As-if Honneth were one Kant (and not another)…

It is quite serendipitous to me that Axel Honneth begins his book Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory with a look at Immanuel Kant’s essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” As an undergraduate, I lived and breathed Kant’s transcendentalism. I kept my heavily underlined copies of the Meiklejohn translation of Critique of Pure Reason in my backpack. “As-if” was my mantra, as one professor or another listed their arguments against Kant. “You make ethical decisions as-if you could will them universally.” “Judgments of taste are subjective, they are only willed as-if everyone would agree.” The Kantian world I inhabited was a mystical place of uncanny “as-ifs” and sublime negative pleasures connecting harmoniously with scientific reason and synthetic a priori knowledge.

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Matt Taibbi on "The Great American Bubble Machine"

Oh, I'm a huge fan of this guy's investigative journalism, published today "on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression."  (Cue emphatically vague, prosaic protests from the PR wing of Goldman Sachs.)  Especially as at times he seems like the only one who is effectively doing this: translating our reality of economic-apartheid/corporate dictatorship/organized crime to a popular audience, and with proper pathos of indignation.  Taibbi may not have been possible without the likes of Chomsky, but he sure does a better job keeping us awake.  (Needless to say, part of this work is holding otherwise sympathetic but obviously worn-down, increasingly platitudinous critics-become-automatons to a higher standard, which Taibbi also does pretty well.) His conclusion under the fold:

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WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN?

The following is Zizek's response to the events currently taking place in Iran.  Surprisingly, they seem rather banal and uncontroversial.  I am curious what people think of his view that "we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists."

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The Idea of "Tradition" and Animal Studies

Being the sort of person who reads - and comments - at blogs, I've found myself in discussions from time to time regarding the morality of animal use. Lately, the context has been the Canadian seal hunt and efforts by Native advocates to justify one form of seal hunt (traditional), but condemn another form (capitalist). Notably, the major American animal welfare organizations also make this distinction between traditional use and commercial exploitation. I am in the minority, it seems, as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Mr. Money-bags just as much as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Noble Savage.

Advocates of the "traditional" hunt will routinely make reference to using much more of the seal's carcass than what is found in the "capitalist" hunt. (Although the reason why Mr. Money-bags doesn't use the entirety of the carcass is likely because there is limited potential for commercial exploitation (e.g., meat, oils, by-products) and, if there were, seals would be rounded up and placed in factory conditions.) Of course, the advocates of "tradition" usually forgot that a commodity, the base unit in capitalist economies, is any good produced for sale. The seal is, indeed, largely slaughtered for sale - the "traditional" hunt is as capitalist as the "capitalist" hunt.

But, from the theoretical standpoint, that isn't the most interesting thing - fetishizing cultures isn't really an academic interest in mine (although one has to wonder if the fetishization of Noble Savage as engaged in an authentic lifestyle outside of capitalism has something to do with a feeling of inauthenticity experienced by many living in large cities where no outside of capitalism can be seen; it is the urban advocates of the "traditional" seal hunt that are interesting). What is interesting is the recourse ostensibly "progressive" people have to defenses of "tradition."

Why do self-named "progressives" find security in tradition? What is so "progressive" about tradition? The question I put to them is quite obvious: how do you justify one form of "tradition" for the very reason that you perceive it to be "tradition" but condemn another form of "tradition" because you just don't like it? How can the seal hunt be defended because it is "tradition" but anti-semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and the like cannot? How can you say Noble Savage is a being who finds his moral core in the traditional hunt while at the same time condemning marital rape or genital mutilation? How do you distinguish between "good" traditions and "bad" traditions? Can that even be done? Once you've defended one thing "because it is tradition," it seems that only logical position one can adopt is to defend all practices deemed traditional.

The only response I ever get is that I am being shrill.

Notes from the Long Sunday Beginning June 7, 2009

Entry 11 – June 8, 2009:  This evening, my outreach team spent a half an hour guiding a staggering Tamil man down Yonge Street and across Queen to Fred Victor, the shelter at which he is living.  Nevertheless, he wound up conked out in a bus enclosure across the way.  The building was surrounded by fire trucks, cop cars, and news reporters and a second floor room was gutted and still smoldering.  D., the brief flame of I.’s around the time she took the broken bottle to her previous boyfriend’s neck, happened to be hanging out at the bus enclosure.

