The More-Than-Human Body

Throughout most of Western thinking, the body has been reduced to a thing, an object in the world like any other. Only recently was it recast as something far more: the root and expression of subjectivity. The first to push the conversation in this direction were maverick thinkers like James, Dewey and Nietzsche. Then, since the mid-20th century, the phenomenologists, feminists, and cognitive scientists have joined in. But the discourse they animated has been decisively limited. It mostly confines itself to a particular sort of body, that of the homo sapiens sapiens. This move results in inoculating us against relatedness to other bodied beings. At the same time, it has the effect of conceptualizing the body as a vehicle for human culture and spirit−for what continues to be seen as “more-than-animal.” In other words, the rethinking and revaluation of the body have served primarily to prop up a new humanism, to rehash an answer to the question of what it means to be human.

One the one hand, this approach can be understood as a necessary and desirable component in the struggle against the technoscientific effacement of the Subject. It is easier to protect a human essence from technological onslaught when it is neatly isolated from the inessential. On the other hand, such a division is compatible with the technical-instrumental attitude that dissects the world surrounding the Subject. In this sense, it helps to once more artificially delineate the human from the other animals. It facilitates the liquidation of the Nonhuman Subject that now proceeds at double speed, with humanism and technological reification holding hands. Meanwhile, the body and the somatic come to be conceptually grasped as the (back)ground for qualities that had long been praised not only as uniquely human but fetishized as evolution’s crowning achievement.

Reason, intelligence, and language, now seen as embodied, are largely reserved for the body seen as human. To the degree that our body is still called “animal,” it is mostly in tribute to the heritage of Darwin and to the scientific method in general. Indeed, mainstream thinking has it that the human is not really and not exactly an animal. Whatever the intentions behind such distancing from animality, some of the effects have been to: 1) ideologically uphold human domination in a deeply speciesist world, and 2) further take away from the humans’ animal joy of life. As a species, we have grown increasingly isolated, alone, and locked away from the world. Interspecies similarities and differences are found and acknowledged, but not to the end of establishing a pluralist appreciation. Even though more attention is given to our bodies, the fleshly commonality of all animals is seen as a residue of a discardable past. In its place unfolds a homogenizing exclusion of the Other, propelled by the latest twist in the narrative of human exceptionalism.

The specific organization of our bodily faculties supposedly makes us stand out, in many ways, from the other animals populating the earth. Standing out, we exist. Self-assured of our uniqueness, we can afford to look down on our animal kin. We unabashedly take ourselves to be a special case. This is not to say that we are not unique as these bipedal, large-brained animals. But looked at soberly, the specific features and feats constituting our uniqueness might not give us as much reason for celebration as most of us like to believe. The aspect of our organism that we abstract from its life and call “mind,” “soul,” or “spirit,” has long ago grown apart from the world. Since then, we have been unable to paste it back in. In fact, we see that very abstraction as the core of the uniquely human self. The human has been identified precisely with this prevailing sense of ego with all its purported characteristics of self-direction, self-determination, self-control. These were first understood as working over and above the flesh, and then−since the “corporeal turn”−through the flesh itself. What followed was a severe, sustained contraction of our organic being.

The constraints and pressures inflating the individual- and the culture-wide ego are all too real; the material, institutional, and discursive arrangements dominant in social life draw the atomistic ”I” out from the subconscious spontaneity of bodily life and into a prison of separation. In no particular order, the list of factors conducive to this state of affairs includes: manufactured and real scarcity coupled with a sense of fear before the future; the predominance of a regime of enforced and competitive work and a related experience of life as hurried and lost; sensory overload on the one hand and the boredom of isolation inside the four walls on the other; and accelerating privatization of space with the withering away of communal life. Many more items could be added but their detailed discussion is not the point here. These developments are generally recognized. The point is rather that, taken together as the inevitable of human progress, they may turn out to be our primary legacy.

Granted, there are practical improvements that soothe and sustain us. But at a systemic level they mainly serve to cushion our insertion into abstract, hostile structures that support and facilitate our alienation from the rest of nature, other beings, and one another. We are manipulated, often by forces that seem wholly impersonal, into deepening our existential predicament. At its civilized apogee, humanity is further than ever from a relatively harmonious way of being-in-the-world. Undeniably, humanity is an Empire. But at its heart is the individual who, increasingly steeped in a mass of faceless others, perseveres like a muscle in excruciating spasm.

Not everyone feels subjection to the demands of technocapitalist hegemony as keenly as the next person. Those of “higher” social standing will accuse me of exaggeration. But my conviction is that the comfort of the minority is built through a sustained, iron grip at the throats of the countless dispossessed. Despite their usual sedation with routine and their impressive powers of denial, even the beneficiaries subliminally tremble at the prospects of an increasing instability of (post)modern existence. Repressed anxiety simmers, feeding neurosis, until it is ripe to break out into the open.

In a tightly structured and technologically suffused system, we are not left to our own devices in seeking relief. As pathology after pathology is turned into a source of profit, the endlessly regurgitated, manufactured fad of instant gratification is proposed as one of the antidotes to lurking psychic strain and numbness. The pressures of daily life mount, so the culture industry has an easier job pushing shabby trips to replace the lost sensitivity of animal presence. The only thing it can offer here and is the commodity up for consumption, and with flashy packaging.

Good in themselves but poor as substitutes of a blooming animality−music, art, sports, comedy, tourism, and more− become professionalized and standardized, cut up into bite-size pieces and sold. For good measure, pills are thrown into the mix as a shortcut to the desired results. But both because they are sham, and because our insatiability is carefully cultivated, we are left perpetually dissatisfied with these quick fixes. Instead of the promised relief and release from the burden of our cumbersome ego-self, we feel our sensorial numbness amplified, and experience an absence from experience. Or we take another hit not to experience that, either. As we resign ourselves to illusory gratification and remain oblivious to the animality suppressed within, our life energies only become more dispersed.

We also end up with a distorted view of spontaneity, play and animality. Spontaneity is simultaneously desired and lost. Reduced into an object of striving, ever-elusive and chased after, it is delayed and inadvertently pushed out of reach. In turn, in the eyes of many, play comes to be equated with Dionysian frenzy: adrenalin must flow! Until one has gone mad, one has not played. Without the background of a deadening form of life, one would have no reason to think so. Animality itself is devalued into either dumb play or grim toil. In fact, as sustained observation of the myriad other animals by ethologists shows, it extends well beyond both. Other animals hardly ever fail to attend to their vital needs, of which play is in many cases a major component. Before consigning them to the “realm of necessity,” one should take a long look at how they play and leisurely enjoy themselves. In fact, the boundary between “work” and “play” in other animals’ lives is often impossible to demarcate. This may be seen as one of the hallmarks of free animality.

With our own lives becoming ever more compartmentalized, we used to look to the other animals for some sense of our own animality. However, these days we seldom have the time, patience, attentiveness, or humility to actually notice what the pigeons and the squirrels are doing. The animals considered pets would be our next stop. But while they remain a source of joy, companionship, and love to their caregivers, many of them have been made too dependent and too cut off from their original lives to give us a sense of freedom that developed animality brings. Just think of leashes, collars, and chains on dogs’ necks. And more species are en route in the same direction. People already keep cats indoors their entire lives or walk them on a leash.

The zoo, as always and by definition, offers not free play and spontaneity but artifice, plain and simple. It both mirrors, and makes more difficult to notice, the cages in which we lock ourselves away: the barren contours of the technoworld. We also used to be able to relearn bits and pieces of animal spontaneity from our children. The sense of regaining something lacking, something that was lost, seems to be part of the fascination of adults with childhood and children in general. But as some able writers have argued, childhood is fast disappearing as children are becoming more and more like adults. The earlier they start to speak, count, and read, the better. Their time becomes increasingly structured and organized by professionals, their play turns into planned, supervised recreation. And recreation fuels, and is organized around, improved performance. In this way, children gradually subordinate their playful impulses to the technical attitude.

The path out of this rut requires a gut realization that this body is more than human, that it is not just a basis for abstract conceptualizations, not merely a necessary foundation for a departure into disembodied realms of technical and contemplative prowess, and not an just an object of utilitarian considerations. Reduced to an appendage of the machine, the body-as-subject suffers and withers away. Humanism has been insufficient to make sense of this and appreciate its devastating consequences. It consecrated culture and set it off against technology, forgetting that both are constructs that rip us out of the immediacy of worldly being. Questions dealing with our animality may suggest more desirable avenues for the difficult task of somatological revival. Until they supersede those of our humanity, we are likely to remain animals at war with ourselves, the world, and our own technological constructs.

If the abstraction of the human from the animal continues to be analytically useful at all, if we had to take sides on that sort of ground, we would do well with a short confession. It is the body that sustains itself through its assumedly human essence, and not the other way around. It is when, under pressure of material and cultural circumstance, the body uses its mind against itself, that things go awry. Otherwise, the body “in its big reason does the I”−as Nietzsche said−for its own sake and those around it. It is vulnerable and frail, the bemoaned house of pain. But it is also powerful, Nietzsche’s mighty ruler. It permits but does not ask permission. Its voice is expressed and heard as limits, needs, desires, and instincts, thoughts and as ego itself. It not only holds the key to all experience, conscious and unconscious. This sentient, sensible body is experience itself.

But only by transcending the mind/body dichotomy will we be able to appreciate anew the relative coherence and sanity of animal life. One can pay lip service to animality, one can call us homo sapiens sapiens, designate a slot for us in a taxonomic scheme, and forget about the whole thing. But if we truly are an animal species, and if hardship and tragedy constitute an unavoidable side of animal life, then it might just be better to face reality as an animal reconciled with its various dimensions rather than one in denial. Out of a sense of opposition between the animal and the human and between the body and mind, we have been driving a wedge into our sensitive flesh, attempting to break out of ourselves in the name of an ethereal sort of autonomy. But the human is not the opposite, or the other side, of the animal. It is but an extension. And not, as some would like to believe, a “vertical” one, offering an escape route up to the heavens. Rather, it unfolds “horizontally,” leaving us immersed along with all the other animals in the surrounding ecologies and the dirt, pain, and joys of carnal life.

These considerations are intended as a mere fragment of a slowly sprouting, larger whole. As others before me, I mean to suggest that it is necessary to reevaluate the dominant worldview that has 1) crippled the human, 2) granted it phony, undeserved nobility, and 3) sentenced a multitude of other animals to misery in the wake of human supremacy. Such rethinking requires theory to work with, around, and against the abstractions in which we have become immersed, sacrificing the sensuous dimensions of our animal natures. But the impulse for the revaluation of animality does not originate in theory and should not end there. To leave the matter on paper would be to betray it and to further betray ourselves. These thoughts emerge from, and refer back to, practical, daily life, and only there can truly be animated. As such, they call for a gradual yet radical transformation. A longing matures in many of us for conditions of life that would allow for real simplicity, immediacy, presence, empathy, and wisdom. At present, the options for those who feel at odds with the current order are few: some accommodate and buy into the sham substitutes, others subsist at the margins, hoping to be spared as the machine presses on. Most attempt to navigate between these two poles. But this more-than-human body wants something else altogether. It hears the truth of a different life.

Gravando el Moderno Sistema Mundial (Spanish Version of Taxing the Modern World-System)

Que el estado moderno está bajo asedio no es novedad. Por un lado es presionado por la ciudadanía y la excluida no-ciudadanía, y por el otro es embestido incesantemente por la riqueza y el azote corporativo dirigido hacia las políticas públicas. Todos los que ya están en el juego quieren ser servidos de mejor manera, y los que no, esperan en fila ser admitidos. La crisis entera es la acumulación de antiguos problemas no resueltos, históricamente enraizados en los principios, mayoritariamente no reconocidos, de dominación y alienación que subyacen bajo el proyecto de la modernidad; síndrome de un portador de procesos sistemáticamente arraigados y omnipresentes. Se podría creer que algo así requiere de una respuesta exhaustiva.

Y aún así, todo esto es notoriamente enmarcado en términos monetarios y se concentra alrededor de huecos presupuestarios y aquello que ordinariamente les sirve de parche, vale decir, los impuestos. Cuando es requerido un aumento en la entrada de los ingresos públicos, no parece haber escasez de excéntricas y resucitadas ideas sobre qué gravar. Es un atroz fenómeno  que podemos observar una vez que hemos superado la actitud de “no es realmente mi problema de ninguna forma directa”. La única razón por la que también es chistoso es porque se tiene la posibilidad de observar los graduales y superficiales remiendos de un sistema que está fallando de forma fundamental, no siendo capaz ya de posponer su inevitable colapso, como hizo de forma tan trágicamente maravillosa en el pasado. Su presente engaño no es más que la extensión e intensificación de su normal funcionamiento.

La edición de hoy de un periódico local gratuito (gratuito pero envuelto y colonizado por publicidad insoportable) cuenta con una interesante sección al respecto. La lista de cosas/actividades a ser gravadas, compuesta por ejemplares fraguados por miembros de distintas facciones partidistas y de gobierno, incluye lo siguiente: ―vehículos antiguos, ―no tener hijos, ―impuesto al sistema de drenaje de aguas lluvia, ―ser propietario de departamentos y casas, ―basura, ―conducir un vehículo privado, ―ingresar al centro de la ciudad en vehículo, ―recoger champiñones en el bosque, ―retirar dinero desde un cajero automático, ―visitar la estación de trenes. Ahora bien, me abstendré de explicar qué significan en cada caso, y sólo propondré que puede ser que su bizarra naturaleza surja, en parte, del hecho de que estamos hablando de Polonia. O tal vez no. Después de todo, Polonia es nada más un país semiperiférico en el moderno sistema mundial, que materializa la destructiva dinámica que éste arrastra en su marea cargada de polifacéticos imperativos de capital, tecnología y poder político. Es difícil siquiera enumerar detalladamente todos los frentes, relacionados entre sí, en los que hemos sido tomados como rehenes. En vez de ello, déjame preguntarte ¿qué es lo que llamas un sistema social, en uno en el cual lo que sea que hagas, cualesquiera sean las políticas que tomes y sus direcciones, las cosas sólo empeoran?

