I want to move forward somewhat tentatively at this point, because I have had the tendency to offend even I did not mean to when I have talked about this in the past. Extending the post from Feminist Philosophers, was this post over at APPS. I want to expound on some things Catarina Novaes said. One, she said:

Men, think for yourselves: could you sleep at night in peace if you knew that in some corners of the world men were being systematically castrated at a very young age? (Btw, male circumcision is also genital mutilation, but that's a different story.)

I don't want to say that there is anything we do that is worse than infibulation. I am pretty sure we don't, but I also think that sort of comparison are often fairly counter-productive. Besides what is simply called circumcision, there are whole litany of weird and often horrific things we do to genitals, even male ones (and not to mention ones of ambiguous determination). It has been nearly a decade since I did research on this topic, and I have lost all the research I did. I cannot speak in the particulars I would like, but there are many cases of men who are expected to scar their genitals and release blood in coming of age ceremonies (a sort of weird mimicry of menstruation). There are also places where there are even more extreme mutilation of male genitals (again, usually occurring during coming of age ceremonies), with at least a few places practicing partial castration. None of this is to claim that the rates are anywhere near the same of FGM (to be honest, I have no clue), or to take away the importance of fighting against FGM.

However, there is one other thing I need to note on:

FGM of any form, but in particular the most radical forms, entails that a woman will never be able to fully enjoy the right that every single animal has to their sexuality.

There are two ways to read this sentence, but I will go with the one that means: I agree, I believe that every single animal has the right to fully enjoy their sexuality. I think this is sometimes not addressed by animal advocates directly (maybe because we are uncomfortable doing so, or because we will seem like a laughing stock, or both): but one of the many harms we commit against animals in our care, be it pets, lab animals, or farm animals (both factory farm and family farm) is the removal over decisions of their sexuality. Frequently this is done through very invasive means, and often this is done through genetic manipulation. One of the frequent examples given are that modern turkeys have been breed in such a way they can no longer naturally reproduce, they are forever denied the ability to express their sexuality.

Jonathan Safran Foer vs. Bourdain part III: Descartes laughs last

2010-12-08T19:42:00.000-05:00

This post was meant to be written at least a couple of months ago. However, I got busy. And once my blogging routine gets sufficiently messed up, it takes me a bit of work to get back on track. This post is only loosely connected to the debate between JSF and Bourdain, mostly it follows up on the previous posts in this series (see here and here).

Descartes somewhat famously declared that animals were machines. Nowadays, people either spend their time rolling their eyes at that pronouncement, or contending that he meant something a little less fanciful by his arguments. At the same time that philosophically and culturally there seems to be little success in Descartes' arguments about animals as machines, there has increasingly been a movement toward treating animals exactly as if they were machines. If you look at this brief article about a debate between a Cornell food science professor and a member of the HSUS (h/t vegan.com). Not only does it continue to highlight the absurd anti-rationalism of speciesists, but it also shows the way that a certain logic of animal as machine has continued to today. And it shouldn't come as a surprise to see a Cornell food science prof be so absurd.* Regenstein (the food science prof) argued that:

“His [Balk’s] argument is very well put together, but violated rational thinking, as the Humane Society is a vegetarian organization committed to eliminating animal agriculture,” Regenstein said.

He added that he believed the HSUS only references studies that support its own agenda.

In other words, rather than actually refuting the studies made by Balk, he argues implicit bias and automatically assumes anyone working toward eliminating animal agriculture violates rational thinking. Talk about putting the cart in front of the horse (or the slaughterhouse in front of the cow). However, the real problem emerges with this exchange:

“Each hen laying eggs for Cornell is given less space than a single piece of paper to live for her entire life,” Balk said. “These birds are crammed so tightly in small wire cages that they cannot even spread their wings.”

To this, Regenstein responded that Balk was appealing to anthropomorphic expectations.

“Birds don’t think like us; birds don’t function like us. They react to different things. If there is a thunderstorm, egg production decreases. If you wear red and walk around the hens, egg production decreases. When you put hens in cages, production increases,” Regenstein said.