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The Idea of "Evil" and Animal Studies

Elsewhere, in a discussion about using the word evil in relation to factory farms, I brought up an incident from the class for high school students I taught a month or so ago. We had just finished watching the documentary "Death on a Factory Farm" (if HBO asks "HBO Canada or HBO USA," choose the latter) and I was trying to impress upon them a significant point: they needed to video of a pig being killed via hanging in order to proceed with animal cruelty charges. They didn't understand why the hanging was so important. The reason they needed to video of the hanging is, in simple terms, that if the practice is generally accepted, then it cannot by definition be cruel. Hence, regardless of how horrible generally accepted practices are, they are completely legal. So, just providing footage of gestation crates, of piglets being thrown up to ten feet into a cart, tossed by their tails or ears into the back of a school bus (what they used to move animals on the farm), segregating dying animals among themselves without food or water or medicine, not providing medical assistance to sick or injured animals, use of electric prods, etc. is not sufficient because these are the normal practices of all pig farms. Cruelty, under the law, requires exceptional cruelty. Thus, the investigation focused on getting footage of the favoured method of euthanasia on this farm: hanging pigs by chains from forklifts. Once I had established this point, the students wanted to know if the people working on the farm were evil - only an evil person would willingly act this way. I wasn't expecting that question and I wasn't sure how to proceed.

Now, this is important. In much animal rights/animal welfare literature, the concept of evil is strongly resisted, largely for rhetorical rather than theoretical reasons: if you are trying to convince someone to change the way they live their life, calling them evil is likely not especially productive. My first attempt to answer their question was to point out a series of incidents in the documentary: the defense lawyers and many locals attending the trials would routinely point out that these are radical animal rights activists coming in from California (the farm was in Ohio) to tell them how they should live their lives. They experienced the animal cruelty charges as an attack on their lifestyle. To an extent this is true. Afterall, most of the people in this community are farmers and all of them had come from farming families. Generations of their families had lived in this way. What they were doing - raising animals for slaughter - was completely normal to them as were the practices entailed in raising animals for slaughter. In effect, to accuse one of them of acting cruelly was to indict the entire community for being cruel and evil. This led the students to consider if evil was dependent upon one's standpoint: how could what they do seem evil to use but seem absolutely normal to them?

After this line of discussion, I tried pushing it a little further and asked them what would mean if the farmers - even the ones charged with animal cruelty - weren't evil. What if it is the system as a whole that is evil, but that the individuals themselves are not necessarily good or evil? The point here, in part, being that if they want to call the farmers evil and if they themselves eat meat, then there is a good chance that they are also evil. The students certainly didn't feel evil even though many of them ate meat, besides they would know - or so they thought - if they were evil or not.

I then pointed out that all of us have incredible capacities for violence and cruelty without even being aware that we are acting in violent and cruel ways. I told them about the Stanford prison experiment. The basic conclusion of the experiment is that so long as an authority is telling us to do it, we tend not to experience the action as evil or cruel. This, in turn, led to another unexpected development. A student who was Jewish - she had previously talked about kosher restrictions on her diet - said this sounded a lot like the Holocaust. I agreed with her that it did, but I didn't push the point. She went on to say that it was hard to call individual Germans evil and that it would be hard to distinguish between death camp guards and regular Germans, but that she also wanted to call the Holocaust as a whole one of the greatest evils ever perpetuated by humans against humans. I agreed with her: it is hard to say that every individual German suddenly became evil in 1933 and suddenly became normal again at the conclusion of the war. Given this, how are we to think about the Holocaust? Surely, we want to call it evil but doesn't that also mean that millions of regular, everyday Germans went into a decade long trance of ultimate evil and then came out as normal as ever? This hardly makes sense.

