Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2004 18:45:16 +0000
From: "steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Re: sideways - incapacity


eric

The reason why I tend to try and get beyond the question of 'fairness' 
and 'suffering' is because it always ends up in a fruitless discussion 
of the rights  of  animals to inflict pain and suffering on others.  
That is to say the rights of  human beings to destroy entire sub-species 
of animals in their own interests is assumed to be equivilant to other 
creatures inflicting pain and suffering in order to survive.  This is 
singularly uninteresting for me because it is clear that such cases have 
been adequately addressed by utilitarian philosophy at least since the 
recent reinvention of the animal-rights and liberation movements. But I 
have no desire to restrict the question to utiltarian understandings, 
though I do have some sympathy for these positions and will always 
regard these ethical positions as sounder and more useful than for 
example Levinas. We have I think established that we are merely animals, 
inhabitants in the biosphere and as such together it is perfectly 
acceptable for me to agree that justice should  involve all 'parties 
fairly'.  It is true that it is possible to misunderstand the 
implications of evolutionary theory and believe for example that any 
living human has more value than any other animal,  however this is not 
a sustainable position because of the implications of the scientific 
work notably that humans are only assemblies of genes, but also because 
of the philosophical work on rights, suffering and difference.  Any 
understanding of the theories of evolution that places one species as 
superior to another is always going to be a misunderstanding, an 
ideological misreading of the theory - to accept the truth of evolution 
is to recognize that one assemblage of genes is completely equivilant to 
any other, the theory of evolution is founded on a radical equivilance.  
If there is an issue with regard to the utilitarian philosophical line 
from which the best of the animal-rights and specieist statements have 
derived it is precisely that it is founded on 'pain and suffering' , the 
inability to go beyond the latant humanism, an aware human having 
greater value than a non-human is obviously unacceptable - but the pain 
and suffering aspect is more problematic in that it is founding the idea 
of morality/ethics judgements on the human inability to not inflict 
suffering on others.

You are correct in that I am placing all singularities,  including 
specific instances such as you or george the cat, as equivilant on the 
plane of difference.  I'm unclear why such a radical equivilance, is not 
an inevitable result of Deleuze and Guattari's own thinking about this.  
The first truism of political-philosophical action is that you need to 
recognize the historically constructed nature of a body politic before 
we can successfully  try to change it.  If the best we can do in the 
circumstances is to argue that we should not torture animals to death in 
the interests of mass consumption including:  gourmet dinners, the 
pleasures of slaughtering, or cosmetics -- because they suffer pain then 
we have a problem being trapped within the dominant axiomatic.  I am 
suggesting rather that we currently have arrived at the possibility of 
making the argument from a better position.  Deleuze and Guattari's twin 
injunctions should be kept in mind: firstly don't be satisified  with 
the subject your've been given,  experiment with the strata and secondly 
always evaluate carefully because you cannot tell ahead of time what is 
going to work, we know not to believe 'that a smooth space will suffice 
to save us'  - which is understandable but the alternative you are 
offering here is to continue within the axiom of radical inequality. I'd 
need to see a way of building an alternative which allows any two 
singularities to be considered as always equivilant. The most relevant 
area of Deleuze's ontology is the section where it emphasizes the 
intensive morphogenetic processes that produce from disequilibirum - 
equilibrium/steady state/stable systems. These processes show intensive 
properties that cannot be changed  beyond critical thresholds without 
some major change in kind and that show the capacity for merging, 
meshing into networks of bodies that still preserve the  heterogeneity 
of the members (singularities) even whilst showing systematic emergent 
behaviour. However whilst in the evolutionary structures both organic 
and inorganic we can see this, especially  in ecosystems, human groups 
and so on - in the morphogenetic processes which are charecterised by 
rates of change and difference, any change in relations past the 
critical threshold will trigger qualitative changes in the assemblages. 
The example of the predator-prey relation that you raise between a 
song-bird and it's cat predator is an assemblage,  the assmblage is an 
abstraction from a more complex problem involving the processes of the 
entire biosphere (which incorporates climate, geological, social and so 
on) -- the point being that if you extrapolate up from the predator-prey 
relation it begins to be clear at the higher levels of abstraction that 
no singularity can be raised above another. The assemblage could as well 
be thought of as a dialectical relation in this case.

I simply do not acknowledge that you have the right to judgement over a 
song bird or a virus - the idea that you can have judgemental rights 
over their existance or non-existance, in effect over the assemblage  of 
their relationship is to misunderstand what the 'technology of the 
assemblage' is-  whereas you would presumably claim that you do not have 
such rights over other  human beings.

To declare nature as a zero-sum game is to deny our responsibility for 
the current extinction event - nature as considered in its 'actuality' 
is currently a human activity - from the temperature of the planet to 
the species that will exist in 25 years time and those which will be on 
the verge of extinction and not something external in which we exist....

enough for now...
steve



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