As Speed Increases So Must Our Trust II: Unexpected Next Step, Research Time, 09/12/2014

As I thought about the basic idea that lay behind yesterday’s post, I had an intriguing idea. It was an answer to Paul Virilio’s critique of the accelerating speed at which information and material in modern human society moves. Remember that Virilio’s analysis is based on the notion that as communications and materials move faster and faster in a society, the more militarized that society becomes. Or at least, the more vulnerable to militarization the society becomes.

Virilio himself isn’t quite so hesitant as I am, but that’s because of a fundamental difference between he and I on the human capacity to adapt to high speeds. In this sense, for all his association with radical left politics, I find Virilio a conservative figure. He has little faith in humanity's ability to change with its changing world. In so many aspects of our existence, I consider humanity an immensely changeable and adaptable species. 

A foundational psychosis of our modern sensibility is the
simultaneous fear of mechanization and breathless
anticipation to become a machine.

The danger of accelerating speed in human life is that humanity’s control of itself will be overwhelmed. The prophets and theorists of totalitarian politics and life envisioned humanity as constantly accelerating (as in the propulsive image of the car on an empty highway for Marinetti) and embracing a mechanization that renders individuality superfluous until it disappears (as in Jünger’s nightmares of the First World War). 

Organic existence requires, in this perspective, slowing down and thinking. Only in slowness can we hope to take control of our existence, of the processes that determine how we live. In a slow-moving communications environment, possible knowledge accumulates at a speed that allows a single person to get on top of the details of every intellectual and political event and development. This is the myth of the early modern polymath, the idealization of men like Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. 

When we are able to move slowly, we can take self-conscious control of every aspect of human life and politics. Comprehensive knowledge frees us because it empowers us to act as an expert in every domain of human life. Such slowness finds itself deluged in the propulsion of contemporary communication and material flows.

My first critique of this idea is that I don’t think such totally comprehensive knowledge was ever possible on an individual scale. Even if human society was ever so simple that one person could ever plausibly understand everything that was going on with any genuine comprehensiveness, the physical world around us was always more complicated than this. One aspect of this simpler, slower world that is too often romanticized is that everyone was incredibly ignorant about almost all of existence. Our knowledge has exploded beyond the scale where any one person can be a true master of everything, but it’s become more comprehensive as a whole of the world itself.

Here’s what all this has to do with the Romney-Obama campaign story I told yesterday. When an individual or a small group attempts total control of all of a complex field of action, their knowledge to control it is inevitably inadequate. The top Romney campaign brass would not let anyone else communicate without their knowledge, and they could not build their knowledge and understanding with the speed required for adequate response in our fast digital media environment.

The key factor was trust, enabled by the democratization of knowledge. Every member of the Obama digital media team was included in the intimate knowledge of the key messages and public images that the campaign developed. Having been welcomed into that knowledge, they were empowered to enact that knowledge in their communication. They knew the organization’s goal, and they already had the expertise in action to push that goal forward in their own venues. They could do so because no one at the top expected to have total control over every act of communication.

The lesson for our politics is this. We need not be afraid of a world of accelerated media and material flows. The fear lies in the inability of any one individual to master knowledge of every phenomenon as it changed. But a group can achieve what is beyond the means of an individual. A team working together to combine their specialties is more powerful than even a superman. Knowledge and trust binds those teams together, just as it binds together communities and societies.

Here is a key lesson underlying the anarchism — sorry, network politics — in my own political ideals. Our greatest enemies, the most fundamental forces of destruction in our world, are willful ignorance and fearful paranoia. Practical action in the world must be based on knowledge and our ethics at every scale of human action must be based on trust.

As Speed Increases So Must Our Trust, Research Time, 08/12/2014

I came across an article today that was very revealing not only of the power of contemporary social media, but its nature, which also put me in mind of some of the more abstract political philosophy that I’d read over the last year or so. In particular, I’m thinking of Paul Virilio, because it has to do with the speed of social media processes.

Daniel Kreiss teaches at the Media and Journalism School at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He got several high-ranking people in the Obama 2012 and Romney 2012 campaigns to talk to him in obsessive detail about the social media strategies, organizations, and noteworthy events of the most expensive political campaign in the history of modern democracy. The paper was written like a bog-standard social science chunk of research academia: intro, lit review, methods and sources, findings, analysis. The content is fascinating.

