I started this page because there are a lot of things I feel I need to express that I never do, responses and clarifications compelled by what, in many conversations, is an overlooked or unseen web of considerations that often fails to coalesce, for me, into a vaguely linear order until minutes, hours, or days after the events or discussions to which I felt them applicable.
If you are wondering how this might be relevant, it is sort of pointed at the heart of a complacency about being, about identity, what things are, how we know and how we rely on what we learn from our particular, and largely invisible to us, ways of knowing. If you know me, and ever create or share knowledge about me, or any other person really, then this is of the utmost relevance because here you will find a lot of the context that is missing in such attempts, and a meditation on the consequences for revolutionary politics of our culture's particular ontological and epistemological frames.
The build up toward this particular attempt to try to take a more rigorous stab at, what I see as, a sort of prevailing cognitive lapse consisted of moments of sharing time with various combinations of friends, and friends of friends, often around meals in different places around our beloved San Francisco bay area. Its pretty remarkable, the frequency with which this happened and the similarity in terms of how it happened but a food would be passed around, pretty much always meatless, and sometimes I would wave it away or decline and then one of my friends would say "He's a Vegan!" in a loud yet ever so subtly sneery tone, as if to preempt my explanation--which, for the record, I was not like to provide anyhow. And this was, and I suppose has been, the reason why I eat some things and not others, not my reason mind you but the one that, thanks to interventions like these, resides in the minds of the people I cross paths with.
And?
Before I get into why this is significant, and in fact dangerous, I want to emphasize that this is not intended as an argument for animal rights, environmental protection, and or shifts in consumption habits. I'm not going to get into the specifics of my own explanation but may need to list some basic priorities so I can illustrate how the aforementioned ontological explanation results in a drift between what are the desired consequences of my choices and how things tend to play out. In doing so, a reader may inevitably recognize what could be reasons for certain practices, however I think an argument over the relative quality of one approach as opposed to another is impossible when everyone is looking at a dramatically different picture.
This is an attempt to build context, a common basis for communication, which will be a basis for transformation.
When I refer to things I think or do, try to see these statements as a reflection of a perspective that is out there in the air where anyone can take it in, put it on, like a pair of shades, and not a line I am trying to draw between myself and other people.
To begin, nothing I do is because I "am", or am trying to "be" or not be, something. This is a very important feature of my world. People will say "You can't eat this its Not Vegan" or "He can't eat this he is Vegan." Its not: "I choose not to eat that because of the circumstances of its production and those consequences." it sounds like a sort of condition, something I have that prevents me from eating certain kinds of food. Check your pulse, how many fingers am I holding up? Not vegan? good, chow down. It ends up Not being a distinction between the items, the entailments of their respective production, but a distinction between the identities, the idea selves of the people at the meal. The emphasis is taken away from the whole reason a person might have changed their consumption habits and is explained by the infamous condition of Veganism.
For those sympathetic to concerns about animal suffering or maintaining a healthy environment, by explaining things through being, through a sort of ontological determinism one further imperils the environment by taking certain food-related actions and or preferences, which often have specific, to each individual whom umbrella terms like vegan seek to encompass, condition - response - effect - analyses behind them, and locating them as signifiers of a rare type of being.
Call your mom, double check to make sure you don't have veganism.
all clear?
another BLT please.
What you "are"--as if we're all made of different stuff and suffering and environmental degradation applies to some of us and not to others--is not relevant. There is no such thing as a Vegan, and for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as Vegan food and non-vegan food. Just because something does not have animal products in it does not mean its harmless. Just because you are "not Vegan" does not mean that your actions don't have consequences that effect the world we all live in. And so the practical question is not, "are you vegan, is that vegan?" but maybe where did that come from, what are its consequences, because vegan and not-vegan are just proxies ostensibly attached to material meanings but which in circulation often guide us far from the goal of increasing happiness and decreasing harm.
