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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57334415489677842562015-06-13T20:13:21.061-04:00 Critical AnimalThe agony of the rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. - Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-83778383726883032152015-06-13T20:13:00.002-04:002015-06-13T20:13:21.096-04:00Matthew Calarco has a new book outMatthew Calarco's Zoographies was one of the first books in animal studies that focused on the intersection of continental philosophers and the ethics, politics, and ontologies of other animals. Now, Calarco has a new, short book: Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction. This book has just been released, and I am excited to read my copy when it comes in the mail.

Summary from the Amazon page:

The rapidly expanding field of critical animal studies now offers a myriad of theoretical and philosophical positions from which to choose. This timely book provides an overview and analysis of the most influential of these trends. Approachable and concise, it is intended for readers sympathetic to the project of changing our ways of thinking about and interacting with animals yet relatively new to the variety of philosophical ideas and figures in the discipline. It uses three rubrics—identity, difference, and indistinction—to differentiate three major paths of thought about animals. The identity approach aims to establish continuity among human beings and animals so as to grant animals equal access to the ethical and political community. The difference framework views the animal world as containing its own richly complex and differentiated modes of existence in order to allow for a more expansive ethical and political worldview. The indistinction approach argues that we should abandon the notion that humans are unique in order to explore new ways of conceiving human-animal relations. Each approach is interrogated for its relative strengths and weaknesses, with specific emphasis placed on the kinds of transformational potential it contains.
Scuhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-8234592981995965022015-03-14T14:30:00.000-04:002015-03-14T14:30:42.857-04:00Recent books I am excited aboutNo real overarching theme to these books, except they have come out recently (all at least from this year), and I am excited about checking them out.

Recent

Judith Butler -- Senses of the Subject

Lori Gruen -- Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationship with Animals

Katherine McKittrick -- Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis

Wendy Brown -- Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

Robin James -- Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism

Steven Shaviro -- No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

James McWilliams -- The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

Franco "Bifo" Berardi -- Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide

David Graeber -- The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Forthcoming

Tobias Menely -- The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen -- Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

Quentin Meillassoux -- Science Fiction and Extro-Science FictionScuhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-73102343146927574812015-02-08T13:39:00.000-05:002015-02-08T13:39:25.182-05:00Soy Calculus? Hypocrisy and EthicsDo you ever feel like your vegan or vegetarian friends are a little touchy sometimes? Ever feel like someone is being curious, and your friend is acting like they are personally under attack?
Well, one of the reasons is that we are constantly bombarded by bad faith arguments, that are laughably bad, and that we are expected to take seriously. Here is an article that I recently saw on my facebook wall.
In the article, the argument is made that after America, soy production is the highest in Brazil, and that it often involves destroying rain forests to produce land for soy production. And that further, vegans and vegetarians eat a lot of soy, so our dietary needs are not pure and innocent. All true.
But the article itself is totally absurd. It admits that only 6% of all soy produced is consummed directly by humans. Only six percent. The article admits that most of the soy produced is feed directly to livestock. Indeed, in the same article that claims 6% is consumed directly by humans, it points out that 85% is consumed by livestock. So, in an article when all of the facts points to a strong pro-vegetarian/vegan argument, somehow the article furthers an anti-vegetarian/vegan. Straightforwardly the argument should go: Soy production sometimes destroys rain forests. 85% of soy is produced to give to livestock. We should become vegans to significantly lower soy production and demands. But rather somehow this becomes an argument is the opposite direction. This is perplexing, until you realize that these sorts of arguments have absolutely nothing to do with figuring out hard ethical truths, or advancing a vision of a better world, or even figuring out reality. Rather, these arguments are about alleviating guilt, about creating the thinest form of excuse for someone to give in to their addictive and harmful life habits. Once we understand this, the arguments make sense. They are a game of ethical tag, in which the person advancing them is able to prove that the vegan or vegetarian are not pure. It matters not at all if purity or innocence has ever been brought up in these discussions. This is because the arguments being advanced are not concerned with attacking vegetarianism or veganism per se, but rather with attacking the vegan or the vegetarian. They are aimed at delegitimizing the vegan and vegetarian as ethical actors, aimed at erasing our being. This is why vegans and vegetarians are so defensive when arguments are being made, because almost all of the arguments being advanced are meant to be attacks on the vegetarian or vegan as such. It is about turning us into hypocrites so the one attacking can feel better about themselves.
I know I am an hypocrite. My guess is that you (whoever you are) know you are, too. One of the great evils of systemic violences is that those of us who are privileged from such violence (whites with racism, humans with speciesism, men with sexism, straights with heterosexism, etc, always the etc). To care, to give a damn, to try and be ethical or political, requires being a hypocrite. Because the individual cannot singularly overcome the contradictions of the systemic. While we cannot overcome the contradictions, our twinned tasks of short circuiting the systemic violences while building alternative communities and worlds are still left to us.

(h/t to Robert S. for the title of the blog post. But I really liked Dianne B's suggested other title: What are my shoes made of? Why don't you bite me?).Scuhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-44998101518743598912014-11-08T14:09:00.001-05:002014-11-08T14:09:33.059-05:00Digital Manifesto Archvie interviews Jeffrey Schnapp, Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & SocietyThe Digital Manifesto Archive interviews Jeffrey Schnapp (Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures @ Harvard University, Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society) about The Digital Humanities Manifesto and the history and future of the digital humanities.

Scuhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-61675810126852280432014-11-05T22:23:00.001-05:002014-11-05T22:23:15.228-05:00CFP: When Species Invade: Towards a Political Invasion Ecology (at DOPE Conference). When Species Invade: Towards a Political Invasion Ecology.
Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) Conference | University of Kentucky | Lexington, KY | 26-28 February 2015
Organizers: Matthew Rosenblum (University of Kentucky), Laura Ogden (Dartmouth College)

Scholars from a range of fields loosely organized under the banner of 'political ecology' have become increasingly attentive to the lives of non-human beings. Political ecologists in geography have situated their research in sites as diverse as the laboratory and the slaughterhouse, spaces where non-human life is made and unmade, to the end of showing the relevance of non-human bodies in socio-spatial processes. The turn toward affect, experimentation, and liveliness in the ecological humanities and social sciences has produced fruitful accounts of the intimacies involved in 'when species meet' but has left much about the being 'out of place,' the radically contingent, irredeemably destructive, or invasive species, yet to be said. What has been said in the social sciences, and indeed even in the natural sciences, is often preoccupied with the existing vocabularies of invasiveness and the ways in which the rhetoric of invasion ecology is linked to rhetoric's of colonialism, nationalism (Olwig 2003, Groning & Wolschke-Bulmahn 2003), xenophobia (Subramaniam 2001), etc., with attention to how these emotive and value-laden discourses implicate the practice of conservation biology Of course the link between the discourses of the natural sciences and modes of human marginalization is important since such taxonomic strategies have facilitated "beastly behavior toward the animalized and the naturalized" (Coates 2006; 135). But beyond these anthropocentric arguments which problematize invasion ecology largely because of its effect on human communities are the violently excluded bodies of the invasive and the feral. In many ways the popular discussions of invasiveness have abounded to the detriment of exploring questions of how metaphor and discourse motivate agents to act upon the world (Bono 2003), to what end these actions endeavor towards, and whether or not those actions are commensurate with a worthwhile ethical framework. After all, "the search for a precise lexicon of terms and concepts in invasion ecology is not driven by concerns for just semantics" (Pyšek et al. 2004; 131), it is about action, and surely a process of categorization that is meant to decide which beings belong and which do not has real, felt, material, consequences. While the discursive focus takes furry, leafy, and other invasive bodies as its object, these beings are, ironically absent. Discussions about what nomenclature is best suited to categorize certain forms of nonhuman life have virtually ignored the fact that the practice of invasion ecology implicates humans as well as nonhumans in an economy of violence directed at the attainment of a certain ecological ideal (Robbins & Moore 2013) through the use of "quarantine, eradication, and control" (Elton [1958] 2000; 110). In this light, even many of the most critically aware scholars has failed to ask questions about the value of invasive lives and whether killing them is in line with a truly political ecology, one that views "ecological systems as power-laden rather than politically inert" (Robbins 2012; 13)- one that includes non-human lives as subjects of politics rather than mere objects of human fascination.

The aim of this session is to move beyond the discourse of invasiveness to explore alternative ways of both politicizing the science and practice of invasion ecology and bringing invasive entities, both alive and dead back into the discussions that implicate them. Topics might include, but should not be limited to:
-Queer critiques of ecological futurism
-Emotional geographies of ecological loss
-The 'invasavore' movement
-Non-constructivist approaches to invasiveness
-The biopolitics of invasive species management
-New directions in the discussion of the rhetoric of invasiveness
-The conflict between environmental ethics and animal ethics
-Invasiveness and landscape studies
-Animal Diaspora and non-human mobility
-Political ecologies of bordering
-Hunting power
-Invasiveness and the politics of the Anthropocene
-'Novel ecologies' and engagements with scientific concepts such as equilibrium, resilience, etc.
Anyone interested in participating in the session should send an abstract of 500 words or less to email@example.com by November 10th, 2014. Participants must also register at the conference website: politicalecology.org by the registration deadline of November 17th 2014.

References
Bono, J. J. "Why Metaphor? Toward a Metaphorics of Scientific Practice." Science Studies: Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge. Ed. Sabine Maasen and Matthias Winterhager. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2001. 215-33.
Coates, Peter. American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006
Elton, Charles S. The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. Chicago: U of Chicago, [1958] 2000.
Groning, Gert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn. "The Native Plant Enthusiasm: Ecological Panacea or Xenophobia?" Landscape Research28.1 (2003): 75-88.
Olwig, Kenneth R. "Natives and Aliens in the National Landscape." Landscape Research 28.1 (2003): 61-74.
Pyšek, Petr, David M. Richardson, Marcel Rejmánek, Grady L. Webster, Mark Williamson, Jan Kirschner, Petr Pysek, and Marcel Rejmanek. "Alien Plants in Checklists and Floras: Towards Better Communication between Taxonomists and Ecologists." Taxon 53.1 (2004): 131.
Robbins, Paul. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2012.
Robbins, Paul, and S. A. Moore. "Ecological Anxiety Disorder: Diagnosing the Politics of the Anthropocene." Cultural Geographies 20.1 (2013): 3-19.
Subramaniam, Banu. "The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2.1 (2001): 26-40.Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-69746625940362521062014-11-01T18:40:00.002-04:002014-11-01T18:40:29.036-04:00Forthcoming titles in Italian Philosophy (plus a French one)First the French:

Grégoire Chamayou -- A Theory of the Drone.
Grégoire Chamayou, who we have talked about before, has a book coming out January, 2015.

Drone warfare has raised profound ethical and constitutional questions both in the halls of Congress and among the U.S. public. Not since debates over nuclear warfare has American military strategy been the subject of discussion in living rooms, classrooms, and houses of worship. Yet as this groundbreaking new work shows, the full implications of drones have barely been addressed in the recent media storm.
In a unique take on a subject that has grabbed headlines and is consuming billions of taxpayer dollars each year, philosopher Grégoire Chamayou applies the lens of philosophy to our understanding of how drones are changing our world. For the first time in history, a state has claimed the right to wage war across a mobile battlefield that potentially spans the globe. Remote-control flying weapons, he argues, take us well beyond even George W. Bush's justification for the war on terror.
What we are seeing is a fundamental transformation of the laws of war that have defined military conflict as between combatants. As more and more drones are launched into battle, war now has the potential to transform into a realm of secretive, targeted assassinations of individuals—beyond the view and control not only of potential enemies but also of citizens of democracies themselves. Far more than a simple technology, Chamayou shows, drones are profoundly influencing what it means for a democracy to wage war. A Theory of the Drone will be essential reading for all who care about this important question.

Now the Italians:

Maurizio Lazzarato -- Governing by Debt, due out February, 2015.

Experts, pundits, and politicians agree: public debt is hindering growth and increasing unemployment. Governments must reduce debt at all cost if they want to restore confidence and get back on a path to prosperity. Maurizio Lazzarato's diagnosis, however, is completely different: under capitalism, debt is not primarily a question of budget and economic concerns but a political relation of subjection and enslavement. Debt has become infinite and unpayable. It disciplines populations, calls for structural reforms, justifies authoritarian crackdowns, and even legitimizes the suspension of democracy in favor of "technocratic governments" beholden to the interests of capital. The 2008 economic crisis only accelerated the establishment of a "new State capitalism," which has carried out a massive confiscation of societies' wealth through taxes. And who benefits? Finance capital. In a calamitous return to the situation before the two world wars, the entire process of accumulation is now governed by finance, which has absorbed sectors it once ignored, like higher education, and today is often identified with life itself. Faced with the current catastrophe and the disaster to come, Lazzarato contends, we must overcome capitalist valorization and reappropriate our existence, knowledge, and technology.
In Governing by Debt, Lazzarato confronts a wide range of thinkers -- from Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault to David Graeber and Carl Schmitt -- and draws on examples from the United States and Europe to argue that it is time that we unite in a collective refusal of this most dire status quo.

