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.

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[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.

Against Identity, or Always Difference.

It can be helpful to consider certain philosophical distinctions as playing a role in our practices. One such distinction is the difference between appearance and reality. It was once thought that reality is beyond appearance and that we can never be sure if we have referred to reality because, as Descartes suggested, we might be under the influence of an evil demon, or, in a truncated ontology, that our brains are hooked up in vats like those that were made popular in the Matrix. Perhaps we can see this distinction as a virtue rather than as an issue; perhaps we can see this distinction as guiding our ability to name X under the term P, whatever P. 

The reality that we are not referring to has everything to do with the banal form of predicating that we normally use. By using <P>, it seems that <X is P> may mean either that <X is being P> or that <X is P>--and it makes a difference. To say that X is P, as though 'P' is all that X is, is to reduce an object that is already different from the sign ‘P’ to ‘P’, and nothing can be identical to anything else other than itself. So it seems we are only left with the latter: X is being P, by which I mean X is being like P. 

Of course, the inference that X is partaking in the Reality of P is just as violent as the absurd identification of a functioning object with a stagnant symbol. To say that X is right now functioning in order to create the reality of P is to dismiss as irrelevant all the other differences that are functioning at the site as well. Partaking in the reality of P is the reality of scientific mono-culturing; it is the scientific tendency to reduce a real functioning object to the “reality” of a term <P> which represents some algorithm. But this violent algorithm is necessarily a “violence of fitting”; for it is always a reality-signified that is represented as a signifier. The reference of the term here is not the infinite object of systematic differences but is rather, the object under the imposed sign. It takes a forming apparatus to call into Being--sort of--this particular object as "fitting" <P>.

So it seems that the distinction between appearance and reality can serve to interrupt the conclusion that X is behaving like Y, because the reality X is never subsumable under the appearance Y which can only name an appearance-form.  There is no Womyn; there is no Man; there are bodies. The question we must ask is: Is Y(x) really Present? Is X's total functioning really Y(x)? Or is Y(x) being re-presented(imposed)? But here we are asking whether a reality is Present (Y(x)), rather than an appearance; for an appearance, as we mean it, is nothing more than an imposition of Imperial mono-cultures.

Places of privilege

The rhetoric of identity politics is debilitating. As both Peter Gelderloos and David Graeber point out, the issue with identity politics is that its rhetoric tends to crush possibilities. For instance, the result of theoretical identity politics upon the possibilities set forward by the desires of the Zapatistas was one of denial. Being Maya originally, identity politics suggests that they could only assert the right to continue to be Mayan or to be recognized as Mayan. “But for a Maya to say something to the world that was not simply a comment on the own Maya-ness would be inconceivable" (See Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology 68). Gelderloos puts the problem succinctly by pointing out that the Authorities that lie behind the construction of the identity determine the possibilities that are permissible for those under the identity  (Lines in the Sand 6).

Given such a point of view it really isn’t any wonder that many white male anarchists cannot accept the labels being thrown their way. The incredulity that one might show here towards Meta-Narratives, a piece of good postmodern philosophy, is the greatest ally in rejecting the story of privilege. I am not a ruler; it wasn’t me that colonized indigenous people. But Gelderloos also notes, importantly, that meta-narratives help to make sense of one’s position in society (4). From this I can reason that I did have the luxury of a better education than most (although it was religious), and that my parents have managed to make a lot of money for themselves. Is it plausible to suppose that this has something to do with systematic privilege? Did blessings fall onto my parents because they are white? Is there supposed to be more to the story than that inference from generalizations? Simply casting this story as a story of systematic privilege does no justice to these objects; what does justice to those objects is what those objects contribute to the goodness of the fit. So the matter cannot be simple.  


This may be the reason for Gelderloos' remark that identities may be useful (for some purpose) but are "never valid" (ibid, 1). My ability to construct an identity for an other may be useful, but the persyns under the identity must determine the fit. So it's better for a person that does identify with an identity to determine the scope of the identitity. Of course, some believe that identities are unnecessary--that they must necessarily miss the point of what I am. 


Gelderloos' point is that Identity labels do not sit well, if one isn’t related to them in any experiential way. More succinctly, if one identifies with anarchism, if one feels it in their bones, then one cannot make sense of the idea that one is also part of the ruling class. Others may feel that a white anarchist has more privilege than others; but here we have an example of an Other constructing an invalid identity for an Other. While useful, such is never valid. So whatever story an anarchist thinks that I need to understand in order to understand systematic privilege, it may or may not be a story for me.

The purpose of an identity construction is to give a name to something that goes to work; but the conclusions of the work must be a matter of individual determination. However, in clarifying how these terms suit us, how they are justifiably applicable, we must not forget that identities have not been designed by us, but are rather a function of society and in particular the machine that we together hope to destroy. In short, they are functions of social (non-anarchist) parameters (an apparatus) and in using these terms we are the voice-pieces of Leviathan. Hence there is something wrong with the general belief that by relating an anarchist to a privation within non-anarchist society, it is likely that the functional term (male, say) will fit. In the very least, such explains why using terms that are prevalent within non-anarchist culture for persons within anarchist culture is often met with hostility and resistance. Such terms of Leviathan do not generally function as a part of an anarchist’s identity (if one has one).--Such terms are designed to hold-back, to make open possibilities seem impossible.

Obviously defining what one means by the term ‘male’ is part of the problematic. If it is a function of social parameters, in the voice of whomever, anarchism means I don’t have to take it seriously. If it is being used differently, it should come as no surprise that the definition will be contested because now we are talking about how I am to be identified. If anarchism has any virtues, surely they include self-determination. So you can bet that anarchism means that I will have something to say about my resultant, relevant, identity.