Killing Animals in Video Games

So, Cameron Kunzelman has two short articles out in Five Out of Ten. I purchased the issue for $5.60 (£3.50), and you should too. There is even profit sharing.* He has two articles, one on second gaming (which I will try to get to later), and the other playing Minecraft while vegetarian.

I actually first played Minecraft because of Cameron. He nagged and insisted, and really, it wasn't so hard to convince me I should play video games rather than do my work. Like Cameron, when I play video games (not often) I usually play as a vegetarian/vegan. In most video games that means not eating meat that occurs/drops as premade. It does not usually mean avoiding hunting or domesticating. In Minecraft (at least when I last played, some two years ago), in order to eat meat, you had to hunt and kill animals, that squealed when you hit them. This is Cameron's comments about the one time he decided he'd rather kill the virtual pig than die (also virtually):

I hit it once. It squealed and snorted and tried to run. I chased it. I hit it with a shovel and it tried to run, panicked, and didn’t make it very far. I hit it until it tipped over and pieces of meat flew out of its body.
I’m haunted by it. I’ve killed hundreds of AI humans in video games. I have executed civilians. I have ended civilizations. I’ve cleared out a fictional Dubai of all living beings. I’ve made a wasteland of digital worlds and preemptively struck with nuclear weapons.

Cameron has some theories about why one is perhaps different than the other for him. You have to read it to find out, but here is why it is for me in Minecraft. For those who have never played, Minecraft is the ultimate sandbox game, you mine stuff and you craft it, and you decide what you want to do in the game. Want to build a floating library made out of glass and towers and light and hanging gardens? You can do it. Want to build a replica of the land from The Game of Thrones? You can do it. You get the idea. Minecraft is also weirdly evil. Monsters come out at dark, unless you have light and walls and swords. Look, I am loath to link, but this Penny Arcade comic covers it all quickly and humorously. One, two. Everything in Minecraft is pure resource. Everything is meant to be manipulated, transformed, used. And if you don't make light and walls, the monsters will get you. Using animals in this context always bothered me, because the idea that animals are pure resource is exactly the thing I am always fighting against. Or maybe it is just part of the whole techne tou bios of veganism I have talked about elsewhere.

*Look, I understand it is a weird and roundabout way to give money to someone. It would drive economists insane. That is, honestly, a good enough reason to do it. Buy Five Out of Ten to give Cameron a dollar, and you drive an economist insane. Good call!

Beware the Cyborgs? On Augmented Reality Glasses and related matters.

By now you have all heard about Google Glass, probably more than you wish. For those of you who don't know what I mean, here is a decent overview. And of course, there are plenty of developers for augmented reality goggles, not just Google Glass. Anyway, there is already a movement to try to ban goggle glasses in certain public spaces, (and despite what Eric Schmidt says, these concerns are clearly not just from people "afraid of the future"). I really suggest reading and following the blog, Stop the Cybrogs. As you can see, the blog is about more than just wearable computing and augmented reality glasses, but more broadly, about the way that certain Big Data and computerizations are producing certain realities. This Ars Technica article/interview is really useful for an overview.

What is at stake here isn't any sort of traditional romanticization of privacy, but rather, a very different question is at stake. As Adam from StC has put it, google glasses has the potential to "destroys having multiple identities" and that "You're never going to see a stranger as a stranger again." Remember the time when we all thought the internet was going to make it so we got to be all genderqueer deconstructionist deleuzian radicals? Good times. But rather than the internet making it so that we have so many identities, we are all beginning to confront the reality that instead the internet is also good for fixing Macro and Molar identities. Or, as the StC puts it:

In the past interacting in the physical world was “private by default” and “public through effort” whereas, on the Internet, the reverse is true: What we do is “public by default” and “private through effort.”
Our point is that with wearable’s and the internet of things the physical world also becomes “public by default” and “private through effort.” unless we actively work to replace friction by law and by norms.

Clearly, this isn't some sort of wide-reaching critique of the internet, or a claim that there are not radical possibilities and realities of the internet, or anything of the sort. And, I know for most of us, this is all old, old hat. But yet, I think it is important to remember that Donna Haraway might have gotten this one really, really wrong. Rather than cyborgs being fundamentally hybrid beings, they are vectors of the the digitalization of everyday life. There is something about the singular identity and the removal of the stranger that is philosophically dense here.


Also, I dunno, it is part of my protracted silence for a while on this blog. I went on the job market, and I was encouraged by many to minimize my digital footprint (I did some stuff for things I said as an undergrad and early grad student, but couldn't bring myself to delete and remove most of my extensive online self). Who knows if that was or was not a good idea. But somehow even in the supposed pro-free speech and free thinking world of academia, I thought it was a good idea to curate my digital existence and enter a period of digital silence.