Maurizio Ferraris -- Manifesto of New Realism, due out December, 2014.

Retraces the history of postmodern philosophy and proposes solutions to overcome its impasses.
Philosophical realism has taken a number of different forms, each applied to different topics and set against different forms of idealism and subjectivism. Maurizio Ferraris's Manifesto of New Realism takes aim at postmodernism and hermeneutics, arguing against their emphasis on reality as constructed and interpreted. While acknowledging the value of these criticisms of traditional, dogmatic realism, Ferraris insists that the insights of postmodernism have reached a dead end. Calling for the discipline to turn its focus back to truth and the external world, Ferraris's manifesto—which sparked lively debate in Italy and beyond—offers a wiser realism with social and political relevance.

Paolo Virno -- Deja Vu and the End of History, due out February, 2015.

This book places two key notions up against each other to imagine a new way of conceptualizing historical time. How do the experience of déjà vu and the idea of the "End of History" relate to one another? Through thinkers like Bergson, Kojève and Nietzsche, Virno explores these constructs of memory and the passage of time. In showing how the experience of time becomes historical, Virno considers two fundamental concepts from Western philosophy: Power and The Act. Through these, he elegantly constructs a radical new theory of historical temporality.

Paolo Virno -- When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, due out May, 2015.

Originally published in Italian in 2002, When the Word Becomes Flesh provides a compelling contribution to the understanding of language and its relation to human nature and social relationships. Adopting Aristotle's definition of the human being as a linguistic and political animal, Paolo Virno frames the act of speech as a foundational philosophical issue -- an act that in its purely performative essence ultimately determines our ability to pass from the state of possibility to one of actuality: that is, from the power to act to action itself. As the ultimate public act, speech reveals itself to be an intrinsically political practice mediating between biological invariants and changing historical determinations. In his most complete reflection on the topic to date, Virno shows how language directly expresses the conditions of possibility for our experience, from both a transcendental and a biological point of view.
Drawing on the work of such twentieth-century giants as Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, and Gottlob Frege, Virno constructs a powerful linguistic meditation on the political challenges faced by the human species in the twenty-first century. It is in language that human nature and our historical potentialities are fully revealed, and it is language that can guide us toward a more aware and purposeful realization of them.
Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-10669621065068288512014-10-30T14:27:00.000-04:002014-10-30T20:30:41.906-04:00Guest Post: Toward An Abolition of Keeping "Pets"The following is a Guest Post written by A. Marie Houser. It is a rejoinder to my post "On Pets: A Provocation for Uncanny Ethics." It has been cross-posted at her new blog, Human[e]Species. The recipient of a 2013 Culture & Animals Foundation grant, A. Marie Houser is a writer and editor currently in her second master's program. Her poetry and prose have been published in various journals; essays have recently appeared in the The Feminist Wire and The Journal of Critical Animals Studies. She's edited an anthology of fiction and hybrid-genre literature for nonhuman animals that is now under consideration.

***

There's an eyot in the Mississippi where prairie grasses come up in startled tufts. From a bridge, the island appears as a softly quilled rodent emerging from water. Victorian homes, built by lumber barons and land stealers, lurch up from the ground. Tall and narrow, aching with age, they appear shocked too: shocked by their own skeletons. They haunt themselves. Sometimes structure is a kind of imprisonment.

Often you see a cat bunch up inside a window, looking for a whiskerclutch of sun. The island is dewy, shaded. I walk through it struggling to conceptualize my belief that "pet-keeping" must become a temporary phase on the way to abolishment of the practice. I am thinking, at the same time, of heartbreaking ends, the sinus rhythm of a relationship that could flatline. This island, where two people looked at each other and chose love, is suspended in tension: tension between freedom and containment, and the mutuality that keeps the two in balance.

So I begin thinking of that mutuality, how it also holds in suspension companionship and the letting go of it. Begin with the anecdote: a woman, not unlike me, and the cats she loved. Begin with the specific case, how the woman and the cats had lived as particles in turmoil: separate, come together, separate, the woman and her partner, until he left for good, the flat was half-empty, and the cats startled at noise. The boy cat's need had an adhesive quality; he pawed until you sat, then clutched your lap in sleep.

She did not mean for her companions to live that way. Nor did another friend, a man who is a more outspoken advocate of nonhuman animals. But he had adopted a dog from a shelter when he had neither the resources nor the temperament to care for a traumatized Bully. He would have excoriated another person for doing what she eventually did—rehome the dog—but he found himself without many choices. This is the dirty secret of nonhuman-animal rights activism: we aren't infallible. Of the activists I've known, most of us have had shameful secrets about our failures in "pet-keeping" than not.

There isn't much data on just how many nonhuman animal companions arrive at shelters already traumatized—nor, of course, is there consensus as to what constitutes traumatization. Behavior ratings, which shelters use to assess which lives are disposable and which are not, instrumentalize even grief and trauma: feeling becomes behavior, that behavior mapped according to human need and desire. Their pliancy is our true North.

James writes beautifully of farmed animals, "Our tendency to breed animals with the thought of the corpse backwards, so that life is but preservation for the animal's flesh, has made it so that there are some animals that are no longer born living, but born deading." But he questions whether such a thing is true of companions we bring into the house, our pets; perhaps, James writes, they are still living.

But walking this eyot, grids and curves risen from earth by a kind of bureaucratic necromancy and pinned to our conception of things with street signs and addresses, I view "pets" as ghosts already, d[h]eading from leash to euthanasia table, living being to corpse: they are a simultaneity of here and not-here states. Maybe the possibilities of their lives end in a whiskerclutch of sun, maybe they end in terror. But the point, of course, is that the possibilities of their lives largely collapse into one end or the other because of choices humans make.

The HSUS reports that six to eight million nonhuman animals arrive in shelters each year; of those fifty percent, or three to four million, are killed. Welfarists anticipate a future in which the numbers flatline to zero. They divine a future in which the tension of human-animal companionship resolves into harmonious affiliation, and pets aren't killed because they're inconvenient. Pet euthanasia has, according to The HSUS, significantly dropped since the 1970s, from 25% of total dogs and cats to 2%. But perhaps I and other abolitionists ask more of our victories: to me, every murdered and discarded body is one too many; three to four million is a horror show of obliteration. Structurally, a genocide; structurally, a holocaust.

I stop outside the house that draws me nearest. This house, with its own small prairie and nearby railroad tracks, which have almost passed from their function as accomplices to machines of conquest into the quaintness of tableau, strikes me as uncanny. I experience the uncanny as a fullness that feels like love. So I approach the house and ache to be let in; I want to be held fully in the space of the mysterious. I once said to my lover, "I'm on all fours and pawing your feet." He replied, "I get scared at the thought of a world without you."

Mutuality holds in its suspension companionship and the letting go of it. But when we hold fast to domestication, willing to contain and hold captive individual lives rather than risk the end of "pet species," our relationships with other beings cease to be mutual. The human decides; the companion animal must make do with those decisions. That's not to say that domestication is a process consciously initiated. But if humans do not consciously initiate domestication of animals as pets, then animals who have become pets can hardly be said to have chosen domestication.

What did the first cat want when she scratched at our doors? What did my lover want when he came up to my city in that first season? Something takes shape without pre-determination: we choose love but cannot predict where it takes us. Need or expectation presses a relationship too hard, flattening possibility. The first cat perhaps wanted something less than to be locked in the treasure box of a house within which she would be worshipped. She wanted to be let out as well as in.

But no matter how long certain animals have lived with us in domestication, "petness" is far more elastic than its tendency to be affiliated with certain species: the fleet and furry dogs and cats who are the only animals counted in The HSUS's survey of pet euthanasia rates. Petness doesn't burst out of animal-DNA like milkweed; it is made and maintained with each being brought into—and largely shut inside—our homes. Even animals happy with a whiskerclutch of sun strain against human expectation, strain against harnesses, leashes, and invisible boundaries around counters and sofas.

It has become increasingly obvious that petlike behavior has the potential to emerge from members of most species. Recently a video made the rounds of an eel and a diver. In it, the eel peeks from a shelter of corral, recognizes the diver, and swims into her arms as though to seek embrace. The diver feeds the eel a smaller fish as reward; according to the narration, diver and eel have met before. Judging by comments about this video, viewers apprehend the eel with wonder and joy—but only once she becomes petlike. The tension waves of domestication move further and further outward, enfolding more types of animals within, rather than collapsing back. And I wonder: do we stop only when there are no animals left to tame?

Some animals may be particularly adept at expressing their needs or desires through behaviors preferable to humans. But that means neither that those animals cannot live without us nor that they are inevitably to live among us as pets. But if animals regarded as pet-able can live without us, we do not allow them to. Those pets who commit the offense of not acting petlike—or those animals identifiable as members of species that should act like pets, but instead behave as ferals—are often contained in more restrictive enclosures: cages in shelters rather than rooms in houses. Pets don't get to grow up, leave the house, and develop self-determination. They don't get to leave when relationships within houses go awry.

I realize now that it may sound as though I'd advocate turning pets out of houses, rather than the usual abolitionist phase-out plan: cease breeding of nonhuman animals we regard as pets, adopt all the ones remaining in shelters, carry out trap-neuter-return initiatives, then let the species die out. I am not. I cannot bear the thought of animals resembling the ones dear to me roaming winter streets. I am tempted to conclude, then, that pets have domesticated me. But such a conclusion would be a foolish conceptual inversion of a structural inequality: I will always be the one deciding for my cat the trajectory of her life more than she.

On the island, where two humans might form a helix holding hands, a relationship may form in which one person determines its course more than the other. That may satisfy. That might not. And when it doesn't, one of those two humans might find herself one day revisiting those grasses, those railroad tracks, that house, unsure of what to do next—wanting in, wanting out, wanting in.

Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-14367594292731672952014-10-23T00:15:00.001-04:002014-10-23T00:18:49.463-04:00On Pets: A Provocation for Uncanny Ethics

I call the two cats that live with me my pets. I cringe a little when people refer to their pets as if they were their children. I cringe even more when people call their pets their roommates. Are these cringes fair? Probably not. Pets are a complicated matter.

Those who have read Deleuze and Guattari probably know about their infamous cry that "Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool," (ATP p. 240, emphasis in the original). This rejection of domestic pets is something found not just throughout A Thousand Plateaus, but also in the opening discussion of L'Abécédaire. He explains there that despite having a cat in his household, he hates having a human relationship, and instead wants an animal relationship to animals. His concern, in both texts, is less with the animal herself, and more with how the domesticated pet oedipalizes humans. In other words, he is interested in the ways that pets are used as immunization against our own animality. I find that interesting, but that is not what makes me cringe. Instead, I want to focus on how our human relationships to pets, our decisions to make them one of the family, immunizes ourselves not against our shared animality, but rather our non-shared sovereignty. We take what should be an entirely uncanny, disturbing ethical relationship, and we, well, domesticate it. As usual, a complex ethical situation is suppressed for the desire of the innocence in roommates or children.

Why is the ethical relationship to pets one that should disturb? That should be uncanny? In a recent interview with 3:AM Magazine, Lori Gruen discussed the ethics of captivity. Her argument, that our pets are really also our captives, is important. I quote at length:

The ethical issues around captivity are remarkably complex and it is surprising how little philosophical attention has been paid to them. [...] When we start thinking about pets or "companion animals" as captives then we may start reflecting in new ways on how we treat them. Clare Palmer and Peter Sandoe wrote a provocative chapter in the book that questions the received wisdom that routinely confining cats indoors promotes their well-being. Cats may be happy with our affections and their lives may be longer if we keep them safe indoors, but there is a loss here, to their freedom to go where they want and interact with and shape their larger environment. In captive contexts, the trade-offs, between safety and freedom, protection and choice, are often obscured. [...] Seeing pets as captives, I think, does bring some of the complexities of captivity into sharper focus. [...] One justification for keeping individuals captive has been that captivity is better for them. In the context of companion animals and zoo animals, for example, one often hears that they will live longer lives and they won't have to worry about injury or predation or hunger. The sense is that they are better off having lost their freedom. The same sorts of justifications were also heard in the case of slaves. Captors wanted to believe that slaves were better off, became more civilized, more human, because of their captivity. Of course, this is odious in the case of human beings, and there are some who argue that this attitude is equally objectionable in the case of other animals. Comparing captivity to a type of slavery, some animal advocates are opposed to all forms of captivity, even keeping pets. They take the label "abolitionist" as a way of linking their views to earlier abolitionist struggles to end slavery. But I think our relationships with other animals (of course humans, but also nonhumans) are a central part of what makes lives meaningful. Rather than thinking we must end all captivity and thus all our relationships with other animals, we'd do better working to improve those relationships by being more perceptive of and more responsive to others' needs and interests and sensibilities. Since we are already, inevitably, in relationships, rather than ending them we might try to figure out how to make them better, more meaningful, and more mutually satisfying. Importantly, by recognizing that we are inevitably in relationships to other animals, replete with vulnerability, dependency, and even some instrumentalization, and working to understand and improve these relationships, I'm not condoning exploitation. Acknowledging that we are in relationships doesn't mean that all relationships are equally defensible or should stay as they are. Relationships of exploitation or complete instrumentalization are precisely the sorts of relationships that should change. And this is where an exploration of conditions of captivity and the complexity of the individual captives' interests comes in. Some animals, like whales and elephants, cannot thrive in captive conditions. As much as we might want to have closer relationships with them, it isn't good for them. Others, like dogs and chimpanzees, can live meaningful lives in captivity but only if the conditions they are captive in are conducive to their flourishing and they are respected. Part of the problem with captivity is the relationship of domination that it tends to maintain. By re-evaluating captivity (and for many in our non-ideal situation, there is no real alternative) we can start to ask questions about whether and how captive conditions can, while denying certain freedoms, still promote the dignity of the captives.