Now, maybe you are thinking we aren't all that different from chickens anyway, after all if you change the thickness of which you are reviewing an application on, it seems to change how you feel about the application. Or any other weird insight into the ways humans process the world around us (or conversly, any of the weird ways that the world around us process us. We are all benommen [captive] to the world, Heidegger has this wrong. But there is something even more profound that I want to point out.

Regenstein believes that the best way to point out that chickens are different from humans is to go immediately to the questions of production, rather than ethics. That is, the best way to handle this question to shift the focus from ethical questions of the boundary line between humans and other animals, and the ways we should treat each other, to questions about how to think of the animal as a series of inputs that can be manipulated to change outputs. In other words, animal science has doubled down on Cartesianism, they are firmly committed to the idea of animals as machines. Anyone who has spent time reading the trade magazines and academic journals of animal sciences and animal businesses knows this truth. If you want to skip that step, may I refer you to Jim Mason's and Peter Singer's book, Animal Factories. Animals are transformed from living, individual creatures into black boxes whose importance is as a converting machine. How do we convert feed into eggs, into milk, into flesh? (The feed question is also important. One of the historical shifts of America into a factory farming system from a more classical European system of farming animals came from a need to extract value from the overproduction of corn by converting that corn into animal flesh for selling and shipping). Here is another quotation (taken from Animal Factories):

Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory. Schedule treatments like you would lubrication. Breeding season like the first step in an assembly line. And marketing like the delivery of finished goods. - J. Byrnes, "Raising Pigs by the Calendar at Maplewood Farm," Hog Farm Management, September 1976, p. 30.

In this sense, even a mild proposal of switching to cage free eggs is treated as the height of irrationality, because it opposes the pure economic rationality of production that dominates animal sciences. Even the most mild of criticisms of the ways that animals are treated are responded to with extreme denunciations. This is because while Descartes' view that animals are machines has become an absurdity to most of us, it is also the practical reality with the way humans treat the vast majority of animals under our 'care'.

* Weird note about Cornell and their food science. My fiance use to be a student at Cornell, and I spent a lot of time on their campus. It just so happens that one of the best vegan burritos I have ever had were made in the cafe in the lobby of the Mann Library, their agriculture and food library. Well, that means and I would go and eat these awesome vegan burritos, and then go work in the library. When I was bored or blocked, I would walk around and look at the journals, the books, etc. This is actually what shifted my dissertation from a purely theoretical and history of philosophy dissertation into one that gets into the practical genealogy of our relationship to the animals we raise, kill, and consume. It also led to a goldmine of archival work. Cornell agriculture and animal/food sciences is crazy. They have this cow they have created a hole in her body so that you can look inside the living cow and see inside it. They are all into hardcore all the factory farming and genetically engineering of animals. They also, as animal sciences in this country generally, have a long-ago strong connection to the American eugenics movement. The stuff you learn because of awesome vegan burritos. Never pass up the opportunity to eat awesome vegan burritos.

A Post of Links

2010-12-05T23:01:00.000-05:00

Last time I linked to Dr. J's job advice, JJ Cohen has some interview advice. It is worth reading, and it also links to this worthwhile post with advice about skype interviews.

Speaking of those non-anthropocentric medievalists, Nicola Masciandaro has a post up on the unknowing animals. To give you a hint of what is at stake, here is how it ends, "The weird, taskless task that animal theory may inherit from the Cloud-author is to see the human into being what Heidegger thought animals are." Why aren't you already reading it?

Speaking of cool, interesting things on animals, Reza Negarestani has a rare and great post on rats and becoming-animal.

Maybe you have interesting things to share? Well, the deadline for the next issue of Speculations is coming up.

