So, on a recent trip through the northeast US, I ran across no shortage of these flags, and other signs of this ‘tea party’ movement which has lately drawn the attention of the media. No less a luminary than Noam Chomsky has publicly equated these gatherings with the masses of Nuremberg, claiming that

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.

Normally I defer to Prof. Chomsky’s judgment on matters political, and though my own anarchic political leanings lie slightly to the right of Chomsky’s, I consider myself a fellow-traveller. But I think he’s grossly misapplied the ‘fascist’ tag here, as have many others drawing this connection, and I think Chomsky’s mistake speaks to the wider issue of invoking ‘fascism’ in public discourse. So here, I’d like to offer a few comments about the misapplication of an early 20th-century Italian political movement’s name to any vaguely populist, vaguely scary political clique which one opposes.

First off, we have to think a little about what National Socialism and Italian Fascism really were. It’s crucial to not fall into the trap of conceiving them simply as collections of racist mobs which gave rise to autocratic regimes. If this were all it took to qualify a government as ‘fascist,’ we could find examples leading back many centuries. While racial ideologies, crowd phenomena, and totalitarian dictators were their most obvious manifestations, these movements need to be considered on their own terms, as forming – in the minds of their leaders and adherents – a relatively specific and consistent political ethos. Taking the German example as my case in point, some crucial additional elements to be taken into account when drawing comparisons such as Chomsky’s are their völkisch character, their corporatism, and their Führerprinzip. While individually the Tea Party movement may present parallels with certain aspects of these elements, taken together they make it clear just how far the Tea Partiers are from Fascism.

It is worth pointing out that, as clichéd as such comparisons became toward the end of his presidency, the reign of Bush II was much more closely aligned with the policies of National-Socialism than is the Tea Party ‘ideology’ (if one can call it that) of today. Amongst other policies, its insistence on ‘homeland security’ and the exclusion of ‘undocumented workers’ can be interpreted as means of emphasize the twin dimensions of communal ’security’ and ‘purity;’ its claiming of a ‘right-wing,’ small-government lineage while overseeing an enormous expansion of government powers and a blurring of the lines between government and business presents obvious connections to Nazi corporatism; and its doctrine of an ‘executive privilege’ which transcends the rule of law is a direct borrowing from Weimar-turned-Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his doctrine of the ’state of exception.’

Now consider, point by point, the Tea Party. To be sure, its mass rallies have many features in common with those at Nuremberg, and crowd phenomena more generally. There is a sense in which a mob is simply a mob, irrespective of its ideological justifications. The 1920s/1930s German mobs, like the contemporary American ones, were spurred by economic catastrophes – the ruinous hyperinflation which followed the Treaty of Versailles, and the recent housing crisis, respectively – and a diffuse sense that the current regime was making things worse. And while I think it clouds the issue to simply call either set of mobs ‘racist,’ there can be no doubt that in both sets there were a higher-than-average number of overt racial supremacists, and a far larger cohort of individuals feeling, to greater or lesser degrees, that the traditional positions and privileges of the dominant ethnic group were being usurped by ‘foreign’ populations. In other words: while few Tea Partiers would throw around racial slurs in public, the NYT reports that they “are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.” In the contemporary context, the anti-Semitism of earlier movements (while no doubt still present to some degree) has been supplanted by a conviction that blacks, Latinos, and other minority groups have unjustly benefitted from social welfare policies and programs such as Affirmative Action. This means that, while Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly white, there are some middle and upper-class blacks and Latinos who can identify with the movement. Hence it shares many crucial similarities with the völkisch movements of early 20th-century Germany, but its ideology is not as unambiguously or explicitly ‘racist’ (as in the ethnocentric ideology which became known as ‘Blut und Boden‘ under National-Socialism).

There were many völkisch movements which were not ‘fascist’ in the sense of Hitler’s NSDAP, however, and many similar populist movements which have led to very different sorts of regimes in other parts of the world. Thus the two other elements, corporatism and Führerprinzip, are of the essence in determining a specifically ‘fascist’ trajectory, and I contend that the Tea Party movement not only lacks either but would actively resist steps in those directions. While I have no interest in defending the movement per se – as I will suggest, I think it could lead to any number of frightening dystopian scenarios if some variant of its ideology ever came to power – I reject the label of ‘fascist’ for it, specifically because it is laissez-faire and individualistic where fascism is centrally-organized and corporativist. While the people who make up this movement likely have no idea of the nuances which distinguish communist from broadly fascist dictatorships, and in fact would be the sort to reject National-Socialism out of hand for its name (disregarding its having nothing to do with Marxist socialism), there are any number of steps down the road to Fascist serfdom that the Tea Partiers would unquestionably reject.

