Keep your Friends Closer.

In the latest issue of the Peak—an excellent publication courtesy of an even more excellent group of humyn persyns—there is a rather boring, yet seemingly ironic text by Alex Balch titled: ‘With friends like these: Anarchism and the left.’ I say ironic because I often wonder about the distinction (is it real?) between various syndicalisms and the very idea of the authoritarian left. Platformist positions, whatever one’s “striving”, are ruled by ideology, a consensus based determining but a determining no less that shows forth indifferently to differences. Perhaps the trouble is caught up in their Marx-fetish; perhaps all of this has everything to do with the rather bizarre notion of History, as if revolution were not a process but a final state, as if one already knows what this must be like because.... How I be(come) is mine to make.

I have one point of critique that I want to argue; a reading about the point of the article; and my final point will be to stress the latter. First is the dismissive ‘leaving alone’ of the term post-left by way of a rhetorical strategy (18). The term ‘post-left’ is a hybrid between left (which yields content) and a prefix ‘post’ which signifies ‘after’ or ‘subsequent to’. So then when does it mean to be "after the left"? This is the question of post-left; and with this correction it would seem that we post-leftists are beyond the left; it no longer matters perhaps. Only a moron would suppose that this makes us rightwing; for the content (left) indicates what is being modified. So modified how? I want to say that it isn't clear; that all that is clear is that we are after/subsequent/beyond the left, not after the left, as in looking for it, trying to find the corpse to yield "life" again, like Dr. Frankenstein. The term (left) is caught up, it is prefixed; so it is not compatible with the right; so it is not a pure negation. Its negative is also modified by it. Perhaps we want to gesture at the in infinitum as opposed-to the pure ad infinitum here. In the least, to reduce this important resonating difference, which is not fixed, that is, which functions as negation in/ad infinitum, to a “semantic quibble” is to fail to grasp its import (which is ongoing). In other words it is already (also) a critique of Balch’s (striving) platformism. The rhetorical move: ‘merely semantics’ conflates the negative modifier for its closest approximation to the left. The irony is here, caught up in this revelation of position: Balch says post-left has to do with “a critique of classical anarchism and its historical relationship to other leftists groups.” Hence, it would seem that what Balch is doing is post-left work, given that he means to prescind “the left” from classical anarchism.

This brings me to my other point. Balch is not beyond the left. He refers to the other leftists that have and so will likely throw anarchists under the bus as “at best, fair-weather friends” (21). Here, he would seem to suggest that sometimes it is OK to work with Maoists (the other leftists, still within the leftist milieu along with anarcho-syndicalists), but that these friends are really enemies. With friends like these who needs enemies? One rejoinder is that we already have so many enemies, including Maoists, why not make real friends. And with this thinking, one is going to have to experiment with what one can accept. It is telling that a platformist would be OK with a Maoist but finds a green anarchist problematic; for it is presumed that anarchy and culture go hand in hand, despite the obvious blunder in this reformist thinking. But green anarchists are also addicted to insurrection. And so: long live green anarchy (and fuck the left!)!

A Revolting Becoming.

The opposing, disjunctive terms, “technophilia” and “technophobia” are rhetorical terms; they signal the characterization of the other in a rhetorical debate. Romantics are typically labeled “technophobes” and “want to recapture tradition”. There are good reasons to be afraid of Technology. If Technology has taken over a technique, automating or displacing workers, what’s to stop the ongoing lottery? Is it ongoing? Are certain routines exempt from displacement? Are some jobs not routines? It doesn’t seem impossible that the logic of capital, our being in space that we control minimally, if at all, could always dissolve our livelihood, automated or not, forcing one to learn new techniques. I want to define <technique> as a way of doing something, as in “You sure have the technique down pat!”, and Technology as a system of Enframing Oppression in which techniques are rendered automated. The difference that I mean to gesture at here is that there is a felt difference between a technique that is a form of Art, and a technique that has become routine. When one says 'you sure have the technique down pat' I want to insist that one doesn't mean one has nailed repetition, but rather that one has produced the good. Hence, going against Technology, the automated Totality—Technology as a system—could mean gaining autonomy concerning techniques. But I want to qualify this political-aesthetic stance by noting that I do not wish to suggest that only machines are automated, and, furthermore, that Heidegger’s distinction between technology and modern technology, (techniques and automated techniques) is useful to see that machines aren’t essentially automated.

Now while privileging autonomy is presumably a reasonable way to go about finding support in Romantic circles, given that affirming autonomy implies that full-automation is ultimately dystopic and therefore worse than some level of autonomy, still, there is no way to settle on the best form. And it seems to me that this result is perfectly consistent with the meaning of the term <autonomy>, for how can one speak about how autonomous another should be? Doesn’t that necessarily undermine the right for one to be autonomous, to make decisions for oneself? One might find that ones’ ability to be autonomous depends on labor saving automated techniques. One might find that ones’ ability to be autonomous depends on communing with others.

Now, it seems plausible that full autonomy is as impossible as full automation. Therefore, what ‘full automation’ means in the context of saying that one is like a machine is that the machine-like is under the sway of seeing “the better” in civilizing oneself and falling in line, obeying final causes designed for oneself. In this context it seems possible to say that X has chosen to use privilege to their advantage. And while this may be a minimal form of autonomy, it would seem that in this instance one has merely affirmed final causes set in play by the system, rather than made an effort to design techniques for oneself.

However, settling on any level of autonomy, so long as it is not ‘full automation’, is not sufficient to forestall general anxiety concerning automation. Consider the problem of maintaining nuclear reactors. If these get out of control—which is to say, break down or break free from their designed final causes—it may be impossible to regain control, and it may become impossible to live. Don Ihde argues that just as there is an intentional fallacy in thinking that the meaning of a text can be reduced to the authors’ intent, there is a designer fallacy in thinking that technologies, in terms of use, function and effect can be reduced to designed intent.[1] So if we rely on automated techniques to co-constitute our sense of becoming-identity, it is possible that the final causes that we fix for them may not function according to the desired identity. Tying the designer fallacy in with the intentional fallacy is precisely to the point in gesturing at the difficulty in forming a unique identity given ongoing governmentality all around us; however, importantly, the fallacy also entails the view that one cannot be given a fixed identity as a system of automated techniques.

In getting clear on this point, it is helpful to draw on a distinction made by Giorgio Agamben in his recent What is an Apparatus[2]. According to Agamben, the Judeo-Christian theological problem of God’s unity and trinity was negotiated by noting that God’s substance is one, while God’s administration, or oikonomia of the world, was divided into distinct hierarchical roles (9-10). Just as God’s administration through oikonomia produces Christian subjects, the State is interested in producing civilized subjects. For Agamben, “apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectification, that is to say, must produce their subject” (11). But if this follows, if there is a process of subjectification, there is a prior mode of being distinct from those forms of oikonomia “that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient—in a way that purports to be useful—the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings” (Agamben, 12). Therefore, following a theological formula, the same living substance can be “the place of multiple processes of subjectification” (Agamben, 14). But for Agamben, the process of subjectification, is a process of desubjectification; for this ‘natural’ place, where multiple subjects arise, is a process of “separate[ing] the living being from itself and its immediate relationship with its environment” (16). The example that Agamben uses is Foucault’s docile subject, and the example of coming to see oneself as a sinner requiring confession (20).