What stands out about the paper is how brilliantly it illustrates the speed of Twitter as a medium. That speed affects the medium’s strong limits and incredible potentials. There are two examples. 

All the preparation in the world can't prepare you
to react with the speed you need to live.

1. Connectivity. Before the first Romney-Obama debate, the Republican team had a pile of infographics and tweetable material prepared to launch with every mention of a concrete Romney policy. The Mitt Romney twitter feed broadcast the accounts of influential campaign activists who’d be retweeting prepared material, like those infographics, before the debate, and prepared their dedicated followers to spread the Romney gospel far and wide.

The result was so many retweets of pre-approved Romney material during the debate that its sheer volume made blog-based and traditional journalists declare (with a little help from Obama's own lacklustre performance on the night) Romney the winner. It was a vision that looked organic, but was really deeply prepared.

But while the Romney team’s preparation was a virtue, it was also a terrible vulnerability. The Republicans could prepare for an event that they knew was a long time coming and seed the online audience, essentially, with plants whose volume would manipulate the wider perception of what public opinion was. They understood the dense connectivity of online media.

2. Spontaneity and autonomy. The Romney team didn’t understand the biggest problems of online media’s radically compressed time scale compared to other media. Kreiss describes a key difference between online and traditional media as their cycles of dominance. Online media moves immensely fast. The equivalent of dominating the 24-hour cable news cycle for an entire day is to be among the top trenders for one to two hours. Kreiss doesn’t mention this, but I'd say the older-media equivalent would be holding the front pages of a nation’s newspapers for about a week.

Virilio associates the human capacity to control a political movement – whether in information as I’m discussing now, or in the movement of people and soldiers – with humanity’s ability to handle its speed. A process that unfolds over weeks allows more control, and therefore freedom, than a process that unfolds and finishes before you even know it’s started. If you can move yourself with the movement, then you can maintain control. If the movement overtakes you, you’re sunk.

This is apparently a photo of Mitt Romney dancing to
"Gangnam Style." It is also evidence that typical
American Republicans do not understand the finer
details of popular culture, whether those details are
transformative or trivial.

What sunk Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, at least insofar as it moved through online media and the perceptions such media affected, was that it couldn’t keep up. The Romney campaign could prepare a great deal of pre-approved material in advance. But they were so paranoid about maintaining total control of messaging and public content* that anything needed to be approved by the entire campaign leadership before being sent out. Depending on the point in the campaign, that could be anywhere between 17 and 22 people. 

* Really, who knows why? I could speculate that it was paranoia over the possibility of a staffer making a gaffe, fear of the “liberal media” spinning even the tiniest of ambiguities into an anti-Republican talking point, or any other thing. I don’t know what they were thinking. This is the Mitt Romney campaign. Who knows what any of them were thinking?

This completely constrained the ability of the Romney campaign to respond to unplanned crises. The Obama team, meanwhile, had total autonomy. The upper brass trusted the digital media team enough (and they were trained well enough) on the major messages and images of the campaign to tweet without pre-approval. As a result, they could move as fast as Twitter itself.

That’s why, when Clint Eastwood went on his rant to the empty chair at the Republican National Convention, the Obama campaign could tweet the perfect reply within hours: a photo of Obama’s head and ears sticking over the back of the President’s chair in a White House meeting room, and three words, “This seat’s taken.”

Snap.

When your medium of communication moves beyond a particular threshold of speed, you have to trust everyone whose fingers are on the keyboards. Romney’s team was so paranoid about messaging and a hostile media that they kept a communications approval process barely suited to the speed of cable news: they could formulate, approve, and broadcast a response to an unexpected development by the next day. 

Setting an agenda in online media requires a response time of an hour. Perhaps even less. That takes lightning fast reflexes. But it also takes trust in the lower-level staff whose job is to physically broadcast those messages.