Graham Harman live-blogged the Claremont conference on Whitehead. Remarkably interesting, and very useful service. There are lots of things to add There are all sorts of gems in there I want to address at some point. Let's jump to one, though. Paul Reid-Bowen was interested into Stengers' interest in neo-pagan witchcraft. In recommending a few things for him to read, I came across this article, which I read a while back. It is a beautiful, insightful, stunning article. I highly suggest it. I think she manages to sum up my feelings about critiques and being critical. Both necessary and excessive.

Love this slogan.

The new republican Governor of Wisconsin wants to make opening up and running factory farms all the easier.

As always, I am sure I missed things, let me know what they are.

This post's music comes from my happy discovery that there is a new Jay Munly album out, entitled Petr & the Wulf. For those that don't know Jay Munly, he is one of the great voices of Southern Gothic music. Here is a review of a much earlier album that I think covers Jay Munly very well:

His is a singular presence, even amongst the odd-looking bastards that make up the Auto Club: his hollow eyes, intense expression and funeral director's taste in couture convince you that he's the real deal long before his tales of weird gothic strangeness can. Sure, much of the Southern Gothic attitude is an act, but it's an act into which he pours his whole soul; it's an act, but it's an act the way that Elvis' sex appeal was an "act".

I give you the song, Petr.

CFP: The Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution

2010-12-03T13:38:00.000-05:00

The Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture Student Alliance at Binghamton University (S.U.N.Y.) Presents:

The Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution
A conference

The 25th – 26th of March, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Peter Gratton, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of San Diego, CA

What sense of time is produced through radical politics? Is the understanding of time as future part of a radical imagination? If the commitment to radical social change involves looking forward into the future, will that leave us with a sense of futurity that depends on the linearity of yesterday, today, and tomorrow?
To interrogate the emergence of radical creations and socialities, we welcome submissions that theorize time as it relates broadly to politics, cultural conflicts, alternative imaginaries, and resistant practices. Time has historically been thought and inhabited through a variety of frameworks and styles of being. At times the present repeats or seems to repeat the past. There are actions that seem to take place outside of time, to be infinite or instantaneous. Theories of emergence view time as folding in on itself. Indigenous cosmologies and Buddhist philosophers put forward the possibility of no-time or of circular and cyclical time.
The radical question of time is one around which the work of many scholars has revolved: Derrida on the to-come [a-venir] of democracy, Negri’s work on kairos, Agamben on kairology, Santos on the expansive notion of the present, Deleuze and Guattari on becoming. This heterological list is far from exhaustive, while hinting at the depth of the theme that our conference cultivates. A central political concern, time invokes our most careful attention and the PIC conference provides the setting for this endeavor. We must find the time for time.
At its core, this conference seeks to explore the relationship between time and revolution. Time here may mean not just simple clock and calendar time but rather a way of seeing time as part of a material thread that can go this way and that, weaving together the fabric of political projects producing the world otherwise. Ultimately, the question of time fosters a critical engagement with potentiality, potency, and power; as well as with the virtual and the actual, of the to be and the always already.
We seek papers, projects, and performances that add to the knowledge of time and revolution, but also ones that clear the way for new thinking, new alliances, new beings.

Some possible topics might include:

• Radical notions of futurity, historicity, or the expansive present.

• Conceptions on the right moment of action.

• The political reality of time as stasis or cyclical.

• The colonial creation of universal time, and decolonial cosmologies of time.

• Work on thinkers of time and revolution.

• Work on potentiality, the virtual, and the actual.

• Capital and labor time.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary emphasis of Binghamton University's Program in Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture, we seek work that flourishes in the conjunction of multiple frames of epistemological inquiry, from fields including, but not limited to: postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, queer and gender studies, ethnic studies, media and visual culture studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, critical theory, critical animal studies, continental philosophy, and historiography.
Workers/writers/thinkers of all different disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and non-disciplinary stripes welcome, whether academically affiliated or not. Submissions may be textual, performative, visual.
Abstracts of 500 words maximum due by Feburary 1, 2011. In a separate paragraph state your name, address, telephone number, email and organizational or institutional affiliation, if any.

