Architectural (poem)

What radical architecture could defer
its own wish for unmaking?
For in dwelling, a building, like history,
is taken part, is dis-mantled:
the whole is forgotten,
and what once presented itself as impermeable
ceases to be the total object of our fictions.

Consider the deteriorating cathedral
and the sallow walls of its forgotten nave,
whose ovoid apse swells for collapse,
whose columns snap like branches or curl
under the weight of a sinking, sunken ceiling.
The cracks and gaps map that building's un-sealing,
its eventual, inevitable end.

Why must anticipation
always be accompanied by the darker will
to destroy the conditions of its own existence
and all that goes before it?

Vertigo accompanies the unfinished inscription,
as it memory, too, were only a ledge to fall from.


December 1, 2011 (last two lines)
June 13, 2012

To have taken ill (poem)

to have taken ill
following the familiar paroxysm
a thick viscous strand of white sputum
pulled from the mouth hangs limply
agleam with faint unsourced light

disquiet
the clouded mind refuses to cease its heated operations
like black lizards
turning over stones
in the night


June 12, 2012

De La Torre, Latina/o Social Ethics (Part 2/2)

De La Torre is absolutely correct that powerlessness is the only possible starting point for a new ethics, since, as De La Torre has already established in the first chapter, an ethics of power can only lead to devastating essentialisms and “complicity with empire” (31). That chapter, titled “The Need to Move Beyond Eurocentric Ethics,” will be the focus of my discussion for the rest of this review, and I will argue that it contains several valuable insights into the concealed operations of regulation and control in academic and political discourse.

Eurocentric ethics could be defined as any mode of moral discourse that is produced by the dominant culture and, concomitantly, privileges that culture—whether this privileging is intentional or not does not affect the exclusionary consequences and is therefore irrelevant for De La Torre’s investigation. De La Torre identifies such ideological bias in three figures: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Stanley Hauerwas. If anything is surprising about De La Torre’s reading of these authors, it is how little “digging” he had to do to locate the instances of ethnic elitism and reactionary politics in their work. De La Torre argues that Eurocentric ethics is characterized by covert rationalizations of the normalizing function of state and law, which is expressed in these three authors in various ways. Thus, despite his progressive, socialist leanings, the only way Rauschenbusch could imagine the betterment of minority communities is as a result of their uncritical, wholesale adoption of “white” attitudes, customs, and culture. Similarly, Niebuhr’s “realism” signifies a sort of defeatist pragmatism that systematically excluded from its consideration the reality of the oppressed.

On this evidence, one must conclude that it would be ethically and intellectually indefensible to employ uncritically the paradigms of these thinkers. In fact, the only problem with De La Torre’s critique of such figures as Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr is that few if any serious ethicists in the academy today would build on the ground laid by these thinkers, for whom ethics, after all, was merely a channel for them to transmit their theological concerns. However, even though De La Torre’s discussion would be much more incisive and relevant if he could find examples from contemporary ethics—for instance, in human rights discourse one often finds both a rationalization of state power and the totalization of cultural or ethnic particularities—De La Torre’s critique of Eurocentric ethics is not dulled by his perhaps inappropriate selection of these three twentieth century thinkers.

This chapter of De La Torre’s book has its most immediate and important implications for the classroom. The public school system largely ignores the significant contributions to ethics, to science, to history that minority groups and non-European cultures have made—this is perhaps especially true when it comes to contributions made by Latina/os, despite the rapid growth of the Hispanic population in the United States. And not only the public school system, but in the university, too, the historical discipline, which is itself a construct of the modern West, implicitly asks students to identify with “the winners,” while engagement with contemporary issues constantly seeks a normative position from which other positions can be judged. Such rhetorical gestures aim at “cleaning up” the messy playing field of epistemological ethics, and any approach to ethics that seeks order is complicit with the state and therefore anathema to De La Torre’s “vulgar, earthy way of doing ethics” (122). Education, therefore, must engage with marginalized voices by asking the students to read history from the perspective of “the losers,” and it must also resist the perennial temptation to simplify, to reduce, to categorize. Our future and our liberation depend on the messiness that will result from an ethics and a pedagogy para joder.

