“A cliché about communists or radicals: they like humanity in abstract, but not concrete people. They are even ready to kill them for humanity. “ — Žižek

The juice of solidarity
has become sour! We see

Woolly Mama models
of the newest clams,

throw out two dummy
dollars for everything cancer-

cleaned, lick the film to reveal
our bones. Beneath the swells of

our nation’s un-tuned harpsichord,
the war is constantly constant.

The communication—constant.
Disintegrating conversations

each of us constantly checking
the constancy of our existence.

We spread out upon the sewing needles
and quartz, quietly move to the organ

bench adjusting our exoskeletons, move
to a new closure trying to tease out

celebration and reproduce in the chicken coop.
Our ideology was hot-plated long ago

at summer camp. Absolutes still kiss
on the couch before the movie.

Let us parcel a man for all apocalypses,
drink the firewater and ignore the asterisms.

Let us tenderize the doe,
tune-up our motorcars,

and wade into the syrup of our maps.

*

Lina ramona Vitkauskas (Lithuanian-American-Canadian, b. 1973) is the author of five poetry books/chapbooks: A Neon Tryst (Shearsman Books, 2013); HONEY IS A SHE (Plastique Press, 2012); THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING (Ravenna Press, 2010); Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (dancing girl press, 2006); and Shooting Dead Films with Poets (Fractal Edge Press, 2004). In 2009, she was selected by Pulitzer-finalist Brenda Hillman for The Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading Award, and nominated by Another Chicago Magazine for an Illinois Arts Council Award.  Publications include Coconut, Requited, DIAGRAM, TriQuarterly, The Chicago Review, The Toronto Quarterly, VLAK (Ed. Louis Armand, Edmund Berrigan), The Prague Literary Review, White Fungus (Taiwan; recently displayed at MoMA), and more.

.
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*

Robin Dluzen was born and raised in Southeast Michigan. In 2008, the artist received a BFA in Fine Arts and Literature from Adrian College in Adrian, MI, and in 2010, Dluzen received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently the artist maintains a studio practice in the city of Chicago, and Dluzen’s work has been featured in such venues as the Union League Club of Chicago, Ugly Step Sister Gallery, Chapel Projects at the Charnel House, Chicago Artists’ Coalition and 22 in Berwyn, IL. Formerly the Editor-in-Chief and Senior Art Critic at Chicago Art Magazine, Dluzen is currently an art critic contributing to Art Ltd. Magazine, Visual Art Source, New American Paintings blog and Art F City.

For  more information, please visit http://robindluzen.com/

A couple years back, I invited Paul Lauritzen—noted ethicist and author of the recent book, The Ethics of Interrogation: Professional Responsibility in an Age of Terror (2013)—to come over and watch “Under the Bombs” (2007) a Lebanese film made in the wake of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.  When he heard the title, he said, “I’ll bring the Prozac.”  (We would later collaborate on a course called “After 9/11,” a decade after the terrorist attacks, which exposed students to the post-9/11 world through literature, history, politics and art.  Far more Prozac would be necessary for that semester-long excursion.)

The film tells the story of Zeina Nasrueddi, who returns to Lebanon when the month of bombing that constituted the 2006 Lebanon War ended, looking for her now-missing child Karim and sister Maha.  Over the course of the film, a tenuous relationship grows between her, a modern Shiite woman of means, and the Christian taxi driver who conducts her all over the countryside in the search.  Tony is a player, always on the make, trying to squeeze as much money and action from his passenger Zeina, who is beautiful and wealthy, but also distraught and disconnected—from Lebanon, from her family, and from herself.  The film follows them on the journey from Beirut—the center of Lebanese urbanity and cosmopolitan life—to the South (where Hezbollah’s resistance to Israel is most strong)—from lead to lead, from hope to hope.

They discover that her sister Maha has been killed, the house destroyed, but her son has been taken away, the rumor is, by French journalists.  Over the course of their journey, as the losses accumulate and the desperation of the country and Zeina become undeniable, Tony evolves from opportunist to real friend.  Along the way, Zeina’s own internal changes are marked by her the transformation of her wardrobe from Western garb to hijab, hewing closer to the traditional society from which she has been alienated.  She commiserates with other victims of bombings, and grows closer to the wider grief.