When we talk about our pets as children or roommates, we are disavowing the fundamental, more confusing relationship we have with our pets. How do we go about undoing this moral sleight of hand? One way can be by focusing on the disconnect between our rhetoric of how we think of other animals, and how we treat our pets. In Kennan Ferguson's wide-ranging and fascinating book, All in the Family: On Community and Incommensurability, he examines the relationships between humans and dogs in his chapter, "I ♥ My Dog." The chapter opens with the predicament of spending money to save your dog's life (or even to make her life more comfortable or happier), versus spending money to give to aid agencies to save the lives of other humans. Despite all of our claims that humans' lives matter more than animals, those of us with pets both do and do not act like this. On the one hand, the money we spend on our pets could easily translate into saving the lives of humans; on the other hand, our relationship to our pet will never be like the relationships with other humans in our household. The pet becomes this sort of strange liminal being. This realization is what moved Erica Fudge to ask, "Is a pet an animal?," which she follows up with this observation, "They are both human and animal; they live with us, but are not us; they have names like us, but cannot call us by our names" (Animal, pp. 27-28). Deleuze's desire that we have animal relationships toward our pets cannot but seem foolish now. After all, you cannot relate to a pet as an animal, or as a human. The pet forms a kind of becoming-human, a minor subject who enters into a becoming of a majoritarian subject. No wonder pets, dogs and cats, constantly haunt the arguments of A Thousand Plateaus. How much easier the world would be for Deleuze if it only had wolves.

As is infamously known since Donna Haraway's When Species Meet, Deleuze and Guattari write:

It is clear that the anomalous is not simply an exceptional individual; that would be to equate it with the family animal or pet, the Oedipalized animal as psychoanalysis sees it, as the image of the father, etc. Ahab's Moby-Dick is not like the little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it. Lawrence's becoming-tortoise has nothing to do with a sentimental or domestic relation. (ATP p. 244)
Of course, Delezue is trying to invoke a certain image of an "elderly woman" here, but there is another image that an elderly woman with her dog or cat that she honors and cherishes should conjure up for us.

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. (Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 194).
The witch's familiar represents another vision of our relationship with other animals. These animals, of course, are not the mere pets of the witch, rather, a familiar is a witch's assistant. While I have not done the research to know the history of how we called the witch's animal companions familiars, I cannot help but see the name as being a little ironic. After all, the familiar of the witch's is also uncanny, it is a being that exists in excess of what we imagine defines the being. The familiar is that which "ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light." And what secret is that? Why, that of animal agency. The familiar is not just a pet, but also an actor.

We know that the domestication of other animals have been part and parcel of both settler colonialism and global capitalism. The abolition of domestic relationships seem straightforward when dealing with animals treated as livestock. But, what do we do with pets? Kari Weil, in her Thinking Animals, argues for us to take seriously the agency of other animals when we think about pets. She wants us to take seriously the question "could animals have 'chosen' domestication[?]" (p. 56). This is not some sort of an idea of a social contract or species contract in which animals choose to enter into a pact with humans where we provide for them and treat them humanely and the animals agree for us to eat them. Rather, it is the acknowledgement that other animals have been active participants in their own history, and this might be especially true for the unique intersubjective relationship between pet and human. It is an affirmation that not all domestication has been conscious, and that humans can be domesticated by animals as much as animals are domesticated by humans. And this brings us back to that uncomfortable truth that Gruen raises for us. Namely, that many domesticated animals, including many pets, would no longer exist outside of their relationships with humans.

The animal abolitionist wants to destroy the property status of other animals. And when we think of the animals trapped in abattoirs and factory farms and laboratories, this makes perfect sense. But what do we do with our cats and our dogs, what becomes of our pets? The usual abolitionist line is that we love and care for these animals as best as possible, and we work hard to make sure they are the last generation (through spaying and neutering). It would be too easy to wave my hand at this point, and gesture toward the absurdity of loving animals to death, of loving animals to extinction. But there is a real love here. When I think of the turkey, so changed and transformed she can no longer reproduce of her own, when I think of her body that grows so large it crushes her bones and organs, I cannot help but think we should love and care for these turkeys as best as possible, and work hard to make sure they are the last generation. Our tendency to breed animals with the thought of the corpse backwards, so that life is but preservation for the animal's flesh, has made it so that there are some animals that are no longer born living, but born deading. But most dogs and cats? They are still born living. But they are also born dependent on humans for a good life. The abolitionist desire here seems clear enough, better that an animal no longer exist than for her to be born a slave. But is this really true? I can't help but believe the abolitionist desire to no longer have pets is a bit like the person who claims their pet is their child. They are both disavowals of the great asymmetry in our intersubjective relationship. They are both claims toward innocence rather than facing the hard work of ethics.

I love my cats. And it is part of this love that means I am haunted by my cats, and the decisions that I make for them. I am disturbed by keeping them inside in the city, and disturbed by letting them outside in the country. I spay and neuter my cats, and am horrified by people who declaw their cats, and understand the sovereign violence in both decisions. I am haunted by cats, and I wish they were familiars. I wish my black cats came from pacts with the Devil, and that they could speak a language I could understand. But they are not familiars, and all I have is the opaque affective communication of our intersubjective relation. They are not familiars, but are instead that uncanny being, they are pets.
Scuhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-37572115156443145892014-10-21T14:13:00.000-04:002014-10-21T14:14:30.918-04:00Two New Critical Animal Studies Titles
Two recent books published you should check out.

(1) Framing Farming: Communication Strategies for Animal Rights

Rodopi Books just released the second title of their Critical Animal Studies Book Series. "Framing Farming: Communication Strategies for Animal Rights" by Carrie P. Freeman.

"To what extent should animal rights activists promote animal rights when attempting to persuade meat-lovers to stop eating animals?

Contributing to a classic social movement framing debate, Freeman examines the animal rights movement's struggles over whether to construct farming campaign messages based more on utility (emphasizing animal welfare, reform and reduction, and human self-interest) or ideology (emphasizing animal rights and abolition). Freeman prioritizes the latter, "ideological authenticity," to promote a needed transformation in worldviews and human animal identity, not just behaviors. This would mean framing "go veg" messages not only around compassion, but also around principles of ecology, liberty, and justice, convincing people "it's not fair to farm anyone".

Through a unique frame analysis of vegan campaign materials (from websites, to videos, to bumper stickers) at five prominent U.S. animal rights organizations, and interviews with their leaders, including Ingrid Newkirk and Gene Baur, Freeman answers questions, such as: How is the movement defining core problems and solutions regarding animal farming and fishing? To which values are activists appealing? Why have movement leaders made these visual and rhetorical strategic choices – such as deciding between appealing to human self-interest, environmentalism, or altruism? To what extent is the animal rights movement actually challenging speciesist discrimination and the human/animal dualism?

Appealing to both scholars and activists, Framing Farming distinctively offers practical strategic guidance while remaining grounded in animal ethics and communication theory. It not only describes what 21st century animal rights campaigns are communicating, it also prescribes recommendations for what they should communicate to remain culturally resonant while promoting needed long-term social transformation away from using animals as resources."

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction
Part I. Overview of Animal Rights, Vegetarianism, and Communication
Chapter 2: Ethical Views on Animals as Fellows & as Food
Chapter 3: Activist Communication Strategy & Debates
Part II. How U.S. Animal Rights Organizations Frame Food Campaign Messages
Chapter 4: Defining Problems & Culprits, Proposing Solutions
Chapter 5: Appealing to Values – Constructing a Caring Vegan Identity
Chapter 6: Appealing to Altruism or Self-Interest?
Chapter 7: How Movement Leaders Explain Their Strategic Choices
Part III. Strategic Communication Recommendations For Vegan Activism
Chapter 8: Activists' Latest Insights & Projections
Chapter 9: My Recommendations for Ideological Authenticity in Framing Animal Rights

Carrie P. Freeman is an Associate Professor of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her scholarship on media ethics, activist communication, and representation of animal rights issues has been published in over 15 books and journals. A vegan and grassroots activist for almost two decades, she currently hosts radio programs on animal and environmental protection on WRFG-Radio Free Georgia.

(2) Animal Liberation and Atheism: Dismantling the Procrustean Bed

Religious arguments for animal rights and liberation are fairly common in the literature on the animal question and the animal condition. Meanwhile, arguments considering animal liberation from a deliberately secular perspective are virtually nonexistent. In Animal Liberation and Atheism: Dismantling the Procrustean Bed, Kim Socha initiates the conversation by exploring how the concept of religion is inherently antithetical to animal liberation. She also challenges secularists to view the world differently, free from religion's cultural baggage. Finally, Animal Liberation and Atheism is a call for everyone to consider developing a system of ethics disengaged from anthropocentric and speciesist mythologies so that needless violence against all beings and the environment may diminish.

Kim Socha, Ph.D., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation (Rodopi: 2011) and is a contributing editor to Confronting Animal Exploitation: Grassroots Essays on Liberation and Veganism (McFarland Publishing: 2013) and Defining Critical Animal Studies: A Social Justice Approach for Liberation (Peter Lang: 2014). She has also published on topics such as Latino/a literature, surrealism, critical animal studies, and composition pedagogy. Kim is an English professor and activist for animal liberation, drug policy reform, and transformative justice.Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-7726852308815505932014-10-20T18:36:00.000-04:002014-10-28T23:16:50.133-04:00New Materialism and Anti-RacismIn a recent facebook thread, there was a discussion about speculative realism and new materialism (and allied groups) relationship to feminism, queer theory, and anti-racist philosophy. In that thread, I pointed out some of the obvious new materialist thinkers working on feminist and/or queer theory fields. What I want to do here is collect the works where thinkers use new materialist insights to think through anti-racism. This list will be incomplete, and I welcome anyone who wants to add to the bibliography (I will edit this post as necessary). Also, by new materialists I am using the term in the broadest sense. I mean here thinkers who are broadly engaged in new materialism, speculative realism, non-representational theory, constructivist philosophy, posthumanism, and generally all the headings that can be thought under the metaphysical/ontological/non-human turn. I have also decided to write some very quick summaries of each text. The summaries are not super great, but should give you a sense of how the text deals with race and new materialism.

Mel Chen: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Chen explores the ways that we navigate what we consider to be animate, to be living or dead. In so doing she particularly explores the ways that certain material objects come to be racialized, and she explores the ways other beings become de-racialized and neutered.

Michael Hames-García, "How Real is Race?," which can be found either in his book, Identity Complex, or in the edited volume Material Feminisms. In this essay Hames-García engages Barad's work on intra-action in order to think about the ontological realities (and limits) of race.

Donna Jones: The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. Jones explores how vitalist discourses, including in Nietzsche and Bergson, were implicated in racism and anti-Semitism. She also explores the way that vitalism continues in thinkers like Deleuze and Grosz. Furthermore, Jones explores the way that Négritude cannot be fully understood outside of the vitalist tradition.

Fred Moten: In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, and his essay, "The Case of Blackness." I talk briefly about these texts in this post. Moten work, principally aesthetic, speaks of an "animative materiality."

Jasbir Puar: Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, and also her essay, "'I'd Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory." In both, Puar uses assemblage theory to try to challenge and extend the concept of intersectionality.

Arun Saldanha: "Reontologising race: the machinic geography of phenotype." Saldanha is interested in understanding race as a material ontology, and as a machinic assemblage.

Okay, what obvious things did I miss? What non-obvious things did I miss, and also need to make sure I read?

EDIT:

I thought about trying determine what counted as new materialist/ontological turn/etc., and if it really dealt with anti-racism. But I decided it was outside of my scope. I will just post the lists suggested from commentators. When lots of suggestions occur for an author, I randomly just chose one, read the comments for more. A lot of these are great suggestions. Also, I highly suggest reading the comments, there are lots of great stuff in there.