To make an identity out of a perspective or practice obscures peoples individual relationships to their choices and creates a metaphysical location to invest causality, virtue, and stigma which are applied to people who "fit the category" as if everyone who exhibits the defining feature is the same. Instead of being an idea that anyone can practice at any time it becomes a type of person, and the reputation of this "type" becomes a factor that weighs heavily upon how people relate to practices.
One might assert, "Vegan, this is what it means, someone who doesn't eat animal products, lets keep the term." It easily lets people know what you eat, or what people "can or cant" eat. Why, though, is the emphasis here, on food that is assumed to be less harmful, on the conscious attempt to reduce harm. Why is pizza or ice cream simply considered food but other combinations of foods are called Vegan? Why is it not the other way around, why are foods derived from cruel and unsustainable factory farming considered the default? Is there some othering word for someone who doesn't spit in your face when you walk down the street?
For any who believe it is important to preserve the ecological relationships that make life possible, which are threatened foremost by animal agriculture, it may be strategically useful to de-exotify the orientation toward practices that could result in a more sustainable culture. A problem with bundling every action, preference, and certain arbitrary phenotypical features into social categories is that, related to the false determinism and homogeneity that each category exudes, people focus on, and steer their course based on who they perceive other people "are", based on what they will "be" if they do or don't do something, following social meanings/valuations rather than paying attention to material consequences. Is it not interesting that we have laws to shield animals from abuse, and that to abuse an animal bears great public shame, and yet people often gloatingly emphasize that they are Not Vegan or that what they are eating is Not Vegan, and say it with a sort of pride. This is the sort of dissonance that results from thinking through the abstract realm of being, of the value of whatever 'Is' one tries to 'be' or not 'to be'--good person, bad person syndrome. If you 'are' Vegan, you are bad in our society, and this has a direct impact on the opportunity of earth-oriented ideas and practices to catch. If there is no word for what you are doing, no "who you are" that is invoked, there is no place for stigma to be attached and the actions have to be evaluated for their specific merits.
Inevitably a politics based on being (radical, vegan, queer, etc.) is limited by normative biases, or: "these people are all the same in this negative way". The more you reify a category, the bulls-eye that creates a location for oppression to happen, the more you emphasize whatever stigmas accompany people's idea of that category and ideas and change stalls, because people are not seeing the analyses or the practical considerations, the individual motivations, but seeing and acting in response to the distance between who they "are" and who they think the person speaking or doing X "is".
To identify, to locate yourself, in the world through these types of abstracts, validates the false associations between general attributes(ex. skin color, sexuality, a certain idea) and the causally disconnected virtues and stigmas that social categories emanate--disparately--across the consciousnesses of societies. Whether there is more virtue or stigma in any given category/identity/abstract depends on the point of view of the person participating in it, the cultural foundation, the time, and place, and the contemporary narratives that create a window through which it appears. Staking "who you are" on something so polymorphic is like trying to make your house out of a cloud, making yourself out of an analogy of yourself, rather than simply paying attention to what you are doing.
To think about race, historically oppressed people often identify through the category that was created and used to justify their exclusion/oppression. What does it mean to be of a certain "race"? Your question will get different answers depending on how old the respondent is, what time period, what place (what continent) they are from. Ways of speaking, dress, musical taste are not genetic, all of our ideas about what black is or white is or latino is are imaginary, things we saw or heard in a specific cultural historical context and extrapolated into transcendent laws that people feel bound by and bind other people by. We could have been born into any skin color, not surprisingly the one we inhabit(like our given nation, or religion) is the best, and lumps us into a 'race' to be compared with and contest 'other races', with our abstract ego's well-being depending on our 'race's' performance/reputation. We roll our eyes at others because of their clothing style or because of where they are from, living vicariously through stories of how our identity is better than their identity. This is the moral standard that x = 'category a' rather than x = 'effect a' leaves to us. The moral question is: what does having a look or doing something make you and thus any action or attribute can be good or bad regardless of its effects.