And now for the spoiler (avert your eyes): at the end, they learn that her son is being kept in a monastery, though he is said to be mute.  When they finally meet, and it is not her son.  He reports to her that her son is, in fact, “under the bombs.”

In the end, the film places a primacy on the violence itself, and Israel’s culpability in that violence, and not on character.  One of the weaknesses of the film is that Zeina is not given much work to do, except to grieve.  Zeina could have, for example, adopted the boy, or even pretended it was her son—to add a twist to the grief.  Instead, it remained about the depredations of Israel.

The closing credits dedicate the film to the people of Lebanon.  Along the way, though, is where the documentary evidence of the devastation wrought upon Lebanon—all the destroyed highways and bridges and homes, all the cluster bombs and loss upon loss—images that barely crested the bulwarks of American consciousness.  Other than the two main characters, all the others were played by Lebanese playing themselves, essentially, bringing a powerful vérité to the story.  The film takes us, literally and figuratively, where no films have.  Director Philippe Aractingi apparently began filming less than two weeks after the bombing in 2006, and you sense that the wounds of everything are still very open.

And this is why protest art—art whose allegiances to the actual often come at the cost of its art—is still necessary, and sometimes a vital supplement both to the historical archive and to the history of art.  It says: this happened, in the way that Herodotus—the father of history—begins:  “I Herodotus of Halicarnassus here set down what the Greeks and Persians did so as to prevent these deeds from drifting into oblivion.”  Though we think of protest as a sort of negation, the word protest, after all, comes from the Latin for “to testify before,” meaning a public witness.

When we consider the range of testifying poems in American literature, we are opened to the chronicles of voices unheard or lost to history, beginning with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,
Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons,
Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars—and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts…voices veiled and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.

The notion of the poet as medium for the “long dumb voices” persists, amplified in the age of modernity.  I’ve written elsewhere about the tradition of fact-founded and quasi-documentary poems, a vital stream that flows into protest art.  When I read the visionary “The Book of the Dead” (1938), Muriel Rukeyser had me learn from the voices of a mother whose sons died from when their lungs collapsed from silica’s glassy powder.   Reading “Staying Alive” (1972), I walked alongside Denise Levertov in her exploration of the internal and external convulsions of the anti-war movement.  I learned the story of Norman Morrison, a Quaker pacifist who immolated himself, and absorbed the increasingly revolutionary tone of the movement against the war.  As a poem, it feels overheated, too close to the conflagration of the times; and yet, it ambers many moments lost to the official narrative of the war, probing into what it felt like to be slowly losing one’s mind in the long battle against the Vietnam War.  Reading Peter Dale Scott’s personal epic of political intrigue in the bloody war in Indonesia, Coming to Jakarta (1989) offers an unusually-implicated imperial history—with the pang and guilt of privilege.  These long poems, arguably, are motivated by moral outrage—the fire that animates the heart of protest.

True art, in the end, does not utterly burn itself up in its own moral outrage—however righteous, however justified.  It finds a way of slipping the chains of the factual and the actual, transformed by the artist’s imagination, allowing it to speak a truth that has no expiration date.  Yet while “Under the Bombs” may not ultimately stand that test of “true art,” it nonetheless made me see for the first time the post-apocalyptic landscape of 2006 Lebanon, and hear the voices of people who saw their worlds crumble beneath the bombs, and allowed those people a space to give voice to what had happened to them, knowing that perhaps people like me would be thinking and talking about it years later, though the highways and bridges have been repaired by now, and the last vestiges of that war may remain only in the shape of bodily scars and unshared memories and the photos on walls of those still missing.

*

Philip Metres has written a number of books and chapbooks, most recently A Concordance of Leaves (Diode 2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine 2011), winner of the 2012 Arab American Book Award in poetry, To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa 2007).   His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize.  He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.  See http://www.philipmetres.com and http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com for more information.

[The Sublation of the Animal]

There is unhappily in poetics, and in the majority of contemporary political, philosophical, and ecological thought, a failure to see the nonhuman animal even at its most extreme limit of suffering.