De La Torre’s ethics carries within it the radical capacity to overturn the established order. It is fitting, then, that an instrument used to deprive marginalized people of a voice will now be used exclusively as a means to force those in power to hear the powerless speak. Even so, De La Torre does not dispense with the ethical paradigms of the modern West, nor does he attempt to wipe away the residue of the Enlightenment, inasmuch as such a project, as Foucault too has shown, is impossible. Most significantly, this book succeeds instead at redrawing the boundaries and re-centering the discursive space in which ethics are constructed and practiced. It is therefore a welcome contribution to the collaborative construction of a multicultural resistance to the injustices of state power and world capitalism.

De La Torre, Latina/o Social Ethics (Part 1/2)

Latina/o Social Ethics: Moving Beyond Eurocentric Thinking. By Miguel A. De La Torre. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 157.

In Latina/o Social Ethics, a vital and urgent book written with clear, crisp prose, Miguel A. De La Torre engages the problematic of ethics, which he defines as a privileged and privileging discourse that, as it has operated in Western history, constantly finds itself between those with power and those without power. By situating his analysis in the perspective of marginalized and oppressed people, De La Torre frames his book as a “corrective measure” (xi) that aims at two levels of liberation—the liberation of Latina/o people from the limits imposed by normative, Eurocentric ethics and, to ensure that he cannot be accused of narrow perspectivism, the ultimate liberation of all oppressed people from the crippling power of the modern nation-state and world capitalism. De La Torre performs admirably in pursuit of this noble, essential goal.

De La Torre’s task is two-fold: first, he must expose and exploit the fissures in the totalized ethics of the dominant culture by deconstructing ethics from the inside; then, he must reconstitute the discipline of ethics for the occupants of heterogeneous space and time. Therefore, the first half of De La Torre’s book, “Deconstructing Ethics,” inches the reader out from under the limits of ethics as it has come to be constituted in “ivory towers” (122) as a dry, abstracted, and exclusivist discipline. (Later, I will return to the issue of “Eurocentric ethics” and the validity of De La Torre’s critique of some of its practitioners.) It should be noted that De La Torre’s use of the word “deconstruction” is not strictly Derridean; while his analysis serves to destabilize the dichotomous thinking of the West, it nevertheless presupposes an “outside,” which, in this book, is symbolically identified with the subaltern figure of the Latina/o. De La Torre’s project, interested as it is in power dynamics and epistemological regimes, might fall more accurately under Foucault’s anti-modernist notion of critique as an investigation into the processes and techniques through which the modern subject has come to constitute him or herself relationally and ontologically.

This terminological misidentification notwithstanding, the radical project De La Torre undertakes in the first half of the book constitutes only half of his contribution. Thus, in the second half of the book, having realized that his own task of reconstituting an ethics of and for the oppressed cannot terminate with the “deconstruction” of Eurocentric ethics, he returns to the perspective of the subaltern to reconstruct a praxis-based, “Christocentric” (79) form of fallible ethics drawn especially from Latina/o “scholarship, customs, and traditions” (67)—an ethics that is contingent (en lo cotidiando), liminal (de nepantla), engaged (para la lucha), collectivist (en conjunto), and focused on solidarity (de acompañamiento)—and pushes Latina/o ethics forward by advocating “an ethics para joder”—an ethics that “screws with the prevailing power structures” (92). For De La Torre, the marginalized Latina/o, who in popular and political discourse is often configured as “alien,” as that which is literally on the threshold between human and inhuman, can find a positive, productive mirror for her/his own situation in the ambiguous trickster figure of Hispanic folk tradition. Therefore, the basis for a new ethics is not in any empowered figure but originates precisely in the one whose powerlessness continuously creates radical, unpredictable possibility.

Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 7/7)

VII.

For a conclusion, it is fitting to note that Confucius also appears in the Zhuangzi, though his many appearances are anything but reverential. Usually, Zhuangzi appropriates Confucius’s likeness and influence to subvert it and, in doing so, locate the formal disjunctions between Confucianism and his own proto-Daoism. Especially important in the context of this essay is one appearance of Confucius in which he relates the following story: “I was once in the state of Chu on a commission, and I saw some piglets trying to suckle from their dead mother. After a while, they started up and left her. She did not seem to notice them and so they no longer felt any affinity with her. What they loved about their mother was not her body but what gave life to her body.”[i]