Se solicita no usar el auto. No, eso sería genial ―al menos nos estaríamos moviendo en la dirección correcta. Pero es un paso que es imposible tomar sin una reestructuración más amplia del orden social, y que nadie cargará sobre sus hombros. En vez de eso, se pide utilizar “menos” el auto, o usar uno nuevo. Nuevamente incorrecto. Todo lo que se requiere es pagar por ello, para que el gobierno pueda de esta forma prolongar su irracionalidad. El capital sólo se propagará a sí mismo por doquier. E incluso, si a uno realmente se le pidiera conducir menos, ¿qué más ridículo, en un sistema erigido sobre la propiedad privada y la atomización social? Las disposiciones sociales y de infraestructura están construidas para el transporte privado de tal forma que uno llega a pensar con razón que necesita tener un vehículo. Y eso sin siquiera mencionar el ethos y la realidad en la cual ser dueño de un auto y usarlo se convierte en una segunda naturaleza, aunque sea sólo para transportar el propio trasero a una clase de aeróbica.  La más reciente preferencia polaca ha sido utilizar un utilitario[1] para ese fin. ¡Ah, la prosperidad!

Tal vez solamente cuando comiences a pagar impuestos para evitar sobrepoblar el planeta aún más con personas que terminarán cautivas en ciudades, subordinadas a regímenes alienantes y a un invasivo sentimiento de vacío, y que se convertirán en intolerantes extraños el uno para el otro, quizás sólo entonces comenzarás de verdad a ver el absurdo en todo esto.

¿Qué? ¿Acaso escucho que dices que treintaytantos millones de personas en mi país no son tantos? Por supuesto que existen otras áreas en el mundo mucho más devastadoramente sobrepobladas. Claro que hay lugares más absurdos que éste o aquél ¿Pero acaso tal vez no somos los más aptos para estar confinados a estas auto-impuestas celdas de cuatro paredes, rodeados por millones de desconocidos hacia los cuales no exhibimos interés alguno más que mediante gestos meramente simbólicos, ya que seguramente no podemos conectar con ellos de ninguna forma real, directa, sentida?

¿Puede ser que no seamos los indicados para ser sepultados bajo la masa anónima a la que nos sentencia, inmisericorde, la sociedad de masas? ¿Tal vez tampoco lo somos para escapar del sinsentido de la realidad real hacia el aislamiento de una realidad virtual?

El moderno sistema mundial colapsa y el sueño moderno de control se erosiona junto a él.

Quizás sea el momento de reconocer ―en vista de la primacía de nuestra naturaleza corporal por sobre el discurso que se abstrae de su Carne― que debemos enfrentarnos cara a cara con lo que realmente importa. Ahora bien, tal vez no sea posible expresar en palabras qué es esto. Es siempre más inmediato y más íntimo de lo que las palabras pueden capturar.

Translated into Spanish by Maria Jesus, proofreading by Federico Alfredo Berghmans. Thanks a million, guys!

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[1]    Traducción de “S.U.V.” para vehiculos familiares.

Taxing the Modern World-System

That the modern state is under siege is no news. One the one hand it is pressured by the citizenry and the excluded non-citizenry, on the other there’s the incessant onslaught of wealth and the corporate scourge on public policy. Everyone wants to be serviced better if they are already in the game or else they stand in line waiting to be admitted. The whole crisis is an accumulation of old, unsolved problems, historically rooted in the mostly unacknowledged principles of domination and alienation underscoring the project of modernity, syndrome of a host of processes systemically-entrenched and all-pervasive. One would imagine it requires a comprehensive response.

And yet it is notoriously framed in monetary terms and centers around budgetary holes and what these are customarily patched up with, that is, taxes. When increased inflow of revenue is called for, there turns out to be no shortage of both outlandish and resurrected ideas on what to tax. It’s an excruciating phenomenon to observe once one goes past the “it’s not really my business in any direct sort of way” attitude. The only reason it is hilarious as well is that one has a chance to witness the ridiculous piecemeal tinkering with a system that is failing in a fundamental way, no longer able to postpone its inevitable collapse of which it did such a tragically marvelous job in the past. Its present delusion is merely an extension and intensification of its normal functioning.

Today’s edition of a local free (free-of-charge-except-that-it’s-wrapped-in-and-colonized-by-unbearable-ads) paper has an interesting piece about just that. The list of things/activities to be taxed, made up of items concocted by members of different governing and party bodies, includes the following: — old cars, — no children, — rain tax, –own apartment and house, — garbage, — driving a private car, — entering the city center in a car, — gathering mushrooms in the forest, — withdrawal of cash from ATM, — visiting the train station. Now, I will refrain from explaining what they mean in each case, and just proffer a proposition that their bizarre nature might in part stem from the fact that we are talking about Poland here. Maybe not, though. After all, Poland is merely a semi-peripheral country of the modern world-system, playing out the latter’s destructive dynamic as it comes with the tide, charged with multifaceted imperatives of capital, technology, and political power. It’s hard to even enumerate in detail all the interrelated fronts on which we have been taken hostage. Instead, let me ask what you call a social system in which whatever you do, whatever policy steps you take, things get worse?

One is asked not to use a car. No, that would be great–at least more of a move in the right direction. But it’s a step impossible to take without a broader restructuring of the social arrangements, and that nobody will take on their shoulders. One is asked, rather, to use the car “less,” or a newer car. Wrong again. One is just asked to pay for it so the government can prolong its irrationality. Capital will just propagate itself all around it. Even if one was really asked to drive less, how ridiculous is that in a system built around private property and social atomization? The social-infrastructural arrangements are built for private transportation in such a way that one comes to think rightly that one needs to own a car. Not to mention the ethos and reality in which owning and using a car becomes second nature, if only to drive one’s butt to a fitness class? The recent Polish preference has been to use SUVs to that end. Ah, the prosperity!

But maybe it is only when you start paying taxes for not overpopulating the planet further with more people who’ll come to be locked up in cities, subordinated to alienating regimes and an encroaching feeling of emptiness, who will become intolerable strangers to one another, maybe then you really start to see the absurdity of it all.

What? Do I hear you saying that thirtysomething million people in my country is not that many? Of course there are more devastatingly overpopulated areas in the world. Of course there are places more absurd than this or that one. But maybe we are not best suited to being confined to the self-imposed cells of the four walls, surrounded by millions of strangers whom we couldn’t exhibit care for except through purely symbolic gestures because we surely cannot relate to them in any real, felt, direct way?

Maybe we are not suited to being engulfed in an anonymous mass to which mass society unforgivingly sentences us? Maybe we are not suited to escaping from the nonsense of real reality into the isolation of a virtual one?

The modern world-system is collapsing and the modern dream of control erodes with it. Maybe it is time to recognize that–in view of the primacy of our bodily nature over discourse abstracted from its Flesh–we are to stand face-to-face with what matters. Just what that is perhaps cannot be put into words. It is always more immediate and more intimate than words could grasp.

The Basics of GMO, or On Technology On the Loose

Last night on Polish television (names of people and stations unimportant) a PAN[1] professor met with a popular opponent of the legalization of GMO in Poland. The conversation consisted in a continued back-and-forth of arguments based on scientific findings, fresh and so predominantly still controversial. Both of the gentlemen was entirely predictable in hiding beneath the mantle of science and a prima facie acceptance of the gallop of technology.

The debate concerning the introduction of GMO to Poland, underway for a few years and meant to make it seem as though ghastly busy society really had a say on the matter of technology’s invasion into the heart of the everyday, is confined in narrow boundaries.

The guests of the evening show didn’t feel like undertaking a critique stemming from an observation that is as simple as it is profound, namely that, as usual, the debate regards not “whether” but “how,” taken as givens,  technologization, technicization, standardization, and disciplinization of life will proceed. In other words, that life is uncompromisingly saturated with technology, that it is reduced to an instrument for the implementation of adequate procedure, that in consequence it becomes flat, typical, more governable and manipulable, all of that was left to silence; TV is no place for such philosophical hokum.

If adulthood is equivalent to the death of wonder, we are adults through and through, with very few of us–the “immature” and the unadjusted–remaining flabbergasted. For it has been known since the dawn of modernity sometime around the 17th century that Change in unavoidable. Even that foster-child of privilege and lifelong eulogist for the status quo, the conservative, has known for ages. We are condemned to change, and while it is in fact effected with our own overworked hands, the driving force behind it is elevated far over our heads and to the level of alien, abstract, bureaucratic and scientifically conceived systems that see in us something akin to a malleable and passive biological mass, and that administer an ever-broadening scope of our lives. Such obvious violation should at the very least make one wonder. Kierkegaard said that while ideas can be systematized, life can not. But it turns out it can, albeit at the cost of its gradual immiseration.

GMO is a typical case, another compromise on the part of our fantastically complex, feeling and thinking bodies, another step along the road to a destination unknown–it can be known only that it’s a place where one would in vain look for individual autonomy and freedom, that it’s a place from which all mystery has been banished and there is no room for what cannot be replicated, that everything tastes the same and that nobody knows our name, because there we have accepted serial numbers as our own. In Erich Fromm’s words from The Autonomy of Human Destructiveness, “‘Civilized’ man has always lived in the ‘Zoo’−i.e., in various degrees of captivity and unfreedom−and this is still true.”[2] And perhaps more so in technologically the most advanced societies than anywhere else. There has yet been no police that would interrogate in a way that the technoscientific complex interrogates nature, including the nature of our modest and fragile freedom. Last night PAN’s representative resented the fact that the average Polish citizen does not know that crop plants have DNA at all, as if it was his god-given duty to know that, and if not knowing was a transgression against common sense. But Sajay Samuel, a professor at Penn State University, asks:

“Should we be understanding nature in this way?.. ‘Is there too much or too little science, or scientific ways of knowing?’ is a perfectly legitimate question. And there is no scientific answer to that… The muteness, the silence of science to the question posed of its own legitimacy shows that there is a higher authority… It is through our senses that we apprehend the world. The senses are also the way we are tethered to what is given, and we cannot find our nature unless we acknowledge our naturalness which is shared with the world around us… unless we remain tied to the world, our fingers, as it were, plunged into the soil, we will forever mistake our nature.”[3]

We have let ourselves be made to think that advanced technology is an imperative. We have not been told why. With all the force of mediatized spectacle we have accepted merely a vague conviction that, one way or another, it will warrant our “salvation,” albeit a salvation framed in quotation marks and lacking a capital “S.” We have also come to believe we are held hostage by it–unable to break free, if only for reason that the continued “stability” of the global economy lives and dies with incessant innovation and proliferation of new technologies. Put more simply–and this one will not hear learn from TV–that it is one of the last remaining avenues for capitalist economy to foster for itself attractive capital accumulation opportunities.

Therefore, if it is true that the march of technology constitutes an imperative, then one must realize that if no substantive basis for the introduction of GMO could be established, the reasons would have to be manufactured.

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[1] Polish Academy of the Sciences

[2] E. Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York/Chicago/London: Holt, Reinhard and Winston 1973, 103.

[3] CBC Radio Ideas: How to Think About Science, emphasis mine.

GMO od podstaw, czyli o technologii bez końca

Wczoraj w telewizji polskiej (nazwy stacji i nazwiska osób nieistotne) profesor PAN spotkał się z popularnym przedstawicielem opozycji wobec legalizacji upraw GMO (genetycznie modyfikowanych) w Polsce. Kontynuowano przerzucanie się argumentami opartymi na naukowych, świeżych jeszcze i dlatego kontrowersyjnych, doniesieniach. I jeden, i drugi pan w zupełnie przewidywalny sposób nakrył się płaszczykiem nauki i wyjściową akceptacją galopu technologii.

Debata dotycząca wprowadzenia GMO w Polsce, tocząca się od kilku lat i mająca sprawiać wrażenie, jakoby zabiegane społeczeństwo miało coś do powiedzenia w kwestii wtargnięcia technologii do serca codzienności, zamknięta jest w wąskich ramach. Goście wieczornego programu nie mieli ochoty na krytykę wynikającą z prostej acz przebogatej w konsekwencje obserwacji nakazującej dostrzec, że debata dotyczy jak zwykle nie tego “czy powinny”, ale “jak będą” postępować brane za pewnik technologizacja, technicyzacja, standardyzacja, dyscyplinizacja życia. Innymi słowy to, że jest ono bezkompromisowo nasycane technologią, że zostaje sprowadzone do instrumentu wdrożenia odpowiedniej procedury, że w konsekwencji staje się płaskie, typowe, dające się łatwiej zarządzać i manipulować, zostało przemilczane; nie miejsce na takie filozoficzne dyrdymały w telewizji.

Jeśli dorosłość jest równoznaczna z zanikiem zdziwienia, jesteśmy dorośli na wskroś i tylko nieliczni–”niedojrzali” i niewdrożeni–pozostają w osłupieniu. A przecież od zarania nowoczesności koło XVII wieku wiadomo, że Zmiana jest nieunikniona. Wie o tym już od wieków nawet ten wychowanek przywileju i dozgonny piewca status quo, konserwatysta. Jesteśmy na zmianę skazani i o ile na dobrą sprawę przeprowadza się ją naszymi spracowanymi rękami, siła sprawcza wyniesiona jest do rangi obcych nam, abstrakcyjnych, biurokratycznych i naukowo opracowanych systemów, widzących w nas coś na kształt ciągliwej i biernej biologicznej masy, i zawiadujących coraz większym zakresem naszego życia. Takie oczywistości powinny co najmniej zastanawiać. Kierkegaard powiedział, że w przeciwieństwie do idei, życia nie sposób systematyzować. Okazuje się, że można–kosztem jego stopniowego wynędznienia.