The very thinkers who love animals and grow disturbed by their mass slaughter still eat them. The very people who pride themselves on their championing of The Other, who protest the mistreatment of the subaltern and capital’s disavowal of the suffering of the abject, still tell themselves it’s possible to humanely slaughter. The majority of critical theorists, poets, and ecologists who speak of biopower, ecopoetics, animal welfare and factory farming still willfully take pleasure from the brutalization of our most other others. It bears repeating: the majority of the very thinkers who love justice and who would object to the unnecessary[1]killing of animals still eat them.[2] They persist, even in their most disciplined thought, as ethical misers and energetic dupes of capital.[3]

This sublation of the consciousness and suffering of the animal manifests as a collective misrecognition of the slaughterhouse in precisely those areas that are at present most emergent, if potentially inconsequential, in critical theory: ecopoetics and speculative ontology.

Having recently read an anthology of critical papers and interviews on ecopoetics, I was disheartened to realize that the elision of the slaughterhouse’s unprecedented ecological and ethical effects extends beyond the realm of strictly political thought into those poetries ostensibly most concerned with ecology and the plight of other beings. The book contained not one discussion of the slaughterhouse. In fact the word is not mentioned in the volume at all. It is instructive the degree to which thought about poetry’s material relation to ecology and animals can have so little to do with the single most potent factor in the history of anthropogenic ecological destruction (the animal-industrial complex), and so much to do with the history and aesthetic politics of the Black Mountain School.

If the nonhuman animal is substantively mentioned in an essay on ecopoetics today, it does not surprise if it is the wild, well-named bird or the cold fox in the threatened stream. It is not the 50 million cows who are hung in the nation of the buffalo annually by a back leg. Nor the 8.3 billion chickens raised as balloons of protein above aquifers and thrown each year throughout the United States. Or the 60 billion animals worldwide whose bodies annually are littered everywhere from our alimental interiors to the news stands of airports, and whose systematic and incessant slaughter is the single greatest driver of global climate change.

Surely, from the standpoint of the flesh industry, the manufacture of this apathy, itself a kind of affective labor, is a key goal of immaterial production[4]: the production of the emotional and cognitive habits that constitute the perceptual insensibility necessary to ignore the already incomprehensible calculus that has transmuted the very limit of ontological reality – suffering – into a commodity itself. The labor of the animal is its suffering. Ours is apathy. And we sell it every time meat is purchased.

The animal is also excluded from contemporary ontological speculations. In a recent anthology of critical essays entitled A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, a book concerned with Being’s relation to the real and to capital, the nonhuman animal is mentioned in passing twice and isn’t discussed once. The animal is excluded from a consideration of being. Being, in this field, is not beings. Of a piece with this, is that in this entire anthology of critical essays about Being’s relation to capital, only one article mentions agribusiness.[5] The nonhuman being is left untheorized by the very materialist philosophers who write of the excluded and uncoded flesh subject to biopolitical power. As if to correct this small oversight, John Sanbonmatsu writes in a book[6] published two years later, in 2012, “A left or socialist politics which does not place our enslavement of other beings at its center, conceptually and politically, cannot possibly succeed: ‘speciesism’ is not merely one more ‘ism, but in fact lies at the root of every form of social domination.” The recent work of Giorgio Agamben also turns toward this humanist division between humanitas and animalitas, extending an analytics of ethical consideration toward the nonhuman animal, insisting that this separation has been the chief historical driver of all political conflict.[7] In fact Agamben goes so far as to grant the human-animal distinction a pre-eminent place among the problems of Western philosophy and political thought, declaring that “It is more urgent to work on these divisions….than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values.”[8]