Philosophy of Race and Critical Animal Theory

Tom has an interesting post, that I started writing a comment to, and it became really long, so I decided to turn it into a blog post. You should go read it, it concerns tensions between animal ethics, philosophy of race, and the role of intuition in philosophy. Short, but smart. Go read, I'll wait. 

(Also, I am excited for his two new books coming out. His short monograph Levinas Unhinged, and his edited collection on Habit.) 

The point made my the philosopher of race (I wonder who it was?) is pretty common (though from from universal) in many philosophy of race, decolonial and postcolonial philosophy theories. And as someone who takes decolonial and postcolonial philosophy, nonwestern philosophy, and philosophy of race very seriously (and incorporates it in my scholarship and teaching) this is a real issue for me. I've written about these issues a lot on this blog, so I embed some links to past posts to do some of the work for me. Even though I do not fully agree with all of these posts. 

On the one hand, decolonial thinkers advance some of the best critiques of humanism, on the other they usually do it in order to talk about the need for a stronger humanism . And I do think that fights against anthropocentrism are useful for fights against racism (though they are not sufficient!). However, there is more than just the fact that people of color have been compared to animals and dehumanized, but the history co-mingling animal welfare and rights groups with obviously problematic, racist, and colonialist projects. Peta still engages in campaigns that are not only sexist, but frequently racist (often both ). And not just PETA, but if you look at the original animal welfare groups in Britain, you see some complex and interesting things. On the one hand, you have the The Vegetarian Society, which was viewed with disgrace, attracted a bunch of different radicals, and Gandhi credits with his radicalizing on the issues of colonialism. On the other hand, the RSPCA and the first animal welfare laws were all centered around class concerns, race concerns, and connected to explicit colonialists. 

I think there is a lot that needs to be done by critical animal theorists in order to help this. (1) Avoid the seduction of tokenism, of being able to point out a few diverse people in order to shrug of systemic claims of what is going on at conferences, edited volumes, etc. (2) Maybe we need to read less continental thinkers, and start reading more explicitly radical women and queers of color, decolonialist and postcolonialists, philosophers of race, and generally nonwestern philosophy. If I want an anthropocentric thinker who is critical of humanism, I don't always need to go after Agamben when I can read and cite Sylvia Wynter. (3) This will mean, also, to practice the sort of humility in engagement that can be really hard. To expect to be surprised, to be open to being wrong, and generally to not engage in that sort of way when one goes around and explains that the other side just needs to get how right you have been this whole time ("But don't you understand that anthropocentrism is behind racism? So thank you very much for no longer insisting upon your humanity..." etc.). 

None of this entails necessarily giving up our core ethics, or even being critical of other philosophers of race on occasion. For example, arguments about the cultural imperialism of vegetarianism and veganism that continue  simply ignore that other animals have culture is not very convincing or useful. 

In general, critical animal theorists need to admit that we do indeed, as a field, often have a problem with eurocentrism. No, this isn't unique to our field, and no, we are not all guilty of it. But none of that changes the fact we need to change our field. 

CFP: The Production of Knowledge and the Future of the University

The Sixth Annual Comparative Literature Graduate Conference
Binghamton University (SUNY)
Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics:
The Production of Knowledge and the Future of the University
March 8th-9th, 2013

Neoliberal policies have restructured the university, disciplinary
knowledge, and the disciplines themselves. With the formation of the
‘for-profit’ university, profit-bearing disciplines are valorized,
student loans increase drastically, and humanities departments are
pressured to redefine themselves in the face of intrusive economic
demands. But where does this leave the humanities? What is the status
of knowledge production given economic deregulation and privatization
shaping the present and future of the university?

These transformations have manifested in the dissolution and
elimination of departments in the humanities, and thereby the loss of
certain types of knowledge from the university. Perhaps because, or in
spite of, these very same processes, spaces for new knowledges open
up. For instance, humanities centers are formed to house conversations
between traditional disciplines as interdisciplinary programs are
dissolved. These transformations refer to but also move beyond
questions as they appear in Jacques Derrida’s “The University Without
Condition,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline, or
Edu-factory’s Toward a Global Autonomous University.

We seek papers that address the following questions:

What trends and approaches exist in literary criticism today? Are they
connected to the broader restructurings mentioned? If so, how? For
instance, how do feminist, postcolonial, queer, and other approaches
to literature address questions concerning the production of
knowledge?
What political problems do neoliberal policies pose at the university
level, the disciplinary level, and beyond the university?
How do we define research today within comparative literature,
language departments, visual studies, media studies, cultural studies,
and other interdisciplinary programs? What methods and theories can
legitimately be used within the disciplinary purview of today’s
humanities departments? What does this mean for disciplinary
boundaries themselves?
Ultimately, is literary criticism still relevant to knowledge
production within the university? How does the analysis of a specific
literary movement, period, or narrative reflect these broader
developments?