The conclusion they came to, it seems, is that we need to differentiate between "subjective evil" (the evil individual) and "objective evil" (the evil institution). People can operate within objective evil without themelves being subjectively evil. However, that does not mean that all people in an objectively evil system are more or less good - there are surely subjectively evil people too: those who derive a great deal of pleasure from cruelty. The advantage of this, they agreed, was that we could also talk about incidents of subjective evil admidst a generally objectively evil situation - Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, for instance.

The question they unfortunately never raised was the relation between the objectively evil institution of the factory farm and the rest of society: without the factory farm, societies as they currently exist could not exist. In order to consume nearly 60 billion animals annually worldwide, it is necessary to produce animals under factory conditions. Does that mean that if our societies cannot exist without these objectively evil insitutions that we ourselves are all subjectively evil?

The Idea of "Dominion" And Animal Studies

After putting it off for far too long, I've started to read Erica Fudge's Animal (2002). In the introduction she takes up the theme of Biblical dominion as a way to understand our "lived contradictions" in our relations to animals (e.g., how dogs and cats are pets, but cows and pigs are food). I'm sympathetic to the general argument: even if most people don't believe what is written in scripture regarding dominion, it remains the case that much - if not most - European and North American social, political, legal and cultural institutions are derived from Christian concepts. (Being Durkheimian on this point, I'd argue that all possible human institutions are in some sense 'religious' being based upon distinctions between the sacred and the profane and, internally to the sacred, between the pure and impure, all of which are upheld through a complex set of rituals called the cult; the point here is that the basic structure of the distinction between sacred and profane in Western cultures is 'Christian,' be it a religious or secular (e.g., liberalism, socialism, conservatism) form of 'Christianity.') She points to two particularly important passages, the original grant of dominion to Adam (1:28, which she does not explicitly discuss) and the naming of the animals by Adam at 2:19 (wrongly cited as 1:19 - poor copyediting!). She appears to give more importance to the latter than the former because she understands 2:19 to be an actualization of the power over animals that was merely manifest at 1:28. In the donation, dominion is given to Adam over the animals, but only at 2:19 does Adam exercise that power by naming the animals. In Fudge's interpretation, this naming reveals the inherent power of humans and the inherent powerlessness of animals. Humans can name themselves, but animals cannot. Scriptually, this seems questionable: Adam appears to be a generic term for "mankind" rather than a designation as a proper name; Adam too is unnamed when he gives names to animals. Hence, what we seem to have is a situation of the 'un-named naming the also un-named.' (Although there is a parallel that Fudge does not pursue: Eve is also named by Adam before he takes on Adam as a proper name for himself.) If Fudge is correct that is a name that gives a being substance, then Adam=mankind is at this point also an unsubstantial being. The result is that the world is populated with substantial beings (animals bearing names) and then there remains Adam=mankind who has not yet taken on a proper name for himself, either given to him by God or given to himself by himself. If she wants to extend naming as an exercise of power and names being that which gives a being substance, then she needs to account for why Adam=mankind remains ineffable and unsubstantial. After introducing the naming argument, Fudge comments:

An animal cannot think, we argue, and therefore it is down to us to think for it. If we firmly believed that a cow could think like us it would become very difficult to justify eating it. Instead, we decide that a cow can't think as we understand the term, and that it is therefore morally acceptable to eat the cow. In these terms, dominion is a claim for the human right - even duty - to treat animals as objects of use rather than as fellow subjects of the planet.

The consequence Fudge draws from naming is also at odds with what is recorded in scripture. Naming, she seems to argue, is what enables us to eat animals. The problem is that animals are not given to Adam as food in Genesis. However, immediately following the donation of dominion, God outlines what is permissible to eat:

Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.

It would seem that at the time of creation, humans and animals alike were vegans, being "given every green plant for food." This is confirmed when God brings Adam to the Garden of Eden,

You may freely eat of every tree of the garden.