Yet our cognitive and somatic habits are such that we live in an age in which reputable anthologies in the above-mentioned disciplines – ecopoetry and materialist philosophy – can consider this fleshly existence and its material relation to capital without even mentioning, let alone substantively considering, the industry of flesh – the animal-industrial complex, despite its centrality to capital: its history, its ideologies, its praxes of eating, of diet, of exercise, medicine, slaughter, the cognitive biases innate to carnophallagocentrism, and the material products and effects of the practices of slaughter (clothing, bodily disease, mental health effects, ecological devastation, as well as a kind of effect for which we have no word or any method for measuring, that of the unparalleled flood of suffering induced in the ablation of our most other others). Four-fifths of all antibiotics manufactured worldwide are fed to animals raised for slaughter. Half of the world’s water supply is used in the raising of animals for slaughter. Eighty percent of the world’s soy crop and forty to fifty percent of the global corn harvest, is fed to animals. And eighty to ninety percent (depending on the animal) of the grain that is fed to animals cannot be digested and is left in their manure. These figures are directly related to the global population of one billion malnourished human beings.[9] Fordism itself arises in a very real sense as a matter of diet and animality: the assembly line stems from Ford’s adaptation of the disassembly lines he toured at the Chicago Union Stockyards, specifically the Armour and Swift packing plant, an experience credited for his lifelong vegetarianism. Despite the animal’s central role in capital, this industry’s center is invisible to some of our most innovative thought.

[The Human Political]

“Die Philosophie ist eigentlich dazu da, das einsulösen,
was im Blick eines Tieres liegt.”[10]

Theodor Adorno

How does it happen that politically aware people can fail to see the ethical injustice in their own consumptive and cognitive habits? Some on the left have historically been concerned that the valuation of the ethical marks a diminishment of political commitment. This critique, which stems from Marx’s Holy Family and the Grundrisse to Althusser’s insistence that all ethics is ideological, unscientific, and politically quietistic, arises from a misprision as to the role of the ethical as a means of drawing the abject into the realm of political consideration.

As political struggle is only concerned with those beings who are already part of the polis, we cannot in the realm of politics attend to those who are thoroughly subaltern. This is necessarily so because we cannot recognize the plight of the subaltern if we are only attentive to those already considered members of the polis. From the standpoint of justice, the ethical and the political are indissociable. If we are only politically attentive, we cannot expect to be an agent fully invested in the doings of justice.

In that the political is exclusively concerned with what is already visible as an object of concern, what is given political consideration does not yet include the abject, the disavowed, those beings who, or that, are already excluded from the polis. It is precisely these beings – the sublated, the eaten, the enslaved – who have a need for a pre-juridical, pre-political defense. And this is the role of the ethical.

The way we excite the political and invest the excluded is precisely via insistence on ethical reparation. That is necessarily its function: ethics is the means by which we pull the abject into the light of consideration, into the light of the political; its purpose is to argue on behalf of those who are not even considered “those” yet.

Politically committed people who ignore the argument of the animal, or the plight of animal mothers and children, do so because they believe their own cause encompasses the entirety of justice. And they may in one sense be right. The notion of who justice applies to is always historically bounded by the apathy of violent disregard. To call attention to the studied disavowal of the suffering of other conscious creatures in someone who considers himself politically aware is to invite a remonstration that the animal is not a feminist object of concern, or is not a racialized, or an economic, object of concern. The invitations made by activists and other ethical agents to expend care and concern for the plight of the nonhuman subject more often than not elicit, from both the left and the right, a studied critique over the failure of these activists to attend properly to the human political. The most common objections, then, to the issue of animal abolitionism are less about the welfare of animals and more about the political and psychological biases of animal abolitionists. The human is so invested in its resentments and antipathies for its own concerns that it would almost rather fight about those than extend basic consideration to animal others.  There is a studied disquiet – the human political – at the border of the nonhuman world.

In a climate of political concern that studiously ignores widespread and systematized suffering, it is precisely the epistemic role of the arts and other modes of critical thought to levy pre-juridical and pre-political means of argument in order to draw distant realities of suffering into the arena of warm concern.