GMO to przypadek typowy, kolejny kompromis ze strony naszych fantastycznie złożonych, czujących i myślących ciał, jeszcze jeden krok na drodze nie wiadomo dokąd–wiadomo jedynie, że to miejsce w którym na próżno szukać autonomii i wolności jednostki, wiadomo, że wygnano wszelkie tajemnice i nie ma miejsca na to, czego nie da się zreplikować, wiadomo, że wszystko smakuje tak samo i wiadomo, że nikt nie zna naszych imion, bo sami daliśmy oznaczyć się numerem seryjnym. Jak pisze Erich Fromm w Anatomii ludzkiej destruktywności, “człowiek ‘cywilizowany’ zawsze żył zamknięty w ‘Zoo’–to jest żył w różnym stopniu w niewoli i zniewoleniu–i wciąż tak jest”[1]. I być może jest to prawdą dla najbardziej technologicznie zaawansowanych społeczeństw, niż dla jakichkolwiek innych. Nie było jeszcze policji, która indagowałaby tak, jak kompleks techno-naukowy przesłuchuje naturę, włącznie z naturą naszej skromnej i kruchej wolności. Przedstawiciel PAN żalił się wczoraj, że przeciętny człowiek nie zdaje sobie sprawy, że rośliny uprawne w ogóle mają DNA, jak gdyby był to jego boży obowiązek, a wykroczenie pokrewne było wykroczeniu przeciwko zdrowemu rozsądkowi. Ale profesor Pennsylvania State University Sajay Samuel pyta:

“Czy w ogóle powinniśmy pojmować naturę w ten sposób?.. ‘Czy jest za dużo lub za mało nauki albo naukowych sposobów poznania [świata]?’ jest w zupełności uzasadnionym pytaniem. Na to pytanie nie ma naukowej odpowiedzi… Cisza, milczenie nauki w kwestii jej własnej prawowitości wskazuje, że istnieje tu wyższy sąd… To przez nasze zmysły pojmujemy świat. Zmysły są również sposobem, na który jesteśmy spętani z tym, co jest nam dane i nie możemy odnaleźć swojej natury, jeśli nie uznamy wpierw swojej naturalności, wspólnej nam i światu wokół nas… jeśli nie pozostaniemy przywiązani do świata, z palcami zapuszczonymi głęboko w ziemię, zawsze będziemy się mylić co do swojej natury”[2].

Daliśmy się przekonać, że zaawansowana technologia to imperatyw. Nie powiedziano nam czemu. Siłą medialnego spektaklu wbito nam do głów  jedynie niewyraźne przekonanie, że w ten czy inny sposób doprowadzi do naszego “zbawienia”, choćby ujętego w cudzysłów i pisanego małą literą. Przekonano nas też, że jesteśmy jej zakładnikiem–nie możemy się z niej wycofać choćby dlatego, że “stabilność” gospodarki światowej zależy od nieustannej innowacji i rozpowszechnienia nowych technologii. Mówiąc wprost–czego już w telewizji nie usłyszymy–że to jeden z ostatnich frontów, gdzie gospodarka kapitalistyczna może stwarzać atrakcyjne dla siebie okazje do akumulacji kapitału.

Jeśli więc jest prawdą, że marsz technologii to imperatyw, to trzeba zdać sobie sprawę, że gdyby nie było żadnych merytorycznych podstaw wprowadzenia GMO, powody trzeba byłoby sfabrykować.

---

[1] E. Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York/Chicago/London: Holt, Reinhard and Winston 1973, 103, tłum. własne.

[2] CBC Radio Ideas: How to Think About Science, wyróżnienie moje.

PDF of “Fragments of an Animalist Politics” available!

You can download a nicely put-together version of the essay at http://www.mediafire.com/?wydfw97tulp2pnr for more comfortable reading. Feel free to share wherever you like.

It has also been uploaded to http://ferae-naturae-xvx.blogspot.gr/2012/12/fragments-of-animalist-politics.html and http://www.scribd.com/doc/117372198/Fragments-of-an-Animalist-Politics-Veganism-and-Liberation

Now the essay awaits its Greek translation.

Thanks, George!

Everybody Just Wants To Do Their Job

Everybody just wants to do their job and go about their day. No one wants to get their hands dirty, and least of all the functionaries of liberal institutions. This attests once more to liberalism’s inability to cope with the problems at hand. The enormous shitload of problems that will only knock on our door louder and louder. The right is forever ready to hold a gun as the universal solution but, you know, fuck them… that’s a band-aid, a short term solution building up the problems in the long term. Here the liberal’s evasion and the conservative’s “order” come together in postponing real solutions. The critique and the action must run deep enough. I can’t count the cases to which this applies.

Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating and then feign shock or pretend to be surprised. For all the pretence, the violence erupting now in schools, now at the front, now in this or that explosion lies at the heart of our civilization… Anger and outrage cannot be suppressed or tamed forever. Not with force, not with promises. It is the time–and it has come despite all our hopes and fears–to forget normalcy and face up to what is ahead, and it won’t be pretty. We no longer have a choice. Even though tomorrow we will wake up and go to work just like any other day, those of us who have a job to hide behind, the world we have helped shape will come to reap what we have sown. It will come to claim what belongs to it as the counterfinality of liberalism, capitalism, progress, and civilization. And none of the old solutions will prevent it.

Fragments of an Animalist Politics: Veganism and Liberation

This is an essay developed from a post previously published here. It was solicited by George from Greece, to be made available there as a pamphlet for vegan activists. I will try to make a print-ready version available with the hope that anyone interested can proliferate the text wherever they see fit: animalist gatherings, conferences, protests, whatever. Meanwhile, it will also be published in an anthology of essays in Critical Animal Theory in Canada, edited by Professor John Sorenson from Brock University. Thanks George for encouraging me to write this, as well as to John for suggesting we get it published. Thanks also to Arianna Ferrari, Scott Hurley, John Sanbonmatsu, Federico Berghmans, and Loredana Loy for their invaluable suggestions, corrections, and criticism. The following should turn out to be the final version. Thank you for continuing to visit this archive. Keep coming back!

Fragments of an Animalist Politics: Veganism and Liberation

Both animal oppression and liberation are embedded deep in the structures and habits of industrial society. Its geographically, economically, and historically varied patterns do not easily lend themselves to generalization. They require assessment that will account for differences in economic situation, balance of political power, inclinations of the people involved directly, and those comprising the more detached “public.” The risk one runs in abstracting from significant contextual variables is that of becoming suspended in a vacuum of vague and practically useless concepts.

But today the capitalist world-economy is strengthening its grip over the totality of social reproduction; it brings almost every conceivable area of human activity under its aegis, promoting uniformity subjected to optimal rates of capital accumulation. Increasingly subsumed into a singular structure, differences become ones of degree rather than of essence. This makes big-picture analysis not only possible but necessary. Therefore I assume the following query to be valid and reasonable under most contemporary conditions of liberationist activism: is it sufficient to advocate veganism−the personal practice whereby one forgoes the use of animal products whenever practicable−in order to effect lasting change in the relationship of humans vis-à-vis other animals? Or are there structural forces underpinning individual choice that have the power to nullifiy the efficacy of vegan advocacy? Is the focus on veganism inherently liberatory, or does it require allocation within a broader framework to have socially transformative effects?

§Three Degrees of Insufficiency

Animal liberation is not an uncontested goal among activists. Many continue to struggle simply for so-called animal welfare. Some do so because they fail to see that animal husbandry−behavioral manipulation, breeding, captivity−constitutes abhorrent slavery. Face to face, pushed hard enough, they will confess to believing that it is possible to be both fundamentally unfree and “happy.” But isn’t this a mere shadow of a fulfilled life?

As reformists, they have no good reason either to be vegan or to promote veganism, settling instead for what amounts to a mere loosening of the proverbial shackles put on other animals. The fundamental structure of animal exploitation is left unquestioned, unchallenged, untouched. Underlying the reformist project is a series of convictions. To note only some, it is said that 1) the evils of animal oppression ought not to be exaggerated. Bigger cages, some pasture, less antibiotics, more daylight etc., et voilà−a happy horse, pig, hen. One has a feeling that reformists fail to see past the reductionist stereotypes of other animals as reflex-driven, one-dimensional feeding/breeding machines. Traces of their resistance to oppression are routinely erased.[1] But even numbed-down by ages of domestication, animals do not accept their oppressive condition other than through learned helplessness. Meanwhile, there is a frenzied, mechanized giant claiming the lives of billions upon billions of animals year by year. On the face of it, nothing is an exaggeration.

Next, it is claimed that 2) the system is too pervasive to be abolished. Perhaps, but no one can say so without profound, long-term experimentation with radical alternatives. Besides, there is something about radical activism that clearly transcends rational calculation. Radicalism has a distinctly wild side, borne out of outrage at oppression and, in a sense, bigger than life itself. It is deeply embedded in our animal natures which, unrepressed, cannot bear standing idly by and doing nothing in face of suffering.

Relatedly, it is held that 3) radicalism is dangerous, whereas gradual change is safe. I can only reiterate that one is not doing activism for a sense of security; the job involves significant risk. However, if it’s dangerous to struggle for liberation, it is only because of how unfree other animals, and we ourselves, are. We’re being pushed into a corner, gradually stripped of our rights to protest this lamentable condition. It’s fine to invoke Dr. King, remade into a harmless myth, but Trotsky is off limits. Seen in this light, the next thesis sounds as ludicrous as it should, namely that 4) we all work towards the same end. Clearly, we do not. We don’t all accept systematic animal exploitation as something to merely tinker with. In fact, it is important for liberationists who, by definition, strive for paradigm-shifting emancipation, to disidentify from the reformists. Only by doing so can we pressure them into explaining why they go bankrupt before oppression, and persuade them into taking a stronger stance.

Right after the traditional reformists on this confused scene come the neo-reformists,[2] who declare animal liberation as their goal but whose actions diverge from it every step of the way. Increasingly succumbing to co-optation by animal exploitation businesses, their self-description is reduced to a hodge-podge of superficially radical slogans. It is as if their operations are reflexively accompanied by a wink: “this is not for real.” Animal enterprises and the public seem to understand; activists often don’t. PETA is a quintessential example, with the main thrust of its activity exhibiting an attention-hungry attitude directed at mediatization, and neutralized through the loss of any kind of oppositional momentum beyond the sensationalist spectacle. The spectacle is one of appearances of liberation in the very midst of slavery. Meanwhile, deals are made, such as with KFC Canada, whereby exploiters transition to more efficient methods of killing chickens.[3] Before a counter-argument arises, let me insist on a simple truth: there is no humane routine killing of animal slaves destined from their birth to become a chicken nugget. To suggest otherwise is to confuse victory with misery.

Other organizations follow suit by conducting promotional campaigns in co-operation with industry’s corporate players. The campaigns are aimed at negotiating a compromise with animal exploiters. As with the Peta-KFC case, they result in win-win-lose situations. The minor changes in exploitation they bring about are beneficial to the industry in that they introduce technological innovation and make exploitation more profitable. Additionally, animal products now bear the stamp of a “radical animal organization’s” approval. That is the first winner. Next, the organization can boast success in bringing about “realistic” change, and use the argument to get donations from a concerned yet largely ignorant support base. Another winner. And who loses? A multitude of animal victims abandoned to the uncontested grinding of the machine.

Though many supporters will deny it, reformist and neo-reformist organizations have become a part of the animal exploitation complex and need it every bit as much as it needs them. Odds are that in any country where animal “protection” is an issue at all, there operates at least one such group. On account of its moderate, modest postulates, most probably that group is positioned centrally, surrounded by smaller, perhaps more radical organizations and coalitions. Within such a constellation, the related problems of human species-supremacy and the self-estrangement of the human being from its own animality scarcely ever arise. Thus is animal liberation completely marginalized.

The final current of activism to be discerned can more justifiably be called liberationist. For its proponents veganism has become the be-all and end-all, traced back to the establishment of the Vegan Society in Britain in 1944. It isn’t at all insignificant that activists align their advovacy with personal practice. This sort of transformation has an implicitly political,  prefigurative dimension to it. But even Gandhi with his “be the change you wish to see in the world” would have to admit that a chasm separates the microcosm of the singular body from civilizational transformation. The gap is and will be unbridgeable as long as vegans remain focused on the personal at the cost of the properly political.

Veganism is no more and no less than a matter of interanimal decency necessary to refrain from all exploitation and needless suffering and killing. Aggrandized into a full-blown life philosophy, however, it slips into a position of being expected to solve more problems than it is able to. Meanwhile, it remains on the social margins, unable to disrupt the trademark liberal illusion of the mainstream, namely that all significant historical problems have essentially been solved. Because many of us[4] want to make veganism an easy sell, it’s difficult to admit that vegan advocates suffer social alienation typical of other radicals.

As this pathological civilization soaks the soil and dyes the waters of the world with blood, we are stigmatized at once as malcontents and utopians, and pushed aside. As a result, the movement is becoming inwardly- rather than outwardly-oriented; a subculture emerges that, by its own admission, folds back on itself and leaves the ugliness of the world outside the door. All this follows a trend of retreating from the “personal is political” into a belief that the personal will suffice to take care of the political. Vegans thus join dumpster divers, urban gardeners, potluck organizers, “lifestyle” anarchists,[5] “eco-villagers,” and others who seem to turn their backs on the depressing political context of their milieux. In the end, people who seem to know how bad things are get together, engage in pleasant, relaxing activities and enjoy each others’ company. In a sense, this is both understandable and precious, a development of new ways of relating in roughly egalitarian settings. Also, for the animals we are, it is natural to befriend like-minded bodies. It would not be objectionable, were it not for the apoliticism it engenders.

This situation is not without precedence. Historical examples abound of attempts at kickstarting a pristine society by retreating from the drudgery of the old into communes, phalansters etc. By confining ourselves to our own ranks, we seem to think it alright to fiddle while Rome burns. The isolation is not a strategic or tactical choice; it is a surrender, an easy way out of a pressing situation, and a symptom of a serious crisis whose dynamic begins to make sense with a simple realization: the vegan movement sees animal exploitation not as a political matter but one of cultural and ethical misperception. In other words, oppression can be traced back to wrong ideas, and it suffices to correct those in people’s heads. It is a crisis of consciousness.

Gary Francione has become an activist celebrity noted for a face-to-face, case-by-case approach to combating animal exploitation. He thinks animals ought to be considered persons rather than property, and that this shift in status can be achieved outside of any sort of strict organizational discipline, without establishing mass organizations, through educational activity focused on the individual.[6] Although his popularity has perhaps waned since the publication of his more original work, I think of Francione as a one-man apogee of the veganism-centered position. He has repeatedly admitted that many people cannot be reached through pro-vegan agitation. On the other hand, he claims, there are enough ears willing to listen to keep us busy for the rest of our lives. But that is not what we want, is it? To have things to do? There are many potential vegans, of course. Who knows, maybe all those who are not yet vegan, are vegan in potentia and only resist what is really a basic conversion. Some will be reached but, for reasons to be discussed shortly, one more vegan will never be enough. Meanwhile, the whole issue consumes a disturbingly high amount of our precious time.