Again, Adam is limited to the fruits of the trees. This leads to a new problem, what then does dominion mean if Adam cannot eat animals? We should recall that dominion is granted to Adam prior to the Fall. Consequently, Adam has no need of oxen to bear his yoke. Likewise, Adam has been instructed to eat the green plants. Hence, he has no need of chickens for eggs or cows for milk. Similarly, Adam is naken and does not realize his nakedness. Thus, he has no need of hides or furs for clothing. (And, when Adam and Eve do realize their nakedness, they do not cover themselves with furs or leathers, but with foliage.) The animals over which Adam has dominion have no value in use; they could not have been given to Adam for instrumental exploitation. Originary dominion must mean something else entirely and it certainly cannot be used as a foundation for the justification of exploitation. Indeed, it isn't until well after the Fall and the birth of Cain and Abel that humans begin to gather animals in flocks. Although, again, it isn't clear why Abel gathers sheep into flocks if there are no grounds for their use, except, perhaps, as wool for clothing. The short of it is that despite how we often proceed in "animal studies," blaming the exploitation of animals on Genesis is far more complex than it would otherwise appear.

Notes from the Long Sunday Beginning May 31, 2009

Entry 7 – June 1, 2009:  B. held his ace bandaged, right hand aloft as D. and I entered his über tiny room near the end of outreach.  Forty-five minutes later, our nurse E. arrived w/ A. and confirmed that it was broken below the first two fingers.  Whether he’d broken it against a wall or against a face was a matter of some dispute between B. and a manic Bd. who had been and continued to attend to his needs with terrifically abrupt movement and speech; B., however, managed fine, happy enough that she was just there.  B. had been to St. Mike’s hospital once already with no results, and, given his general hatred of doctors and hospitals, I doubted he’d go back without some real incentive.  E. and A. provided it.  He was shaking a good bit from the pain and because he hadn’t had a drink in two days.  I know that he has withdrawal seizures.  Four days, he replied, when I asked how long until they began.  He was also running short on an impressive list of medications he needs for his devastated liver and related ailments.  The former flyer in the Canadian Air Force has taken to drinking rubbing alcohol and listerine again.

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Notes from the Long Sunday Beginning May 24, 2009

Entry 4 – May 27, 2009: I made it back from 60 hours of retreat at an Anglican nunnery for 9:30 am prayer w/ L. and N.  J. is making progress after [recent events]; currently he is working for L. and W. on their third floor reconstruction project at home.  J. temporarily brightened the room, stopping by on the way into school.  Soon, however, I looked up from phone conversation with T.S. to see three of the enormous undercovers entering our drop-in yet again.  Bad blood instantly coursed through my veins.  They obliged as I escorted them outside, but when I again refused to help in their search for F. and informed them that they were not welcome back inside, especially without a warrant, they blanched.  Ignoring my insistence on the right of sanctuary, they pushed past me and hung around inside for five to ten minutes with no luck.  I requested and received their badge numbers (Randy Schertzen 48873, Peter Desjardin 7109, Andrew Lawson* 5048); the guy with the mouth* in the group refused anything other than a terse “Chief Bill Blair” in response to my query for the name of their supervisor.  A call quickly discovered that they are ROPE squaders, two provincial officers and one Toronto.

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IJZS: Zizek's response to Parker

The International Journal of Zizek Studies has posted Zizek's response to a story recounted by Ian Parker:

A SHORT CLARIFICATION
Slavoj Žižek

A new text by Ian Parker is circulating around the net (available, among other sites, at www.discourseunit.com/publications_pages/parker_papers/2004%20PINS%20Zizek.doc), which begins with the claim that, towards the end of the 1980s, when the Communist regime in Yugoslavia was in its death throes, I acted as a »commissar« monitoring and controlling dissident activity – here is the full paragraph:

»Let us start with a true story. In the middle of a crisis and crackdown in Slovenia toward the end of the 1980s Slavoj Žižek telephones an academic colleague in Britain late at night. This is before Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia and when the League of Slovene Communists was making some last desperate attempts to maintain power. The crackdown was directed at the opposition movement, in which Žižek and the artistic political grouping Neue Slowenische Kunst, were active. So, Žižek is on the phone during this political crisis in an agitated state. He tells his colleague how bad things are, that there is a total clampdown on the opposition. His colleague is sympathetic. Žižek goes on to tell him that things are even worse than that, for in every workplace a ‘commissar’ has been appointed to monitor and control dissident activity. His colleague is very sympathetic, even slightly alarmed by the picture Žižek is painting. And it is even worse than that, Žižek says, for even in the universities, in every department a commissar has been appointed to keep order. His colleague in Britain exclaims that this is indeed dreadful. And, Žižek then informs him that there is only one good thing in the midst of all this. What is that, his colleague asks. In my department, Žižek says, ‘I am the
commissar’.«