Email proposals to: pic.conference2011@gmail.com with a cc: to clawren1@binghamton.edu

Or by surface mail to: Cecile Lawrence, 14 Alpine Drive, Apalachin, NY 13732
Emailed submissions strongly preferred.

A Post of Links

2010-12-01T15:41:00.000-05:00

So many links, so little time.

Tim Morton is live-streaming the UCLA OOO conference. It is already in full swing, but maybe you can see some of it before it ends.

I missed a lot of Thanksgiving links, but let me cover an important one. Magnus Fiskesjö's pamphlet, The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo (.pdf. Also, the longest title for the shortest book) is one of my favorite little tracts. Jason Read integrates this book with a critique of Thanksgiving and our current political situation. Magnus Fiskesjö recently commented on this blog to share that he has a new article out updating much of his analysis in his pamphlet. Fiskesjö, Magnus "The reluctant sovereign: New adventures of the US presidential Thanksgiving turkey." Anthropology Today (October 2010), Volume 26, Issue 5, pages 13–17. Sorry, no link. But if you have some problem accessing this article, let me know and I will help you out. He also points out, "Note, though, that a major aspect I tried to debate there has been obliterated: the Disneyland tour of the post-pardoning turkey. It will now go to the old home of George Washington(back yard?)! See: "George's house, not Mickey's, for pardoned turkey"".

Dr. J has a some useful notes up on the other side of the job market. Definitely worth a read if you are planning on going on the job market, and are curious how the people interviewing you look at the process.

HJM of the always awesome Prodigies + Monsters has an essay out that you can all read. It is entitled, “Medical Histories, Queer Futures: Imaging and Imagining ‘Abnormal’ Corporealities” (.pdf), and I swear to you all it is awesome. Here is the abstract:

This paper explores the political and epistemic work done by ostensibly denotative and reproducible imaging technologies in the process of establishing a scientific concept of sexual dimorphism. Beginning with an account of the prehistory of medical gender assignation in cases of intersexuality, it examines medical photographs of queer corporealities in order to ask after the political and epistemological work done by these images as well as the politics of biomedicine traceable in the orchestration of these images. Building upon Foucault's writing on hermaphroditism and Thomas Laqueur's work on the decline of a 'one-sex' (1990) system of sex intelligibility, it pairs these insights with Deleuze and Guattari's theorization of the function of faciality in the service of subjective biunivocalization (1987) in order to examine the function of the black bar or blurred face in medical photography. I argue that this trope of medical photodocumentation works to both secure the authority of the medical practitioner as modest witness (Haraway 1997) as well as place the queer body imaged in an ontological caesura while proper â€“ that is, male or female â€“ subjecthood is adjudicated upon. This tropology of desubjectivation is often coupled, in the medical photography of queer corporealities, with what Linda Williams has called the 'principle of maximum visibility,' visually indexed by perspectival multplication. While Williams theorizes this principle in the context of an analysis of pornography, this paper maps a certain consanguinity between medical photography and pornography insofar as both seek to image certain heretofore ineluctable 'truths' of sex.

The Sex, Gender, Species conference I will be at now has information on all of the speakers and the schedule for the conference. Check it out.

Over at Anarchists Without Content, we have a recording of Michael Hardt giving a talk entitled "Empire: A Retrospective". He also has a summary of Christian Marazzi's talk, "Financial Entropy: Struggle Within and Against Empire".

I have not been posting about the struggles in the UK like I should be. Not because they aren't important, or even important to me. I just don't have much to add. However, Nina Power has a great post up entitled Against Generations which examines the current struggle and the desire to compare and contrast it with previous struggles. Peter has some interesting follow-ups on this post over at his place.

David Cassuto has a map up that shows where the factory farms are located in the US, with a link to where it comes from with even more maps. This actually reminds me of Noelie Vialles important and under-read book, Animal to Edible. There is a lot of thought and work that goes into where to put factory farms and abattoirs so that slaughtering of other animals remains largely unregulated and, more important, forgettable.