Like the other activities animal advocates have kept themselves occupied with, today’s focus on vegan education has an easy-to-miss cost attached to it. It makes us persistently neglect the strategic-liberationist goals of the movement. The discussion on how to translate the growing ranks of vegans into liberatory institutional change either goes unheard or fails to develop at all. In the process, we tend to overestimate both the strength of our numbers and the impact of our actions. Many vegans tend to spend a considerable amount of time on web sites that resonate with their interests and ethical preferences. These, however, drown in a sea of other sites, either “neutral”−fostering pervasive liberal indifference−or openly reactionary. And then there is the real world of flesh and blood and systemic violence. Despite all of our efforts, who runs the show?

Once we look at our situation with the eyes of a realistic and pragmatic strategist, we will see ourselves as weak. This is the first step to take in order to awake from our rather blissful slumber. To the degree that vegan abolitionism is motivated by so-called humanitarian concerns, Marx’s criticism applies to it. Isaiah Berlin wrote that as Marx looked at the reformers and radicals of his day, it seemed to him that “under the guise of earnest philanthropic feeling there throve, undetected, seeds of weakness and treachery, due to a fundamental desire to come to terms with reaction, a secret horror of revolution based on fear of loss of comfort and privilege and, at a deep level, fear of reality itself, of the full light of day.”[7] He saw that “humanitarianism was but a softened, face-saving form of compromise, due to a desire to avoid the perils of an open fight and, even more, the risks and responsibilities of victory.”[8] We too secretly hope that serious change does not come. Or else, that once there are enough vegans, things will just straighten themselves out. The problems are exacerbated by the fact that the “animal question” is far broader in scope than it is usually taken to be; it lies at the core not only of why and how one animal species ruthlessly exploits a myriad others and itself but also of what that species is and what place it occupies on earth. No one has the whole answer and perhaps we will forever have to rely on fragments pointing to a totality beyond reach. What is worrisome is that vegans are on the whole uninterested in such a bigger picture.[9] But what if the foundations of the modern social order, i.e. the totality, form powerful currents that overwhelm our local, narrowly conceived struggles, and make our efforts futile? What if it crystallizes in most day-to-day actions of individuals as well as in structural transformations of tectonic proportions? Once we have awakened to this as a problem, the next step is to turn theory the right side up; animal oppression is not primarily a matter of wrongheaded thinking but a historical expression of a mode of practical, material human life. In order to decipher links between oppression and liberation, we will have to see more of what makes us tick.

§What is in the Way

For centuries animal oppression has been entrenched in capitalist structures. The significance of this observation cannot be overestimated: animal bodies are sucked into and processed in the heart of capitalism, the commodity form. Capitalism is based on capital accumulation, an inherently expansive process of incremental growth achieved through the transformation of the world’s richness into quantifiable, uniform, exchangeable units. Although commodities seem to be just plain things of more or less use, they are in fact−as Marx noted−endowed with seemingly magical powers.[10] Though occuring in pre-capitalist forms of society, under capitalism they come to constitute the universal form of society’s reproduction.[11] To the enormous extent that production for exchange value predominates, considerations of social usefulness are eclipsed by the profit motive. Bearers of exchange value, commodities move along lines of profitable exchange wherever these lines can be established. Instances where our vital needs are still satisfied are largely coincidental, or related to the continued and diminishing existence of extra-capitalist forms of distribution. But there is really no address to which to send complaints: the wealthy follow the rhythms of accumulation which they did not set up. Through the domination of the commodity form human animals become the products of their own products. This is where the magic lies. The movement of commodities presents itself to us not as a relationship between producers but as “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”[12]

Sadly, social activists and movements also give in to the domination of commodity form, and to the degree that they do, they lose the edge of being a meaningful opposition. This is precisely what happens to those segments of the animalist movement that seek to work “with capitalism” for animal protection. They end up sucked into a powerful whirlwind whereafter they follow the rules of the game that turns the bodies of animals into conduits for capital flows. Collaborationist organizations may choose to ignore the power of the commodity form but−due to this self-deceit−it will digest them all the more thoroughly. PETA, which owes much of its profile to an embrace of capitalism, is a case in point. In an interview with Susan Finsen, co-founder Alex Pacheco made it clear that he was trying to market compassion which, he thought, could be sold to the consumer like toothpaste or soap.[13] Within this approach, compassion thus joins the movement of commodities as one of them, its qualitative features of resistance to exploitation subordinated to exchange relationships. It now has a price, and when sold skillfully, it will enable an organization grow in influence and power. Tied into commodity-logic and ever more cognizant of its financial bottomline, that organization will turn into a profit-seeking corporation focused on increasing its market value. All of it long before any measure of success in reducing demand for animal flesh and labor is achieved. No matter how firm an ethical position veganism is, it is not immune to processes of commodification. Easily turned into a fad, it is welcomed by businesses who profit from niche, lifestyle-based consumption. Oddly enough, it becomes fashionable to be vegan, if only the reasons are harmless enough to the rhythms of economic activity.

From the predominance of the commodity form it follows that capitalism is much more than a set of institutional arrangements; it constitutes a prevalent form of experience of reality, that of an atomized, monadic, isolated, disembodied self.[14] It overwhelmingly uproots moral pleas for compassion from a sphere of bodily feeling and into a context of reification; because capitalism implicitly yet forcefully teaches us to comprehend the world as a series of useful or useless objects, the suffering body is usually already an “It” instead of a “Thou.”[15] This is not to say that all experience is mediated this way. There are still places to hide from the commodity form but they are disappearing with the flow of time, and it is not possible to struggle for civilizational transformation from positions of political withdrawal. The commodity form penetrates into our most intimate perceptions of each other and the world, making capitalism far more difficult to abolish than an enemy who could be tracked down and beheaded. The commodity demands that the world be remolded in its image, and this is in fact happening.

Capital’s intolerance of boundaries to accumulation can bear no ambiguity, and so converges with technoscience[16] in an attempt at sweeping traces of ambivalence away as unacceptable. To that end, nature is conceptualized, processed, and subjugated as a dissectible and fully knowable object. This enables and reinforces the modern addiction to, and overreliance on, science and technology. Technoscientific mediation intensifies at the pace of commodification. Complex commodities require some form of technological processing. In turn, technoscientific operations must assume a commodified form; they are developed solely within the dynamic of capital circulation. Due to the near-universality of both, every conceivable problem is reduced to a matter of administrative, technocratic manipulation within a given, unquestioned structure, and not just in the way we think but also in how we act on a daily basis. Inseparable from ubiquity of technology is the social domination of instrumental rationality. Everything, including life itself,[17] becomes a matter of technique; everything becomes a question of rational management. Zygmunt Bauman observes the very accesibility of technology “redefines successive parts of human reality as problems clamouring for resolution.”[18] What follows is a profound disenchantment of life−now reduced to manipulation of quantifiables−that breaks down the dynamic unity of our bodies and the earth. A dual schism results; one one within ourselves which divides us into an analyzing, computer-like mind and a mechanical body; the other between the dynamic, non-material human essence and the inert matter of nature. These make for a comprehensive, materially and practically dominant trend of de-animalization and de-naturalization.

Buried under piles of techno-junk, slabs of concrete, and layers of scientistic discourse, we find ourselves unable to enact any semblance of egalitarian interanimal kinship. We are deprived of modes of knowing that make it possible. How is one to even conceive of the felt intelligence of a cow if one has scarcely ever been around one? How is one to appreciate the support of the earth under our feet when the land has been rendered mute to the senses, and the senses have become far more familiar with endless little black rows on a flatscreen?[19] In the process of this forced domestication we become deskilled and ever more dependent on the abstract apparatus of production of which the average person can comprehend little. “Call the guy!” becomes the default response to a nuisance. Year by year technoscientific mediation deepens our estrangement from the life of our animal senses. We bump into one another as if on autopilot in the street, ear glued to the phone, eyes in a blank stare. Cell phones, smart phones, x-phones−who can remember life back when having none of these was “necessary?” Yet here we are, perceptually maimed and half-awake.

Crowded into urban dwellings inhospitable to nonhuman others, we seem to see human faces wherever we turn but we’re scarcely able to relate. This is not due to a crisis of humanist values, nor to insufficient will to “do the right thing,” We seem to adapt to mass society only by “spacing out,” shutting off whatever world we live in, and thus becoming unable to relate to our immediate surroundings with the fullness of bodied attention. In the midst of this remoteness from the reality of the senses, we are desperate for experiences of more-than-human otherness and re-grounding in the corporeal but these are increasingly rare. The human has mistakenly been made the locus of philosophical explanation and, I would add, political praxis. Mistakenly, says Maurice Merleau-Ponty, because

one explains nothing by man, since he is not a force but a weakness at the heart of being… His existence extends to too many things, in fact to all, for him to become the object of his own delight, or for the authorization of what we can now reasonably call a “human chauvinism.”[20]

Whether in a liberal guise or not, contemporary humanism reproduces the chasm between the human and the rest of the natural world as if Darwin had never done his work. The anthropocentrist sentiment reappears within the otherwise admirable Marxist critique. Of the necessity of mending natural relations David Harvey writes that nature should

no longer be viewed as ‘one vast gasoline station’, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger complained in the 1950s, but a teeming source of life forms to be preserved, nourished, respected and intrinsically valued. Our relation to nature should not be guided by rendering it a commodity like any other…[21]

A promising statement, unfortunately followed by the repetition of a familiar theme. Rather than a commodity, nature “is the one great common to which we all have an equal right but for which we also bear an immense equal responsibility.”[22] It can be supposed that wolves and cows and ravens are not part of the “we” but rather of that to which the human “we” is entitled. Though it is not stated explicitly, nature is clearly external to the human, something with reference to which we are a visitor with claims of access from the outside, and to that end something alien. From a gasoline station nature is turned into a city park; a place people visit but to which they do not belong, of which they are not part. Animal liberation deepens the Marxist critique of commodification of nature by reclaiming nature as the very ground of human sociality, simultaneously reclaiming us as natural beings. It is therefore a movement toward re-immersion of self-repressed but still entirely natural humanity into the surrounding earthly ecology. It is a movement of homecoming.

§ Death Throes

Modern civilization lives and dies with the proliferation of a host of interrelated oppressive practices throughout the totality of human activity. Animal oppression and liberation are virtually inseparable from questions of 1) human de-animalization and technical regimentaton of human life, 2) capitalist-produced vast spaces of immiseration and economic destabilization, 3) human overpopulation, encroachment into, and destruction of the habitats of other animals worldwide, and general ecological devastation, 4) militarism and war. The list could go on, leading to a single conclusion: we are collectively invested in oppression. In this situation, no matter how noble the ideas and values in which alternative ways of organizing society are expressed, they can rise up to a certain marginal role in social discourse and practice, but no further. The dense material reality of social practice stands in the way. One cannot help using theological language at this point: this is the Fall, if there ever was one. Elites may still be able to watch it from their remote enclaves of privilege. But their lower strata gradually roll down and join the oppressed. In fact, a careful observer may be convinced that, due to internal contradictions, the capitalist formula is finally in its death throes.[23]

As a historical form of society, capitalism has a developmental trajectory and therefore an end, too. Depending entirely on the existence of attractive avenues of accumulation, capital is running out of fresh investment opportunities, with old ones being insufficient due to progressive market saturation. At the same time capitalists are continually fighting off a progressive, if occasionally interrupted, rise in costs of production.[24] Looking at things from a long-term perspective, one comes to understand that opportunities for capitalists are shrinking. China and the former Eastern Bloc are already integrated into the system. So, to a large degree, are South and South-east Asia and Africa.[25] Scarcely anyone remains outside of the capitalist economy, so there are not many more open spaces left to fill. In a finite world, a system with insatiable hunger sooner or later runs out of places to go. While it is true that state-backed capitalism proves more flexible and resilient than its most acute critics could imagine, its flexibility should be attributed to ad hoc extra-economic solutions that, with time, only lead to more serious trouble.

With nowhere else to expand, capitalism has gone virtual, with difficulties “in part resolved by the creation of fictitious markets where speculation in asset values could take off unchecked by any regulatory apparatus.”[26] Having inflated a financial bubble over a period of more than 30 years, capitalism stumbled in 2009 in a property-led crisis, from which it has been able to bounce back only with massive worldwide bail-outs and other measures.[27] Crises of increasing magnitude are inherent in capital’s way of operation. Perhaps at this point capitalism is burning out already and ultimately nothing can save it; Immanuel Wallerstein thus comments on one of the most fundamental contradictions of the system,

what maximizes income for the most efficient players in the short run (increased profit margins) squeezes out buyers in the longer run. As more and more people and zones are fully engaged in the world-economy, there is less and less margin for “adjustments” or “renewal” and more and more impossible choices faced by investors, consumers, and governments.[28]

For capital to exist at all as capital, it must move in cycles of expanding investment. With each cycle a surplus is produced that must then be re-invested to establish an annual compound growth of about 3 per cent at which capitalism tends to achieve optimal systemic balance. Resuming this level of growth meant finding profitable avenues of investment globally of 1.6 trillion dollars in 2010. The figure will reach about $3 trillion in 2030.[29] One must ask: with no opportunities for profitable rate of return on investment on the whole, where will that money go? What will prevent the system from coming to a halt? Will state interventions that pump the dying machine with taxpayers’ money suffice?

Or perhaps critics like Harvey are right to say that “capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped.”[30] Whether or not Harvey is right on this point, clearly “the capitalist class will never willinglly surrender its power.” It most certainly “will have to be dispossessed.”[31] These increasingly turbulent times can turn out to be not only tragic but opportune for decisive political action. It will take a co-ordinated, focused, immense force to make a wobbly giant fall. The problem is what takes his place; the circumstances of practical life after capitalism will make for the background of our relatedness to others and the world: the post-capitalist form of experience. It is in the vital interest of the vast majority of animalkind that the basis of this experience is not barbarism… although it is difficult to see how it could be much worse from what the innumerable beings of the earth are suffering today.

Of course, the critique above runs contrary to liberal proclamations of “progress,” of spreading democracy, of technological optimism, and of superficial environmentalism, all of which tend to trivialize the seriousness of the situation. Nearly all of them originate within the priviliged strata of the human population, either in the global North or among elites of the South. They are bent on changing everything so that nothing changes. These voices of powerful propaganda use mainstream media channels inaccessible to radical, that is to say actual, opposition. This has enormous consequences for animal liberation prospects.