Anonymous:
Simone Bignall: Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism;
Bignall and Patton (Eds.): Deleuze and the Postcolonial
Tony Bennett: Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism
Helen Verran: "A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners."
Mario Blaser: "Ontology and indigeneity: on the political ontology of heterogeneous assemblages."
Marisol de la Cadena: "Indigenous Cosmopilitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond 'Politics'"
John Law: After Method: Mess in Social Science Research
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul

Carlos Amador:
Arun Saldanha and Jason Adams (Eds): Deleuze and Race.
Michael Taussig: Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing

Jairus Victor Grove:
Glissant Poetics of Relation
Castro, The Enemy's Point of View
Muecke, Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy
João Biehl: Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
Danny Hoffman's The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Sergio González Rodríguez: The Femicide Machine
Octavia Butler: Bloodchild

CC:
Kalpana Rahita Seshadri: HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language.Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-25518746061526024122014-09-18T13:48:00.001-04:002014-09-18T13:51:06.125-04:00Oppression and Thing-Power: Some Thoughts on Robin James' Thoughts on Vibrant Matter
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. -- Frantz Fanon, Black Skins/White Masks, p. 77

Robin James has two great posts up over at her place (here and here) on Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, and you need to go read those. It's fine, do it now, we'll wait.

Oh good, you read it? Awesome.

So, I started trying to write one long post responding, and that got unwieldy. So, instead I am going to focus on one argument in her post, and ideally I will go back and respond to other bits of James' post. However, if you go and look through my blog titles, you will see a lot of "Part I"s and very few "Part II"s. So, the likelihood that I get around to responding to every part I want to seems small.

So, before we go further, I want to say some thing about how I come to this topic. For a while now, I have been trying to think through four different types of philosophical positions. The first is poststructuralist positions found in thinkers like Judith Butler, Avital Ronell, Kelly Oliver, etc. The second is new materialist/constructivist positions found in thinkers like Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, etc. The third is decolonial and anti-racist positions found in thinkers like Maria Lugones, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldua, etc. And lastly the work of ecofeminists found in thinkers like Lori Gruen, Carol Adams, Chris Cuomo, etc. There are, of course, plenty of thinkers who fit in more than one of those categories (Spivak, Sara Ahmed, Stacy Alaimo, etc.). But the important part is that these four positions often exist in tension with each other, and I don't always have easy answers to those tensions. So, the goal here is to blog out loud about some of the different tensions that James' posts raises for me. One other preliminary point: I am not particularly interested here in some sort of defense of Bennett per se. So, occasionally James' posts seem to move from discussing Bennett and vital materialism, to indicating a criticism of broader understandings of new materialism. And I what I am trying to do here is try to mobilize some of the things I think are helpful or interesting from new materialism (including Bennett). So, this has less to do with disagreeing with James, and more to do with my trying to clarify to myself some of the tensions in my own work. And there is a lot I don't disagree with James about. For example, when James argues:

So while Bennett says "I cannot envision any polity so egalitarian that important human needs, such as health or survival, would not take priority" (104), I'm arguing, via Beauvoir, that precisely what we need to do is de-center the human in practice as well as in theory. And that will probably feel like "death" to those of us accustomed to having our health and survival more-or-less fully supported by the state, by capital, by patriarchal white supremacy, and so on.
I agree in advance.

On the issue of Ideal Theory/Oppression.

Okay, there is a lot going on here, and I am having trouble with the argument. There seems to be two ways that oppression is working here. One is that oppressed people actually make less of a difference on the world, because of the structures of their oppression. The other concerns this word legible. That would seem to indicate that oppressed people make as much (if not more) difference in the world, it is merely that their difference is disavowed. So, if we take the concrete example given:

For example, women have always practiced creative arts, but for most of history (and arguably even still today) creative genres that were predominantly by and/or for women–needlepoint, chick lit, etc.–have been seen as something other than "real" or "fine" art (see Parker & Pollock's "Old Mistresses" for an early version of this argument). Women's work doesn't really "count" as such–the situation of patriarchy prohibits them from positive development, so to speak.
Okay, so in this example women are producing art, but their art is disavowed as mere craft. This is why there are quotations marks around the word count, right? Because of course important art is being done by women in this example. So, if we mean oppressed people's differences are disavowed, it would strike me that theories that try to undo disavowals of who and what makes a difference would be at least a move in the right direction. So if we follow Beauvoir in saying that oppressed people are turned into things, doesn't the move to talk about thing-power mean that the productions of the oppressed become more legible? This leads us into the discussion of Ranciere's critique post-political consensus.

 Okay, so James makes the following comment after quoting Ranciere:

Universal envoicement actually is "not the liberation" from silencing but the "loss" (Disagreement 102) of political mechanisms for addressing oppression. In giving voice to all matter, is Bennett disappearing vital materialism's constitutive outside (the out-out-side, so to speak) behind a claim for universal envoicement?
There is something to this, but what does one do with Ranciere's support for declarations of rights? If we look at his article, "Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?," we see Ranciere supporting declarations of equality of anyone to anyone. Why? Because, to use a phrase from his On the Shores of Politics, it provides the part that has no part opportunities to create syllogisms of emancipation. The syllogism follows this way, This declaration claims we are all equal, this incident of oppression shows us not being equal, therefore something has to change to make us equal. In other words, universal declarations of equality are important because they allow the chance to produce the logic of tort, to force a recognition of the wrong to come to the fore. This, of course, is also a response to James' critique of the politics of exception. It seems to me that Ranciere would believe that a formal declaration of equality is better than a formal exclusion because at least we would have a better chance of recognizing the wrong in the latter. In the same way, I think that affirming the power of things and nonhuman actors provides us with a chance to recognize those beings who have been disavowed. What matters is refusing to close the political order, and staying open to the reality that our distribution of the sensible needs to change. That there will always exist beings that remain from any account, and that resist the counting order.

And that brings us to the amazing opening line of Fred Moten's In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, where he writes, "The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist." In the introduction of that book, Moten speaks of "animative materiality" (p. 7) and "animateriality" (p. 18). I do not think it would be wrong to say that Moten is forwarding an argument that could be read as part of new materialism. I want to forward this argument a little more by looking at a passage from Moten's later essay, "The Case of Blackness." In it, at one point Moten is exploring the Fanon quotation I used as an epigraph to this post. Moten writes:

What if the thing whose meaning or value has never been found finds things, founds things? What if the thing will have founded something against the very possibility of foundation and against all anti- or post-foundational impossibilities? What if the thing sustains itself in that absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the horrific honorific of "object"? At the same time, what if the value of that absence or excess is given to us only in and by way of a kind of failure or inadequacy—or, perhaps more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presence's ongoing taking of leave—so that the non-attainment of meaning or ontology, of source or origin, is the only way to approach the thing in its informal (enformed/enforming, as opposed to formless), material totality? Perhaps this would be cause for black optimism or, at least, some black operations. Perhaps the thing, the black, is tantamount to another, fugitive, sublimity altogether. Some/thing escapes in or through the object's vestibule; the object vibrates against its frame like a resonator, and troubled air gets out. The air of the thing that escapes enframing is what I'm interested in—an often unattended movement that accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions. (pp. 181-182)
I'm moving too quickly to give the sort of attention that Moten's texts demand, but I would hope that it might be possible to understand an animative materiality. And this might provide a different way of examining the paradox of both a subject and an object, both a thing and not a thing. And it might also remind us that there is always a fugitive, haunted air that escapes in these vibrating objects.

Okay, two counter-arguments to what I wrote above (remember when I said I am just talking aloud about some tensions that I haven't completely answer to myself yet?)

(1) The movement to try and say, "Well, if oppression proceeds by turning marginalized people into things, then we should understand the power of things" reflects a similar problem that occurs in critiques of humanism within critical animal studies. So, in the beginning of Alexander Weheliye's recent Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, he argues that animal studies and posthumanism proceed as if Man is a category that all human beings have equal access too, and that the failure to recognize that is not the case undermines their arguments (pp. 9-11). Now, I think he is being a little too dismissive here, but I also think his main point is a serious one. If we look at the tradition of decolonial philosophers like Fanon, Wynter, Césaire, and Maldonado-Torres we see some of the strongest and best critiques of humanism. We also see, however, a constant move to argue for a better humanism, as well. Those of us on the critical animal studies side are always wanting to say something like, "We agree with the critique of humanism, lets move on from there." And this is something I have talked about before (see, for example, here). I don't have a good answer, but I do think that any movement that does not take seriously questions of dignity alongside questions of who has the protection to be able to declare "I am an animal," or "I am an a thing" are going to end up in bad spaces. But, that is still not an answer.

(2) The other critique to what I wrote is linked with the post I made, "The Right of Obscurity Must Be Respected." Making ourselves more attuned to other beings also needs to take into account the sorts of violences that Glissant understood to happen under the idea of comprehension, and also respond to the problem of what Hartman class hypervisibility. There is a type of violence that can come from refusing intersubjective recognition, but there is also a type of violence that can come from refusing the right of opacity (of that air that escapes). Scuhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-81379902715467250772014-09-17T21:26:00.000-04:002014-09-17T21:26:55.569-04:00CFP: Panel for When Species Invade at AAGCall for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, 21-25 April 2015, Chicago Illinois
Session Title: When Species Invade: Towards a Political Invasion Ecology.
Session Organizer: Matthew Rosenblum (University of Kentucky), Adam Keul (University of Connecticut- Avery Point)

Scholars from a range of fields loosely organized under the banner of 'political ecology' have become increasingly attentive to the lives of non-human actors. Political ecologists in geography have situated their research in sites as diverse as the laboratory and the slaughterhouse, spaces where non-human life is made and unmade, to the end of showing the relevance of non-human bodies in socio-spatial processes. The turn toward affect, experimentation, and liveliness in the ecological humanities and social sciences has produced fruitful accounts of the intimacies involved in 'when species meet' but has left much about the being 'out of place,' the radically contingent, irredeemably destructive, or so-called invasive species, yet to be said. What has been said is often preoccupied with the existing vocabularies of invasiveness and the ways in which the rhetoric of invasion ecology is linked to rhetoric's of colonialism, nationalism (Olwig 2003, Groning & Wolschke-Bulmahn 2003), xenophobia (Subramaniam 2001), etc. Of course the link between the discourses of the natural sciences and modes of human marginalization is important since such taxonomic strategies have facilitated "beastly behavior toward the animalized and the naturalized" (Coates 2006; 135). But beyond the narcissistic anthropocentrism which problematizes invasion ecology because of its effect on human communities are the violently excluded bodies of the invasive and the feral. In many ways the popular discussions of invasiveness have abounded to the detriment of exploring questions of how metaphor and discourse motivate agents to act upon the world (Bono 2003) and whether or not those actions are commensurate with a worthwhile ethical framework. After all, "the search for a precise lexicon of terms and concepts in invasion ecology is not driven by concerns for just semantics" (Pyšek et al. 2004; 131), it is about action, and surely a process of categorization that is meant to decide which beings belong and which do not has real, felt, material, consequences. While the discursive focus takes furry, leafy, and other invasive bodies as its object, these beings are, ironically absent. Discussions about what nomenclature is best suited to categorize certain forms of nonhuman life have virtually ignored the fact that the practice of invasion ecology implicates humans as well as nonhumans in an economy of violence directed at the attainment of a certain ecological ideal (Robbins & Moore 2013) through the use of "quarantine, eradication, and control" (Elton [1958] 2000; 110). In this light, even many of the most critically aware scholars has failed to ask questions about the value of invasive lives and whether killing them is in line with a truly political ecology, one that views "ecological systems as power-laden rather than politically inert" (Robbins 2012; 13) and one includes non-human lives as subjects of politics rather than objects.

The aim of this session is to move beyond the mere discourse of invasiveness and explore alternative ways of both politicizing the science and practice of invasion ecology and bringing invasive entities, both alive and dead back into the discussions that implicate them. Topics might include, but should not be limited to:
-Queer critiques of ecological futurism

-Emotional geographies of ecological loss

-The 'invasavore' movement

-Non-constructivist approaches to invasiveness

-The biopolitics of invasive species management

-New directions in the discussion of the rhetoric of invasiveness

-The conflict between environmental ethics and animal ethics

-Invasiveness and landscape studies

-Animal Diaspora and non-human mobility

-Political ecologies of bordering

-Hunting power

-Invasiveness and the politics of the Anthropocene

-'Novel ecologies' and engagements with scientific concepts such as equilibrium, resilience, etc.

Anyone interested in participating in this session should send a 250 word abstract to Matthew Rosenblum (email@example.com) by 15 October 2014. We will notify the authors of selected papers by 20 October 2014 and ask them to register on the AAG website and send us their pin by 1 November 2014.