For Agamben, being a subject is not just a matter of mere relation to apparatuses; it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a process of resistance to these forms of governmentality (14). What Ihde’s designer fallacy coupled with technophobia can be taken to point out is that one cannot be sure that resistance isn’t already automated, an anticipated feature of governmentality out of our control.

The question that Agamben opens, therefore, is whether it is possible to see an apparatus as true subject affirming, that is to say, whether it is possible to see any apparatus functioning outside of a process of desubjectification. If it is possible, might we then open the way to recapturing ourselves within apparatuses of our own desires?

            Since we are arguing for autonomy over the design process of ourselves, we are not arguing for full-automation. So we can avoid the Romantic’s charge of having a dystopic view. I said above that there are good reasons to be technophobic; but I want to insist that it is possible to creatively resist. The subjectivities that are produced in us are also ready to hand; we can exemplify them or we can idle; they are not fully independent and already co-opted. Therefore, under our control, these designed ways of being-citizen can be readily swerved. We can push back “indeterminately” against the automated techniques that Enframe “us”.[3] It seems to me that the difference between necessary and sufficient causes helps shed light on the difference between automation and autonomy. To be autonomous is to be able to take responsibility for what one has become, saying that one’s decision and design is a necessary cause alongside other necessary causes. Only if we supposed that one were fully autonomous, which is impossible, could we say that our choice is sufficient for what is produced. Why is this impossible? To be able to say, “thus, I willed it”, is to be able to show that nothing else was a necessary cause. Take an example of reaching for a glass of water. Simple enough. But surely the desire to drink water coming from my body cannot be ruled out as contributing to the choice to grab water in the first place. Thus, Hayles claims that there is no a priori way of discerning that one’s choice was sufficient for X. Anything a posteriori here would be a matter of negotiation.

What someone else makes of our artful lives is not peculiar to the machine-apparatuses that might be enlisted for this cause; such is a general problem with interpretations proper to structuralist imposition and the attempt to be unique. If we are automated, and we are, Agamben’s question is whether we are autonomous with the automatons (the apparatuses) or whether we too are automatons. In answering this question I want to trouble the dichotomy by pointing out that machines that may be used to fashion a sense of self, need not be challenged as standing reserve. I want to hold out for the possibility of romantic machines that co-produce a becoming self. This is because a moving target is far more Uncontrollable, the more its parts are Uncontrollable. In other words, the metaphysics of becoming and emergence—what bubbles up in processes of resistance marked by Agamben—is far more liberating than fixed, boring and repeated identities; and if machines can be let be in the register of becoming rather than being-enframed, ones’ actual self is that much more free. If we enframe techniques from the Enframing[4]—an ongoing process without end—perhaps we can break free from the automation of self to be part of the ongoing and resulting romantic picture of autonomous relations with “romantic machines”.

In order to come to this point I want to closely read Minsoo Kang in order to develop the concept of Nature as Machine historically and show its Sentimentalist and Romantic reaction from 1741 onwards. Following that, I want to segue into John Tresch’s text as developing a provocative middle ground captured in his notion of <the romantic machine>. This reading will compound multiple senses of Romanticism in order to undermine the standard association of Romanticism with technophobia, without trivializing this view. With a synthesis between “mechanization” and Romanticism shown in Romanticism’s historical traces, more particularly, between technology in Heidegger’s sense and “the” decentralized subject, I mean to come full circle, gesturing at “subject”-affirming apparatuses as an answer to Agamben’s question.

2. Minsoo Kang notes that a feeling of uneasiness and chaos generated by the Thirty Years War and the civil war in England precipitated the desire for a mechanistic worldview, an ordered polis maintained by the mechanic-sovereign, perhaps reflective of a perfect engineer God who, as first cause, ordered the cosmos (bodies included) according to rational laws.[5] More generally, Kang notes three features characteristic of mainstream mechanistic physiology from 1637-1748 (131; 144). First, metaphysically, humans were dualistic, with an immaterial soul and a material body; second, mechanistic descriptions were limited to bodies; and finally, when they were so analogously described, such was seen as positive given that Nature was created by God. By the middle of the eighteenth century and onwards, however, the automaton lost its ability to be compared to anything autonomous; it took on a derogatory sense in describing the mentally handicapped, the peasant toiling in the field, the conformist and the Absolute tyrant (Kang, 148). These characters were imaged as mere automatons because they lacked the principle of autonomy. But Kang exemplifies careful scholarship in showing that that this shift is not a clean break. Rather, from 1740, there was increasing tension between the positivity and negativity of imaging a human substance as automaton (Kang, 158).

Kang outlines three reasons that contribute to this shift. The first is that imaging the body as a machine, with discrete interworking parts, was beginning to give way to a new holistic picture of the body that presupposed something similar to Aquinas’ principle of activation, or Scotus’ principle of individuation. Buffon, for instance, argued that mechanistic methodology was useless and inappropriate for “the study of the living world” (Kang, 150). The tension mentioned above translates into a questioning about this methodology. Is it totally useless to see human bodies as machines or does the picture simply require supplementation? For if one wanted to replace dualism with hylomorphism, viz., that the body and the mind are not ‘really distinct’ substances, that they are connected harmoniously, if, that is, the mind just is the principle of vitalism in a mechanized body, it is contentious to simply suppose that vitalism is anathema to mechanization (Kang, 152).

So far we have been talking about the mechanization of the body; but it is not impossible to talk about the mechanization of the mind; for within the Cartesian lineage there is a sense of training one’s mind to avoid bodily passions. If the analogy between the soul governing the body and the Monarch governing subjects holds, then in naming the sovereign an automaton-man, one is taking issue with the way the centralized state, and by analogy, the governed humyn substance, is ordered. In the sentimental age, character traits of moderation and order, or centralized authority, started to lose their privilege, opening the way to “passionate and sensitive” nonconformity, intuition and imagination, which made possible the desire for the decentralization of the state (Kang 153-4). Kang explains this general, and increasing tension in Western Europe by pointing to the failures of the centralized sovereigns in the 1740’s, 50’s and 60’s to provide freedom from strife (his second reason) (148; 154-5), and the concomitant growing tendency to accept radical enlightenment ideas (his third) (155-6; 158).

Kang wants us to see that the classical and late enlightenment tension concerning humans as automatons, from this being a permissible characterization to it being a debasement of proper humynity, in the emotional response to automatons. In the classical period, there was a general sense of awe in the presence of Vaucanson’s duck because such mechanical devices signified God’s laws through their creators. Kempelen’s chess player, however, did not generate a feeling of awe because, generally speaking, it could no longer be taken as animate and humyn-like. By the late enlightenment period, as the mechanistic metaphor was continuing to wane, inanimate reason was automatically taken up as an artifact with humyn efficient causality (Kang, 182).

We saw above that the centralized rigidity of the state, once desired for security, gave way to ideas of organic harmony and decentralization in the sentimentalist period. Reason needed to be used holistically. But the hope for sentimental reason, reason embodied in the French Revolution, gave way to “the murderous monstrosity of the Terror”, and finally Napoleon (Kang, 190; 195). In order to explain this tension, that is, that sentimental reason was not the end of history, the German Romantics developed a comforting teleological Metaphysical narrative based upon rupture and dialectical union between Spirit and Matter, set in motion at the birth of the cosmos. The explanation for the Terror, then, was that Spirit and Matter will become One only at the end of Cosmic history. But this way of conceptualizing Matter generated a more extensive picture of redemption than was permissible in sentimentalist late enlightenment. According to the above Metaphysical picture, all things, animate and inanimate were the site (or potential site) of this rupturing and union (Kang, 193).