To begin with, animal exploiters and their associations lead an onslaught of disinformation campaigns through hired public relations agencies, relentless in their attempts to tighten their grip over the public. They incessantly mingle with legislators through intermediate councils and committees on which they buy seats and craft their bill proposals. They hire security firms to investigate activists and infiltrate groups. They quickly expand to countries where consumption of animal-derived products has heretofore been limited, such as the emerging industrial powers of China and India. But they still feel more at home in the cultural and institutional order of the West. Normalization of animal oppression is synchronized with family, school, peer-group, and professional life. This process consists of many familiar steps. It starts with the animal parts and secretions that children actually consume from early on. Then it proceeds with pictures of flesh and milk right next to cows in elementary school coursebooks that lecture kids on “what cows are for.” Somewhere along the way it acclimates one to established leisure-time patterns−fishing, hunting, the occasional grill party etc., typically tied into socially accepted models of masculinity. A protein-heavy diet of steak for the man of the house is a must. The wife will settle for chicken breast in case red “meat” really isn’t healthy. They will then take their seats on a sofa wrapped in cowskin and probably glimpse a KFC commercial on TV. All of us will also learn fairly quickly that there are “people” and then, far below, there are “animals.” What the average person ends up with at the outset of their adult life is a largely unspoken conviction of how “necessary” and “rational” it is for animal exploitation to continue. With animal use come civilization and progress, and who would dare to question these? Exploiters spend hundreds of millions of dollars to plunge the majority of the population into a lifetime of reactionary ideology, conformity, and bad habits.

Being on the right side of the barricade does not in the least guarantee victory. If history was to teach us one thing only, it would perhaps be that truth is pushed aside by empires. The truth of animal oppression is systematically twisted by many of society’s most talented professionals lured with wealth, comfort, and prestige. These scientists, public relations specialists, law enforcers and security experts, lawyers, doctors, engineers, economists, business executives, IT specialists, and others, systematically support animal exploitation; they devote to it all of their talent and most of their energy.

There are some among us whose skills equal theirs, and whose dedication is altogether unparalleled. But our ranks are incomparably more modest, we have less time on our hands, complicated lives to navigate, critically limited access to invaluable resources, we are organizationally dispersed and ideologically confused. Against us stands an economic power legally, politically, and ideologically supported by a bureaucratic state apparatus bent on protecting its private property and profits as sacrosanct. It would seem to have all it needs to put activists out of play. The crackdown has already begun, especially in the USA and Britain. And it will only intensify, taking full advantage of our strategic weaknesses. In addition to what has already been discussed, these  consist in 1) the currently prevalent model of animalist activism in the movement and 2) the apoliticism of the otherwise promising abolitionist veganism.

1) The model is characterized above all by a split into the reformist organization and the covert direct action cell scattered among the others in the underground. The top tier of aboveground activists tends to become professionalized, and thus constrained by the dynamic of their organization’s dependence on donations from a moderate general public. They become quite conservative themselves, losing whatever oppositional momentum the organization might otherwise develop. In turn, the underground activists, dedicated and skillful, are on the whole fairly quickly incapacitated by the far more powerful law ennforcement agencies. Instead of a lifetime of action, their active “careers” probably span no more than a few years. Therefore radicalism is neutralized in two ways: by state-repression underground and financial/bureaucratic incorporation into the mainstream aboveground. The vast void in between needs to be filled by anti-systemic and popular resistance. In view of the first weakness, the abolitionist vegan platform is a promising development within the movement on two accounts. First, it makes repression by law enforcement agencies more difficult by substituting “open rescue”[32] tactics for sabotage. Second, it becomes harder for corporate businesses to co-opt such abolitionist organizations due to their non-negotiable moral baseline.

2) The vegan platform’s weakness lies in its failure to grasp its own broader meaning, potential, and place. For we are facing a challenge we have yet to find the guts to accept: that of an arduous, potentially perilous cultural and political war against the foundation of this oppressive civilization. Witness the order that devours the earth upon which it rests; can any leniency be expected of it? Will there be mercy for the dissenter? Beneath the façade of tolerance there lurks a perpetual, behind-the-scenes holocaust. Saul Bellow writes poignantly in Herzog,

You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think.[33]

Not millions, Mr. Bellow, billions.

§ The Politicized Animal

Whether it is efficacious to foster opposition to animal oppression with vegan advocacy rests on a few conditions. First of all, veganism must fit into a broader movement back to our animal roots and toward civilizational transformation. For the re-animalized human being, it is a simple outcome of interanimal kinship, of belonging to the same order of existence as other sentient, vulnerable, mortal beings of the earth. There is an animalist politics that has yet to be clarified but that incudes and deepens the foundations of past radical movements. It should be obvious by now that veganism cannot become an end in itself, a reflexive response to every encountered problem relating to animal oppression or exploitation. Instead, it must be tied into the development of a popular, lasting, consolidated movement, international in scope but able to intervene locally and regionally, and tear society out of liberal apoliticism.

It is in the interest of the wealthy and against the interest of the rest of us that the majority feels disgusted with politics. And yet here we are, shooting ourselves in the knee. Many activists seem to believe that animal liberation can be won over and above the dirt of politics by exerting external pressure on the ruling classes. That is not possible since the very system of highly bureaucratized liberal government, the cherry on the political pie of modernity, constitutes the negation of the animal. It safeguards the non-stop functioning of the productivist capitalist order that subordinates human and other bodies to continuous alienated performances. Furthermore, the liberal civil society has been the guarantor of the freedoms of “a minority perpetually en route−says Wallerstein−to becoming everyone.”[34] Being a speciesist and class-based construct, it never did and never would stand for everyone. It diffuses its overarching hegemony beneath a fake layer of superficial diversity, peddling its philosophy, common sense, and everything in between to the very masses that become dispossessed under its reign. Since it dictates the conditions of our social existence, we cannot change it unless we engage it. This involves, at the same time, struggle against capital on which cultural and political formations are highly dependent.[35] A bunch of scattered activists will not be able to take advantage of political and ideological momentum. Only a vibrant political movement might, and only if it is able to use the weaknesses of the system against it as soon as it reveals them.

There is a concretness to grassroots political action that will help re-ground theory and orient the otherwise confused practice. It’s a potent tool for all those human animals who still haven’t been domesticated enough to unfeelingly accept their miserable separation from earthly rhythms, whether in a filthy slum or on the top floor of an office building. This much we should understand: this is a war to give up our species dominion. It is a war to overcome the mechanical standardization of life. The echo of our once-wild and still beating hearts reminds us to fight it to the end. The Hegelian notion of freedom as recognition of necessity is in fact an animal realization that things need to be done and we are already in the midst of processes that are remaking human and other bodies in the image of senseless drones. Our animal nature rebels against the juggernaut of human invention. Most vegan advocates have yet to see through its ideological veil and the pervasiveness of its practical domination.

One can drop bombs from a safe distance but not effect social change. Detachment is what enables oppression in the first place, be it physical, ontological, or political. There is absolutely no substitute for co-presence to make us realize the truth of another’s suffering. No amount of moral reasoning, imagination, and conceptual abstraction will suffice. The manufactured eclipse of lived proximity with other sentient bodies deprives us of the chances for frequent empathic encounters and the development of interspecies solidarity. It must be steadfastly opposed and reversed; what is hidden behind walls of concrete and electric fences must be brought to plain sight. The first ones to see it ought to be other Left radicals, already sensitive to the suffering of fellow humans, and natural allies for political action. We must all reclaim ourselves as sentient, sensing bodies to be able to appreciate the extent to which we are being duped, and to feel what gruesome exploitation of other bodies really means. We must empower ourselves as political animals, active participants in a historical shift for which there is no blueprint and no precedent.

Animal liberation is not simply another movement amongst the others. Its proper place is actually beneath all of them. Contrary to anthropocentrist rhetoric, it is animal indignation that moves the workers to strike, only post hoc reinterpreted as an ideal of strictly human dignity. It is the animal that is sedated with the empty promises of liberal progress, and it is the animal that cannot stand this repressive civilization. Animal liberation can no longer be reduced to just another facet of the struggle. It is the basis which undergirds them all, and all opposition as such. Therefore, the mode in which veganism ought to function is one of permeation, one of going beneath. That is, it should move through and across the entire Left, helping to found a basis for the struggle against all oppression. It will thus begin to unite the innumerable local and piecemeal struggles already underway and scattered across the face of the earth. Animal liberation is both a germ of and movement toward an emergent, post-capitalist form of human life. It will not be centrally planned. It need not be jumpstarted with a name. What it does require is that our animal desire be reforged into political will and determination, and sustained over generations to come.

 

 

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[1] See J. Hribal, Fear of Animal Planet. The Hidden History of Animal Resistance. Oakland: Counterpunch/AK Press 2011.

[2] I use the term “neo-reformism” instead of the popular “new welfarism” to indicate the provenance of this current of activism with historical tendencies of other movements. The history of socialism, feminism, black liberation, environmental, and other movements provides telling examples of co-optation of the opposition by the establishment. New-welfarists are precisely the neo-reformists of the animalist movement−radicals turned collaborators. Within a few years the “neo-” in “neo-reformism” might become altogether obsolete as even the rhetorical remnants of once-radical positions are abandoned. For an analysis of new-welfarism see G. Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement. Philadelphia: Temple UP 1996 (2007).

[3] Historic Victory! PETA Settles with KFC Canada: http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/media/links/p144/agreement.pdf. For more information on PETA’s campaign for “controlled atmosphere killing” (CAK) of chickens and turkeys, see: http://www.peta.org/features/the-case-for-controlled-atmosphere-killing.aspx. Notice how the organization openly identifies with the exploiters’ economic interest by calling CAK “more profitable.”

[4] Although I am critical of this segment of the movement, I do not hesitate to include myself in it. My concern, however, lies with the development of animal liberation into a broader, political and antisystemic opposition, as well as with its thematic re-formulation to incorporate the liberation of human animality.

[5] See M. Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Oakland: AK Press 2001, for an analysis of differences between subcultural identity preservation and social and political involvement. (A refutation of anthropocentrist and speciesist elements of Bookchin’s social ecology is not the topic of this essay, although it would follow from the line of argument presented here.)

[6] G. Francione, Effective Animal Rights Advocacy−In Three Easy Steps, http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/effective-animal-rights-advocacy-in-three-steps/, accessed Oct 5 2012. Even though Francione might not truly believe this to the letter, the gros of his activity has been devoted to fostering this kind of approach.

[7] I. Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. New York: Oxford UP 1978 (4th edition), 9.

[8] ibid.

[9] This lack of interest may be simultaneously a sign of 1) a sense of being overwhelmed and understaffed, itself an expression of insufficient mobilization and attraction of new blood into the movement, 2) separation from other social movements which are resistant to abandoning anthropocentrist ideology, and, perhaps most interestingly, 3) a reflection of late-capitalist over-specialization and compartmentalization of both knowledge and practice. For all these reasons, and possibly more, activists prefer to plow their little plot rather than engage in research into processes that underlie the existence of seemingly separate issues.

[10] K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.Vol. I. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books 1976. On page 163 Marx writes that analysis of the commodity “brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtelties and theological niceties.” On the following pages of the section it becomes clear that its “mystical character” can be traced to its very form. The form of the commodity as commodity−a quantifiable item designed for exchange−is constituted as the externalization of social relations between producers into a relation between products which then imposes itself upon producers.

[11] G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. Trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press 1968 (1971). On page 86 György Lukács writes that “this development of the commodity to the point where it becomes the dominant form in society did not take place until the advent of modern capitalism” (italics in original).

[12] K. Marx, Capital…165.

[13] Quoted in D. Nibert, Animal Rights, Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation. New York & Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2002, 244.

[14] See Michael Steinberg’s discussion of capitalism as a factor engendering the experience of this sense of self in his Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press 2005, ch. 9.

[15] Compare with M. Buber, I and Thou. Trans. R. G. Smith. Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark 1937. I don’t hesitate to broaden the humanistic and theological basis of Buber’s dichotomy of I-Thou and I-It relationships to include interspecies animal encounters. Thus reinterpreted, the I-Thou becomes the quintessentially full-bodied, face-to-face relation, the essence of Mitsein, or being-with. In turn, the I-It would epitomizes the mutual alienation of the oppressor and the oppressed.

[16] For the purposes of this essay I assume the term “technoscience” to refer to a complex of processes of production that form a crucial aspect of the modern worldview. Matters of technical manipulation, bureaucratic administration, replicability, and quantifiability assume in it a paramount importance. Interested primarily in how it translates into individual experience of the world, I have opted to disregard the more specialized uses of the term. Suffice it to say, I take theoretical research and its practical application to be so intertwined as to be most usefully analyzed as a functional whole. Hence, there is no science-technology opposition. Instead, a technology-science complex exists that remakes the world into an artifice, supremely antagonistic to that which is wild, non-standardized, and resistant to incorporation into a pre-ordained, super-imposed order. Thus characterized, technoscience bears all the marks of modernity. Existence is modern, Zygmunt Bauman writes, “in as far as it is administered by resourceful (that is, possessing knowledge, skill, and technology) sovereign agencies… Agencies… define order and, by implication, lay aside chaos, as that left-over that escapes the definition. The typically modern practice, the substance of modern politics, of modern intellect, of modern life, is the effort to exterminate ambivalence… it is the modern practice, not nature that truly suffers no void.” See Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press 1991, 7-8. Modernity and capitalism cannot be reduced to one another but are mutually reinforcing and intimately related phenomena.

[17] For a discussion of the inclusion of life “as such” into the capitalist dynamic under the neo-liberal regime, see e.g. M. Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press 2008. Human-generated manipulation of life reaches way back to the transition to agricultural economies but only in modernity and under capitalism does it come to be incorporated into a totalizing project of “design, manipulation, management, engineering.” Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence… 9.

[18] Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge and Maldon: Polity Press 1991, 220, italics in original.

[19] See David Abram’s eco-phenomenological analysis in Spell of the Sensuous.Perception and Language in a More-than-human World. New York: Vintage Books 1996 and Becoming Animal. An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books 2011.

[20] M. Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans J. Wild and J. E. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern UP 1963, 43, quoted in M. Jay, Marxism and Totality. Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1984, 376.

[21] D. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. New York: Oxford UP 2010, 234.

[22] ibid., 234-5, italics mine.

[23] I. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis. An Introduction. Durham and London: Duke UP 2004, ch. 5, where the author says, “whenever a difficulty can be solved in some way, then there is not a true crisis but simply a difficulty built into the system.True crises are those difficulties that cannot be resolved within the framework of the system but instead can be overcome only by going outside of and beyond the historical system of which the difficulties are part… The modern world-system in which we are living, which is that of a capitalist world-economy, is currently in precisely such a crisis, and has been for a while. The crisis may go on another twenty-five to fifty years” (76-7). Wallerstein goes on to elaborate on the contradictions of the system in detail, something I cannot afford to do here.