References
Bono, J. J. "Why Metaphor? Toward a Metaphorics of Scientific Practice." Science Studies: Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge. Ed. Sabine Maasen and Matthias Winterhager. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2001. 215-33.
Coates, Peter. American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006
Elton, Charles S. The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. Chicago: U of Chicago, [1958] 2000.
Groning, Gert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn. "The Native Plant Enthusiasm: Ecological Panacea or Xenophobia?" Landscape Research 28.1 (2003): 75-88.
Olwig, Kenneth R. "Natives and Aliens in the National Landscape." Landscape Research 28.1 (2003): 61-74.
Pyšek, Petr, David M. Richardson, Marcel Rejmánek, Grady L. Webster, Mark Williamson, Jan Kirschner, Petr Pysek, and Marcel Rejmanek. "Alien Plants in Checklists and Floras: Towards Better Communication between Taxonomists and Ecologists." Taxon 53.1 (2004): 131.
Robbins, Paul. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2012.
Robbins, Paul, and S. A. Moore. "Ecological Anxiety Disorder: Diagnosing the Politics of the Anthropocene." Cultural Geographies 20.1 (2013): 3-19.
Subramaniam, Banu. "The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2.1 (2001): 26-40.Scuhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-49033271840131635852014-09-16T18:19:00.001-04:002014-09-16T18:19:28.733-04:00CFP: 14th Annual Institute for Critical Animal Studies North American Conference 14th Annual Institute for Critical Animal Studies North America Conference
April 17 – 19, 2015 @ Binghamton University
CALL FOR PAPERS
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: January 10th, 2015
To SUBMIT: e-mail an abstract of no more than 500 words and short bio of no more than 150 words to email@example.com.
The 2015 Institute for Critical Animal Studies North America Conference is inviting papers, presentations, and workshops from scholars, activists, and artists working on ethical and political issues concerning non/human animals alongside the socioeconomic concerns that impact human populations. This year's venue in Binghamton, NY offers a unique opportunity to investigate the intersections of oppression in a community with a rich history of campaigning for social justice for both non/human and human alike.
Critical Animal Studies as a field has become a powerful canopy for many convergent arenas of thought, politics, scholarship, and activism. In partnership with Binghamton University's nationally ranked speech and debate program, the conference will seek to explore how the law has both served as an impetus and a hindrance to advancing the cause of social justice. The conference also aims to explore the tactics, strategies, and theories that exist outside legal instruments for change. The goal is to create an effective dialog and collaboration between people with differing viewpoints and opinions and not to create an echo chamber for a single-sided viewpoint on how non/human liberation can be achieved.
Presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes in length. We are receptive to different and innovative formats including but not limited to panels, performances, workshops, and public debates. You may propose individual or group presentations, but please specify the structure of your proposal. To submit e-mail an abstract of no more than 500 words and short bio of no more than 150 words to firstname.lastname@example.com by January 10th, 2015. Please be sure to include your name(s), title, organizational affiliation(s), field of study or activism, and A/V needs in your submission.
We welcome presentations, panels, and workshops from a variety of academic and non-academic fields, including but not limited to:
Activism and advocacy
Aesthetic are artistic expressions of liberation theory
Anarchism
Biopolitical thought
Bioscience and biotechnology
Critical legal studies
Critical race theory
Cultural studies
Disability studies
Ecology and environmentalism
Ethics (applied and/or philosophical)
Feminist theory
Film and media studies
Intersectional streams of thought
Literary theory
Marxism
Non/human liberation
Pedagogical approaches to teaching liberation
Political economy
Politics of incarceration
Postcolonial studies
Poststructuralist theory
Queer theory
Theology
For any questions concerning submission relevance, conference details, or in general e-mail us at firstname.lastname@example.com.
We are also interested in soliciting people, groups, and organizations who are interested in tabling during the conference. If interested please contact us. More information concerning tabling will be forthcoming.
Please spread and share this information with anyone who may be interested in submitting or attending. Authors who have worked on edited collections are encouraged to submit panel proposals on the books with contributing authors presenting.Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-13625266144734754712014-09-15T21:34:00.001-04:002014-09-15T21:34:54.650-04:00CFP: Kentucky's Dimensions of Political Ecology ConferenceThe University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group invites you to participate in the fifth annual

DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL ECOLOGY (DOPE) CONFERENCE

February 26 – February 28, 2015
University of Kentucky | Lexington, Kentucky, USA

Keynote Address: Dr. Kimberly Tallbear (Anthropology, University of Texas)

Plenary Panel: Dr. Irus Braverman (Law & Geography, University of Buffalo), Dr. Jake Kosek (Geography, University of California, Berkeley) & Dr. Shiloh Krupar (Culture & Politics Program, Georgetown University)

Other conference events include: Paper sessions, Workshops, Round-table discussions, Panels, Undergraduate research symposium, Paper competitions and Field trips.

Online conference registration will open Monday, October 6, 2014 and close on Monday, November 17, 2014. The conference registration fee is $35 for graduate students and $70 for faculty and non-academics/practitioners. There is no fee for undergraduate participants.

CALL FOR ORGANIZED SESSIONS:

The University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group strongly encourages participants to organize their own sessions. To organize your own session, please:

1. Draft a call for papers (CFP). For guidance, reference the wide variety of CFPs from last year's conference available via the political ecology working group website.

2. Email your CFP to the political ecology working group at email@example.com. We will help you to circulate your CFP by posting it on our website and via our twitter feed, but you should also distribute it among your colleagues and to relevant disciplinary listservs.

3. When you have finalized the details, please send the Google Form on our website to confirm the final orientation of your panel, including participant names, institutions, abstracts, titles, discussants, organizers, chairs and other relevant information. Please be as detailed as possible and send this information before the final registration deadline, November 17th, 2014.

4. All participants in your session must have registered and paid by the regular registration deadline. As such, we suggest having the deadline to respond to your CFP at least a week prior to the conference registration deadline.

Suggestions and reminders for session organizers:
When thinking about your panel remember that each session is 100 minutes long, and we strictly limit you to two session slots for reasons pertaining to space and time constraints.
Please feel free to think more broadly than traditional paper sessions - consider workshops, panel discussions, lightning talks or other alternative session styles. Please email the political ecology email address if you have questions or concerns about organizing a session.
Also please keep in mind that undergraduates are strongly encouraged to submit their papers to our annual Undergraduate Symposium.
DOPE participants can only present in one paper session, and at the maximum, serve as a discussant or panelist in one additional session. We ask that participants limit themselves to two conference activities at most due to scheduling limitations.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

While we strongly encourage participants to submit abstracts in response to CFPs being circulated (see above), we will continue to accept individual abstracts. Abstracts submitted to the conference rather than in response to specific CFPs will be sorted thematically, and are not guaranteed placement in the conference schedule.

Abstracts or proposals should be 200-300 words in length and include titles and three to five keywords. Please submit only one abstract. The deadline for abstract submissions is the conference registration deadline: Monday, November 17, 2014.

Please visit www.politicalecology.org to register.

Follow us on Twitter at @ukpewg or on Facebook as the University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group.

Please send any questions to the DOPE organizing committee at firstname.lastname@example.com://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-30271692984724270602014-09-14T00:23:00.000-04:002014-09-14T00:30:09.101-04:00Whose Joy? Whose Sadness? Building Livable CommunitiesHow do we build inclusive, joyful communities? I believe that building communities where flourishing, livable lives are possible are important projects for us to undertake. But the ideas of joy and sadness are not given terms.

* * *

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

As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.
Sure, I remember that, from his preface to the english edition of Anti-Oedipus. But May's interpretation here (and perhaps in Foucault's original stance), this assumes we know what joy and sadness are, and that they might be the same thing for the same people.

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

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

Whitehead's rejection of Spinoza's monism in favor of William James's pluralism goes along with his rejection of Spinoza's conatus in favor of James's (and Bergson's) sense of continual change, becoming or process, or what he also calls creativity. (p. 22, n6)
We could potentially affirm that both are true, that for some joy consists in preservation of the self, and for others joy (or satisfaction) consists in difference and becoming otherwise. And all of this, of course, will change what you see as sad, or joyful, militancy. If you see joy as persisting in your being, than anything that seeks to change how that being interacts and relates, and anyone who seeks to create new relationships, can only be perceived as killjoys.

* * *

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

The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, of how happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods (a social good is what causes happiness, given happiness is understood as what is good). As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely "it is always easy to describe as happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others]." [...] To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. Even if we are struggling for different things, even if we have different worlds we want to create, we might share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus unhappy archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of "the happy housewife;" Black critiques of the myth of "the happy slave"; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as "domestic bliss." The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon. [...] We can consider the relationship between the negativity of the figure of the feminist killjoy and how certain bodies are "encountered" as being negative. Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. As she puts it, "it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation." To be oppressed requires that you show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. For Frye "anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous."
You can see two currents here. The first is that the feminist killjoy, or more generally the activist killjoy, is the one who is constantly struggling against situations that are declared to be happy. The second current is that oppression often demands that the oppressed declare their happiness in their own oppression (we will return to this second current later). The first current allows us to examine May's original quotation in greater context. It comes as part of this whole paragraph:

To add another example, I know people whose general commitments I would call feminist reject that label because they see feminists as angry man-hating types who just want to make men feel bad. Now, of course, I don't lay all that at the doorstep of feminists. The right does an excellent job of slurring feminism. But I have had the experience of being language-policed when it seems to me inappropriate (ex. by people who would never have escorted women into abortion clinics, as I have). And I think this does not do us credit. As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.
The rather odd thing is the lack of transition that takes us from the discussion of feminism to the discussion of sad militants. He does not do the work to posit why someone challenging his discourse (even someone who lacks May's ethos), leads to sadness. But someone is sad here. Is it May? It is the feminist who "language-policed" him? There exists an ambiguity of where the sadness comes from, and who it is affecting. This leads us to this great blog post by Ahmed. In it, Ahmed argues that when someone points out a problem, it is often the person who perceives the problem who is then perceived by others as the problem. Another long quotation:

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

* * *

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

A similar claim has been (in)famously leveled against "feminism," especially "intersectional feminism": it vampirically drains the lifeblood of the progressive, radical left. [...] Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction. [...] In both essays, feminists, especially feminists of color, are tasked with manufacturing the raw materials–negative affects like guilt or anxiety–on which "good" subjects labor, and, through that labor, generate human capital (e.g., radical cred, moral/political goodness, proper femininity, and so on). They bring us down so we can then perform our upworthiness for liking, favoriting, clicking, sharing audiences. Resilience is part of the means of production, and the "toxicity" of WOC feminists is the first step in this supply chain. Black women do the labor of generating the toxicity that then becomes the raw material upon which white women work; white women do the affective/emotional labor of overcoming, which then translates into tangible employment (writing gigs, etc.)
This narrative of overcoming can be seen in the way that those who are concerned with inclusive language are labeled as policing language, engaging in newspeak, score-keeping, and political correctness. This posits those who are attacking inclusive language as being rebels, truth tellers, concerned about the issues and philosophy. And the failure of social justice movements get laid at the feet of those who want inclusivity. Yet, I really do believe both groups want to create joyful communities.

* * *

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

This last bit should not be taken to mean that we should never confront people on their language. My point is rather that in the question of whether to confront, a little judgment is called for, and perhaps a little fellow feeling for people whose behavior actually puts them in the right (i.e. left) camp. It's one thing to call out a racist who uses an offensive racial stereotype. It's quite another to call out someone who aligns her behavior with a sensitivity to LGBT issues and, among a set of like-minded friends, calls something "gay." We are none of us moral saints (thank goodness), and, if our politics are in the right place, I think we can afford to let some things go. (To be sure, language can shape perception. But not all instances of it do.) And alternatively, we need to be aware that not letting certain things go is no substitute for committed political work.
I want to address the last point, first. I am not sure how many people confine their only work to not letting things go on the internet. I am sure there are some. But because many of us primarily only meet each other in our words (I have only briefly met in person only one person I have cited or talked about in this post), it can seem like all we do is reflect on language. Building communities can never be about just getting the language right. I agree with May on this point. But I do believe if we are going to create the sort of inclusive and joyful communities we want, we have to affirm the right to be to those we include. And for people that society has systemically learned to unhear, unsee, and unknow (or to only hear, see, and know in particular pregiven narratives), creating spaces where different narratives can be understood is not a given. And sometimes it is going to require getting the language right. But let us look at May's other point, that we shouldn't call out people whose politics are in the right place, maybe the dialectic is not one of either calling people out or letting things go.