Following up on that note, the Food Empowerment Project has a short essay on the expansion and exportation of the factory farm to the rest of the world. Not a surprise, but important to read.

I have two pieces of music to share today. The first comes from the 21st Century Monads about the lack of women in philosophy. You can read an interview about the song and find the link to listen to it here. But to my knowledge, there isn't a youtube video of this song (yet?). So, in that spirit I want to give the bizarre pairing with Dire Straits' "Les Boys".

I'm back, what did I miss?

2010-11-29T15:21:00.002-05:00

I spent most of the break in the mountains of north GA, without internet access. So, I am trying to catch up on emails and blog reading. If you tried to contact me, and you haven't heard anything from me in the next 12 hours or so, just email me again. It means your email got lost in the mix, sorry. Also, if there were any really interesting posts out there over the break, let me know. As always, self-promotion in encouraged.

Stuff on comments

2010-11-19T20:48:00.003-05:00

Two important things. (1) I just noticed that several legitimate comments to my blog were flagged as spam. Not sure why, but if you ever have problems with comments, drop me an email. (2) We are having troll issues here at Critical Animal. My immediate reaction has been to make all comments moderated. Which I don't enjoy. If anyone has better ideas about how to deal with trolls, let me know. (Also, the troll went on random rants against AUFS folks, so Adam, I blame you).

A Post of Links

2010-11-18T15:11:00.000-05:00

You might remember my reservations regarding the string of videos making fun of undergraduates who wanted to go on to secondary school. Well, Karl Steel shares this wonderful video of a professor and student seriously discussing graduate school. My only reservation is the idea of the life of the mind. Whatever else graduate school and being a professor is, it isn't the life of the mind. But nothing is, and I think that's okay. Click the link, watch the video.

Jason Read has a smart review of Simon Choat's Marx Through Post-Structuralism. This review came at a time I was having a series of discussions about the relationship of Marxism and poststructuralism with my colleagues in the communication studies department here. Now my only annoyance is the absurd prices that Continuum wants for this (and so many other) books.

Speaking of my colleagues here in the communication studies department, I have been wondering what would happen if I ended up in a tenure track job in a department of communication or rhetoric or something of the sort. I have sort had a lot psychologically built into this label of philosopher. Which is odd, because I freely admit that some of the best philosophy I read is from people not working in philosophy departments. Or, I should say that I read good philosophy both in and outside of philosophy programs. I say this, because whenever I see Brian Leiter get up on his tautological horse about how only people in philo departments are doing philosophy, I feel a lot better about being associated with any department that is doing interesting work. So, go here and go see comments on Leiter's ranking of Continental programs, and also read the comments to this post, where Leiter engages in his usual tautological comments. (h/t Tom Sparrow).

I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise, but it seems that South Carolina will soon be running the largest dairy farm in the state, by using prisoners. (h/t vegan.com).

[update] I forgot this link. Here is an interview with Catalin Avramescu about his book, The Intellectual History of Cannibalism. The interview was fairly interesting, and now I have to pick up the book.

Now, I know this song has been out for a while, but I have only recently been made aware of this wonderful performance by The Heavy on the Late Show, particularly the encore is just pure, unadulterated fun. (it seems the embedding isn't working right, but I don't know why. Anyway, if you can't see the video, click here).

Books that changed my mind

2010-11-18T11:23:00.000-05:00

This post follows up on the meme I picked up from Joshua Miller.

The purpose is not to list books that made me think more deeply about a subject (that's most books), or to list books that made me think a new thought (less books, but still important). This are books that specifically changed my mind about something.

(1) Marx's German Ideology. I picked this up early in college, and it destroyed the humanist, idealist leftist I had been until then. Like many a good leftist out of high school, I was very concerned with individualism and with the power of ideas. Basically, I had read Thoreau's "On Civil Disobedience" too many times. Marx allowed me to think a radical thought outside of the liberal tradition of individualism, and also made me think of collective productions of society. In so doing, I also developed a strong materialist outlook, that also dethroned my "knowledge is power" outlook.