To be sure, the relationship between Romanticism and sentimentalism was not mutually exclusive; in Romanticism, while the automaton-man was still perceived as debased humynity, a consequence of its metaphysics entailed that an inanimate automaton figure could be an “instrument of the supernatural”, fully alive, uncontrollable (Kang 211). Perhaps fear of this possibility explains the disdain that privileged people have towards revolutionary subjects, perceived as machine-like beings with genuine potential to revolt by way of bodily knowledge. According to Kang, Romanticism included these beings, metaphorical and otherwise, in its eschatological vision.

So the need to find comfort in a Transcendent metaphysics coupled with agreement with the Sentimentalists against mechanization precipitated anxiety and technophobia about automatons because of their possible use in Cosmic History. This Romantic tension about automatons, between the worry of seeing oneself as one and yet at the same time seeing machines as worthy of Spirit, can be given flesh with John Tresch’s concept of the Romantic Machine.[6] Tresch’s narrative, stretching from the 1820’s to the 1850’s in Paris can be taken to be about Romantic thinkers that see the problem with Enframing, just as the sentimentalist turn rejected the outright mechanization of Nature, but without opposing Machines to Nature. According to Tresch’s narrative, the thinkers he discusses wanted to draw closer to Final Cosmic Unity, “a more just, free and harmonious society” and did so by joining themselves with romantic machines (xvi-xvii; 10).

The mechanization of nature as an (En)framing hypothesis, with component primitive parts under the sign of a division of labor, in this period, is replaced by an epistemology that doesn’t start with phenomenal fragmentation, but speculates and ultimately aims to discover through enframing intervention, a unified “noumenal” theory, an approximation towards what could be named Schelling’s world-soul. (Tresch, 31; 45; 53). Unlike research that stipulates theories in advance, “as detached, calculating reason” (Enframing), “this is research that does not seek to confirm or reject hypotheses, but simply to become familiar with a phenomena and its extensions” (Tresch, 57; 39). In this <aesthetic state>, “everything—even the tool which serves…—is a free citizen, having equal rights with the noblest” (Tresch, 75). That is to say, “the observer had to gain the instrument’s assent by entering into a dialog, “playing” with it, becoming familiar with its limits and habits” (emphasis added, Tresch, 80). In this way, instruments became autonomous organs of sense, “autonomous” in the sense that “they were disciplined and interconnected but at the same time, spontaneous, active and free” (Tresch, 111).

Clearly instruments were rendered to serve a purpose, but not in a deterministic way; rather, they were rendered on their own terms to signify Nature, a dynamic, awe-inspiring, unfolding process. The Romantic Scientist enters into the open with the instrument, letting it be in order to exemplify Beauty and Order. But where does this (the aesthetic state) come from? Who designed it? If we are trying to exemplify the end of history, where Mind infuses Matter, why should it correspond to what We, collectively, take it to be? If this has anything to do with Kant’s noumenal realm—if Nature is Noumena—surely the fact that noumena by definition entails the impossibility of knowing it implies an impossibility of saying some theory signifies it.

But obviously it is better to take a stab here, designing a harmonious frame that captures what is good for all, than to presume that All is Well when it clearly never has been; but what seems to me to be much more interesting is not collective Harmony, designed by the priests of Order, but distributed harmonies modified by autonomous desires. In Humboldt’s orchestra, the machines, non-human and human alike, must abide by the rule that they are disciplined to follow; the “law was only a law of freedom if it adjusted to the living particularity of the individual” (Tresch, 80). But what if adjustment here makes the law no longer identical with itself? What are the limits of disciplined-freedom? Conformity? Consumerism? Is that a wild and free Noumenal-Nature, set loose in the dynamics of becoming, or a domesticated Phenomenal-Form to which we must submit? Must our imaginations fit the form, or are we free to imagine forms that we want? The promise of Romanticism, in Kang’s sense, seems to entail the promise of possibility, which cannot be contained by the straightjacket of Spinoza’s Enlightenment Reason.

In other words, what Ought to be can never be reduced to what Is; and even Spinoza’s view of what Ought to be must therefore be insufficient. What is this picture? Spinoza, like Hobbes, takes the city and the sovereign to be sources (and therefore limits) of freedom, outside the gnashing of Nature, in an all too typical view of Enlightenment reason; yet, Marcuse's idea of a qualitative difference strikes me as obviously open to its own negation, even if 'practicality' would go by the boards. Decentralization coupled with imagination (sentimentality) produces a picture that I want to disclose below.

3. Decentralization: The story that we have been unraveling can be put in terms of awe and fear. In the ‘classical enlightenment’ machines were awe-inspiring signifiers of God’s design. But this way of viewing the humyn gave way to Sentimental feelings of fear and confinement, which generated desires to imagine different forms of decentralized government, forms proper to humyns. With the failure of this promise in the actuality of the Terror, we saw Romanticism generate a story about Unfolding Spirit that in turn generated the horrific possibility of automatons coming alive, which, in turn, was tempered by seeing machines as awe-inspiring actants in the realization of Cosmic History, a picture that I want to re-characterize in sentimentalist-autonomist terms as horrific and confining, if not completely boring. We might be able to explain the reason that automated techniques can be simultaneously awe-inspiring and horrific by way of Don Ihde’s designer fallacy, which points automated techniques out of their final causes, permanently destabilizing them, and shoring up the possibility of fixed regiments of bringing-forth. This permits the fearful—because unhinged—and awe-inspiring—because not fixed—figure of Possibility, a figure properly named Imagination, placed within the intersection of Romanticism and Sentimentalism. But the fallacy doesn’t inspire hope, not in the least, because there may only be Imagination and Desire—there may only be Becoming; there may be Nothing to save us.

It seems to me that this does not provide a way of thinking about un-Enframed techniques in the network that is ones’ life without technophobia; but the worry that one can control what one is, strikes me as misplaced, even if one minimizes the number of techniques “utilized” to this end. The best that we can do is swerve the apparatuses we are caught under to the imaginative creation of our autonomous desires. Tresch’s narrative strikes me as complementing Kang’s in that it sketches a way in which we might properly open automated techniques according to our desires, in a way that permits them to live too; but in this living—whatever that may become—we are left in the Open of Possibility, a place truly in opposition to automation, and so, truly in an ongoing ‘place’ of opposition to Technology.

What seems clearest here is that automation can become unhinged from its final causality, not in a way that permits it to be whatever we might make it, but simply not only what it was made to be. Given that one's own final causality is therefore not written, to say that one has automated oneself in this unfolding strikes me as misplaced. What better way to smash the machines.  

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[1] Don Ihde. Bodies in Technology. (Minneapolis; Minnesota University Press, 2002), p. 106.

[2] Giorgio Agamben. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 2009).

[3] Don Ihde. Ironic Technics. (USA: Automatic Press/VIP, 2008), p. 29.

[4] Martin Heidegger. The Question Concerning technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1977), p. 31-2.

[5] Minsoo Kang. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Pps. 112-3.