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

Because when I see problematic behavior from someone who is connected to me, who is committed to some of the things I am, I want to believe that it's possible for us to move through and beyond whatever mistake was committed. I picture "calling in" as a practice of pulling folks back in who have strayed from us. It means extending to ourselves the reality that we will and do fuck up, we stray and there will always be a chance for us to return. Calling in as a practice of loving each other enough to allow each other to make mistakes; a practice of loving ourselves enough to know that what we're trying to do here is a radical unlearning of everything we have been configured to believe is normal. And yes, we have been configured to believe it's normal to punish each other and ourselves without a way to reconcile hurt. We support this belief by shutting each other out, partly through justified anger and often because some parts of us believe that we can do this without people who fuck up. But, holy shit! We fuck up. All of us.
I fully admit to having been called out (and called in) on all sorts of statements, beliefs, and behaviors in my life. Sometimes it has been over stuff that I still passionately think I was right on. Sometimes it has been stuff that was incredibly awful for to have said or done, and I have mumbled excuses and apologies, and felt more than a little shame. And sometimes, I have been called out on stuff, and been sure of my rightness, that I got very defensive. And it wasn't until later that I realized I was in the wrong. In general, I have been gifted with friends, colleagues, and mentors who have been incredibly generous to me. They have understood my mistakes, and have often called me in. They have put up with my bullshit, or confusion, or the sort of epistemic parallax that does not let me understand the weight and scars of certain histories, words, and knowledges. And because they are truly generous, they didn't just put up with, but worked to change me, and in so doing gave me the sort of joy and satisfaction that comes from difference and becoming otherwise. They didn't have to do that. Far too often we expect the most marginalized members of our society to have to constantly explain and justify the necessity of their existence. And I hope we can fumble together, to build different worlds, different futures, and different narratives.Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-7096290881910793212014-09-10T23:19:00.003-04:002014-09-10T23:19:33.556-04:00CFP: Latina* Vegan AnthologyLantern Books is looking for non-academic personal stories from Latina* vegans. I got this link originally from Hana Low's great blog post on this, and so I highly suggest reading it. Below is the call for papers from Lantern Books:

What makes our experiences as Latinas possibly different than others? Or have you found it to be harder to be a Latina in the vegan world?

Lantern Books is looking for contributors to an anthology on the experience of being both Latina and vegan. Time for our voices to be heard!

Your piece should be a personal story rather than an academic paper—you don't need any footnotes or references. Rather than a chronological recounting of how you became vegan, feel free to write about connections between your veganism and your culture, or any conflicts. You can write about animal welfare/animal rights, your experiences in activism, food justice, worker's rights, sustainability, or how you have woven family recipes into vegan masterpieces.

For example, one contributor relates the racism encountered while working in animal rescue:

Living in a low-income area, I often acquired stray animals or animals from a plethora of problematic situations such as neglect, abuse, and backyard breeders. When I reached out to the animal rescue community for help, the first thing I often heard was, "The owners are Hispanic, right?" It was not until I was involved in this world that I began to understand some of the sentiments that motivated the anger toward these people, toward my people. The situation was so overwhelming that at times it was easy to fall into the these people discourse. But I knew better, I was these people.
Another contributor talks about the food made by the women in her family:

In my family food was, and still is, a token of affection and love. If we weren't feeling well, my mom's caldo was the cure. My great-grandmother, Abuelita Martina, would say, "Always keep salsa on your table, mija. It's our secret to looking young." And my grandma's tortillas could always make everything right in my world. As a Chicana, I felt like I was rejecting all that these women had given me by going vegan. As though I was judging them and their ways by refusing their dishes. But I wasn't judging them by no longer wanting to contribute to a social construct that I found heartbreaking, or at least I wasn't intending to.
To get more ideas, please refer to Lantern's 2010 anthology SISTAH VEGAN: Black, Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society.
Please submit pieces of writing that are between 2,500 and 5,000 words.

Regrettably, we cannot offer payment, but royalties from sales of the book will go to Food Empowerment Project (www.foodispower.org).

Please send your questions and submissions to email@example.com.

*We are using the term Latina to refer to those with Mexican, Central and South American, and Caribbean backgrounds. If you don't love the term "Latina" but this description fits you, tell us all about it in writing!

Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-13790380105999269162014-09-08T00:03:00.001-04:002014-09-08T00:03:18.815-04:00We do not all desire the same futuresAfter the last 24 hours, several of you may be more interested in disability studies. There are many excellent places to start, but I might suggest you start with Alison Kafer's beautifully written Feminist, Queer, Crip.

Fellow rehab patients, most of whom were elderly people recovering from strokes or broken hips, saw equally bleak horizons before me. One stopped me in the hallway to recommend suicide, explaining that life in a wheelchair was not a life worth living [...] Although I may believe I am leading an engaging and satisfying life, they can see clearly the grim future that awaits me: with no hope of a cure in sight, my future cannot be anything but bleak. Not even the ivory tower of academia protected me from these dismal projections of my future: once I made it to graduate school, I had a professor reject a paper proposal about cultural approaches to disability; she cast the topic as inappropriate because insufficiently academic. As I prepared to leave her office, she patted me on the arm and urged me to "heal," suggesting that my desire to study disability resulted not from intellectual curiosity but from a displaced need for therapy and recovery. My future, she felt, should be spent not researching disability but overcoming it. [...] If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed, it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future. The presence of disability, then, signals something else: a future that bears too many traces of the ills of the present to be desirable. In this framework, a future with disability is a future no one wants, and the figure of the disabled person, especially the disabled fetus or child, becomes the symbol of this undesired future. To want a disabled child, to desire or even to accept disability in this way, is to be disordered, unbalanced, sick. "We" all know this, and there is no room for "you" to think differently. It is this presumption of agreement, this belief that we all desire the same futures, that I take up in this book. (pp. 1-3).
Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-18079409880510792592014-09-04T12:43:00.000-04:002014-09-04T12:43:01.880-04:00The burden of canons & the freedom of philistines: Undoing Eurocentric civilization
"Go out upon the street; choose ten white men and ten colored men. Which can carry on and preserve American civilization?"
The whites.
"Well, then."
You evidently consider that a compliment.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: Toward An Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 146.

I am teaching two sections of Intro to Philosophy this semester. I recently sat and figured out that half of the days I am teaching material written by women and/or philosophers of color. I was kinda proud of myself. But, you know, it is not like white men make up anything close to 50 percent of the global population, nor have they produced half of the world's philosophy. The only way one could feel proud of producing a syllabus with 50% non-white men is by adopting the worse standards of what should be included. That is to say, the standards of including what everyone else includes, which got us here in the first place. And yet, I will admit, it was kinda hard to get to even 50%. I feel constrained by what I feel I should be teaching my students, and feeling like everyone expects them to have read things that other people will recognize as important texts in intro. I feel sometimes like I would be letting down my students if they left my class, and couldn't at least talk about some of the stuff everyone would expect them to have read. They should be able to have at least something in common with everyone else in philosophy. At least a few things--a little Plato and a little Descartes, spiced with Nietzsche.

As a matter of fact, it becomes really hard to imagine a course that reduces white men (and white people in general, and men in general) to something resembling demographics of the world. Or perhaps harder still, it is hard to imagine the sort of person who would design such a course. What person could get rid of all the beautiful texts that inform the culture around us?

* * *

I have increasing become interested in what could be called negative conceptual personas. These are ways of understanding the world that consist of figures and attitudes that have normally been abjected; seen as beings who must be repressed, resisted, and preferably destroyed. To cite at least a few examples there is the clown of Adorno, the idiot of Deleuze and Guattari and furthered in Isabelle Stengers, the concept of stupidity in Avital Ronell and furthered in Jacques Derrida. These are figures that can serve to slow everything down, that can ask questions whose answers everyone knows and that goes without saying. The idiot, for example, might be resistant to the urgent syllogism of the national security state. You know the one, "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done." But there is more that such negative conceptual personas might allow.

Often, when I am telling colleagues that we need to include less eurocentric work in our introduction to philosophy classes, and undergraduate classes in general, I am often told things like, "No one here knows how to teach outside of the Western tradition." Or I am told things like, "It is great that you are bringing in all of those different traditions, but I am not trained in that." They say it like it is destiny, like a law of nature. They say these excuses like there is no way to change. I am not asking them to do scholarship in those areas (though, it would be nice), or to provide graduate courses on these areas (though, again). All I am saying is to incorporate diverse thinkers and texts in your undergraduate courses. But I realize that for many of these people, what they are afraid of is transforming from the sage on the stage into the fool on the hill. That is, they are not just saying they don't really think those areas and thinkers matter, and that they are unwilling to spend even a little bit of extra time to make a more pluralistic syllabus. They are also deeply afraid of appearing stupid in front of their students. Sometimes things don't change without a bit of a stupidity and an army of fools.

One of the works that I have been obsessed with since it came out, is Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche. This is a book in which the main protagonists are all negative conceptual personas. The heroes of the book are the losers. Indeed, Bull challenges us to read like losers. He explains, "In order to read like a loser, you have to accept the argument, but to turn its consequences against yourself. So, rather than thinking of ourselves as dynamite, or questioning Nietzsche's extravagant claim, we will immediately think (as we might if someone said this to us in real life) that there may be an explosion; that we might get hurt; that we are too close to someone who could harm us. Reading like losers will make us feel powerless and vulnerable" (p. 36). Another hero of Bull's book is the philistine. As Bull reminds us, the anarchist and atheist were originally created by others as terms to attack their enemies. Originally, no one self-styled themselves anarchists or atheists. "In the sixteenth century, therefore, atheism, like philistinism today, was everywhere condemned but nowhere to be found. Yet by denouncing atheism, theologians mapped out an intellectual position for their phantom adversaries that was eventually filled by people who actually espoused the arguments the theologians had given them" (p. 8). The philistine, for those of you who remember your Nietzsche, "is the antithesis of a son of the muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture" (Untimely Meditations). But I want to follow up the question that Bull asks later (though our answers will be different from his), "Could something as inherently unpromising as philistinism be an opening to anything at all? And if so, where are philistinism's new seas?" (p. 26).

* * *

Back in February (I know in blogging time that is the dark ages), Jon Cogburn at NewApps asked for reading suggestions for trying to get analytically trained philosophers to understand some of the stakes of what is going on in continental philosophy. Here is the original thread, and here is the follow-up thread. A somewhat sad and predictable pattern occurs at first, with almost exclusively male and white names being suggested for being read. However, this changes as Robin James, Peter Gratton, Ed Kazarian, and whole host of excellent anonymous commentators suggest a variety of readings, and make a strong case for prioritizing diversity in readings, rather than reducing the analytic and continental divide as the only one in philosophy, and a debate that is principally between white dudes. Jon Cogburn explains that he is "Let me reiterate that in the extended sense of 'pluralist' I think that a pluralist reading group would not be nearly as helpful. Since we're all busy, we don't have time to study everything under the sun. Given these strong constraints it makes sense to read books that will help analytics best understand the maximum number of talks at SPEP that they would otherwise not understand given their poor training in so many important areas of philosophy. Philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, American Pragmatism, feminism, or the new pluralist philosophy of mind (all things suggested above) in general would be poor subject matters with a group with this as an end-goal. German Idealism and Phenomenology are very good subject matters for this end-goal." I know, right? But, at the same time, I recognize here the very same arguments that constrain my own syllabus designs. The desire to create philosophical commons, the belief that teaching too much stuff outside of the canon is to do a disservice to your students (or colleagues). It is to open up your students to ridicule for not really understanding the stakes of most philosophical discussions. This is why I wanted to include a discussion of the very possibility of syllabuses for Ferguson.

There were many smart responses to this, and I suggest reading the comments. However, here is part of one of my comments from those threads: "This goes back to the post here on New APPS about citation practices, as well. The names that we immediately think of, and think of as important, are bound up with a whole history that ignores why we cite some names instead of others. I agree with Robin James, sometimes we got to knock 'em down and rebuild. [...] And maybe Fanon or Arendt or whomever are not as canonical (maybe?), but how cool would it be if your reading group just pretended they were? What if one of the analytic folks were talking to a SPEPer one day and said, "Well, I haven't really read Husserl, but I read this great book on Fanon, and I was wondering...", or "you mention Derrida on play and difference, and I haven't read him, but Maria Lugones argues..." that would be a better philosophical world. And if the SPEPer hadn't read seriously Fanon or Lugones as important intellectual figures, it would be a great kick in the rear." It is a bit of a utopian impulse, but it is also one that requires a type of philistinism. It requires someone who honestly does not understand what the culture is suppose to be, what is normally counted as great, or foundational, or enduring. In the mixed up world of the philistine, the ephemeral becomes the lasting and the marginal becomes the central. The philistine designing her syllabus is not interested in preserving and carrying on the civilization around. Perhaps because she knows that is not a compliment.Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-30578834000695984972014-08-30T23:08:00.002-04:002014-08-30T23:08:56.182-04:00A syllabus on the very possibility of #FergusonSyllabusRecently, Leigh Johnson has started putting together a draft of "Ferguson Syllabus for Philosophers." I highly suggest going, looking, and commentating. It was inspired by the rather compelling "Ferguson Syllabus" created by Sociologists for Justice. I think this is important work, and I am glad to see it being done. I hope this, at the very least, gets philosophers reading important work in the philosophy of race, decolonial philosophy, and africana philosophy (especially considering the numbers of black philosophers in the profession). However, with all of that said, there is an interesting and important literature base about the role of philosophy to think race, the problems and challenges of multiculturalism, and the way diversity and institutional life can intersect. I think some of these questions are just as important for us to understand. So, in that vein, here are some texts that are important on these issues. This is just a small list. Like Leigh, I would ask for any suggestions, additions, corrections, or general comments.

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.

Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.

Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy.Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-58460528308051025902014-07-25T15:20:00.000-04:002014-07-25T15:20:14.959-04:00CFP: philoSOPHIA--Neolithic to Neoliberal: Communities Human and Non-HumanphiloSOPHIA: A Feminist Society
9th Annual Meeting
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
May 14-16, 2015
Emory University
Atlanta, GA

The 9th annual meeting of philoSOPHIA will run from the evening of Thursday, May 14, to the evening of Saturday, May 16, 2015, at the beautiful Emory Conference Center Hotel.
Conference theme:
Neolithic to Neoliberal: Communities Human and Non-Human
Highlights
Keynote speakers: Drucilla Cornell, Lisa Guenther, and Kelly Oliver
Plenary session: The Ethical Lives of Animals (co-sponsored by Emory's Center
for Ethics). Two workshops for discussion of participants' and organizers'
papers, with limited participation:
"Whose Community? Intersections of Gender, Race, Sex, and Nationality
in Kant and German Idealism" (with a focus on social and political
philosophy), led by Dilek Huseyinzadegan, Emory University
 "Fugitive Femininities" (with a focus on concepts of race, femininity and
sexuality within the context of narratives of capture and escape), led by
Rizvana Bradley, Emory University
Up to two graduate student travel prizes will be awarded for the best graduate
student papers
GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION:
You may submit one of the following:
1. Individual abstracts of 500-700 words.
2. Panel proposals (500 words) with individual abstracts (500-700 words
each).
3. Workshop paper abstracts (500-700 words). Please identify which
workshop.
4. For those graduate students who wish to be considered for a travel
award, a complete paper (3000 words). Please also declare your status
as a graduate student in the body of your email.
Abstracts, panel proposals, workshop paper abstracts, and papers should be
submitted in an email attachment suitable for anonymous review. In the body of your email, please include your name, affiliation, contact information, and a
brief bio, along with the title of your presentation.
Please submit all proposals electronically to
email@example.com
DEADLINE: DECEMBER 1, 2014
For more information, please visit: www.philosophiafeministsociety.orgScuhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-68235715607322059942014-07-22T17:17:00.001-04:002014-07-22T18:27:58.597-04:00Simply Neoliberalism, Or, the Algorithms of the Natural. In Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, Alissa Hamilton explores all the ways that industrial processes are incorporated into the mass production of orange juice. What are the industrial processes of orange juice, you may be asking. But think about it, oranges are really only in season a few months of the year, and yet, not from concentrate orange juice is available year round. And while there are ways to grow oranges out of season, orange juice is consumed at a much higher frequency than oranges, and it would be really hard to grow all those oranges year around. If it is January, and you live in Minnesota, you can go to any grocery store and get Simply Orange orange juice. What makes that possible? From Hamilton:

The technology of choice at the moment is aseptic storage, which involves stripping the juice of oxygen, a process known as "deaeration," so it doesn't oxidize in the million gallon tanks in which it can be kept for upwards of a year. When the juice is stripped of oxygen it is also stripped of flavor providing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren't listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature. The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor. Mexicans and Brazilians have a different palate. Flavor packs fabricated for juice geared to these markets therefore highlight different chemicals, the decanals say, or terpene compounds such as valencine. The formulas vary to give a brand's trademark taste. If you're discerning you may have noticed Minute Maid has a candy like orange flavor. That's largely due to the flavor pack Coca-Cola has chosen for it.

Got it? You take the orange juice, put it in tanks without oxygen, and then reconstitute the flavor later. Actually, that makes it sound more straightforward than it actually is, because you have to take into account demand from all over the place, and figure out issues of hurricanes and freezes, and all sorts of other variables. In order to do this, Coca-Cola, which makes both Simply Orange and Minute Maid, has created complex algorithms for their juice business, as reported here. ""We basically built a flight simulator for our juice business," says Doug Bippert, Coke's vice president of business acceleration." Because, it seems, vice president of business acceleration is totally a thing. The algorithms and storage vats are all attempts to "take Mother Nature and standardize it," says Jim Horrisberger, director of procurement at Coke's huge Auburndale (Fla.) juice packaging plant. [...] Bob Cross, architect of Coke's juice model, also built the model Delta Air Lines uses to maximize its revenue per mile flown. Orange juice, says Cross, "is definitely one of the most complex applications of business analytics. It requires analyzing up to 1 quintillion decision variables to consistently deliver the optimal blend, despite the whims of Mother Nature."" All of this resulted in a writer at the Chicagoist to use the phrase, "all-natural orange juice experience, free of algorithms" non-ironically.

So, why all this talk of orange juice? Mostly because as a capitalist product goes, it is one of the ones most identified with its naturalness, its simpleness (as in, Simply Orange). The label of not from concentrate was itself used a marketing gimmick to single the orange juice as being fresher, more natural, more authentic. We can think here that neoliberalism operates as a type of craft or sorcery that works by transforming the constructed and arbitrary into the natural and the essential. By craft here, I am mostly thinking of the excellent work of Karen and Barbara Fields on Racecraft. Under the Fields, racecraft functions by taking racism (the structure of discrimination and violence), and naturalizing it into race. And in the same way for sorcery I am thinking of Pignarre and Stengers' Capitalist Sorcery, which reveal the ways that capitalism produces infernal alternatives for anyone who seeks to oppose neoliberalism. The artificial becomes natural, and the natural becomes inevitable, maybe even eternal.

At the same time I was making these points on facebook, Robin James and Leigh Johnson posted about neoliberalism and algorithms. Over at Cyborgology, James argues that "As an ideology, "neoliberalism" is a very specific epistemology/ontology (or, more precisely, it's an ideology in which epistemology and ontology collapse into one another, an epistemontology): neoliberals think everything in the universe works like a deregulated, competitive, financialized capitalist market.[...] The object of neoliberal economic analysis is the "calculation" of the program, protocol, indeed, the algorithm that makes apparently incoherent choices cohere into a model that can then be used to predict that individual's future choices. Economic analysis finds the signal in the noise." Under this epistemontology it makes sense for our vice-president of business acceleration to hire the person that optimized Delta flight revenues in order to make orange juice. And over at NewApps (and actually, make sure you read the comments), Johnson expands on James by arguing:

Perhaps the single most important proposition in modern capitalist economic theory, inherited from Adam Smith, is that competitive markets do a good job of allocating resources, that such markets channel individuals' self-interest toward the collective good as if directed by an "invisible hand." (I won't detail the manner in which such a proposition qualifies as "onto-theological" here, partly because there simply isn't room to do so, but mostly because I think it is self-evident.) [...] One of the problems with neoliberalism's particular ("invisible hand") iteration of onto-theological prejudice-- and this is something that James' account of the neoliberal "algorithmic modelling" fetish made more clear to me-- is that it effectively blinds itself to the manner in which it not only does, but must, conflate the Hand-that-Guides with the hand(s)-that-are-guided. When synchronicity or harmony is absent, when dissonance is resonant, when the aleatory interrupts or real human freedom (s'il y en a) insists-- that is to say, when the Invisible Hand is not only non-apparent but also non-existent-- neoliberalism's epistemonto(theo)logical commitments force neoliberals to, quite literally, phish or cut bait. And what is phishing, after all, but the manufacturing of an Invisible Hand?

This is all very important, because no matter how much it is clear that the algorithm is produced (and look again at the earlier quotations on orange juice, in which two different people talk in terms of opposing the algorithm to Mother Nature, and therefore one assumes the natural), and no matter how much violence is marshaled to make these algorithms work, they are always naturalized. As Bruno Latour has argued (and he is not the first) we have witnessed a strange shift of first and second nature. First nature represented the stuff that is unchangeable, that is usually what we mean we say something is natural, or talk about the world. Second nature is that which is produced by us. But in our era of global warming and the anthropocene, it is clear that the unchangeable first nature of the world is really second nature, something we can produce. Meanwhile, our economic systems, those things we clearly produce, have increasingly become seen as first nature, and inherently natural and unchangeable. And the results of this are clear and devastating. So much so that Fredric Jameson's now famous quip "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism," came first as farce, then as tragedy.

But I think the chicagoist line about algorithm free shows another fear. In the face of the deterritorialization of global capitalism, with its simulacrums and appeals to nature, has arisen a relatively conservative response that argues for the local, for the slow, for the authentic, for the non-calculative. In other words, there are those against the artificial, but in favor of something they see as truly natural and algorithm free. Anyone who has been reading my blog knows that I do not think that is the way out (see especially here and here, and make sure to read my brother's more critical take on the calculative here). It is a bit like Heidegger's critique of the standing reserve. I am sympathetic, entirely. But his alternative reeks of agrarian fascism. Instead, I believe we should engage in a different craft and sorcery. Not one that turns the artificial into the natural, but one that instead seeks to undermine the narratives of nature while producing a new world.

EDIT: I was unclear in that last paragraph (as both Leigh Johnson and DMF made clear). I am not saying that it is conservatives who support the local, etc, but that it is a conservative ideology. And there are, of course, very conservative advocates of the local and the non-calculative, such as Joel Salatin, who is overtly xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, etc (he is the owner of polyface farms, and was made famous as a sort of hero of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma). But in addition to the Joel Salatins of the world, I am lumping in certain proponents of locavorism, and certain Heideggerians.

What I should have been clearer about is that I have no problem with the desire of the local, or the slow, or whatever from a tactical standpoint. I usually buy a share in Community Supported Agriculture wherever I live, I usually think that putting your money in a local credit union rather than a large bank is a good idea, I almost always buy beer from local or regional microbreweries when traveling, etc. In an era of globalized capitalism, creating local alternatives can be a real form of resistance. My problem is when moved to the level of strategy or a vision. When the advocacy is for a world of nothing but the local, the slow, the authentic, the non-caclculative, that is when I see a creeping conservative ideology.

Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-54401817206468543302014-07-18T12:40:00.000-04:002014-07-18T12:40:41.826-04:00Special Issue on the EcoGotchic has just been releasedSpecial Issue Gothic Studies 16/1, "The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century", has just been released, and will probably be of great interest to many of you.

The special issue addresses introduces a new field of inquiry, the EcoGothic, which includes, among others, two essays on carnivorism and speciesism in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The issue is available in preview on the Manchester University Press website and by subscription through many university libraries. A brief description of the issue follows below.

This special issue of Gothic Studies brings together Gothic works--British, Irish and Italian--to consider their engagement with species- and environement-related issues through the theoretical lens of an emerging field of critical inquiry–the EcoGothic. An EcoGothic approach takes a nonanthropocentric position to reconsider the role that species, nonhumans and the environment play in the construction of monstrosity and fear, examining the construction of the Gothic body–unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid–through a more inclusive, antispeciest lens.

Contents

The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century David Del Principe

Abominable Transformations: Becoming-Fungus in Arthur Machen's

The Hill of Dreams Anthony Camara

(M)eating Dracula: Food and Death in Stoker's Novel David Del Principe

The Bog Gothic: Bram Stoker's 'Carpet of Death' and Ireland's Horrible Beauty Derek Gladwin

Italian Rural Gothic: The Powers of Were-Goats in Tommaso Landolfi's La pietra lunare [The Moonstone] Keala Jewell

Meat, Cannibalism and Humanity in Paul du Chaillu's Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, or, What Does a Gorilla Hunter Eat for Breakfast? John Miller

'L'orrida magnificenza del luogo.' Gothic Aesthetics in Antonio Fogazzaro's Malombra Maria Parrino

 An Already Alienated Animality: Frankenstein as a Gothic Narrative of Carnivorism Jackson Petsche

 Between Darwin and San Francesco: Zoographic Ambivalences in Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee Nicoletta Pireddu

(Thank you to David Del Principe for both putting this together, and letting me know this existed).
Scuhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-26328329293309016772014-07-17T13:50:00.000-04:002014-07-18T14:14:15.004-04:00Forthcoming Titles in Animal StudiesEDIT: You probably want to check out at Adam's blog a list of Critical Animal Studies books, most recently published.

Before I get to the forthcoming part, here are two very new titles in animal studies.

Carol Adams and Lori Gruen's edited volume on Ecofeminism. I know most of the authors in this volume, and I promise you this is an important book to get. The philosophical importance of ecofeminism is being reevaluated, and this book is a major argument for its importance.

Gandio and Nocella's The Terrorization of Dissent is an important work in analyzing all the ways that resistance to the animal-industrial complex has been turned into terrorism (includes an essay by my brother).

Now, on to the forthcoming proper list (these books are listed by upcoming publication dates).

If you know the work of Cynthia Willett, then you already know to be excited about any forthcoming work from her. Interspecies Ethics (due out in August), looks to be no exception.

Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy. Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.