These lines are notable because the Confucius of the Analects would never have spoken them. The passage unworks the qualitative distinction between human and animal inasmuch as Confucius anthropomorphizes the behavior of the piglets and, consequently, animalizes the behavior of humans: pigs have the capacity to “notice,” to feel “affinity” for others of their own kind, to “love.” In other words, this passage enacts a fragile articulation between human and animal, and, by creating the necessary conditions of their coincidence, Zhuangzi calls into question these very categories. For Zhuangzi, philosophy takes place precisely in the moment of the flight of an animal, in the kitchen the “gentleman” is taught to avoid, in the hyphen that connects “human” to “animal” in the phrase “human-animal relation.” To put it simply, the Zhuangzi is a book that asks its reader to follow the piglets. Only by following these loose animals can one lose “the animal” and forget the human will to power over animal life. Therefore, to speak of animal/ized ethics is to learn from an animal that “the animal” does not exist.

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[i] The Book of Chuang Tzu, 42.

Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 6/7)

VI.

The current political program or paradigm that is of utmost concern for any animal (or “animalized”) ethics must be the contemporary discourse on “animal rights,” which, as it continues to grow in global influence, has begun to operate as a covert form of imperialism that cannot, as it is currently formulated, solve the problem of human-animal relation. It is especially relevant for the present study that many advocates for animal rights specifically target China as a site of many violations of such hypothetical rights. Miyun Park and Peter Singer, two well-known activists for animal liberation, have recently published an article on the globalization of animal welfare initiatives by NGOs and anonymous collectives and have sounded an unequivocal call for international measures and regulations—similar to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—to combat cruelty, especially in Asian countries like China;[i] and, in a related editorial written for Project Syndicate, Singer specifically condemns the prevalence of animal cruelty in China, where dominant cultural attitudes remain largely unmoved by (if not formally critical of) the appeals of animal welfare activists, and where currently there are no national laws protecting captured animals from torture and cruelty.[ii]

While I agree that incidences of animal cruelty—at home and abroad—must be addressed by a global, collective activism, I have serious objections to the particular solution proffered by Singer and Park. What I find problematic in their argumentation is the notion that the legislation of animal life is the only or even the best possible solution to the prevalence of animal cruelty and the devaluing of animal life; a problem of ethical and practical importance always arises when one grounds an appeal to collective action in a reductive legalistic or juridical framework, for this tactic increases activists’ reliance on state-power and entrenches the world further into the biopolitical paradigm of modern liberal democracies. Furthermore, while juridical frameworks based in rights are capable of punishing infractions, they have proven again and again to be incapable of preventing such infractions from occurring, as the numerous and continued infractions of “human rights” by multinational corporations and state governments have demonstrated.

Instead, to ground a global, collective resistance to animal cruelty, one might, as I have argued, (re)turn to classical texts with the current context in mind—and, furthermore, one should not only examine texts that belong to the Western tradition to which Derrida and Agamben subscribe and subvert, but one should make use of a plurality of texts from Asian traditions as well. This essay has looked at texts from three classical Chinese philosophical traditions—the School of Names (Gongsun Longzi), Confucianism (the Analects, Xunzi, and Mengzi), and Daoism (Zhuangzi)—of which the latter two schools have retained some influence in contemporary China and continue to shape (and be shaped by) East Asia’s intellectual landscape. Furthermore, I have argued that Daoist or proto-Daoist teachings about humans and animals as preserved in the Zhuangzi may provide a more suitable ethical framework for a new politics of human-animal relation. Thus, even though Bai Tongdong argues that the basic premise of Confucianism is an expansion of compassion “to eventually encompass everything in the universe, including animals,” he admits that obligations to other humans necessarily override similar obligations to animals.[iii] Confucius himself summarizes the anthropocentric orientation of Confucian thought in the Analects, when Zigong, a disciple, seeks to spare the sacrifice of a sheep at a certain ceremony and Confucius reproaches him by saying, “You grudge the sheep—I, ritual propriety” (3.17). In the final analysis, when the care of the animal is entrusted to the state, it cannot but lead to sacrifice, whether to a deity or, bloodlessly, to the will of law itself.

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[i] Miyun Park and Peter Singer, “The Globalization of Animal Wellfare,” Foreign Affairs 91.2 (2012), n.p.