[6] John Tresch. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon. (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Response to Bison Wilder

Having heard JZ this week on Anarchy radio, I was referred to Bison Wilder’s essay (formerly known as Bobby Whittenburg-James) in order to consider his excellent critique of veganism. I am very pleased that veganism as an authoritative ideology is being critiqued in a very hot way; having lived with vegans, and also being one, such criticisms are inevitable, especially if one follows Oppression to root causes. The trouble is that these criticisms tend towards misunderstanding. I want to consider some of the arguments that Bison presents and then imply a sort of So What? rhetorical question in order to call into question what is being implied. I also want to be very clear: I subscribe to the telos of Anarche, which is better gestured at by Primivism than any other.

Too often animals are considered as part of the world of consumption, as though they ought to be reduced to mere commodities, much like womyn and the consumption of pornography. Given the implicit analogy this should be shocking; it should feel terrible to receive privilege off of the backs of enslaved animal persons, or at least just as terrible as watching oppressive pornography.
If we simply do not care about these things because of the logic of cynicism, say, then there is nothing more one can say. However, if we adhere to coherence (dubiously, surely), then if we want to make the argument that consumption in the world of capital doesn’t make a difference, we are bound by coherency logic to suppose that viewing oppressive pornography doesn’t make a difference.

From my cursory glances at these arguments made by primmies looking for excuses to eat flesh we might suggest a chain of reasoning like this: I can buy eco-detergent or I can buy Palm-Olive. The latter depends on vivisection, whereas the former doesn’t, and the former, moreover, excludes harmful non-natural chemicals that hurt more in the long-run. Furthermore, given that Palm-Olive is cheaper than any eco-brand, I can be less oppressed by working less for more money, thereby freeing up more time for myself. Both, however, depend on the system; so neither challenges the state nor capitalism, and in that contracted sense, there is no difference concerning my choice. Clearly there is a question of harm-reduction, and so there is a difference made despite ones’ delusions on the matter; Indeed, a “lack of difference” is a rhetorical and ontology falsehood, and that’s where the argument has to start; for we take on the responsibilities of those that we eat; if we eat them we eat what they ate.

Jackie Derrida has already produced some of these thoughts, at least insofar as he has thought through a lot more coherently than vegans have some of the implications of responsibility. (See his "eating well" in Interviews). Given that it is impossible to act perfectly, since it is impossible to not cause pain (...) how is it that we can say that this action X is best, when there can always be another that is better? The very idea of the best is stunted by the implicit hidden qualification: possible. We do the best that we can do. Bison makes this point well when he says that Vegans act as though they are morally superior to meat-eaters, while pretending that there isn't any "blood" on their hands. They therefore tote ridiculous slogans like: Go Vegan, Save the Planet—as though all that is necessary is not eating meat. But vegans that eat organic-monocultures are evidently not really with it when it comes to lines of responsibility either. Domestication is not a virtue; the only virtuous act present in eating organics is the possibility of staving off further ecological devastation through the total destruction of bee populations. But even though my desire to save agriculture through organics is on all fours with my desire to save capitalism, I still give a shit about bees.

Part of the reason that Singer articulated Specieism (Practical Ethics) is that it can be supported by scientific inquiry, and can thereby support appeals to the outside of Anti-Oppression. It is silly to suppose that the animal demarcates just where humyn begins, a fortiori in a Darwinian universe. Of course, these differences purported especially by humynists have already been deconstructed by way of Aristotlean science; we are animal: to kill the animal is to kill the life-body. So our ethical views can be supported biologically. Moreover, we can imagine care-for animals given that they have eyes, mouths, and faces, pace Levinas’ arbitrary line; Indeed, that they have mouths makes them more like us, and precisely unlike plants which do not have mouths but only in a metaphorical sense that would fail upon literalization. The trouble with Bison's analogy between animal and humyn pain and plant pain is that we require a different way of thinking concerning plant-pain. In other words, it doesn't make very much sense to say that a plant is like us, and it makes a lot more intuitive sense to say that they are unlike us. In Levinasian terms, the face, the look, the resistance, the text-writing, the plans--a fortiori with excellent books like Hribal's Fear of the Animal Planet--and even more so, given evolutionary biology, we have a responsibility only to those that we can imagine as being like us. So we can firm up the analogy in the relation between animal and humyn presumably because we share a genus; but we cannot with the plant unless we go one step back and thereby trivialize the relation that we have to others of the same genus. And that’s the trouble with attacks from agriculture that would seriously trivialize veganism as a worthy pursuit of ethical excellence. We share being with the earth, but the proximity that it has in a circle of care is far removed; we share more with animals, therefore, and less with plants. It is for these reasons that Bison’s charge that specieism occurs in vegan practice nevertheless is misplaced; while it is true to say that plants are of a different species, they fit into a different place on the hierarchy of being, a hierarchy that doesn’t support a well reasoned analogy because there is a disanalogy based on a genus. We might want to say, instead, that one is surely being genusist, an ugly word to be sure but no less ugly than Singer’s term.

Now, on Utilitarian grounds it is morally irresponsible to eat meat simply because one is only aiming to satisfy a certain scope of peoples (maximally). (Of course, whether or not it is possible to maximize this view is the question, given that animal production obviously destroys humyn communities too.) Nevertheless, it is better to not eat animals (and also make it ones responsibility to destroy animal agribusiness) than it is to simply steal meat from the supermarket, as Gelderloos put it. Is there egg on the vegans face? Of course! As Derrida says: we must eat; so we must eat well. I take this to suggest that rather than being Big Dicks, we should be the little dicks that we must be. Since we cannot avoid harm, we ought to avoid causing more than necessary.

So this of course means avoiding agriculture in all of its senses; but this point should not override the value of animal plans. Where Bison’s argument utterly fails then is where he supposes the charge of exclusion as being sufficient to undermine the ethics involved in veganism, a point that is already undermined by simply pointing to the logic of the better. So if one wishes to reduce harm, then one ought to follow one’s logic; if not, fuck it all. But Bison is not saying fuck it all. Bison appears to desire living ethically. This is because respect for all life implies that one make an effort, and especially, that one refrain from eating products that come from working class animals—if it even makes any sense to say that they sell their labor—and this only if we are still playing the buying game.

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Vegans are decidedly in agreement about one thing; but in the movement there are abolitionists and there are welfarists. The former are divided on fighting for social justice issues—although they cannot be blamed given the sheer quantity of animal oppression. Approximately 52 Billion will be manufactured for death this year, and if we take Justice into consideration, thereby sidelining social justice, one simply has too much on their plate. Just as one can spend one’s lifetime without working on animal oppression, one can spend their lives working exclusively on the same. For me animal liberation just means liberation from the state in every sense because we are animals. For most other vegans, anarchy is too worrisome, and anarchism too socially inclined. So there needs to be a bit of nuance concerning veganism and what it really means: If one is truly interested in abolishing all forms of hierarchy one would probably become a vegan, or in the best case a gatherer-hunter; if one is only interested in ending non-humyn animal oppression, one will probably only be a vegan and surely wither away in the wilderness. In order to account for this difference—and to avoid equivocation—one must say that Bison has merely attacked the latter. And that attack closes the internal critique that vegan-anarchists have been waging all along, with their own.