Also in August, is Wahida Khandker's (very expensive) Philosophy, Animality, and Life Sciences. I wish it wasn't so pricey, because it sounds very interesting:

A study of pathological concepts of animal life in Continental philosophy from Bergson to Haraway. Using animals for scientific research is a highly contentious issue that Continental philosophers engaging with 'the animal question' have been rightly accused of shying away from. Now, Wahida Khandker asks, can Continental approaches to animality and organic life make us reconsider our treatment of non-human animals? By following its historical and philosophical development, Khandker argues that the concept of 'pathological life' as a means of understanding organic life as a whole plays a pivotal role in refiguring the human-animal distinction. Looks at the assumptions underpinning about debates about science and animals, and our relation to non-human animals. Analyses the relation between the purpose and limitations of research in the life sciences and the concepts of animality and organic life that the sciences have historically employed. Explores the significance of key thinkers such as Bergson, Canguilhem, Foucault and Haraway, and opens up the complex and difficult writings of Alfred North Whitehead on this subject.
There is an interview between the author and series editor, that can be found here.

EDIT: Thanks to Steven Shaviro for alerting to me this exciting anthology edited by Patricia MacCormack, with the kindle edition out, paperback out in August-- The Animal Catalyst.

Brian Massumi has been a central thinker in promoting a non-anthropocentric philosophy, being an early thinker in assemblage theory and affect theory, Massumi is following this work up with What Animals Teach Us about Politics, due out in September.

In What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion." Massumi finds the conceptual resources for this logic in the work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, the theory of play, and the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

Corbey and Lanjouw's important edited anthology, The Politics of Species, has an affordable paperback edition out in September.

Another edited anthology in September is Moore and Kearns's Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology.

A turn to the animal is underway in the humanities, most obviously in such fields as philosophy, literary studies, cultural studies, and religious studies. One important catalyst for this development has been the remarkable body of animal theory issuing from such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. What might the resulting interdisciplinary field, commonly termed animality studies, mean for theology, biblical studies, and other cognate disciplines? Is it possible to move from animal theory to creaturely theology? This volume is the first full-length attempt to grapple centrally with these questions. It attempts to triangulate philosophical and theoretical reflections on animality and humanity with theological reflections on divinity. If the animal human distinction is being rethought and retheorized as never before, then the animal human divine distinctions need to be rethought, retheorized, and retheologized along with it. This is the task that the multidisciplinary team of theologians, biblical scholars, philosophers, and historians assembled in this volume collectively undertakes. They do so frequently with recourse to Derrida's animal philosophy and also with recourse to an eclectic range of other relevant thinkers, such as Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, Gloria Anzaldua, Helene Cixous, A. N. Whitehead, and Lynn White Jr. The result is a volume that will be essential reading for religious studies audiences interested in ecological issues, animality studies, and posthumanism, as well as for animality studies audiences interested in how constructions of the divine have informed constructions of the nonhuman animal through history.

Speaking of edited volumes, Eben Kirksey has an interesting, if not strickly animal studies, work coming out in October, The Multispecies Salon.

A new approach to writing culture has arrived: multispecies ethnography. Plants, animals, fungi, and microbes appear alongside humans in this singular book about natural and cultural history. Anthropologists have collaborated with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Contributions from influential writers and scholars, such as Dorion Sagan, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing, are featured along with essays by emergent artists and cultural anthropologists. Delectable mushrooms flourishing in the aftermath of ecological disaster, microbial cultures enlivening the politics and value of food, and emergent life forms running wild in the age of biotechnology all figure in to this curated collection of essays and artefacts. Recipes provide instructions on how to cook acorn mush, make cheese out of human milk, and enliven forests after they have been clear-cut. The Multispecies Salon investigates messianic dreams, environmental nightmares, and modest sites of biocultural hope.
There is also a related website with this volume, found here.

If I have missed any forthcoming books, please let me know. If you are a publisher interested in my reviewing your book on my blog, please feel free to contact me at email@example.com://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-76094848036420541772014-07-17T11:24:00.001-04:002014-07-17T11:24:22.641-04:00Save the date for Kentucky's Political Ecology conference(I didn't know saving the date for conferences was a thing we were doing now, but, the conference looks cool, so I am posting it anyway).

Please Save the Date for the 5th Annual

Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference

at The University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY

February 27 - March 1, 2015

The University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group (UKPEWG) is pleased to announce that the 5th Annual Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference will be held February 27 - March 1, 2015 in Lexington, Kentucky, USA.

In addition to paper sessions, panel presentations, field trips and various social events, we are pleased to announce that the 2015 keynote speaker will be:

Dr. Kimberly TallBear (Anthropology, University of Texas)

Details of further keynote speakers and panellists to follow in the coming weeks!

DOPE 2014 featured a huge increase in overall attendance with more than 450 participants and 70 panel sessions across myriad disciplinary and research affiliations from all over the world. The conference included two keynote addresses from Drs. Laura Pulido (University of Southern California) and Bruce Braun (University of Minnesota) and a plenary panel with discussion from Drs. Melanie DuPuis (UC Santa Cruz), Carolyn Finney (UC Berkeley), Rebecca Lave (Indiana University), Sharlene Mollett (University of Toronto, Scarsborough), Laura Ogden (Florida International University) and Dianna Rocheleau (Clark University).

If you are interested in organizing a session at DOPE 2015, please plan to circulate your session proposal or a call for papers on listsevs beginning in August, since conference registration will open in September (exact date TBA). Each session is 100 minutes long, and due to space and time constraints, we cannot accept more than two sessions per proposal/CFP. Session organizers are responsible for finding their own chairpersons. Please send your CFP or session proposal to email@example.com so that we are able to post it on the website and in the final program for the conference. All participants in your session must be registered by the deadline in November (exact date TBA) and by that date all session details must be forwarded to the email address stated above by that date. Please do not feel restricted to traditional paper session formats! Be creative and feel welcome to think beyond the 4 papers and a discussant or 5 paper session style (though if you want to stick to this style that is also welcome). You might want to also organize discussions, workshops, lightning sessions (i.e. short presentations of five minutes from more participants) or other alternative session styles.

If you are interested in submitting a paper, please try to find a compatible session by looking through the CFPs posted on the website, politicalecology.org.

If you want to submit a paper, but don't see a session that it would fit into, consider organizing your own session if you think you might find others with similar interests. Alternatively, submit your paper directly to us, and we will try to place it in a relevant session, or create a new session with similar papers.

All participants will need to register for the 2015 DOPE conference. Registration will open in September and close in November (exact date TBA). Each participant will be limited to submitting one abstract.

Please visit politicalecology.org for more information.

Questions? Email firstname.lastname@example.com://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-5733441548967784256.post-76558624997851209072014-07-09T15:22:00.001-04:002014-07-09T15:22:14.422-04:00Plants, Again (or, ethics, still). Part IPlanted, An Introduction.

This post tries to think issues of veganism and vegetarianism alongside issues of the active nature of plants. The first part of the post will respond broadly to this question, and lay out my general ethical framework for these issues. For those of you have diligently read this blog for at least a few years, you might find part one repetitive (also, wow, thank you). The second part of the blog post (which will be posted another day) engages theorists forwarding these arguments, particularly Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology, and Michael Marder in his Plant-Thinking, his article "Is it Ethical to Eat Plants?," and his debate with Gary Francione (Marder also has a forthcoming book I haven't read, The Philosopher's Plant).

Plants I:

This is not the first time I have addressed our ethical relationships to plants. See this post, and this post (and several more asides in other posts). This most recent post is immediately caused by a new scientific study that shows that "Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewing." This has caused a variety of news sources to frame this recent discovery as being some sort of unique challenge or cause of concern for vegetarians and vegans. See, for example, this Gizmodo article which actually ends with this line, "Either way, we do know one thing for sure: The world just got a little less smug for the vegan set." Okay then. So, here is the relevant question, why? Why is it each time that some new study comes out expressing the idea that plants are more active and intentional than previously considered, there are a flurry of articles that seem to see this as somehow an argument against vegans? If you are concerned about plants, and any sort of suffering that may come from consuming them, wouldn't adopting a vegan diet be a first step to lowering that suffering? This is true because it takes from more plant protein to produce animal protein, and because that much of animal agriculture includes polluting and destroying lands. And of course, some people concerned with our ethical obligations to plants have made this very point. Near the end of Matthew Hall's Plants as Persons, he makes this very argument:

A third very significant driver of harm to individual plants, plant species, and plant habitats is the unnecessary, unthinking use of plants. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the use of plants to feed massive numbers of animals for the world's wealthiest nations to consume. Recent estimates suggest that humankind farms and eats over thirty billion animals each year. In a plant context, this live- stock rearing is important because it accounts for more than 65 percent of the total global agricultural area. It also accounts for large volumes of grains and soya beans which are used as feed. In 2002, approximately 670 million tons of grains were fed to livestock, roughly a third of the global harvest. They were also fed 350 million tons of protein-rich products such as soya and bran. The areas cleared to rear animals and feed them on such a huge scale are natural plant habitats such as tropical forests, savannahs, and grasslands. The rearing of livestock on such large scales is one of the major drivers of habitat loss. Basing diets on meat consumption excessively inflates the area of land that is put under human cultivation. Reducing the amount of consumed meat is a direct way of reducing harm done to plants, animals, and human beings. Not least because this large industry is also responsible for generating 18 percent of global carbon emissions—which to provide an idea of scale, is more than all forms of transport combined. (p. 165)
So, rather than seeing plant sentience as a unique challenge to vegans, it seems vegans are already doing something to limit harm to plants. Rather than making the vegan set less smug, wouldn't this make the vegan set more smug? Actually, wait a second, don't you assume that the author of the Gizmodo article probably eats plants herself? So, there is no reason that plant sentience is at all something particular to vegans. This argument could be used against literally any social justice movement. For example, imagine this conversation:

Person 1: Would you like to help out to end genocide against X human population?
Person 2: Did you know plants might be sentient? So, I can't help you.
Person 1: Uhm... okay...?
Person 2: Well, see you are trying to expand our ethical obligations to X human population. But there are still groups you haven't expanded our ethical concern to. And until you figure out a way to respond ethically to all beings, you really haven't done anything yet, have you?
Person 1: I'm pretty sure that's not how ethics work.
Okay, I hear your objections. This scenario ignores that maybe there is something particular combining our thinking about eating ethically. In other words, the failure to create a completely harm free eating experience negates trying to reduce harm in other ways. But again, if we aren't talking about veganism, would that objection really hold any water? Imagine this conversation:

Person 1: No thank you, I try to avoid X product because I try to avoid products produced by slave labor.
Person 2: Well, all capitalist labor comes from a system of exploitation (surplus value is theft), so there is no need to fight against products produced by slave labor.
Person 1: ... . So are you doing anything to stop either slave labor or capitalist exploitation?
Person 2: What? No, I am just saying stop being so smug, I don't have to feel guilty for using slave labor because of capitalist exploitation.
Person 1: I'm pretty sure that's not how ethics work.
So, plant sentience is not an argument against veganism because (1) veganism already reduces harm against plants, and (2) if plants present an ethical call, it is an ethical call for all of us, not just vegans. There are, of course, other arguments we can explore. For example, while the research that plants are active beings seem undeniable, what that means in terms of how sentience is expressed seems to be a fairly open question at this point (see this article by Oliver Sacks, and this blog post from Scientific America). And even if sentience was answered, it would not always be a guide about what interests plants have. For example, I am concerned about voting rights being denied felons, but I am not worried about getting voting rights for my cats. And while I am concerned about what Lori Gruen calls the "ethics of captivity" in prisons and zoos, I have trouble believing there are similar issues in botanical gardens. But let us, for now, bracket these broader questions about our ethical obligations toward plants.
So, if there is no reason that vegans are uniquely implicated in the ethics of plants, why is it that we are constantly bombarded with arguments that plant sentience undermines ethical veganism? First, as I have long contended, there is a confusion between ethics and innocence. If there was the possibility for innocence, we wouldn't need ethics. Ethics exist because we have to try to figure out ways to live a good life out of a bad life. What are the ways we can live and act in a world where innocence is impossible? And as in the conversations above, the argument that there is no way to eat without harm is a way of removing responsibility. Universal guilt becomes its own form of innocence, a way of avoiding ethical calls. People don't want responsibility, so they figure out a series of ways to push ethical obligations away. Problems are seen as systematic, so individual change is not called for. Because no solution will be perfect, we know that any change and tactic can be co-opted, so we don't do anything. You only want to help these individuals who are in pain and suffering, and because it focuses on individuals, it is neoliberalism and we don't have to help those in pain. Because there is no innocence, we might as well go ahead and do what we wanted to do anyway. And suddenly, enough excuses pile up so that we somehow have managed to be radical and ethical without ever having to change who we are. It is hard, after all, to be responsible (even just for those lives in front of you). It is confusing to know that we will have politics that will be tainted, that we will communications that fail, and that we will have actions that will cause harm. Spinoza defined conatus as the striving to preserve oneself, and he called that joy. So, perhaps it is sadness to be haunted by others, perhaps it is despair to have to change for others. No wonder we want to create excuses to not act and still pat ourselves on the back. So, maybe we need some other definition of joy. One that finds in our vulnerability the basis of sociality, of laughing together, and of mourning. Perhaps we can find joy (as well as frustration and love) in the difference of others, and with the creative impulse to build a different world. To yearn, and to act, together.Scuhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com