Really Good Science-Fiction, Composing, 07/12/2014

As I’ve written before, I’ve always been into science-fiction throughout my life. It isn’t really, when you think about it, a big deal because so many popular culture involve sci-fi forms and ideas. But even though sci-fi ideas basically are popular culture now, actually identifying yourself as someone who likes sci-fi per se has, at least until recently, put you pretty solidly in nerd cultures, with everything that entails.

But I’m also a published novelist in sci-fi now. Even though I won’t be able to get fully into promoting Under the Trees, Eaten until the new year (it was always going to be a slow build sort of thing anyway, as I’m trying to get my new career in communications and network science off the ground at the same time), I’m still actually part of the field.

So whenever my friend Philosojaysfan* tweets links about his Stanley Kubrick fandom, I’m usually interested, especially when it’s about 2001, which is one of the greatest science-fiction movies ever made. This time, the British Film Institute posted a scan of Kubrick’s original letter to Arthur C. Clarke that started their collaboration on what would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

* Yes, that is seriously his Twitter handle. Don’t judge him, because you know it’s actually kind of brilliant.

So many pictures of Kubrick make him look intense or
manic, but I prefer the images of him as amused or
bemused.

Kubrick’s movies were really influential on my thinking when I first started to consider seriously the possibility of creating art as one of the major things I did with my life. My own styles and priorities have since become very different than his, but that formative influence, admiration, and love is still there. As well, there are attempts throughout my work to make what I’d call “really good science-fiction.” 

So I thought this and the next few Sunday/weekend posts would discuss some of my ideas about what makes “really good science-fiction” and how I put these into my work. Right now, my two major projects are Under the Trees, Eaten and the Alice script that I’m developing with Lee Skinner. I’ll discuss an idea I had for a comic series a few years ago, and how that developed in my thinking after meeting a possible collaborator in Toronto this summer. And maybe I’ll talk about some ideas I’ve had about a dream project of mine: what I’d do if my writing career ever gets to the point where the BBC would commission me to write an episode of Doctor Who.

What do I think generally constitutes “really good science-fiction”? A lot of it is in that letter Kubrick wrote to Arthur C. Clarke in 1964. There should be a thoughtfulness to it, considering a question that could (or perhaps should) reorient how we understand the universe and our place in it. I ultimately don’t like what Clarke did with the 2001 concept of extra-terrestrial life in the novels that followed their collaboration. He essentially made them superpowerful gods whose mission was to seed the universe with life of all kinds. 

There was a naïveté in those Clarke novels that depressed me at the time I read them without entirely knowing why. Kubrick and Clarke’s original collaboration didn’t get into the aliens’ motives for what they were doing at all, letting their actions remain mysterious, and our encounters with them taking on an almost mystical character. Aliens would be so different from us that encountering them would require a temporary suspension of your own humanity, an experience that only our religious mystical traditions have come close to preparing us for. When aliens that were once the causes of world-shattering encounters are treated as technical problems to solve and tinker with, a lot of literary and philosophical majesty is lost.

This is a problem that I have with a lot of sci-fi influenced by the Golden Age period anyway, as Clarke’s very much was. The stories were not about character, ethics, or any deeper meaning, but simply puzzle boxes. Culturally, we’ve figured out how to combine puzzle boxes with all that now, and so the quotidian triviality of puzzle box storytelling only becomes more frustrating to encounter.

Dancing Through Kensington, Composing, 06/12/2014

One of the essays in Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism collection that I loved, for both philosophical and personal reasons, was his analysis of Dancer in the Dark, the Lars von Trier film from 2000. Wolfe examined the film in the context of the tradition in Western philosophy that makes a problem of our sensory and perceptual relationship with the world.

There are two pretty remarkable ideas I had when I was reading this essay. One regarded Wolfe’s intriguing reading of the philosophical implications of the film. He uses it as a springboard to examine a key epistemic problem of modernism, and how his own perspective (a post-humanist and post-modern perspective influenced by systems theory and Jacques Derrida’s philosophical encounters with the impossibility of any certainty that doesn’t subvert itself at some level) engages with modernist models of knowledge.

The terrifying ecstasy of a Björk whose world falls apart.