Living an ethical life is rewarding. We do what is necessary to live. If that means eating whatever the fuck from dumpsters, so be it. But if humyn privilege is off the table as a discourse for dealing with one’s shit, then we’re passing from Anarchy to anarchism, and fuck caring about that old worn out hat. It is totally impossible to live without having slaves given the privilege/sickness of civilization; it is totally possible to reduce the number of slaves that one requires to make possible one’s life in civ. I take it to be obvious that the goal is to be totally free from the responsibility of these unenthusiastic yeses of consent (or, in the animal case, these obvious and painful no’s). That is to say: A consensual act is an enthusiastic yes; and no one that works for someone else works enthusiastically without being dis/ease-ridden. And you have to be pretty diseased to want the privileges of civilization.

Kant-speak

 

Most of us are post-Kantian when it comes to morals. The idea that there could be moral knowledge prior to experience—because consistent with reason in advance of experience—is less and less useful as an explanation for why we ought to be moral. Immanuel Kant was a product of a world that thought denial of bodily desire was the beginning of being-ethical, a Patriarchical/religious worldview that no longer has much clout. Moral Obligation on this view is the idea that doing something has to be difficult, even in opposition to your desires—although of course, one could become the type of being that only desires fulfilling what one has the duty to do. Kant would have us become fully subjected to the agency of moral law.

According to Richard Rorty, and I think he’s right, the very idea of ‘moral’ is the issue. For when we follow the trace of ‘moral’, we end up with Kantian signifiers that prescribe rules for any experience to come. No matter what you ought to do X, even if you don’t want to, and especially even if you can think of reasons why you shouldn’t.

The attentive reader will note that if one should do X it follows that there are only reasons for doing X. But that’s the issue. We can think of reasons why we ought to lie some of the time, reasons that we should not tell the truth, indeed, reasons for disregarding our Kantian duty to do X, come what may. But if we posit two uses between ‘ought’: Ought_K and Ought_H, it would seem that we have the beginnings of a genealogy of ‘should’, or a genealogy of ‘ought’, that may alleviate much confusion, and perhaps, explain why Kant’s views are only partially intuitive. That is, if Kant is using normal terms (should, ought, permissible) to talk in a way that is bizarre, we shouldn’t expect anything less than disagreement over terms. Just because Kant provides an explication of moral obligation, doesn’t mean his explanation is what we commonly think about moral obligation. (But how Kantian should we be?)

On the topic of our moral obligations, it would seem that on a Kantian construal there can be no difference between my obligation for my partner, my dogs and my friends, and the neighbor in the street that calls for my help, “calls” by way of being in a situation that demands action, whether through a ‘look of pleading’, or simply by way of the context—that may or may not presuppose a look of pleading. But this way of thinking about obligation, this Kantian way of thinking about obligation, fails to meet our moral intuitions because we do not feel obliged to help just anyone. We tend to think that morality has to be possible, and it would be simply impossible to meet the needs of humyns in the world at the expense of our privileges. Otherwise Peter Singer asks, how do we explain that we still have accumulated capital? If we were Kantian, perhaps, it is morally obligatory to will poverty upon ourselves in order to balance the right to resources.

So we are not Kantian.—That is, we tend to reason already, weighing consequences of behavior, pros and cons. For instance, we may feel obliged to hand some money to the persyn in the street that asks, or we may rationalize our way out of the guilt-look—the felt obligation of the look—by saying to ourselves, typically of course, “X will simply waste that my money on drugs.” This ability to reason, one way or the other, means, as Rorty would say, that there is no Truth in Morality, just rightness relative to a particular moral identity.

The question for us is whether we can say it is always wrong to do X about any act X, or whether this view can only mean the imposition of a moral code from one identity to another that doesn’t agree. There are a few candidates, of course. One is rape. And perhaps we can explain our intuition that rape is always wrong by the more general Kantian principle that it is always morally impermissible (One always should_K not) to treat another X as a means rather than as an end. Is the wrongness of rape simply a misunderstood view that can be clarified by of moral relativity? Or, alternatively, is moral relativity simply a description that excuses oneself from listening to reasons?

If I try to articulate the inherent value of this animal’s interest to our decisions, it would seem that the right to say ‘I disagree’ is buttressed by moral relativity. A good reason for refraining from doing X can only be the objection from an Other whom is (or would be) affected by our action; and animals have never demonstrated an objection and thereby an end that must be considered prior to our actions. It seems the same excuses could excuse one from considering the inherent value of wild-spaces, and the inherent value of the earth. The earth has never spoken and said, “Fuck Off, Stop Raping Me”—so we rape the earth, taking resources to build skyscrapers, urban sprawl, and useless technologies that only serve the purpose of demonstrating hierarchy to poor communities. More than that, however, just existing in Industrial Civilization is a collective matter of Rape. So either our views of raping Mother Earth are misplaced, or we have to renegotiate what it means to be children of the earth, whereby we are taken care of by our true Mother. (And if it turns out that our notion of morality ought to be considered in an arbitrary way, whereby we scope moral obligation to suit our humynist purposes, perhaps we want to say instead (un-arbitrarily) that we do use each other because we take care of each other. More to follow...) 

Presently it is as though we have Killed our life-source again and again; so we ought to be ashamed. So, just as we can tune ourselves off from feeling the desire to alleviate some of the suffering of others in our midst, those that are close, those that oblige us, those that ask, so we tune off our ability to concern ourselves with being concerned, heeding the pains in the Other, whatever the Other.

The weight of responsibility that we have collectively can only be alleviated by the pragmatic choice to distinguish between direct and indirect responsibility, or, at most, between non-humyn animals and animal others, or again, between those and the earth. But why should we accept these arbitrary demarcations, these lines that we draw in the sand in order to give sense to the limits of created-good, as though ‘the Good’ should not be restricted by the Better? If the Good is restricted by the Better, we cannot call it best. 

In my non-novel view, there can be no un-arbitrary view of moral obligation, unless we accept that Kant was only talking about those that can speak and give reasons, rather than any other that can look and demonstrate pain--present to us the destabilizing figure of the face. More precisely, we have to begin to ask whether there is anything to be said about the Kantian intuition that ‘we should never treat X as a means (whatever the X)’. Maybe there isn’t something wrong with the opposite in some contexts (draw your lines) so much as there is something wrong with it in every context. Who knows? 

As for me, I think using an other for ones' purposes is always a problem, unless, of course, the other is using me and both parties are open to each others' usings. A mother permits the use of the child for consumption purposes. Presumably this is an earth ethic of Care.

Review of Defending the Earth: A Debate Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman.[1

The debate between social ecologist Murray Bookchin and Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman is interesting because it touches on some of the most pressing issues that stand in the way of any genuine dialogue between those that privilege the humyn socius and those that hope for a renewed world-view that privileges all life—not just humyns. In what follows I would like to evaluate some of the arguments presented in this debate. I wish to discuss the first text in the book named above especially and allow for a dangling thought to be produced by way of Dave Foreman’s repetitious gelassenheit, a Heideggerian term that means ‘letting things be’.