One should note the serious implications of these lines: I am accused of nothing less than being an informant of the Communist power against dissidents. Let me be as clear and unequivocal as possible: this »true story« is entirely false, everything in it is a lie. Not only was I never any kind of a »commissar,« I also never boasted – ironically or truthfully – via a phone – or any other – conversation that I am anything like that. The only thing to add is that anyone who knows a little bit about Slovenia in the late 1980s will immediately see that the »true story« doesn't make sense, for two obvious reasons. First, which »department« would be »mine«? In Yugoslavia, I was never employed at any university department - how could I then be active there as a »commissar«? Second, from (at least) the middle of 1980s, the Communist party effectively lost control over the employment politics at the university. At the Institute of Sociology where I was then formally employed (formally, since I already spent most of the time abroad), if a candidate for a job was suspected to be too closely linked to the Communist party circles, he had no chance of getting the job – at the end of the 1980s, to be »against« the regime was already a way to make a career!

(cross-posted from I Cite)

Notes from the Long Sunday Beginning May 17, 2009

Entry 1 – May 19, 2009:  Excerpts published in this month’s Harpers from Werner Herzog’s journals while he filmed in South America in the early eighties have inspired me to commit to short, fifteen minute entries each time I return home from … work over the course of the next year.  H. harangued staff at the Trinity Square Café as I ate lunch with I., a new street outreach volunteer, today.  “I am Satan,” H. menaced, as the cashier-manager attempted to shoo him out of the building.  She turned and instructed a co-worker to call 911 and his anger increased.  “You fucking demon bitch, calling the fucking cops …”  I sat and watched, knowing that entry into the situation would ratchet him up more, reserving the possibility of engagement against physical abuse.   (H. heckled me – “can you believe this asswipe, get some toilet paper” –  from the front row as I officiated my first memorial service a couple of months ago.  Only J.’s presence averted a complete disaster.) I circled the building to witness, advocate if necessary, with the police, but he was nowhere to be seen when they arrived.  I did, however, run into First Nations B. and his brothers …   B., whom I used to see often near King and Jordan, volunteered that he’d like to start coming to [our church] after what happened with St. Mike’s hospital and our advocacy there with respect to the beating by security guards of C. and D.  He was the relative they were visiting and says he will not be going to St. Mike’s hospital anymore. 

A. and E. recounted, in debriefing from their walk, seeing T. shit on the property at [our church].  

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Discipline and Punish

Following from Barret's post on interdisciplinarity, one might also wish to enquire into the problem of disciplinarity. In our case - Barret and I are both doctoral students in Canadian sociology departments - our professional association is engaged in a series of "professionalization" measures which, to be sure, are at once also disciplinary (in the sense of imposing discipline on those who call themselves sociologists or who study or teach or research in sociology departments) measures. This comes into close relief in two instances: first, changes to the structure and organization of our annual meeting and, second, larger arguments regarding the structure of the discipline in relation to other disciplines (this is external, boundary policing). In large part, this follows what from what is perceived as a 'coming crisis in English Canadian sociology' (for the most part, there is no communication between French language and English language sociologists in Canada - mostly because English Canadian sociologists can't be bothered to learn to read French and French Canadian sociologists have closer ties with other non-Canadian French language sociologists than they do with Canadian English language sociologists) premised upon the fact that most senior sociologists who presently dominate the discipline in Canada were more or less hired at the same time and will more or less retire at the same time, thus creating a power vacuum. The question, then, becomes what to do with sociology once the old guardians are gone.