The central analogy through which we typically understand knowledge today is the imagery of vision. This in itself isn’t controversial, and Descartes is the usual reference point here, with his continual talk of the importance that knowledge be clear and distinct, at least in most people’s introductions to philosophy in university classrooms. But the general modernist account of knowledge also depends on knowledge’s inaccessibility. This is where Kant’s idea appears, that the world we experience are the appearances of a thing-in-itself as our encounters are conditioned by the apparatuses through which we experience the world. 

Further explanation of this model comes with Wolfe’s account of Derrida’s distinction* of voice and noise. For us to gain knowledge from sound, we make sense of it, sensible noise being regarded as voice. But sound without this conditioning of our interpretation is just noise. We wouldn’t even be capable of understanding any sound as pure noise, because the mere act of going to work on sound to make it somehow comprehensible is making some manner of voice from noise. And since we don’t experience noise without interpretation, the sense of hearing better explains this notion of the thing-in-itself. 

* You like my recursivity here?

Another aspect of Dancer in the Dark that this essay helped me see regards my own artistic work, which is why I gave this post my Composing label, even though most of its content is better suited to research time. Wolfe is also doing some genre analysis in this essay, to make sense of what weird kind of narrative and film Dancer in the Dark actually is. 

To do that, he discusses the nature of opera, particularly the aria, and compares it to the Hollywood musical. Musicals are an important element of Dancer in the Dark’s story: Björk’s character Selma’s favourite type of film is the musical, and Wolfe’s essay walks you through a conception of the Hollywood musical sequence as an attempt to impose an ethical sensibility on a world that is otherwise chaotic, terrifying, and hostile. Her musical sequences see her subjectivity itself taking control of the film: the disparate noise of realistic cinema becomes the sensible clarity of choreographed music and dance.

The shaky handheld camera of the film’s realistic sequences contrasts with the steadily shot, immaculately composed and coordinated musical sequences when Selma begins to sing. As her situation grows increasingly desperate, her musical interruptions of the realism likewise grow more difficult to succeed, as when she desperately searches for some sound to morph into music in the oppressive silence of her death row jail cell and when her last attempt to sing is cut off by the fall of her neck into a hangman’s noose.

Sam Nemeth played an excellent
Vicki, but I didn't notice until after
our first production wrapped that I
made a Lars von Trier lamb out of her.

The musical sequences function as arias: operatic attempts to impose a moral order that prevents disaster on a world that resists conformity to best action. It’s a perfect element around which to focus a Lars von Trier movie, as his narrative often revolve around taking a female protagonist to the absolute breaking point in her suffering and actually breaking her. 

This is why I sat in shock for a long time after I saw Dancer in the Dark for the first time (and in the sensory immersion of a cinema too, not the relative distance of a television or a computer screen); watching this story of Selma being tortured and essentially flayed alive until she was dead, even though she always tried to do the right thing, was paralytically horrifying to me.

I realized, on reading Wolfe’s account of the aria, that I did this in You Were My Friend, despite my own general discomfort with von Trier’s styles of narrative. Vicki and Madison’s solo scenes, whether monologues or realistic explosions, are their arias, their expressions of yearning for a world where their compromises and terrible circumstances can be avoided. But whether it’s in their own natures or the natures of their world, they can’t avoid their worsening situations. Without even knowing I was doing it, I gave them a von Trier plot, even though I hate those plots when I see them.

Why People Wear Masks, Jamming, 04/12/2014

I find it strangely fitting that Phil Sandifer’s chapter on the legendary V for Vendetta in his Last War in Albion project on the British Invasion of the American comics industry dropped this Tuesday. V for Vendetta is a work that created the most notable imagery of protest in our era, the Guy Fawkes mask that conceals your identity so you can speak your mind freely. Phil’s country, the United States of America, is having yet another revolutionary moment of its own, not only through the continuing protests and public outrage against the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri and the failure to indict the police officer who shot him to have even a public trial. 

Wednesday saw a New York grand jury decline to bring any charges against police officer Daniel Pantaleo, who personally choked a middle-aged black man named Eric Garner to death on a sidewalk where he and several other officers attempted to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes. Unlike the sketchy and mutually contradictory eyewitness accounts of Brown’s murder, a witness named Ramsey Orta, Garner’s friend, actually filmed the entire incident on his phone. It’s right here.