Murray opens the debate by articulating this precise issue.[2] He targets a position (a deep Ecologists position), namely that many think that the natural environment requires protection from all humyns. This position has often been associated with the view that the world would be better without humyns in the first place—that the humyn is a evolutionary mistake, and that Nature is trying desperately to restore the balance. It is important to get clear on this issue because there is a sense in which it lends a hand to the view that implies that natural disasters are good. (Of course, natural disasters are normal, indeed balancing, but the idea that Nature is deciding to destroy humyns is ridiculous because Nature doesn't have agency)

Bookchin counters this first point of view (not the associative cluster) by reductio ad absurdum, arguing that this position erases the differences of responsibility that exist between molar-masses, and that this ‘blames the victim’.[3] In his words, the black kid in Harlem is not the same as the CEO of Exxon. So, by talking about all humyns as being collectively responsible for the catastrophes on the earth, we blame those that are also directly affected by the actions of some humyns. Moreover, because these othered humyns, caught up in the exploits of capitalists are, ex hypothesi, on all fours with these capitalists, we trivialize the actions of the capitalists. In other words, relating the bosses to the workers makes the workers worse, and the capitalists better.

The trouble with this argument is that is let’s humyns off the hook for fucked up processes of consumption. Can we really say that humyns that live in industrial civilization are not to blame? Perhaps we shouldn’t say blamed in the same way; but we cannot let any industrial process off the hook. Just because you happen to occupy a space in fucked up social relations doesn’t mean that you have not contributed to the seething mass of plastic in the Ocean, or the deaths of Trillions of Animals. The original position that there is a problem with being-civilized can be defended provided that we make a distinction between those that have been formed by industrial civilization and those that have not; it would be victim blaming only if we said that all non-industrialized civilized humyns are on all fours with all civilized humyns. So, instead of advocating the death of all humyns, we advocate the death of 'industrialization' and so, all the processes that are picked out by this geographic reality.

Murray Bookchin seems to want to evade these issues because, in his opinion, ecological devastation has a limit; namely, that provided social relations and hierarchies are dissolved—of course only humyn hierarchies—ecological problems will be resolved.[4] In his mind it is patriarchal masculinity and echoes of this form that destroys the planet. But being a capitalist isn’t limited to only this or that body. Similarly, anyone can replicate the form of being-hierarchical. So there is no fixed ‘come what may’ distinction between Oppressor and Oppressed, despite leftist/anarchist rhetoric.  (In a language yet to be disclosed we can think of bodies as territorialized and territorializing productions; hence, while there are real issues to be resolved with repeated forms of hierarchy--and bless this anti-o apparatus--there is always more deterritorialization to occur. Only when all individuals are free to follow their own desires can we say that we have a prefigured apparatus for installation.)

The question that has to remain front and center is whether social justice entails ecological justice. Bookchin supports this view by noting that Humyns are part of the natural world and must be considered part of what we mean by Nature. Humyns are a product of natural evolution; we didn’t arrive ex nihilo. So it seems that we are destined to be here and our destiny is defined by virtue of ‘long antecedents in natural history’[5]. But our being here is not this or that; as it turns out, we have evolved to be possibly responsible (“nature rendered self-conscious”), and so, pro-ecological, rather than irresponsible and anti-ecological as our social apparatus has become with patriarchy at the helm.[6] So in Bookchin's view we have to alter our cancerous social apparatus and adopt a view towards the world that is pro-ecological and responsible. This argument trades on the genetic fallacy. It is strictly indeterminate whether humynity ought to continue; it is strictly indeterminate that the existence of Seven Billion humyns ought to be considered an “intended” part of the “natural” flows of “random” mutation. Just because something is or happens to be, doesn’t mean it ought or will continue to be. There are all sorts of conditions that humyns have produced that make the possibility of blind-evolution neither here nor there. It is strictly indeterminate that evolution is our ally, or, more precisely, that something to come isn’t seeking to break-through the civilized humyn being. Of course, this is what Bookchin is advocating when he says that we render ourselves self-conscious and in touch with Nature, as part; but I wonder if this position doesn’t seek to make humyns in control of what is essentially uncontrollable. 

Frankly, I doubt very much that the interests of the universe see the necessity of the humyn being in the first place. We should say instead, if humyns want to survive they had better adopt a new land ethic that is ecologically feasible. The idea of being rendered self-conscious implies that one is in a state of being-aware of how things really work (and ought to); and this thought segues rather well into the notion of mega-fauna advocated by Dave Foreman whereby we try to reach a natural threat-based cold-world equilibrium rather than create one that is warm and fuzzy for all humyns, or even create the illusion of one that is warm and fuzzy.  In the very least Dave Foreman has a nice little thought experiment here.

Dave Foreman wants to see a return to a world that permits the flourishing of all species (gelassenheit), even the reintroduction of species that would pose a threat to humyn beings.--My oh My! Of course, this point requires a bit of qualification: there has always been a ‘threat’ to the civilized world by way of “the wild”. From coyotes attacking roosts to cockroaches ruining dinner parties, and from rats eating the filth left over by raccoons, the humyn-wild binary has been upset; yet, the end result has always been the destruction of the different by humyn technologies of control. Dave Foreman’s view of gelassenheit is what he calls ‘rewilding’—that is, restoring ‘big wilderness’ (and then conserving it) based on the regulatory (top-down) roles of large predators.[7] So rather than permitting humyns free run over the earth, and thereby limiting the wild to “protected areas”, Foreman advocates, cautiously of course, that the humyn population be reduced drastically so that Nature can regain an originary equilibrium.

At least Foreman is willing to say something.

---

[1] Bookchin, Murray and Dave Foreman. Defending the Earth. Montréal, Québec: Black Rose Books, 1991.

[2] Bookchin, Murray and Dave Foreman. ‘Looking for Common Ground’ in Defending the Earth, 27-46. Montréal, Québec: Black Rose Books, 1991.

[3] Ibid., 31.

[4] Ibid., 32.

[5] Ibid., 33

[6] Ibid., 34

[7] retrieved from Dave Foreman’s website (http://rewilding.org/rewildit/what-is-rewilding/) on November 16, 2011.

The Dreaded Comparison

A persyn in Toronto recently has brought a form of indiscrimination to the attention of the humyn rights tribunal here in Toronto. Allegedly, her academic superiors refused recommendation to other schools for PhD programs because she believes that humyns and animals demand, presumably, the same moral obligation. This persyn seems to be doing the wrong work in the wrong program. Why the hell would one carry out a discussion concerning animal rights in a faculty of humynists that find the most radical forms to be state-sanctioned disability studies? Of course the expansion of inclusion is important; but give me a break! The reason why social justice is a pile of malarkey is precisely that it is grounded more fundamentally by a call from animals, the wild; no humynist is willing to accept that point. Instead, the line between “reasonable research” and “off-limits research” is reified, and 'wild et. al' is dismissed arbitrarily. Of course, once the social sciences are updated with French Post-Structuralism, say Deleuze or Derrida, AR will be a natural outcome.—In good time. As it stands Anti-Oppression can only (rhetorically) be a matter of humyn privilege.

            Anyways, this persyn has decided to kick up a stink. While it isn’t clear that she has finished her MA and that she is off to carry out a PhD, it seems clear that her desire to study Animal rights (in sociology) has been met with derision. But she has also been referred to as a racist for comparing some humyns to animals. Evidently there is a disagreement over terminology here; but it is curious. It obviously trades on meaning and use. I want to consider her entire claim and also some of her arguments before I turn to this last point and its soundness.