"Is" is not what's at stake. "Causes", "effects" are what are at stake and these, at least, are quantifiable.
I find myself often hating being around my friends because it feels like I'm being dragged along behind one of those arcade shooter games where baddies pop up out from behind trash cans and you have to shoot them down as fast as possible. It will often be some totally innocuous feature/look/statement that someone in our culture here sees and then BANG! label-stigma, invalid lesser person. Its demoralizing to imagine so many people outside of one's group of friends all doing the same thing, shutting down opportunities, erasing the potential for expanding communities or movements, only seeing caricatures because of all the things they have been conditioned to link to "lesser people".
Its epistemologically indistinguishable from racism, and, in fact, the imagining that "we are better than them" throughout time has been and remains foundational to oppression. This instinct to label is contributing to the culture of belief in categories and category causality and in doing so reinforces the ontological and epistemological basis for racism and homophobia.
Among people I know, there is a shared normative backdrop that puts race outside of this causality generator, but this is not the default in other circles and so by reinforcing "this person is this ergo.. blah blah blah" one acts like the jingo unable to see the violence coming from their own camp yet constantly lamenting the evil of others.
Because people's ideas of themselves are propped up by these imagined sides (I am conservative, you are liberal) ideas are not often addressed for their actual potential impacts but are dismissed for being radical, extremist, hippy, right-wing. You don't lose any additional information by not classifying ideas and practices, you do, however, lose the ability to dismiss through analogy, identity, or based on what is only your vague understanding, with its inevitable bias, against an idea or strategy. Because of our normative valuations of different 'types' of people, we are currently steered from genuinely engaging with actions and ideas for the broader contexts across which their effects can be registered, and instead our thought bubbles, because we attach our mutually exclusive analogies to them, function like bumper cars. This is how separating people into categories removes the possibility for communication(expanding considerations) and instead we can only argue, try and replace someone else's conclusion with ours.
For example, we tend to argue over whether or not someone Is racist, rather than simply discussing how certain statements might function and what missing considerations make those statements possible. Racist is a negative 'type' value in our society but the stakes in 'proving'(as if) whether or not someone Is racist only amount to publicly registering a value that they, and others with similar conclusions, will not think fits them; and because our attention was on constructing someone, we forgot to share the effects of actions, and the information present and lacking that makes those views real to people.
By working under the assumption that doing or saying or considering a certain thing makes you into something different, we tend to argue at the level of establishing what someone is or is not, assigning a value, rather than pointing out the effects of specific actions. This approach tacitly assumes that stigmatizing people who say certain things will result in people not saying those things. There is no attempt to bridge understandings because that person Is this category in our minds, rather than someone who, like us, has in some way been cultivated within a certain identity struggle.
If you leave behind the labels, and find out the motivations, the stories, the history, you start to get a sense of the context, causality, and factors in play, allowing events to be read for their effects, for their origins, instead of for whose side the label determines we should be on. These are things you cannot know at a glance, things you cannot see through the silhouette of appearances and motions, things you cannot repair by forging sides. Any discourse that reduces another life-form to a type or lower order, results in putting that life-form on the other side of, and beneath, the conceptual location of people's idea selves. There is nothing more than this perception that is required to instigate ego competition, to justify violence, exploitation. I sensed something very familiar, years ago when I started avoiding animal products and began to hear the justifications. They are just...
niggers. Swap the word for any other in history, the process of instituting a hierarchy, where none exists in nature, is the same. The boundless potential for cruelty that such ontological distinctions permit is the same. And then or now, none of the differences supplied as evidence can erase the fact that we all have the same capacity to feel pain, we all need the same things. So when I hear someone explaining, or justifying, through some metaphysical invention it makes me a bit uncomfortable, because people in our culture still haven't learned to see through the classifications and see themselves as they might be elsewhere in the world, if only from a different starting point.
Thanks for reading.