[24] Wallerstein calls neoliberal globalization just such a “massive political attempt [by capitalists - KF] to roll back remuneration costs, to counter demands for internalization of costs, and of course to reduce levels of taxation… As with every previous such counteroffensive against rising costs−says Wallerstein−it has succeeded partially, but only very partially… the costs of production in the first decade of the twenty-first century are markedly higher than they were in 1945.” He concludes that the “underlying structures of the capitalist world-economy have been moving in the direction of reaching an asymptote which makes it increasingly difficult to accumulate capital.” See I. Wallerstein, After Developmentalism and Globalization, What? [in:] Social Forces, vol. 83, no. 3 (Mar 2005), 1272-3

[25] Despite geographical and historical fluctuation of varying significance, including the waning of the US political and economic hegemony, the modern capitalist world-economy remains a global and virtually universal system today. Even nominal opposition in the form of national socialist-style experimentation is tied back into it and fulfills a largely supportive role in its perpetuation.

[26] D. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital…, 217.

[27] For analysis see Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital where he says that bail-out amounts to “taxpayers simply buying out the banks, the capitalist class, forgiving them their debts, their transgressions, but only theirs (…) And the banks are using the money, not to lend to anybody but to reduce their leveraging and to buy other banks. They are busy consolidating their power” (30-1).

[28] I. Wallerstein, The Economic Recovery That Isn’t Happening, http://www.iwallerstein.com/economic-recovery-happening/, accessed Oct 5 2012.

[29] ibid., 216. Harvey compares these figures to the $0.15 trillion surplus which it was necessary to invest in 1950 and $0.42 trillion in 1973. The figures are adjusted for inflation.

[30] D. Harvey, Enigma of Capital…, 260.

[31] ibid.

[32] The tactic of open rescue generally assumes that activists remain mask-free, unless avoiding health-hazards requires otherwise. Liberated animals are given veterinary care, and placed in safe homes or sanctuaries. The conditions of exploitation are documented and publicized. Attention is drawn to the horrors perpetuated by the exploiters. With activists’ identities revealed, it becomes harder to label them “terrorists.” See, for example, http://www.nzopenrescue.org.nz/index.html. The method is not without critics. Some maintain that it is more resorce-intensive than clandestine direct action; it becomes necessary to pay fines and damages, and sometimes the legal costs of court trials as well.

[33] S. Bellow, Herzog, London: Penguin: New York 2003, 315.

[34] I. Wallerstein, After Liberalism. New York: The New Press 1995, 2.

[35] V. Chibber, Capitalism and the State. Lecture at the New York Marxist School 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5R-9X_BtP4, accessed Oct 8 2012.

Animal Welfare for Better Sleep. Fragments of a Materialist Denunciation.

Exploitation is a phenomenon of subordination, control, and brutality that plays out in the thick of materiality: bodies relating to other bodies, immersed for the most part in their daily routines with a certain inertia. In a sense, it keeps itself going just through continually renewed acts that agents are simply well accustomed to. However, that in itself would not be enough in face of occasional flashes of critical recognition that perhaps things could be done differently, or not at all. There are other factors to keep an exploitative system in motion. These invariably involve some kind of gratification for a at least a number of bodies involved.

This much, I think, can be said without historical qualification. I wouldn’t like to have Marx rolling in his grave more than he already needs to, so perhaps I should have restrained myself even more. In any case, modern animal exploitation as a total phenomenon in its many guises seems to function this way: it does not originate in ideology, or social thought.  It is not a result of an a priori worldview. It is not a matter of “yes, if we can do anything, how about we do this?” Not a consequence of a mental impulse that somehow embodies itself in the world, having descended to it from an ethereal realm of reason. How, then, or what happens? A properly open-ended, phenomenologically sensitive materialism — one operating on probabilities and approximations rather than apodictic dogma — promises to offer a more coherent picture than the idealism I have just aimed to discredit.

Thinking is a form of acting, it is not “mental”, but as real-world as it gets. The “content” of this form of activity often stands in blatant contradiction to the other things we do. A parent beating her child thinks of herself as a loving mother. In the absence of such active rationalization, life would become extremely difficult or impossible to her. The reality of being a hateful, violent child-beater is hard to swallow. When observers have sufficient knowledge of the situation, and are asked whether they think she is a good parent, what do they say? Without trouble they should be able to ascertain that she is horrible, despite all the things she says about her love for the kid. We look at what actually happens between and among living bodies beneath the layer of discourse. It is just as true for collective, i.e., social life. Here, I’m after just one instance of this.

Equipped, perhaps inexplicably, with a primal sense of intercorporeal sympathy for other animals, we have developed an intricate ideological complex to cover up the reprehensible actuality of animal exploitation. There are perks to animal exploitation, at least so it seems at first glance: cheap, good quality resources of food, clothing, entertainment and more, a feeling of species superiority, of belonging to “something better”, of having built personal and collective identity over and above the heads and backs of “lower beings” etc. To most, these are all worth having. Just as the mother contradicts herself claiming to love the the child who’s now in the hospital ER, we need to counterbalance the brutality of exploitation with storytelling. The story folks have written for just this purpose is entitled “Animal Welfare.”

Scarcely anybody todaydenies that other animals, say, pigs or cows, are conscious, have needs that can be frustrated, and so on. But there is no agreement as to what those needs are and what that entails for our ruptured relationships with them. Science tends to be mired in reactionary debates on things obvious to a curious child. Crucially for the complex of exploitation, freedom — the ability to develop one’s potentialities through encounter with the challenges of one’s natural environment — is not in the welfarist’s vocabulary. Now that this is out of the way, the welfarist and exploiter can sit down to discuss how to best have the cake and eat it, too. The animal bodies stigmatized by the industries’ relentless profit-seeking can be both exploited and cared for. It is now finally possible to use — hold captive in confined spaces, invade and kill bodies — and “defend”, i.e., find ways to “reduce harm.” For instance, limiting the field of vision of the pig led to slaughter is said to both lower her stress levels before death (increased “welfare”) and make her resist the march less (facilitated extermination). You see, there is well-being in hell!

The Animal Welfare paradigm provides the meeting space for softened-up animal activists and representatives of the flesh, skin, zoo incarceration, and other businesses. By now it is not easy to say unambiguously just who told the story first. But a good story is not bad, no matter if an animal protection platform is hi-jacked in the process of its writing and proliferation. It is just a story, none the less, contradicting the reality of animal slavery. And business is business, both for industry and, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding, to large bureaucratized animal protection organizations. All of them, like the monster-mother, live in contradiction that is overwhelming, but not nearly enough to paralyze and make them stop. Drawn into a whirlpool of habitual violence, which to them is like breathing, they must be stopped from without.

Insofar as we need one, the story of animal liberation must write itself anew over and through our actions aimed at finding weak spots in the operations of a relentless, lethal juggernaut. It is fundamental to realize, and this may come as a kind of materialism-inspired epiphany, that stories are dangerously efficient when reactionary; they have the power of a strong sedative. But they do not suffice to change the terms of social practice. Countering the collaborationist tendency among advocates, we ought to go full tilt in challenging and erasing their dubious narrative. That is but one element of the struggle. Not much in the world has been won by throwing words at one’s adversary. And ours has a magnificent PA system, now assisted by ceaseless welfarist chatter of our former friends turned collaborationists. It is crucial to actually disrupt the horror visited upon myriad animal victims. Otherwise the weighty dynamic of this dense material world will play out in the form of consequences we have heretofore known.

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** photos used without permission.

Liberation?: In Defense of a Materialist Phenomenology of Politics

This paper was given on my behalf at the South American Institute for Critical Animal Studies Conference on Aug 10 2012. I have yet to to get my hands on the questions that followed the talk. As soon as I do so, I will publish my answers in a separate post. Spanish version below, courtesy of Federico Alfredo Berghmans who presented in at the conference. Thank you for reading!

 

Oppositional movements are now in disarray and many of their members can’t even see it, having accomodated their expectations to levels which they are at present able to satisfy, but which are nowhere near the needs of those who suffer and die, ground down by the invincible juggernaut of anti-animal terror. Defining ourselves, for better or worse, as “animal protectionists”, we constitute a loose set of dispersed organizations, activists, and academics. We are appear near-formless on the social landscape, sometimes as cultural scandalists, sometimes as misanthropes and terrorists, other times as “animal enthusiasts” with too much time on our hands, and recently as uptight theorists.

Confused as to our goals, we remain suspended between extemporaneous, ad hoc direct action, endless theorizing, and collaborationist, equivocal tactics. We share some goals implicitly, but have no agreement on whether the protection of “animals” implies their liberation, much less how to effectively achieve either, and still less even as to who or what is or isn’t an animal, and what that means to our ideology-infused heads. Above all, the relationship of the homo sapiens to other sentient species and the land of earth itself is so ruptured that we stand clueless about how to go about mending it, and what the end-goal would be: the forced separation of a hands-off approach, or, more plausibly, ecologically viable co-habitation. But co-habitation on what terms, negotiated and set by whom, and how?

Strategically, we seem to have no real sense of how to position ourselves in relation to other distinct movements and activists. Now, given that one can define one’s identity only in relation to an other, this amounts to not knowing what we are on the oppositional arena. In order to arrive at a sufficiently appropriate perspective of investigation, I shall take a brief detour through some indispensible philosophical-methodological considerations.

§1

I hold that acting comes ontologically before statically conceived thought. Thinking is–properly speaking–an activity undertaken within the world itself and preconditioned by it. The thick “suchness” of this earthy realm preceeds any attempts toward conceptualization. Simply put, the world comes before “mind,” and “mind” is itself fundamentally a function of bodied existence and part of worldly reality.

I would like to place this formulation at the heart of 1) an excavation of the centrality of pre-reflective experience of the sentient being, i.e., the animal, and 2) a materialist Weltanschauung (…) which builds upon that experience to establish the dense flesh of corporal reality as the basis of all experience whatsoever.

Materialism has in many ways played the role of a beggar in Western philosophy; either marginalized or brutally distorted and simplified to the point of losing its practical usefulness. It was not until Marx and Engels, and Darwin, that hopes for a non-mechanical, i.e., historical and dialectical materialism resurfaced. It still has not recovered from the reductionism to which many of their epigones subjected it. Extreme mechanicism invited a reflex reaction in the opposite direction of idealism and voluntarism. It remains to us to become properly sensitive to both empirical research and bodily-experiential aspects of worldly being. Only then, perhaps, can we address the social-natural turmoil in which we find ourselves today, especially as it pertains to the plight of other animals and opportunities for radical oppositional praxis.

Walking a materialist and naturalist path, I don’t see the character of culture or society as a product of thought or belief, but rather of largely habitualized, productive, bodily practice. The historically unparalleled scope and intensity suffering produced by established systemic practices (…) are a product of something fundamentally deeper than wrong thinking. These involve e.g. pervasive animal exploitation, ecological devastation, global warming, economic instability and staggering discrepancy of wealth distribution among humans, reification of human-animal life etc., as well as the disintegration of oppositional movements. On the other hand, the promises for radical change lie deeper than in right thinking. This does not render ideology entirely secondary to and derivative of material processes in a base-superstructure scheme, as orthodox Marxists of the Second International would have it. For there is no decisive separation of matter and mind that would extend to a divorce between economic and cultural dimensions. Both are aspects of what I would, for present purposes, call the “real world”: a reality that precedes reflection, making itself simultaneously evident and intrinsically ambiguous to material, bodied subjects in a neverending process of transformation. It is not that what is usually refered to as the psychological aspects of living is entirely passive. On the contrary, much energy is routinely and systematically invested in the construction and maintenance of ideological structures which simultaneously reinforce and cover up the more basic, material-economic spheres wherein oppression and exploitation usually originates.

Accordingly, the phenomenologically-sensitive materialist critical theory that I propose makes room for psychological and discoursive considerations. But it doesn’t frame them as autonomous, self-generating, emerging and existing in and of themselves. Instead, it locates them firmly within a nexus of structural forces and material practices. These act not in any determining way upon social subjects, but make some trajectories of action much more probable than others; thus they will not allow some ways of conduct to become more than marginal.

§2

The three major, interrelated factors which are commonly underestimated in a liberal, value discourse-ridden approach to social studies are: the imperatives of capital accumulation, the rise of technoscience, and the increasing domination of society by the spectacle. All of these forces converge in disdain for the animal as that which is “wild,” which is to say unstandardized, insubordinate, attuned to broader natural rhythms rather than the requirements of the productive apparatus; all of them are complicit in disciplining, regimenting, and reifying individual experience. Unchallenged in practice, all of them nullify the prospects for oppositional praxis. Let us look at these mutually constituting groupings of phenomena in turn.

Capital Accumulation

Under the imperatives of capital accumulation, our bodily activity comes to consist more and more of pre-programmed daily movements, centered increasingly around performing wage labor in anxiety-ridden urban/office/industrial spaces. We are simultaneously made to navigate mazes of glass, concrete, and bureaucracy. It becomes so unbearable to our living flesh that it is all the easier to identify prospects for freedom with shedding the burden of the body. The body itself is of course the performer of that feat, the key to which lies in a transfer of one’s hopes and dreams into abstractions. What was formerly an afterlife in a celestial realm, now becomes perhaps a Second Life computer game profile, a Facebook account, idolization of a celebrity, etc. As escapism reigns, we are part of the deadening routine of millions of cars trundling through countless motorways, poisoning the air we breathe. We witness the narcotic dance of office workers either overwhelmed by deadlines or bored out of their wits and busy shopping online or downloading pornography at work. Millions of us spend countless hours staring at flat-screens whatever we may be busy doing. Then we look at so-called manual labor reaching levels of alienation which Marx pointed to but which would have shocked even him. I refer one to a standard “meatpacking” plant for a realization that, if this is a bearable world, it is becoming an unliveable one.