According to her claim, she is being discriminated against because she is vegan and because she believes that the moral imperative to help a humyn is the same call that obliges us to help an animal. Thus, animal rights and humyn rights are on the same foot. It was this ‘religious creed’—her words, certainly not mine—that purportedly got her into trouble; and because vegans follow a certain set of principles and rules, she thinks that she ought to be protected from discrimination, and that in particular, her reputation should not be destroyed because of her beliefs concerning moral obligation. The trouble is that her opinions are racist.

She objects! She identifies as a person of color; so it is impossible for her to be racist. The trouble is that her words have nothing to do with her at all. The form of her words is necessarily racist because it compares the animal to some humyns thereby, essentially, calling them animals. To say that the suffering of animals is anything like the suffering of any humyns is to refer to those humyns as less than humyn. The trouble of course is that the form of words (say, “the ongoing animal holocaust”) cannot escape this kind of racist-trace because the term ‘animal’ is always going to be sorted onto the complement or, outside. Remember that every humyn victory in the social justice world has been a matter of forcing the privileged class (the humyns) to see that “the oppressed” are not animals. To say that animals are anything like some subset of humyns is to necessarily relate some humyns in a direction that they would not desire, indeed, in the direction that “Oppressors” have always sorted them. So, it doesn’t matter that this persyn is Racialized. The function (animal holocaust, say) sorts some set of humyns (presumably not herself) onto the outside of humynity.

Of course there is a difference in use that is present. Some of us see that all the assigned terms and predicates are totally bullshit. But so long as we use the same terms to extend the line of persyn, the traces that precede us will always produce contrary conclusions to those that we desire.

Consider another example that was brought to my attention a while back. Deep Ecologists have always fetishized the idea of Nature as Woman—as caretaker, as Mother, and sometimes, when it suits them, as Wild and uncontrollable fury. To say that rekindling one’s uncontrollable fire is what is really important—in opposition to Stoic Patriarchy—overlooks the fact that this space (the wild) has traditionally been assigned as a lack. So there is a certain sense that even though Deep Ecologists meant the term in a different way, the semantic meaning of the term preceded its use and made it difficult, or even impossible, for deep Ecologists to make their point. This privileging of Mother Nature in the form of desired re-wilding, presupposes that the function of Patriarchy is legitimate in some sense. Deep Ecology supposes that what Patriarchy assigns to Womyn is what should be assigned to all of us. The trouble is that many persyns fought really hard to escape from the lack that they were assigned, and a reassignment is fucked up. 

The dreaded comparison between humyns and animals always reassigns this lack in a racist way, no matter how racialized one is; for even if one is assigning oneself the category of animal (and that is all that one can do) , there is every reason to suppose that one voice is not sufficient to speak for every right to an identity. In other words, just because you identify as an X doesn't mean that you can speak for all others that identify with X or that all X's would agree with your anti-hierarchical claim, and so, your reduction of X-hood to Y-hood by comparison.

The only real group that stands outside in the margins when it comes to similarity with the animal plight is the persyn that has been denied civic status in such and such a state. These persyns are treated "inhumanely" because they have no rights (or, what's the same, because they have animal rights). In order for there to be a positive value, there has to be a negative oppositional place, a place that is denied value so that every other place has value. Paradoxically, even if animals had rights, there would still have to be a place occupied by the reality of being-an-animal and so, being-treated "like an animal".

The Animals that We Have Always Been... Already

The classical binaries that oppressions generate, the differences between man and womyn, humyn and animal, or, more generally, the differences between reason and rhetoric, emotion/rationality, and Civil/Wild have lots of similarities. Indeed similarity is caught up in an originary definition of being human, as Aristotle put it: human just meant <rational animal>. However, as specialization over humyn bodies increased divisively under the sign of Capital, a complementary and manufactured desire forced the imposition of difference between humyn and animal in a rigid way so that we became less autonomous. If that which is wild is the very meaning of autonomy, and I intend to make this argument later, then domestication (zooification) is a process of de-autonomization. If it is true that the process of becoming more and more dependant describes the human condition, then humyns have never been free. Rather than acknowledge the animal within as a part, indeed, as the liberating (free) part, we began (and yet still!) attribute to the animal those undesired traits we find rupturing our codified (and predictable) existence.

Particles of our language signify this <setting apart from>. We often say in the negative that such and such a person is a beast, or a bitch, or that one is acting like a chicken or a peacock, or a mule, an ass, a pest, a bug or that certain types of people are pigs, or that living with some people, like me, according to my partner anyways, is “like living with a primate.” These terms signify traits that we do not wish to own, burdens that the animal has been created to bear, a negative placeholder for disowned behaviors. Are chickens really chicken? Are primates really messy? Do peacocks really parade around, fluffing their feathers and chests in such a fashion? Contrary to this logic, it seems overwhelmingly the case that the particular animals that we use to stand for undesired human traits do not in fact exemplify any of ‘their’ specified traits. Instead, it may be that these general points of specification are a function of a general logic, a logic that is amplified by associations that, by way of being negative, generate a necessary effacement.

One may wish to say that just as there are negative traits from which we wish to distance ourselves surely there are positive traits that we often use to describe ourselves positively. For instance, we might be inclined to say that we were as brave as a lion. Alternatively, in a weird sort of limit case, some of the more patriarchal among us might be inclined to say that so and so was “hot like a fox” hereby signifying, despite the beastial overtones, that men in fact desire “foxy ladies”. But while comparisons of desired attribution, as proper functions of animals, are a part of our everyday discourse, comparisons to animals, the brutes, tend to be negative. The reason is that it is of paramount importance that we (willingly) zooify ourselves, that we make ourselves set a/part from the animals.

The point that the animal has been “created to bear” undesired traits has everything to do with originary meanings of <animal> that have very little to do with animals at all and much more to do with us. The animal cannot be said to be stupid because the animal doesn’t make ‘stupid mistakes’; indeed, the animal is precluded from any attribution because the animal doesn’t conform to patterns of failed rationality. Despite this point, we have been given a representation for the animal that is variously described through a set of lacks: lacking in reason, lacking the ability to think, lacking the ability to choose to eat only plants, lacking the ability (or potential ability) to respond responsibly, to be ethical. From these meanings I’m supposed to understand the referent of the concept animal. But there can be no animal because the very idea of an animal is simply the distinguishing mark of the non-humyn and anything defined by way of lack will be necessarily imprecise. And this point is redoubled, indeed, doubly impossible, because the animal is defined by what the humyn lacks, and what the humyn has, positively, is also unclear across the board. So if the animal is defined by way of the humyn, and the humyn cannot be defined, then the animal cannot be defined. Here we do not have a limited that abuts against another; instead, we have a tangle, a mess that can only be prescinded for convenience.

Traditionally persons have used the term ‘beast’ or ‘the brutes’ to signify the animal; and this sort of anti-animalism finds a telling voice in Beauty and the Beast, a cultural artifact that I would like to turn to briefly. Here we have a monster, and not a monster made of different recognizable parts, like a griffin, or a centaur, or Medusa, rather, we are presented with a monster that doesn’t have any understandable similarities, indeed an “animal” par excellence. The closest kind that The Beast signifies is the wildebeest, from what I can gather; but the beast in the Disney film is nothing like the wildebeest, a kind that is misleading in its English dress given its close kinship to grass munching cattle. So here we have a story perpetuated by Disney that takes the form of the wildebeest and shifts its reality in order to create a particular entity, a fiction that stands no animal in particular; a brute in the truest sense of the word because this non-animal/animal stands for everything uncivilized that we should not want. The beast is isolated, untamed, aggressive, angry, irrational, uncivilized, in short a wild beast (wildebeest). And this introduction is assumed from the beginning. If you recall, this monster is completely irrational or unreasonable, truly animal, for Belle’s father, lost and looking for his way is enslaved upon trespassing.