Please send your 300-500 word abstract to Isabella To at
thefutureuniversity@gmail.com by December 14th, 2012.

Concerned Philosophers for Peace Conference CFP

Unruly Creatures I&II

Backdoor Broadcasting has the recordings up of Unruly Creatures (which they have had up for a while), and the more recent Unruly Creatures II. If you click the links, you will get the talks, plus sometimes other things. You will also get a quick summary of the talk.  [sidenote: I am not done with the Feminists Encountering Animals event, just thought I would put this up first].

Unruly Creatures I: The Art and Politics of the Animal. June 14th, 2011. Hosted by The London Graduate School.


Participants include: Cary Wolfe, Vinciane Despret, Steven Baker, and Phillip Warnell (there are also important respondents and introductions).

Unruly Creatures II: Creative Revolutions. June 18th, 2012. Hosted by The London Graduate School.

Participants include: André Dias, Erica Fudge, Jonathan Burt, and Anat Pick (and again, there are also important respondents and introductions).

FEA: Stephanie Jenkins, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and killable subjects

Two quick notes: (1) The "virtual symposium" has been extended until at least July 20th. So, if you haven't had a chance to read and participate, you have longer! (2) The comments are coming more quickly than they were in the first few days. There are several lively and interesting discussions throughout the various posts of the symposiums, and I highly suggest you pop on over there and read the comments, even if you have already read all the initial posts. They are worth your time.

Stephanie Jenkins' contribution is a wonder, and particularly close to my own work. She wants an "an affective feminist practice that views animal others as grievable, vulnerable, and valuable"*. Such an understanding gives us (either contra or pace Warkentin, I am not full sure) a different understanding of veganism. As Jenkins argues: 

When built upon feminist ethics, vegan practice is not a universal obligation or a fantasy of purity but rather a “bodily imperative” (Weiss 1999, 129) to respond to another’s suffering and to reject the everyday embodied practices that make certain animate others killable.

This is a strong contribution to a rethinking of veganism that several of us are trying to produce, in which veganism is neither reducible to another instance in the economies of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the polluted, and the innocent and the damned; but also is not reducible to one more consumer choice, one more boycott, one more instance in the transformation of us into homo economicus.  

Jenkins in interesting in contrasting an ethically engaged animal studies with what she, cleverly, called "hypo-critical animal studies". 

Because it isolates ontological inquiry from ethical practice, hypo-critical animal studies constitute a response to animal suffering that is a nonresponse. These studies do not call upon us to change how we eat, dress, or entertain in the world in regard to our everyday relationships with other animals. 

Hypo-critical animal studies would be what Michael Lundblad terms "animality studies".  

The major target of Jenkins attack is Donna Haraway, and particularly Haraway's notion of "killing well" (a somewhat strange translation of Derrida's eating well). For those who have read When Species Meet, Haraway justifies scientific experimentation on animals, as well as killing and eating animals. Both of which are problematized, but ultimately the conclusions are for our right to kill and eat animals in ways that very, very problematic (and conclusions matter, no matter nuanced we get there). For example, Donna Haraway is okay with killing and eating wild boars in California because they are an invasive species. To tie this back into Kelly Oliver's piece, just as pit bulls are seen sometimes in racialized and criminalized codes, the invasive species occupies a similar ground, bringing in our xenophobia and anxieties over immigration (I want to thank my colleague Kevin Cummings for this insight). After all, the invasive species does not belong, replicates too quickly, drains important resources that should be going to other, 'more natural' species that 'belong'. For Donna Haraway, killing well often means a biopolitical justification of killing, that is of sacrificing the individual for the population's sustainability (I have argued this before). Now, for a brief disagreement with Jenkins. 

Jenkins is concerned with articulating a nonviolent philosophy, one that centralizes the idea of though shalt not kill, as opposed to Haraway's formulation of thou shalt not make killable. I am not at all convinced that nonviolent ethics is truly possible (again, see my discussion of ethics and innocence). And I agree with Haraway that the issue isn't one so much of thou shalt not kill as much as it is one of thou shalt not make killable. Haraway failure, and here I come back to full agreement with Jenkins, is that she doesn't actualize this ethos. Jenkins is passionate in her articulation of why the violence of the vegan and the violence of the omnivore is not the same violence. 

Jenkins ends her short essay with an appeal to Butler's work. (Stephanie, along with Eric Jonas, presented on Butler and animal ethics/ontology/politics at the Sex, Gender, Species conference. Their work on Butler has been essential for my own). Needless to say, I agree, and I encourage to read it (and all of the comments) in full. 

*I currently don't have the pdf in front of me, with the page numbers. And cutting and pasting from it caused the weird formating issues from earlier posts. So, I don't have page numbers right now. Also, I will keep to calling Stephanie "Jenkins", even though we are friends, and it seems weird.