Technoscience

As opposed to a set of practical tools used by human animals, technoscience is a force structuring human life from the outside, increasingly beyond any sense of agency on our part, increasingly forming the ground on which we stand materially, and supplanting much of our direct connection with the natural world, including with our organic selves. Humans, Sartre wrote in a Marxian vein, become the products of their products. Perhaps finally this human body can negate itself entirely through its own activity! Perhaps–one would vainly hope–there is salvation in genetic engineering, neuroscientific manipulation, artificial intelligence, in becoming an ontological hybrid, the machine itself, in absolute self-denial. Humming patiently in the background to the amazement that many express at the triumphant march of technoscience, is the immovable earth which supports each and every manifestation of madness before sweeping it away. Technoscience might just signify the ultimate devaluation of earthly life, but in the way it proceeds it remains largely a socially unintended outgrowth of capital accumulation which, when the chips are down, cannot say “no” to a profitable investment. Simply put, this is where money is to be made, so this is where investment flows.

Spectacle

The spectacle offers a complex of distractions necessary for the maintanance of a social system which degrades its own conditions of production. Debord wrote of the spectacle that it “is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience (…) it corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life (…) social space is continually being blanketed by stratum after stratum of commodities.”

Capitalism, with its alienating productive infrastructure, technoscientific mediation, and spectacular superstructure, is all the more difficult to oppose, because it’s not just a set of dogma or institutional arrangements; I think Michael Steinberg is right when he says that capitalism is rather a form of experience: that of a disembodied, atomized, isolated self, seeking refuge within artificial spaces which further its alienation. We can now see the consonance between 1) the impoverishment of our actual existential condition, and 2) the prevalence of escapist practices available to and focused on that alienated, isolated subject. We cannot relate to the plight of billions of animal victims when our tangible bond with them is ruptured by forces whose gravity the Animal Protection Movement fails to appreciate.

§3

Within the APM we tend to commit significant errors of political misperception. Many assume a perspective amounting to a myopic view, in which the very presence of a radical organization equals its being a meaningful nexus of opposition with regard to a given issue. Accordingly, the actions of small–both numerically and in terms of real influence–animal rights organizations are taken to be a measure of some success of the animal rights cause. Within that perpective, focused as it is on activists watching their friends and the friends of their friends becoming vegans, or an editorial or two published in New York Times, one might think: “progress”. In so doing, one would fundamentally miss masses upon masses of people completely unfamiliar with even that narrowly defined cause, some of whom don’t care for NY Times, and some who–in addition to the mentioned editorials, will read hundreds of others whose message contradicts that of the former. Despite our best intentions, the structures of capitalist production fail in the least to budge except in order to accomodate veganism as a lifestyle option, dietary fad and market niche. In a word, to commodify it.

Within this approach, Animal Igualdad seems to have set a new programmatic paradigm for a single-issue abolitionist “animal” organization. Grounded in a Francionian and Dunayerian framework, they draw a hard line in their praxis between animal liberation and issues pertaining to human well-being. They do not get involved in the latter, ostensibly fearing they would become overwhelmed by these other issues and easily marginalized by other movements that follow general speciesist ideology. One is inclined to share some of their worry.

Despite the admirable idea of “animal equality” imprinted in its very name, an organization based in the paradigm of veganism promotion has no real, substantial connection to those other movements beyond nominally shared concerns for human freedom from–and here we encounter a host of idioms–sexism, heterosexism, racism, ageism, ablism, and other forms of oppression. Now, general reliance on the liberal mass media has heretofore served the organization rather well–scarce in numbers, its members were able to appear repeatedly on TV news, talk shows, and in newspaper and magazine headlines. At the same time, it has been its weakness.

The liberal–the capitalist–media will only allow so much before their own economic dependence on the extremely well-connected animal exploitation conglomerates kicks in. Gatekeepers will be used to tighten the noose around the protectionists’ mediatized connection to society. So far all has been well, the organization, the idea, and so on, were a novelty, and novelties are welcome as fashionable trends. Despite the best intentions of the organization, as the novelty wears off, the fate of  their message in the long term will be obscurity. A small organization of a couple hundred members, even dedicated specialists, will perish on the margin without a mass, grassroots base. It would seem that such a base can only be built by drawing connections and noticing commonality of rationale between the APM and other movements within a progressively carved-out platform.

§4

What is needed in order to enable and facilitate coalescence between movements, and the permeation of the APM into the veins of broader social struggles, is a transcendence of Animal Igualdad’s paradigm. What is needed is a common ontological denominator of the Animal, of Bodied Being. That “spine” of a new international movement that doesn’t cover over the differences between movements but builds bridges between them and reveals them to be intimately connected. The connection is not an external linkage but common, if unacknowledged, origins in the concerns of all sentient beings to be free from unnecessary suffering. It reveals the emergent core of the APM to be almost religious in flavor, if without the apodicticity typical of monotheisms with their revealed Truth. The living world has been dimmed, covered over, and forgotten. It demands recollection and needs to be redeemed. If at all, it will be redeemed in more of an “as we go” manner than through a clear-as-day prophecy.

Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher of ambiguity par excellence, said that we are “condemned to meaning.” To the extent to which we are creatures inherently organized around purposeful interchange with our environment that should be obvious enough. Steinberg notes relatedly that “meaning is reductionist; and explanation co-extensive with the facts it explains is as useless as a map on a one-to-one scale.” Thus ambuguity becomes an ever-present fact of creaturely life. All the more so in its collective extension among humans: politics, where we can never know outcomes with certainty.

Still, rooted in experience, intuition, and decision, political strategy must be thought of in terms as concrete as the crushing repression that opposition faces at the hands of a mode of production on the defensive. It must be as real as the animal self-repression of the homo sapiens. Only with and through a political strategy can the Animal be made the acknowledged raison d’etre of structural and ideological transformations that go with, and not against, the vast majority of the bodies of the earth. Only through political action can the Animal be set in the midst of and against the power constraints of a system flourishing via exploitation and degradation. But political thinking and action are inherently context-driven, geared to specific geographical and historical conditions. Proper analyses, at least some of which will take tedious work in political economy, will fill many a volume. For the purposes of this short presentation, I must limit myself to a few general observations.

§5

Compassion, justice, equality, and responsibility, are modes of intercorporeal and interanimal relatedness that cannot be marketed and sold, and therefore under capitalism they are suffocated. Capitalism seems to be equipped better than ever to neutralize meaningful opposition, removing the very ground upon which we stand from beneath our feet. What would it be like to awaken the people from their slumber and find they are numb? This is the grave consequence of expecting a rapid deployment of revolutionary force to bring about constructive change within an unprepared society. Given that radical changes are on the way anyway due to deepening capitalist crises, resource scarcity, ecosystemic devastation and global warming, fundamentalisms on the rise, it is key to finally establish the Gramscian counter-hegemonic bloc in the midst of a civilization whose decline seems to be quickly accelerating. Contra Gramsci’s notion of the centrality of class struggle, this material, political, and ideological-cultural formation would now require a broader base in eco-animalist struggle that would subsume and enrich the meaning of class struggle itself in its stress on corporeality of life and opposition to the reification of the body. At the heart of this vision lies a politics that is grounded in the body, establishes animality as the common-sensical core of what we are, that takes us to belong to the same onto-ethical order as the rest of the animal world.

The establishment of the bloc calls for a coming together of a whole host of anti-systemic movements which alone prove time and again to be ineffectual. Among them I would name radical greens who can see past the collaborationist bad habits of mainstreem environmentalists cuddled with big business in high-rent skyscraper towers. In order to avoid anarchist dispersionism, they need the corrective of the Marxists-socialists with their focus on strategy, coordination, and their ruthless critique of capitalist domination. Most notable of those are eco-socialists, who have been busy convincingly explaining the connections between the all-pervasiveness of the commodity form and ecological disruption. Into that marriage of ecology and socialism, we–animalists–inject the heretofore continually repressed creative energy of the Animal. We stress the centrality of the senses and corporal embeddedness to any revolutionary project. Part of repressed nature, flesh-and-blood animals that we are, we find ourselves in desperate need of release from the material conditions which immensely impoverish our everyday existence: the triad of radical ecology, socialism, and nearly nonexistent but dearly needed animalism, may hold a glimmer of hope.

As we build up a political movement, we can rewild the atrophied human fleshly soul through a return to the sensuous, an elucidation of the material processes of commodification whereby escapism and self-denial condition human bodies, and turns billions of other bodies into things. We can open the way toward a revival of animal indignation in us, the part of ourselves that forms the unacknowledged basis of our self-respect and makes compassionate responses to unnecessary suffering akin to the objection of a tiger grinding down its zoo-oppressors. Coordinated communally, that energy has the potential to topple any oppressive system. This is not the force of discourse, whose weight is insufficient to effect lasting structural change, but of the flesh, putting limits of technology under collective supervision, and negating the capitalist experience of life via decommodified education, growing mass grassroots activism, and bodied example of direct action tied back into an imperfect, ambiguous, unceasing projection of the animal’s longing for liberation.

Selected references coming soon.

 

Liberación?: En defensa de una fenomenología materialista de la política – ICAS Sudamérica

Los movimientos opositores están de momento en desorden y varios de sus miembros ni siquiera pueden verlo, habiendo acomodado sus expectativas a niveles que pueden de momento satisfacer, pero que no están ni siquiera cerca de las necesidades de quienes sufren y mueren, sometidos por el invencible leviatán del terror anti-animal. Definiéndonos a nosotros mismos, para bien o para mal, como “proteccionistas animales”, constituimos un vago conjunto de organizaciones dispersas, activistas, y académicos. Aparecemos sin  una forma definida en el paisaje social, a veces como escandalistas culturales, a veces como misántropos y terroristas, y otras veces como  “entusiastas de los animales” con demasiado tiempo en nuestras manos, y más recientemente, como teóricos molestos.

Confundidos en cuanto a nuestros objetivos, nos mantenemos suspendidos entre una acción directa extemporánea y ad hoc, unateorización sin fin, y tácticas colaboracionistas y equívocas. Compartimos algunas metas implícitamente, pero no tenemos ningún acuerdo en cuanto a si la protección de “animales” implica su liberación, y mucho menos como efectivamente alcanzarlas, y aún menos acerca de quién o qué es o no es un animal, y qué significa eso para nuestras mentes imbuidas de ideología. Para colmo, la relación del homo sapiens con otras especies sintientes y con la tierra está en sí misma tan dañada que estamos sin ninguna pista acerca de cómo enmendarla, y cual sería la meta final: la separación forzada de un enfoque más laxo, o, más plausiblemente, una co-habitación ecológicamente viable ¿Pero co-habitación en qué términos, negociados y establecidos por quienes, y cómo?

Estratégicamente, parecemos no tener un sentido real de cómo posicionarnos en relación a otros y distintivos movimientos activistas. Ahora bien, concedido que uno puede definir su propia identidad sólo en relación con otro, esto no agrega nada al  hecho de no conocer qué es lo que somos en la arena oposicional. Para llegar a una perspectiva de investigación suficientemente apropiada, tomaré un breve desvío a través de algunas consideraciones filosófico-metodológicas indispensables.

Sostengo que la acción viene ontológicamente antes de un pensamiento concebido estáticamente, y pensar es –propiamente hablando– una actividad llevada a cabo en el mundo mismo, y así la espesa      “manera de ser” de esta realidad terrenal precede a cualquier intento de conceptualización. Dicho de manera simple, el mundo viene antes de la “mente”, tomando precedencia ante esta, y la “mente” es en sí misma fundamentalmente una función de una existencia corporizada y parte de una realidad en el mundo.

Me gustaría colocar esta formulación en el centro de 1) una indagación de la centralidad de una experiencia pre-reflexiva del ser sintiente, por ejemplo, el animal, y 2) una weltanschauung o manera de concebir el mundo que se constituye a partir de esa experiencia para establecer la densa carne de la realidad corporal como base de toda experiencia posible.

El materialismo ha jugado de muchas formas el papel de un mendigo en la filosofía occidental; ya sea marginalizado o brutalmente distorsionado y simplificado al punto de perder su utilidad práctica. No fue hasta Marx y Engels, y Darwin, que las esperanzas de una forma de materialismo no-mecánico, es decir, histórico, resurgieron. Luego de que muchos de sus discípulos sucumbieran ante las distorsiones positivistas de sus ideas, en el siglo XX pensadores notables como Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sebastiano Timpanaro, Guy Debord, y más recientemente David Abraham y Michael Steimberg se volvieron adecuadamente sensibles a tanto la investigación empírica como a las experiencias corporalistas de ser en el mundo. Permanecieron, una vez más, como minoría. Es entonces fundamental atender a los aspectos más prometedores de sus trabajos investigando el desorden natural-social en el que nos encontramos hoy, especialmente si es pertinente a la causa de los otros animales y a oportunidades para una praxis radical y oposicional.

Siguiendo sus pasos como un materialista y naturalista, no veo el carácter de la cultura o la sociedad como un producto del pensamiento o la creencia, sino como una práctica corporal ampliamente productiva y habitualizada. El alcance sin parangón histórico y el intenso sufrimiento producido por practicas sistemáticamente establecidas, por ejemplo ocurrentes en y a través de la extendida explotación animal, devastación ecológica, calentamiento global, inestabilidad económica y la tambaleante discrepancia de la distribución de la riqueza entre los humanos, cosificación de la vida humano-animal, etc. son un producto de algo fundamentalmente más profundo que un pensamiento incorrecto. Lo es también así la desintegración de los movimientos oposicionales. Por otro lado, las promesas de cambio radical van más allá del correcto pensamiento. Esto no vuelve a la ideología enteramente secundaria y derivativa de procesos materiales en un mapeo de base superestructural, como lo hubiesen querido los marxistas ortodoxos de la Segunda Internacional. Porque no hay una separación decisiva entre materia y mente que se extendiera a un divorcio entre las dimensiones económica y cultural. Ambos son aspectos de lo que yo llamaría, para propósitos prácticos, el “mundo real”: una realidad que precede a la reflexión, que se hace a sí misma simultáneamente evidente e intrínsecamente ambigua a sujetos materiales y corporizados en sus interminables transformaciones. No es a lo que usualmente se refiere como a los aspectos psicológicos de vivir enteramente pasivos. Por el contrario, gran parte de la energía es rutinaria y sistemáticamente invertida en la construcción y mantenimiento de estructuras ideológicas que simultáneamente refuerzan y cubren las más básicas esferas material-económicas en donde la explotación y la opresión usualmente se originan.