[ii] Peter Singer, “Moral Progress and Animal Welfare,” Project Syndicate, July 13, 2011, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/moral-progress-and-animal-welfare (accessed April 10, 2012). In the editorial, Singer cites footage which has circulated online, footage that includes the extraction of bile from caged bears for medicinal purposes and furred animals being skinned alive. A documentary produced for Al Jazeera features images similar to the ones Singer describes. The documentary goes on to say that the animal rights or animal welfare movement in China is most prevalent in larger cities, where such footage has spurred various popular movements across the country to combat what they see as infractions of animal rights. See Al Jazeera, “China’s animal crusaders,” Al Jazeera 101 East, July 12, 2011, 20:00ff., http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2011/07/20117129224537494.html (accessed April 10, 2012).

[iii] Bai, “The Price of Serving Meat,” 94.

Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 5/7)

V.

If Confucianism’s complicity with sovereign power and ambiguous, seemingly contradictory stance on human responsibility toward animals would be problematic for the ethical grounding of animal welfare initiatives today, one can seek an alternative model in other schools of Chinese philosophy. Indeed, my argument that animal ethics, especially as configured in classical Chinese philosophy, is integrally tied to issues of language and categorization reaches its most intense expression in the Zhuangzi, which, I will argue, may provide a possible theoretical basis for a new ethics of human-animal relation.

The Zhuangzi’s primary target seems to be language and the way it is used to limit human thought and structure human experience. The animal thus becomes for Zhuangzi a site of possibility for a way of living outside of the normalizing constraints of language; “The animal,” Irving Goh writes, “points the way toward thinking the Way.”[i] Furthermore, Goh argues that Zhuangzi’s writings prefigure Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal,” which, as developed in A Thousand Plateaus and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, expresses “a desire for [human] thought to pass through the animal.”[ii] Indeed, there is a faint resemblance, though Deleuze and Guattari never explicitly make use of the Zhuangzi.[iii] But, similarly to Zhuangzi, for Deleuze and Guattari the leave-taking of the subject from subjectivity marks a departure from the limits imposed by anthropocentric modes of thought, especially identified with state politics: “To the inhumanness of [politics], there is the answer of a becoming-animal: to become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an ape, ‘head over heels and run away,’ rather than lowering one’s head and remaining a bureaucrat, inspector, judge, or judged.”[iv] With Deleuze and Guattari as his starting point, Goh goes on to examine such well-known passages as Zhuangzi’s dream about the butterfly and Huizi and Zhuangzi’s conversation about the “happy fish,” though, as Goh himself stresses, the Zhuangzi follows the animal throughout the text, in both the inner and outer chapters. In what follows, I will make use of two additional examples.

In the Zhuangzi, Deleuze and Guattari’s “run[ning] away” is mirrored by a desire to depart from normativity that often takes the form of the literal fleeing of animals. One early chapter contains a fictitious exchange between Wang Ni and a disciple in which Wang Ni says, “People said that Mao Chiang and Li Chi were the most beautiful women in the world, but fish seeing them dived away, birds took off into the air and deer ran off. Of these four, who really knows true beauty? As I see it, benevolence and righteousness, also the ways of right and wrong, are completely interwoven. I do not think I can know the difference between them!”[v] At work in such passages is a radical desire for human ontological displacement similar to that of the better known “butterfly dream,” in which perspectival difference comes with a challenge to preconceived notions and received wisdom.

Rather than being portrayed in negative light (as in the Xunzi), the chaos and confusion that necessarily results when mutually exclusive categories enter into an intimate indistinction becomes the productive site of a new politics of human-animal relation. As Zhuangzi writes, “In this time of perfect Virtue [至德], people live side by side with the birds and beasts, sharing the world in common with all life. No one knows of distinctions such as nobles or peasantry!”[vi] This image, drawn from the utopian imagination, is rarely registered in the text as a “return” to some imagined state or time of perfection but rather as a perennial, continually open (or open-able) possibility that emerges from the fissures of any attempt at a systematized political program or paradigm. It is therefore this utopian image that one must seek to activate or actualize in the context of modern systems.

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[i] Irving Goh, “Chuang Tzu’s Becoming-Animal,” Philosophy East and West 61.1 (2011), 110.

[ii] Ibid., 111.

[iii] Deleuze and Guattari do, however, at one point make a perfunctory reference to Daoism, though it has no relevance for the current discussion. See A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 157.

[iv] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 12.

[v] The Book of Chuang Tzu, 17.

[vi] Ibid., 73.