For whatever reason, Canadian sociologists tend not to discuss these issues in public - our dirty laundry is aired in unread journals and unread newsletters. (For my part, I have a stack of unopened copies of the Canadian Review of Sociology, formerly the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. First boundary policing measure: cut off the few anthropologists who still participate in what was called the Canadian Sociological and Anthropological Association.) Other disciplines, such as English language philosophy, however, enjoy bringing their reasoned debates to the level of a visceral spectacle more commonly found in celebrity gossip blogs, such as the Superficial, and fully, openly and gleefully engage in disciplinary policing right out in the open. (It makes for great reading in the same way that the Superficial does.)

Now, I have no desire to revisit the tired question - fought mainly by those who already control the discipline of philosophy anyway - of analytic vs. continental philosophy and the apparent delegation of the latter into "literary" or "social" or "political" or "cultural" theory housed at the margins of other disciplines... (I am in a sociology department in large part because of two reasons: (1) political theory has a distinctive conservative slant in the major departments in Canada and (2) the generally insular, hostile and venomous atmosphere displayed in English language philosophy.) It seems, the philosophers just can help themselves: endless quantifying of "the most important" or "greatest" philosopher through online polls, endless quantifying of "the most important" or "best" journals, publishers and doctoral programs, and endless disputes over, say, political theory and philosophy. (See here replying to here; and here and here and here and here and here - you get the idea!) Other than reeking simple-minded aristocracy, what do these endless fights - fought mostly on one or two blogs but involving dozens of people - mean, if anything?

Note: I expect John Emerson to step up to the plate on this one.

Truer Words Never Spoken

Bernard Mandeville makes the following observation in the 'Preface' (1714) to his The Fable of the Bees, "every Moment must produce new Filth." Indeed, truer words have never been spoken.

Interdiscipline matters

 Coming from a small Arts and Sciences College in Canada the problem of discipline was never a big deal to me. I didn’t feel restrained by the so-called methodology of the discipline that I was part of, even though Sociology can be a bit of a bummer – it is pretty much mandatory that a method section precede your dissertation or thesis (and, no, 'I will read books and write on them' does not constitute a 'method'). I’m not sure how this plays out in philosophy or the study of languages, but I presume there is an equivalent to the obsession with method that characterizes the social sciences. That’s fine by me – I think it is important to get your metaphysics in order before moving on to analyzing a specific problem or set of issues. 

But my point in this post is to recall how liberating ‘interdisciplinarity’ was to me in my second or third year of studies. Interdisciplinarity had a liberatory ring to it – I was not restrained by discipline any longer! However, as I look back now, I realize that I wasn’t ‘restrained’ in the first place. Yes, the statistics courses were terribly boring (and there were many of them). They were basically irrelevant for what I wanted to do. Methodology didn’t seem very methodical but rather based on some quite elementary assumptions (the world presents normal curves, etc). But the college that I attended was open to students studying in a variety of areas, and it was even required as part of our mandatory course requirements. So, why did interdisciplinarity seem so radical and freeing?

Perhaps I could sense that the institutions were resistant to it and that's what made it feel sub-versive. For instance, in my current university students can enroll in the interdisciplinary program to work between, say, two or three departments. But what they really get is a run-around. The departments with which they are affiliated usually put the interdisciplinary students at the bottom of the list when it comes to funding, supervision, teaching assignments, RAs, etc. In a word, it is risky to be a part of an interdisciplinary research program because you can never be sure what lies around the corner. Precarity becomes the order of the day, which usually happens after the PhD, MA, or BA, not before it.

But, secondly, there has been a wider shift away from interdisciplinarity both at the institutional and individual levels. There is a growing concern about students having a lack of expertise in any one area and a rather summary understanding of a variety of disciplines. The main concern in this regard is that InterD. students have no expertise in particular and no one is really qualified to supervise them. This sort of complaint tends to come from faculty members and committee members who resist interdisciplinarity as being anything even resembling a ‘strength’. It is, on the contrary, a lack (of ‘rigour’, ‘discipline’, ‘strength’, and so on).

So, where does this leave us? Does interdisciplinarity still have a liberatory aspect to it? I suppose the answer would be ‘yes’, as in, interdisciplinarity leaves you free from big 'd' Discipline and thus free to starve…

Cross-posted at The Yolk blog.