Not that poetry has any special abilities in this regard. Poetry has in fact been at times, even recently, a force for stupidity of nearly magical proportions.[11]

A stupid art is any art that insists on its own a-ethical or non-political content.[12] Or more accurately, it resists its own already ethically dimensioned content. There is no ethically flat enactment possible in any art. “Literature begins with a porcupine’s death…. As Moritz said, one writes for dying calves. Language must devote itself to reaching these feminine, animal, molecular detours, and every detour is a becoming-mortal.”[13] Art must contain or elicit the energy of a mortal ethic.[14] A truly minoritarian art will bear a mortal ethic that will illustrate for those blinded as to the prejudicial ablation of the animal that one cannot be considered a politically invested or an ethically energetic being, an innovative poet, an ecologically responsive or environmentally concerned being, a skeptical thinker committed to the factual, or an activist bent on the cultivation of political emotions, if one eats animals, or any part of an animal. A truly mortal art must touch the diet. It is itself a class of food. And it proves the template for food.

Where compassion[15] is not enough, and where critical theory is clearly not enough, a change of diet is sufficient. And where a change of diet is sufficient, an outspoken and lived solidarity with the indignity of the enslaved and eaten is imperative.

[Object-Oriented Ontology and Neoliberalism]

“Jede Umwelt bildet eine in sich geschlossene Einheit,
die in all ihren Teilen durch die Bedeutung
für das Subjekt beherrscht wird.”[16]

Jakob Johann von Uexküll

The recent vogue of Object-Oriented Ontology and its efforts to establish a “radical democracy of objects” is of a piece with late capitalist attempts to extend personhood to corporations and zygotes.[17] In its efforts to shift the groundedness of ontological dignity, and hence moral consideration, from the suffering of beings to the democratic extrinsicality of objects, it reinscribes capital’s elision of suffering. Levi Bryant, a blogger particularly enthusiastic about developing a “universe” of flat ontology, includes animals in his list of “asignifying objects.” Formally classifying as objects – in the name of “radical democracy” – those beings who have historically, both scientifically and as a matter of folk-lore, long been considered mere things is done with a remarkable lack of irony in a world now built on the industrialized suffering of those same beings, beings whose anguish is precipitated in cellophaned units of exchange-value some euphemize as meat.

In fact, if I had tried to imagine how neoliberalism might manifest in metaphysics, I’m fairly certain something like OOO is what I would have come up with: a panpsychism that dissipates an ethical imperative toward other beings by diffusing among the furniture of the world the significance of the bodily pain and mental anguish felt by that class of neuronal objects called animals. OOO wishes to destroy thoughts predicated on human privilege, yet in doing so it formalizes the very chauvinisms against the world of sentient-others that makes human privilege problematic in the first place: the division of the world into the human being and its instruments[18]. OOO tries to ablate the primacy of the human, but in doing so it underscores the instrumentality, and further legitimates the instrumentalizing, of other sentient beings.

In his Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu offers an analysis of what he terms scholastic disposition, insisting that it is characterized by ‘‘theoreticism,” or a “scholastic epistemocentrism,” by which he means a privileging of theory by the elision of practical understanding: the “primary understanding of the world that is linked to experience of inclusion in this world.” Insofar as we are now faced with a class of neoliberal thinkers in thrall to an idealist disdain for the unique experience of worldly inclusion felt by those objects that fear their own extinguishment and its attendant excrutiations, we need to counter the stupidity of those who seek to isolate ontological inquiry from both ethical practice and empirical verification. Not to do so risks not only giving a free pass to what Furio Jesi calls esotericism, “the articulation of the modalities of non-knowledge,” but the likelihood of real-world ecological and ethical mistakes that could further erase the animal.

The untestable academic suppositions offered by OOO are not innocuous. To dissociate speculation about being from effective ethical practice, not to mention empirical verification, is to ignore the politics of suffering and the politics of the sciences of suffering surrounding those beings who have historically been classified as objects.[19] Such intellectual parochialism is especially impactful in considerations as to the heterogeneity of being, simply because certain kinds of errors here necessarily, and without exaggeration, result in dire suffering for billions of beings, most of whom are invisible to our philosophy and our poetry, though people who do not know they are without mercy wear them and find them on their plates.

* * *

Here I call from a Chicago journal, the historical city of the slaughterhouse, to poets that they help in this effort to touch the diet and alleviate the global suffering of the enslaved nonhuman animal, as they are without question persons well suited to the task of making mercy’s[20] absence visible.