De manera acorde, la fenomenológicamente sensitiva teoría social materialista que yo propongo da lugar a consideraciones psicológicas y discursivas. Pero no las encuadra como autónomas, auto-generadas, emergentes y existentes en y desde sí mismas. En cambio, las coloca firmemente en un nexo de fuerzas estructurales y prácticas materiales. Estas no actúan de manera determinante sobre sujetos sociales, pero hacen algunas trayectorias de acción mucho más probables que otras; y así no permitirán ciertos modos de conducta que se vuelvan más que marginales.

Los tres factores mayormente interrelacionados que están comúnmente subestimados en una aproximación discursiva liberal al estudio social son: los imperativos de la acumulación del capital, el ascenso de la tecno-ciencia, y el incremento del dominio de la sociedad por medio del espectáculo. Todas estas fuerzas convergen en un desdén por el animal que es “salvaje”, lo que es lo mismo que decir sin estandarizar, insubordinado, sintonizado a ritmos naturales más amplios que los requerimientos del aparato productivo; todos ellos son cómplices en disciplinar, reglamentar y concretizar la experiencia individual. Incuestionados en la práctica, todos ellos anulan los prospectos de la praxis oposicional. Permítasenos ver estos mutuamente constitutivos agrupamientos de fenómenos por separado.

Acumulación de capital

1) Bajo los imperativos de la acumulación de capital, nuestra actividad corporizada comienza a consistir más y más en movimientos diarios pre-programados, centrados cada vez más en desempeños de labor asalariada en espacios urbanos/oficinistas/industriales signados por la ansiedad. Estamos hechos para navegar laberintos de vidrios, concreto y burocracia. Se vuelve tan intolerable que es mucho más fácil identificar prospectos de libertad con el desembarazarse del peso del cuerpo. El cuerpo vivo en sí mismo es por supuesto el que desempeña la proeza, la clave en la que reside la transferencia de los propios sueños y esperanzas en abstracciones: anteriormente una otra-vida en una realidad celestial, hoy quizá en un perfil de juego del Second Life, una cuenta de Facebook, idolatrar una celebridad, etc. Mientras el escapismo reina, somos parte de una insonorizada rutina de millones de autos que ruedan a través de incontables autopistas, hacia la narcótica danza de oficinistas abrumados por fechas de entrega o bien aburridos por fuera de su ingenio y ocupados en comprar online o bajar pornografía en el trabajo, mirando por incontables horas pantallas planas cualquiera sea su tarea. Entonces miramos el tan llamado trabajo manual llegando a niveles a los que Marx había apuntado, pero que lo conmoverían incluso a él. Refiero a alguien a una planta de empaque de carne para dar cuenta de que, si este es un mundo soportable, se está convirtiendo en uno inhabitable.

Tecno-ciencia

2) Como opuesto a un conjunto de herramientas prácticas usadas por animales humanos, la tecno-ciencia es una fuerza estructurante de la vida humana desde el afuera, cada vez más por fuera de cualquier sentido de agencia de nuestra parte, cada vez más formando el suelo en el cual nos paramos materialmente, y suplantando gran parte de nuestra conexión natural con el mundo natural, incluyendo nuestra identidad orgánica. Los humanos, escribió Sartre, se vuelven los productos de sus productos ¡Tal vez finalmente este cuerpo humano puede negarse a sí mismo enteramente a través de su propia actividad! Quizá –uno podría esperar en vano– haya salvación mediante la ingeniería genética, la manipulación neuro-científica, y la inteligencia artificial, al convertirse en un híbrido ontológico, la máquina en sí misma, la absoluta auto-negación. Tarareando pacientemente en el trasfondo al asombro que muchos expresan ante la triunfante marcha de la tecnociencia, es la tierra inamovible que soporta cada una de las manifestaciones de la locura antes de barrer con ella. La tecnociencia quizá pueda significar la última devaluación de la vida terrenal, pero en el modo en que procede se mantiene largamente un producto socialmente inintencionado de la acumulación de capital, la cual, cuando las fichas estén repartidas, no podrá decir “no” a una inversión redituable. Puesto de manera simple, aquí es donde está el dinero, y hacia allí nos estamos dirigiendo.

Espectáculo

3) el espectáculo ofrece un complejo de distracciones necesarias para el mantenimiento de un sistema social que degrada sus propias condiciones de producción. Debord escribió acerca del espectáculo que “es el mundo de la comodidad reinando sobre toda experiencia vivida (…) se corresponde al momento histórico en el cual la comodidad completa su colonización de la vida social (…) espacio social está continuamente siendo cubierto por estrato tras estrato de comodidades”.

El capitalismo, con su infraestructura de producción alienante, mediación tecnocientífica, y espectacular superestructura, es tanto más difícil de oponérsele, porque no es sólo un conjunto de dogmas o arreglos institucionales; creo que Steinberg está en lo cierto cuando dice que el capitalismo es más una forma de experiencia que una entidad descorporalizada, atomizada y aislada, buscando refugio en los espacios artificiales que profundizan su alienación. Podemos ver ahora la consonancia entre 1) el empobrecimiento de nuestra actual condición existencial, y 2) la prevalencia de prácticas escapistas disponibles y enfocadas en ese sujeto alienado y aislado.

No podemos relacionarnos con la situación de miles de millones de victimas animales cuando nuestro tangible vínculo con ellos está dañado por fuerzas cuya gravedad el movimiento de protección animal falla en apreciar.

En el MPA tendemos a cometer significativos errores de percepción política. Muchos asumen una perspectiva, teniendo una mirada miope, en la cual la misma presencia de organización radical equivale a ser su significativo foco de oposición a un asunto determinado. Entonces, por ejemplo, las acciones de pequeños –en términos de números y en términos de influencia real– organizaciones de derechos animales son tomados como una medida de cierto éxito en la causa de los derechos animales. En esa perspectiva, enfocada en hacer que los activistas vean que sus amigos y los amigos de sus amigos se vuelvan activistas, o una editorial o dos publicadas en el New York Times, se vea como “progreso”. En ese hacer, pierden de vista las masas tras masas de gente que no conocen con incluso esa tan estrechamente definida causa, algunos de ellos no importándoles el NY Times, y algunos que –además de las mencionadas editoriales– leerán cientos de otras cuyo mensaje será contradicho por el anterior. A pesar de nuestras mejores intenciones, las estructuras de la producción capitalista fallan en ceder excepto para acomodar el veganismo como un estilo de vida, moda dietaria y nicho de mercado.

En este enfoque, Igualdad Animal parece haber instaurado un paradigma programático para una organización “animalista” abolicionista. Fundamentado en un marco de trabajo que tiene a Francione y Dunayer, marcan un límite muy claro en su praxis entre liberación animal y asuntos concernientes al bienestar humano. No se involucran en éste, temiendo ostensiblemente verse abrumados por estas cuestiones marginalizadas por otros movimientos que siguen una ideología especista general. Uno se siente inclinado a compartir algo de su preocupación.

Una organización basada en el paradigma de la promoción del veganismo, a pesar de la admirable idea de la “igualdad animal” impresa en su mismo nombre, no tiene una conexión real y sustancial con todos los otros movimientos más allá de la nominalmente compartida preocupación por la libertad humana desde el sexismo, racismo, discriminación por edad, por discapacidad, y otras formas de opresión. Ahora, la dependencia general de la masa de medios liberal ha servido así a la organización bastante bien –sus miembros, escasos en número, pudieron aparecer repetidamente en las noticias, en talk shows y en los titulares de los periódicos. Al mismo tiempo, esto ha sido su debilidad.

La prensa liberal – capitalista – sólo permitirá un tanto antes de que sus propia dependencia económica en los extremadamente bien conectados conglomerados de explotación animal usen guardianes para apretar el nudo alrededor de la conexión mediatizada de los proteccionistas con la sociedad. Hasta ahora todo ha ido bien, la organización, la idea, y así, eran una novedad, y las novedades son bienvenidas como tendencias de moda. A pesar de las mejores intenciones de la organización, tal será el destino de su mensaje a largo plazo, mientras que la novedad se disipa. Una pequeña organización de unos cientos de miembros, incluso especialistas dedicados, perecerá en el margen sin una base masiva y bien asentada. Dicha base puede, me parece a mí, solamente ser constituida estableciendo relaciones y reconociendo la comunidad de razones que el MPA y otros movimientos en una progresiva y definida plataforma.

Qué es necesario para habilitar y facilitar coalición entre los movimientos, y la permeabilización del MPA en las venas de otras luchas sociales más amplias, esto está más allá del paradigma de Igualdad Animal. Lo que se necesita es una denominación ontológica común de lo Animal, del ser corporal, que no cubra las diferencias entre movimientos, pero que construya puentes entre ellos y les revele que están conectados no externamente pero desde el interior de una comunidad de preocupaciones de todos los seres sintientes de ser libres de sufrimiento innecesario. Esto revelará el núcleo emergente del MPA de ser casi religioso en su talante, como con la apodicticidad tan típica de los monoteísmos con su Verdad revelada. El mundo viviente ha sido atenuado, cubierto, y olvidado. Demanda recolección y necesidad de ser redimido. Si es el caso, será redimido en una manera de tipo “vamos viendo” que a través de una profecía clara como el día.

Merleau-Ponty, que ha sido llamado el filósofo de la ambigüedad par excellence, dijo que estamos “condenados al significado”. A tal punto somos criaturas organizadas alrededor de un intercambio con propósito con nuestro medioambiente que esto parece ser cierto para mí. Steinberg nota repetidamente que “el significado es reduccionista; y la explicación es co-extensiva con los hechos que explica siendo tan inútil como una mapa de escala 1/1”. Así la ambigüedad se vuelve un hecho siempre presente de la vida criatural, tanto más así en su extensión colectiva entre humanos: política, donde nosotros nunca podremos saber los desenlaces con certeza.

Aun así, arraigado en la experiencia, la intuición y la decisión, la estrategia política debe ser pensada en términos tan concretos como la aplastante represión que la oposición encara en las manos del modo de producción en la defensiva. Debe ser tan real como la auto-represión animal del homo sapiens. Sólo con y a través de una práctica política puede el Animal ser reconocido como la raison d´etre (razón de ser) de transformaciones estructurales e ideológicas que van con, y no en contra de, la vasta mayoría de los cuerpos de la tierra. Sólo a través de la acción política puede el Animal ser puesto en el medio de y en contra las ataduras de poder de un sistema que florece via la explotación y degradación. Pero el pensamiento político y la acción están dirigidos inherentemente por contexto, articulados a condiciones geográficas e históricas específicas. Análisis apropiados, al menos algunos de los cuales tomarán tedioso trabajo en economía política, llenarán mucho más que un volumen. A los propósitos de esta corta presentación, me limitaré a unas pocas observaciones generales.

Compasión, justicia, igualdad y responsabilidad, todos son modos de relaciones intercorporales interanimales que no pueden ser comercializadas y vendidas, y por lo tanto bajo el capitalismo son sofocados. El capitalismo parece estar mejor equipado que nunca para neutralizar una oposición significativa, removiendo la misma tierra sobre la que estamos parados bajo nuestros pies ¿Cómo sería despertar a la gente de su sueño y verse ellos entumecidos? Esta es la grave consecuencia de esperar un rápido despliegue de fuerza revolucionaria para traer un cambio constructivo con una población no preparada. Concedido que los cambios radicales están en camino de cualquier modo a causa de la profundización de las crisis capitalistas, la escasez de recursos, la devastación del ecosistema y el calentamiento global, fundamentalistas en ascenso, es clave que finalmente y gradualmente establezcamos el bloque contra-hegemónico gramsciano en el medio de una civilización cuya declinación parece estar acelerándose rápidamente. Contra la noción de Gramsci de la centralidad de la lucha de clases, esta formación ideológico-cultural material y política debería ahora requerir una base más amplia de lucha eco-animalista que subsumiría y enriquecería el significado de lucha del clases en sí misma en énfasis en la corporeidad de la vida y la oposición a la cosificación del cuerpo, establece la animalidad como el núcleo de sentido común de lo que somos, que nos lleva a pertenecer al mismo orden onto-ético que el resto del mundo animal.

El establecimiento del bloque precisa del llamamiento de toda la hueste de movimientos anti-sistémicos, los cuales por sí solos demuestran ser toda vez inefectivos. Entre ellos yo nombraría a los radical greens que pueden ver más allá de los malos hábitos colaboracionistas de la mayor parte de los ambientalistas arropados en grandes negocios en rascacielos de costosos alquileres. Para evitar el dispersionismo anarquista, ellos precisan la correctiva de los marxistas-socialistas con su foco en estrategia, coordinación, y su crítica despiadada a la producción capitalista. Los más notables entre ellos son los eco-socialistas, quienes han estado ocupados en explicar convincentemente las conexiones entre la penetración de la forma de la comodidad y el trastorno ecológico. Dentro de ese matrimonio entre la ecología y el socialismo, los animalistas inyectamos continuamente la energía reprimida, heterótrofa y creativa del Animal. Junto con eco-fenomenologistas como Abram, enfatizamos la centralidad de los sentidos y la imbibición corporal a cualquier proyecto revolucionario.  Parte de la naturaleza reprimida, animales de carne y hueso que somos, parecemos estar en una necesidad desesperada de liberar desde la condiciones materiales que empobrecen  inmensamente la existencia diaria: la tríada de ecología radical, el socialismo y el prácticamente inexistente pero desesperadamente necesario animalismo, puede contener un destello de esperanza.

A medida que construimos un movimiento político, podemos reconstruir el alma carnal humana atrofiada a través de un retorno a lo sentido, la elucidación de procesos materiales de comodificación en donde el escapismo y la auto-negación condicionan los cuerpos humanos, y convierte a miles de millones de otros cuerpos en cosas. Podemos abrir el camino hacia la resurrección de la indignación animal en nosotros, la parte nuestra que se forma en la no-reconocida base de nuestro auto-respeto y produce respuestas compasivas al sufrimiento innecesario constituyen la objeción de un tigre moliendo sus zoo-opresores. Coordinados comunitariamente, esa energía tiene el potencial de hacer caer cualquier sistema opresivo. Esta no es la fuerza del discurso, cuyo peso no es suficiente para efectuar un cambio estructural perdurable, pero de la carne, poniendo límites a la tecnología bajo supervisión colectiva, y negando la experiencia capitalista de la vida via, educación descomodificante, haciendo crecer un activismo de bases profundas, y un ejemplo corpóreo de acción directa atada a una imperfecta, ambigua, incesante proyección de los animales anhelando liberación.