The civil unrest that has understandably followed the major events of the Brown case, and has already arisen over Garner’s murder, expresses the rage that many Americans rightfully feel against a system that is openly prejudiced against a significantly large and increasingly vocal minority. I’m glad that some resistance to the racial injustices in Western societies are getting some popular press through social media, thanks to campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter and #CrimingWhileWhite.

And the intellectual left in online circles rightly identifies that there are systemic causes that need to be changed. One of the bravest articles on the post-Ferguson landscape of thought about racial politics was a piece published in Jacobin Magazine a few days before the announcement that Darren Wilson would not be indicted. Mariame Koba asked her readers to “indict the system.” 

Understanding the systemic causes of institutionalized racism and its material injustices is very difficult for humanity to do. Humans typically understand direct causation, when someone physically acts. And we typically understand indirect causation, when an action one person takes causes someone else to act in a particular way. 

Eric Garner seems to have been a very nice man.
Nonetheless, because he was killed by police officers,
many people speak very arrogantly on the internet as if
he was a criminal to deserved to be choked to death. Not
only is this callous and cruel, but it voices a terrifying
underlying presumption: that if a police officer kills you,
then it was right that you were killed.

But systemic causation is literally causation without agency, the causation of conditioning, tendencies, and likelihoods of what actions at the individual level will emerge from a complex set of relations. This is why it’s so difficult for so many people, like the Chief Justice of the United States' Supreme Court, to notice racism without racists. We can easily understand what it means for an individual to hold racist beliefs and treat people in discriminatorily violent ways. 

Yet it’s hard for us to assign moral blame and shame to, for example, an individual white police officer who has best friends who are Hispanic, friendly neighbours who are Arab-American, and an African-American wife, but who also stops and frisks any black or Latino male walking down the street who’s lost some weight lately and is wearing old pants that are slipping. Because he’s part of an institution that has trained him in certain modes of behaviour, he himself isn’t a racist, but still behaves in racist ways because of his institutional function and training. 

That's why indictments and criminal justice procedures centred on punishment aren't even really the correct means to fight the social problems we face today. Identifying the responsible party for a specific wrong act and punishing them works fine for incidents of direct and indirect causation. But the true triggerman in cases of racist police violence is the institutional system itself. Where causation is systematic, the instantiation at the individual scale is a matter of chance. Darren Wilson happened to see Michael Brown one day carrying a fistful of shoplifted cigarillos. That this was the act was bad luck. That there would be an act eventually was inevitable. 

The only way to repair wrongs that occur at the systemic level is to change the actual system. This isn't a matter of retribution and punishment, but of large-scale reform, repair, and social and institutional transformation. Systematic injustice requires not retributive, but reparative justice.

That this film and this novel should turn into Alan Moore's
most visible legacy in the human race speaks to its
incredible power and its core lesson. That even if we must
be anonymous to do it, we must not let our leaders and
institutions believe that they control society simply
because of their role in institutions. The police work for
us, and they ultimately must take our orders, not we theirs.

The dangerous part of Western institutional systems in this case is that we give a portion of our population the power of the legitimate use of violence against all other citizens and regular access to many kinds of weaponry. Too many of us trust these people instinctively, even though such trustworthiness should never be taken for granted. My old friend Sheena, a journalist with Sun Media, tweeted an article about the Pantaleo non-indictment which had a disturbing comment section, even by the standard of internet comment threads, that terribly unnerved her.

Those commenters illustrated what I think is a terrible tendency of thought. The most important common element that I saw among all the commenters was universal trust in the judgment of police officers. If a police officer was attacking you, then you did something wrong, because police officers only attack criminals. The default attitude of these commenters is to trust without criticism or a second thought the group of people who are institutionally empowered to do armed violence to the populace.

I found the same frustration reading Robert Nozick, if for an entirely different reason. He follows a tradition in Anglo-American political philosophy of reasoning through a society’s essential political relations in the abstract argument of a social contract thought experiment. And because the abstract terms of his argument define security through a monopoly on protective services as the only legitimate function of the state, the police and the military become the only legitimate state functionaries.