At one point in the film, Disney lets out a subconscious word of explanation concerning this very peculiar non-animal/animal. Gaston has persuaded the townsfolk to go and kill the beast. Why? Because they

“don’t like what [they] don’t understand, in fact it scares [them],

and this monster [the beast] is mysterious at least.”

Indeed ‘the monster/the animal’ must be mysterious. Animals that function to stand for everything Wild cannot make sense to a culture that desires to destroy everything, or better, more deceptively, reduces the wild/untamed to that which is understandable. The beast, having no recognizable form, having nothing in common with a lion, or a tiger, having everything in common with a wildebeest but nothing to do with its operations, just is that which is fearfully non-humyn. It must be killed; or else, it must be made understood by way of a different presentation, say, by being mounted on Gaston’s wall—by being made weak as a sign for true humyn strength.

             The term <noble savage> gets a lot of play in Beauty and the Beast. The beast is clearly set up to be the noble-savage archetype, but it seems that we can invert these terms to signify Gaston, a <savage noble>, in the very least in order to understand what’s happening in this movie, how these two terms play off of each other. It seems reasonable to infer that Gaston is a noble or stands for the noble type given that there are no other nobles in town, and given that he thinks he has a rite to Belle’s hand in marriage. So how does Gaston fit the term <savage noble> that I am here inverting? We hear from Belle, that he is “boorish and brainless”. Being boorish just means being rude, or without manners, and “brainless” is the attribution classically given to animals that categorically fail to think and reason—clearly both tend to describe Gaston as a savage of sorts. Indeed, even Gaston seems aware of his brainlessness in that, at one point, he says to LeFou, “LeFou I’ve been thinking”. LeFou cuts him off saying, “a dangerous pastime” to which Gaston replies “I know”. So, just like an animal, Gaston is brainless and reactionary.

            The relationship between the savage noble and the savage becoming noble-savage is best represented in the climactic moment when Gaston and the Beast square off. Just as the beast is about to kill Gaston by dropping him from the ledge, the Beast, as True Noble (Savage), listens to Gaston’, “I’ll do anything for my life”, and completes the (implicit) contractual-promise, ordering Gaston to “get out”. Once in a safe space, Gaston, as savage, stabs the true Noble-Savage in the back. In breaking the implicit promise to the Beast, therefore, the nobility of Gaston is eclipsed by the Nobility of the Beast, a true noble savage. However, the state cannot leave it there; instead, the Beast must be eclipsed as savage-part of Noble-Savage becoming truly ideal and totally imaginary. It is important that we understand savagery as a curse, just as the beast understands that being a Beast was always a curse. This is why at the end of the movie it is important to have the narrator show the fictional archetype (the beast), the animal, becoming truly (humane), civilly civilized, desiring this way of being, rather than his perfectly imperfect savagery.

Interestingly, neither the beast nor his perfected humyn resurrection, have names. Disney has created a totally artificial way of being that spans from beginning to end, the perfect man and the perfectly imperfect animal without likeness. This artificial being, the perfect noble, is just as artificial as the being that existed just a few minutes prior. What we have is a set of artificial categories designed to set the humyn a/part from, on the one hand, the savage noble, as well as the noble savage. The truth that Disney hides is that the separation of the humyn from the animal is a separation of self into partial object and Other. In rejecting the wild, in reproducing the desire to reject the wild, a manufacturing of desires that is not our own, but is desired of us, a desire that speaks through us constitutes us as civilized subject, we are complicit in setting ourselves a/part, ready and waiting, an artificial apparatus that puts to pieces both ourselves and parts of us (as artifice), the animal, so that it becomes necessary to find ourselves again—so that it becomes necessary to re/wild.

Most of us resist the conversation that follows from the Genesis Narrative, and with good reason. Yet, that story contains a seed for a new reading of the difference between the humyn and the animal. The first thing that the humyns did once they had become accustomed to knowledge of good and evil, having disobeyed God and consumed the forbidden apple, was to put on clothes, nakedness being a source for their shame (Genesis 3:7). Having gained (God-like) knowledge of what is right and wrong, the humyns felt that it was wrong (improper) to be naked. Thenceforth, humyns lost their freedom to be naked without inhibitions, to be truly indifferent to ones’ shame because oblivious to nakedness. So I want to offer the notion of <re-wilding> as a matter of stripping sources of shame. What makes us zooified, shall we say, is the ability to feel shame.

In order to paint this picture, in order to trace part of the meaning of what it means to out strip sources of shame, I want to re-read The Emperor’s New Clothes. Here we have a down going that is opposite from the transcendent up-going of the Noble-Savage to Pure Civility. Thus, we might say we have instead the down-going of Pure Civility to Pure Animalism/pure freedom.

If you recall, the story goes something like this: we have an emperor adorned in all of the latest fashions, as Andersen says, “to [the emperor] clothes meant more than anything else in the world… He had different robes for every single hour of the day.” Then, along come some swindlers promising to make the emperor a new set of clothes, more beautiful than anything he had ever seen. The catch is that the clothes contain magic properties that appear invisible to anyone stupid or (and so) not worthy of their position in the emperor’s court. Since no one wants to be stupid, like an animal, stupidity being a purported sign of being-animal, no one admits to the plain truth that the emperor was being swindled. The next day the Emperor parades his new “clothes”, and a child, perhaps indifferent to the charge of stupidity, exclaims boldly that the Emperor was wearing nothing. In response and feeling as though there was perhaps some truth in the comment, the Emperor “drew himself up and walked boldly on holding his head higher than before…” (my emphasis).

            So here we have a moment where an exception to subject-hood, a child, “tells the truth” to another exception to subject-hood, an emperor. In response, taking responsibility and being reactionary, the Emperor goes beyond his clothed humans to demonstrate naked power. He shows that even in the face of embarrassment, figuratively speaking, nothing can touch him. Like an animal or a child that can maim and destroy with impunity, this state of exception shows himself as indifferent to his nakedness. Having tasted what it means to be truly beyond subjecthood, to truly not worry about placement as emperor, to know about his nakedness and yet remain indifferent, indeed, to be in the spotlight in a way that is exceptional, I would be surprised if the emperor could wear clothes again.

The Emperor is set apart from his subjects like an animal is wild. He is totally unpredictable, and even more now that he has discovered pride beyond shame, a way of being that puts him truly beyond law. He once had prided himself in wearing the finest clothes; yet now he has produced a sign that all of that is hardly important.

           

Jacques Derrida may have had the emperor in mind when he commented that autobiography without confession is captured in being-animal, or, being before/after the fall, being in a place where a distinction is not drawn—although, admittedly, Yhwh did grant Adam with the rite to name, and therefore subjugate everything except himself to the inability to name oneself—nevertheless, being-there merely living, without apology, indifferent to Dasein.

Humyns have a lot for which they ought to apologize. We humyn animals haven’t even begun to realize and take responsibility for our shame.