On Veganism

Besides being a generally liberal point of view, predicated on harm reduction--which is optional from a strictly individualist point of view--veganism is often challenged as a consumerist program that is evidently not anti-capitalist in any sense of the word. We have seen efforts to undermine this ideology in this vein through local farming, in that such is oppositional to the reality of acceleration and its simultaneous collapse of place-based space-time. But this localized point of view ruptures any sense of a non-anthropological machine via the whiny mouthpiece of Derrick Jensen. For those that have read A Language Older Than Words, the question of the domesticated animal gifting itself to the man with a knife makes certain forms of predation permissible within domestication. This romanticized version of weakness is pretty off-putting; yet the general question about animals is always what do they desire? And how can we determine this? Anthropomorphisms abound here.

In any event, ataraxia seems to provide a better way of interpreting eudaimonia, given that freedom from pain is a little more clear than flourishing in general. And yet, we still want, nay desire to define eudaimonia: more often than not, we pinpoint the purposes of animals in general as reproduction, or better, that there is a prior purpose working through us: the genetic desire for genes to reproduce themselves. I wonder if there is a genetic fallacy here caught up in the purported purposeful work of genes, so to speak.

I want to consider a proposition that I have been testing out for quite some time. It is an internal critique in the sense that it focuses in on an issue within the practicality of animal rights. It's simple: If all the animals were to be free tomorrow, which is an insane projection but no less a "natural" vegan desire, where the fuck would we put them? Rather than flood a welfare class, rather than supposing that all existing beings deserve to live, no matter how much it costs the collective that (re)sources sources and maximize outputs (without considering consequences), I propose that the best thing to do for domesticated animals is to advocate their deaths; to have a world wide slaughter of everything domesticated. And why do I make this argument? So that Wild might bring forth; so that domestication, perhaps on all fours with Hope, might grow some wings and fuck right off, or better, so that we might rip our wings and practice wild downgoing. On this reading, mink liberation is far more primitive in its trajectories than the liberation and consequent necessary containment of a factory farm chicken, pig, cow, or whatever.

There are a few ways of mitigating this proposition. On the one hand there is the view that even if one animal is housed and sheltered, and even if we continue to work so that these might receive the fruits of our labor, such is worth it for that animal. It is of course granted that one doesn't save the world in this instance; but I wonder if that's because the very idea cannot be maximized given the above assertion. There are just too many animals, and not enough space for companionship. It might very well be that the impossibility of total animal liberation casts doubt on its liberal framework. We, on the other hand, take what we like, articulating that releasing beings to (nature) being is all that one can do; always first for oneself, and then always afterwards for others. Yet it might be, of course, that these sorts of liberations provide a trajectory, a dream, a desire that defines us as bringing us forth and out of the city.

A better way of thinking this proposal is Singer's view that stipulates the best is to maximize satisfaction, as far as possible--and it can always be extended--without presupposing the value of any (sentient) kind over another. We primmies would suggest this to be foul smelling if only because sentience depends on provability; whereas the wild makes no such differences, and Singer is raising an anthropological machine. Singer is therefore on the way to Agamben, and requires Agamben to get out from colonizing sentience.

'As far as possible' pushes the individual saving mechanism to its limits; to push it beyond practicality into genuine possibility is our desire. To take apart the city is to destroy all anthropological machines. It is to release ourselves to nature, and to see if we can cut it outside the city walls, as many animals do already; outside the city, outside capital, where we cannot invent a meaning of strength, where strength is simply the ability to weather the storm.

I do not wish to house dependents. I do not wish to become weak through codependency.