Because Nozick’s work lies at the foundation of modern libertarianism, these principled individualists who stand against government violence interfering with personal liberty see more violence in a state health insurance plan or environmental regulations than in battalions of armed civil servants with the power to kill and imprison citizens with regular impunity and, at best, personal inconvenience. Libertarians should be the natural enemies of state-sanctioned violence, but I’ve met too many who show the same blind trust in the police as the poor fools I linked above.

We’ve institutionalized both racist norms and a capacity for unchecked violence in the institutional authorities we invest with the power of violence. This is a recipe for disaster and I’m glad that, as a society, we’re coming to clear grips with that. Too bad it took generations of disasters.

The Deceptive Ease of Looking Back, Research Time, 03/12/2014

We don’t really know anything about the past, even the recent past. We think that we do, but that isn’t really the case. It isn’t that we delude ourselves that we perfectly understand the past and where we come from. I’m not going Freud-style with my thinking here. I’m just riffing about a particular idea that Cary Wolfe skirts in his What Is Posthumanism collection about the nature of history.

It’s an an essay called “Animal Studies,” where he examines some of the university system’s professional tendencies that have led to the proliferation of “X studies” disciplines. These remarks are almost marginal, occurring in some closing sections of his overall argument, casually tossed into a discussion to explain a Derridean idea that our sense of our own narrative is foreign to itself. But since he’s such a fan of Derrida, I’m sure he’ll have no problem with my getting some mileage out of an idea he discusses on the margins. 

When I read War and Peace, I was impressed by
Tolstoy's ability to combine the personal scale of
a single noble family with the grand historical
political movement of Napoleon's wars of
European conquest, the man Hegel called "the
World-Spirit on horseback." But Tolstoy still cut
away from the detailed stories of the people
beyond the noble class in those wars. Ostensibly
comprehensive history revealed to be selective.

Where we come from as a culture is often very clear to us. We learn all the basic beats of our countries’ social and political histories in the earliest years of our education. The foundation of our state, major waves of immigration and settlement, the chronologies of the major wars, as well as national and international political events. All this heritage is clear. 

But there’s a lot of our history that doesn’t make it into the history books or the canon of what’s self-consciously culturally remembered. I don’t mean history in that self-conscious sense here, how a culture in the present understands and knows its own past. 

I mean the actual physical causes that interact in the process of roiling time. Almost all of those causes were events that occurred to ordinary people, or that ordinary people created. Wolfe makes a peculiar point. Say 200 books from the Victorian era end up being remembered culturally in some, at least minor form. That’s barely half a percent of all the books that were published in that time. 

Here's another example. I was thinking to myself yesterday that I wanted to find some heavy rock music from the 1960s. I heard a 60s-sounding guitar in a store the other day, but it was heavier than most of the music I knew from the period. So I found this list online that someone who knows WAY MORE about music from this era than I do compiled of 158 heavy rock bands from the late 1960s. I had heard of hardly any. Now, I want to track them down. These were people who formed bands, made some kickass music, and disappeared from our knowledge of history. Yet their actions still contributed to the constitution of our causal history.

And now I really want to get into Atomic Rooster.

Wolfe’s point is that how we understand our own cultural narrative is actually incredibly selective, and has cut a lot away from consideration. We only remember in our history books a few centrally important narratives and chains of events; so much else has been forgotten about and disappeared without a trace in the present anymore, except for proliferating physical effects that effect indirectly and systematically a variety of events today, which will probably later be similarly forgotten.

This fact causes a lot of problems for many influential conceptions of history, particularly any philosophy of history that sees human historical existence as an ultimately unified process. Or at least as a process with a particular end point in mind. Let’s make the scope even more broad: any understanding of history as having any sort of simple organizing concept. 

So I’d actually like to hear from some of my Hegelian friends about this idea. Because when I first started this blog in July 2013, I was reading Georg Hegel’s Philosophy of History, had some good discussions on the subject with B, and some irritatingly dogmatic discussions on the subject with P. Ever since I first started reading Hegel in detail, in a graduate course I took during my Master’s studies going through The Phenomenology of Spirit, I found the goal of this central book in Hegel’s thought is laying out a conception of history that has a clear, unifiable meaning.