(2) Maria Lugones' Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. It is hard to separate reading Maria's work from working with her. Either way, my early encounters with Maria and her work overturned a certain domination of a particular brand of poststructuralism on my thinking. In particular, I realized the violence inherent with the desire to get rid of identity, to leave behind all forms of identity politics. This, shall we say, nomadic desire for becoming-imperceptible ran into its own limitation. I was forced to confront how my desire to give up my name, history, and identity was strongly rooted in my desire of not being held accountable, of being able to think from what Haraway would call the god-trick. It also made me realize how vital identity, history, and names were for others. That demanding that people give that up or not be radical was the worst sort of reactionary claptrap.

(3) Subcomandante Marcos et al. Shadows of Tender Fury and William Haver's "The Ontological Priority of Violence". Again, I have trouble separating working with Bill Haver from reading Bill's work, but both of these works changed my mind on the issue of pacifism. I had considered myself to be a sort of generic pacifist, but I don't think I had ever really thought through the position. For example, I was convinced that the Zapatistas were already at war before the first gun had ever been picked up. I was convinced that there is an ontological relationship, that we need to pay attention to things like dignity and the need "to have been dangerous for a thousandth of a second" (see Haver's piece for commentary and citation). In other words, pacifism had become a way of delegitimizing certain survival strategies in genocidal cultures. Pacifism, as I had understood it, had become a way of furthering various forms of violences. This isn't really against pacifism, but rather against the sort of generic and default leftist position of something called pacifism.

(4) Agamben's Homo Sacer and State of Exception. I had really inherited Foucault's belief that sovereign power was mostly a reactive and repressive mechanism. Agamben really returns sovereign power to its properly productive functions.

(5) Ranciere's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and really Ranciere's work more generally. The same sort of individualism that conflicted with Marx had never entirely left me. In particular, I was often given to beliefs of elitism, especially when it came to students. Well, an early encounter in grad school with this text really finally changed my mind. I am a pretty strong believer in egalitarianism at this point. Also, it was Ranciere's article, "Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man", that brought me off the fence about the importance of rights. Until then, I basically shifted my position on the question of rights from whatever the last thinker I had read felt about the subject. (Deleuze is against it, must be bad. Foucault is for it, must be good. Etc.). This tends to put me in some level of conflict with most of the other continental or critical animal scholars, almost all of whom echo Derrida's belief that the idea of rights does more to hurt animals than help other animals. This is not to say that I don't think the question and issue of rights doesn't need some sort of critical intervention, but I don't think it can go on the dust heap of history.

(6) Peter Singer's Animal Liberation. This book didn't change my mind in any of the obvious ways. By the time I read it, I had long been on the same side when it came to the animal question. What it changed my mind on was the issue of utilitarianism. Like most good radicals, particularly of a poststructuralist stripe, I had long felt that utilitarianism was some sort of clownishly evil system of 'ethics'. I am sure there are probably people reading this blog who basically feel the same way. After reading Animal Liberation, I decided there was a lot more going on with utilitarianism than I had ever allowed for. This is not to say that I became an utilitarian, but I began to more seriously engage the work of consequentialism.

I am sure there are more, but these are ones I have been able to come up with over the last 24 hours or so. Most of the things that have changed my mind have not been books, but conversations. Just saying, comments always open. Also, I'd love to see this meme spread. What books have changed your mind?

Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler

2010-11-16T18:19:00.001-05:00

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).

Some More Thoughts On Cheating

2010-11-15T22:33:00.000-05:00

I assume most of you have seen this CHE story (h/t Joey) written by someone who writes custom papers for students who pay for it (and they pay a lot). It's interesting, if not terribly noteworthy (except for how much he and the company he worked for gets paid. Particularly the company, which seems to be extracting close to a 100% profit). However, certain responses to the story are worth noting. Take this one, for example (h/t Craig). There seems to be a general argument from both the author of the CHE story and the author of the blog post that rampant cheating is somehow the fault of the faculty. But I don't care about that, here is what I care about: That in a desire to better police cheating, many educators seem willing to decrease the effectiveness or excitement of their pedagogical assignments. I have before taken a stance for anti-cheating measures, but only because they allowed me to become less of a cop and more of an educator. However, many educators admit to going to only in-class writing assignments or in-class tests in order to deal with such for-hire plagiarism services. Other educators admit to moving toward smaller and more narrow focused assignments in order to thwart such cheating.
Now, there are surely many appropriate times and places for tests, in class writing assignments, and certainly for narrow focused assignments. However, it seems many professors are moving to these assignments, and almost exclusively toward these assignments, not because of any pedagogical demand, but because of a policing demand. I am tempted, at this point, to write something cliche, like: If you assign this the cheaters have already won!
What really galls me from the CHE article is how the author seems oblivious to how his work and his stated goals are at cross-purposes. It is exactly the sort of assignments that the CHE author claims he supports, open-ended assignments that allow for the maximum creative and academic freedom, that are the most vulnerable to the sorts of services he provides. Most professors do not read the CHE article and feel that an effective response is to provide more academic freedom to students. I don't think anyone here believes that students are willing to pay $2000 (!) for an assignment simply because they felt it was too restrictive.
Anyway, if I am ever going to have to choose between being an educator or a cop, I am going to choose educator every single damn time.

A Post of Links

2010-11-12T15:14:00.001-05:00

I've been very negligent in keeping up with the various blogs and discussions, so I am sure I am going to miss a lot of important stuff. If it seems I have missed some things, let me know.

I just saw this cool looking conference over at SUNY-Buffalo, Animal.Machine.Sovereign. If I still lived nearby, I would have to be going. As it is, you still might want to think about going. (h/t Complete Lies).

Here is Levi on Hyperobjects and OOO. Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? was the first book of theirs I read from cover to cover as well, I also read it my first year in undergrad. Jason Wirth called it their deceptively simple book, and I have always agreed with that assessment.

At this year's ASLE, the panels on "The Vegan Challenge to Posthumanism" looks pretty awesome. Two abstracts have been posted, Craig on CAS & OOO, and Eric on Derrida, Hospitality, and Veganism. I really wish I could be at this conference, but I will be on my honeymoon. So, maybe I don't wish it that much...

Speaking of awesome conferences I wish I would be at, Devin is getting ready for the Radical Philosophy Association Conference. You can follow that link to get a link for what is going on at that conference. I really don't know why I didn't my act together in time to try and go, but I will make going to the next one a priority.

Lastly, here is Henry Salt on the ridicule of vegetarians. Still mostly true.

The band Dark Dark Dark have a new album out, and it is completely gorgeous. They seriously have one of the best sounds around. Here is the 'single' off that new album Wild Go, "Daydreaming". You will not regret listening to it.

How states raise revenues: something of a rant.

2010-11-10T14:44:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted in a while. October was a rough month, and then I got sick. Also, once I fall out of the habit of posting, it is hard to get myself back into it.

Recently my fiance got a speeding ticket. In general, most speeding tickets annoy me. They tend to be rather obvious attempts to raise revenue, rather than promote any sort of general welfare. But, whatever, we paid the absurd $245 fine. However, I just got another notice, this one from the state, which feels my fiance is a super speeder, and therefore we also have to pay the state $200. This is for going less than 20 miles over the speed limit on the interstate, and not in any sort of construction area or other high danger place. The state law went into effect January 1st, 2010. Despite all the sound and fury over sticking it to speeders, the law is clearly about raising revenues.
This is what happens when the state is suffering from falling revenues and yet won't raise taxes. This is one of the practical problems that emerges when you demand that states continue the same level of services while cutting taxes. And the sad thing is that I am pretty sure that many people would still support more fines and fees over a regulated progressive tax structure. Oh well, rant over. And here is music video for how all of this makes me feel.