But if our understanding of our culture’s own history is so selective in its composition that almost all immanent social phenomena are cut away when we tell the story of a given era or historical path, then even a figure like Hegel who (along with his many, many, many followers and reactors) pitches his own historicism as a universal structure of humanity’s very temporality, then all these pretensions to the universal are a lie.

There is no one story to history of any kind. There is always more to be discovered beyond the neat conclusions of a historicism determined by a single set of concepts. We forget more than we have ever known. We never learn all there is to know. No matter how dead and dull we might think the past may be, there are always more stories to discover if you look.

Angry PostHumanism III: “How Dare I Eat Meat?! I Almost Cried,” Research Time, 01/12/2014

Those of you who remember Scrubs will know that the
person usually in charge of bioethical decisions in
practice rarely prioritizes purely moral motives.

Continued from previous . . . The longest essay in Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? collection is a complicated critique of bioethics philosophy. I’ve heard plenty of critiques of bioethics, both as philosophy and as practice. 

The practice criticism is fairly simple: a hospital bioethicist has been trained in a philosophical context of dense arguments and to act as an emotional caregiver to families and friends of patients going through intense life or death issues, but the biggest pressure on their jobs is often handling situations such that the hospital avoids liability.

Wolfe’s essay on the subject, “Flesh and Finitude,” concentrates on the philosophical critique, being a philosopher. It’s a sprawl of an essay, and I think it suffers from that sprawl, setting up a problem in one context but never really returning to it by the end of its conceptual journey. It begins with the subject of bioethics and drifting away to consider how more fundamental aspects of human subjectivity impact how we think of our rights. 

It can be difficult to critique the language of rights, practically speaking, because almost all civil, criminal, and international law is conceived in terms of rights. The entire institution of tort law, for example, depends on a person’s claim to standing against another to make an accusation for redress. So much of our moral thinking is about the nature and reach of our rights to make claims against each other. 

Animals are often cut out of this, intuitively speaking, because they physiologically can’t speak to make claims upon their rights. Even Bruno Latour, a thinker who’s often considered a radical post-humanist and whose writings on science are nefarious in some circles for destabilizing public faith in the infallibility of scientific knowledge,* has written that there can only be a just relationship of humans and non-humans when scientific instruments have enabled non-humans to express their interests linguistically. This is the key idea behind his parliament of all species in The Politics of Nature.

* Latour himself now belongs in that camp. Over the last ten years, as he has engaged with the politics of climate change deniers, he has openly expressed regret that he carried out any of the anthropological studies of scientists and scientific institutions that defined his early career. Even though his research showed the humanity of science as an institution, he now wishes that he could convince people that scientists were infallible possessors of pure and perfect truths about the world again, because it would cut off the viral skepticism that drives the popular denial of climate change.

The language of rights in our culture has a powerful gravity. Even writers who have tried to theorize ways to conceive of animal ethics beyond the old-fashioned scope of civil rights and standing end up just creating more lists of demands and claims that basically are rights, but under a different name. One of Wolfe’s central examples of this is Martha Nussbaum’s list of animal capabilities: she pitches it as having moved beyond the rights-based approach of cataloguing standings and demands, but it practically amounts to a list of standings and demands that a wider range of organisms can claim.

The approach of creating lists of claims based on some clear criteria (rights, capabilities, or some other) is an approach to philosophy that sees its goal as crafting specific problems to deal with well-defined issues by producing definitive answers that ends the inquiry. I’ve never liked this approach to philosophy precisely because it tries to settle problems that motivate countless writers across the world and across centuries in neat little packages. It treats difficult questions as if they had easy answers. 

Wolfe considers literature better suited to engaging with the core issues of what our attitudes should be to the animals on which we depend to live. Literature depicts difficult situations, undecidable moments, suspension in an existentially powerful tension. He refers to J. M. Coetzee, who has written about the existential terror of realizing that we must consume creatures with which we’re evolutionarily continuous. 

By showing how the problems of rights and standing to make claims against those who harm them can apply to the situations of animals, Wolfe tries to problematize the bioethics of hospital practice. When not only humans, but many kinds of life, can provoke the ethical unsettling of an existentially problematic encounter, a lot of the core presumptions that ground our everyday moral practice are shaken along with ourselves.