Consider, for instance, the origins of the Tea Party movement: could a group which began organizing in response to a simple government transfer of wealth to large businesses possibly accept the kind of close integration of government, corporations, and trade unions that was a first principle of both Italian and German fascism (ie, corporativism or national syndicalism)? No doubt many of the Tea Partiers are as resistant to ‘Big Companies’ as they are to Big Government, especially when they perceive these companies as mismanaged or as the beneficiaries of government aid; indeed, as a side note, I have often felt that a huge step in bringing these libertarian movements around to a more sensible ideology would be to recast large corporations as the main villains with respect to ‘handouts’ in their collective imagery, in place of the imaginary ‘welfare queens’ of Reaganite rhetoric. What of the necessary step toward a smoothly-functioning Fascist state, whereby firearm ownership by the general public is made illegal? We all know what these and other well-armed groups in the US think of even the slightest steps toward that particular policy. In these and other respects, I think that any steps toward a traditionally fascist type of government would be violently resisted by the Tea Party.

While this by no means precludes the usurping of the movement’s political clout for purposes contrary to its original ends, I would say that the Tea Party is individualistic and fragmented enough that it could never lead to something closely resembling twentieth-century Fascism. It has its disturbing, charismatic, and often eerily dictatorial figureheads, like Glenn Beck, but in general its only rallying points are a very basic economic individualism (‘keep your hands off my stuff!’) and a hazy dissatisfaction with the current order of things. Even though they sometimes slavishly parrot the talking points of Fox News, in no way do they have anything resembling the coherent, autocratic ideology of the NSDAP’s Führerprinzip. (I find, in fact, that it grates even to call it an ‘ideology,’ lacking as it is in any internal logic.) Even its leaders are wildly inconsistent and incoherent, while its members have difficulty reconciling their individualism with the benefits they receive – to the point that they can shout at politicians to keep their ‘filthy government hands’ off their Medicare. In this sense, I find such right-wing populist movements generally less frightening than left-wing ones: insofar as left-wing populism is more coherent and already prepared to let its leaders abrogate individual rights (to whatever ends fit the ideology of the particular movement), it may lead more readily to authoritarianism; a movement like the Tea Party, by contrast, is so deeply fragmented and resistant to any perceived encroachment on individual rights, that I think it can ultimately accomplish very little but a destabilization of the Republican voting base.

My point in this is not simply to attack a brief remark of Chomsky’s, but to point out the importance of rethinking the ‘fascist’ analogy. If we speculate a bit on what sort of dystopian future might come of the Tea Party movement, a few possibilities arise – none of which resemble twentieth-century fascism in any important respects. The closely-aligned programmes of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, along with the so-called social policy of the present administration, give us some interesting clues. Perhaps the future which would arise from the Tea Party would have to be such that individual rights were quietly eliminated without any real government oversight, and with any possibility of resistance by arms rendered irrelevant. Consider, for instance, that in the midst of our ostensibly democratic societies there are myriad authoritarian structures called ‘corporations,’ and that these are progressively taking over many of the functions traditionally reserved to government in the United States (from criminal justice to military operations, intelligence gathering, and who knows how much further afield). All the connotations of an analogy with fascism misguide us, inasmuch as they lead us to imagine futures according to a collectivist model of totalitarianism. Perhaps we might imagine an individualistic dystopian future in which one’s access to security, justice, and medicine were still more closely and formally linked to one’s wealth; where still more of the elements of government have been transferred to nondemocratic corporate entities, and the privileges of citizenship are reserved to stockholders; and where resistance has been foreclosed either by technological means (either much better weapons, drugs, à la Brave New World, or other advances in biotechnology) or simply by maintaining the general public in a state of (more) total ignorance. In a sense, I admire the consistency of a libertarian-individualist position, yet in practice I find libertarians woefully ignorant of these sorts of dystopian possibilities, as opposed to the all-too-obvious failures of authoritarian collectivism.

This world of individualism run amok, and not the dystopia of gulags or concentration camps, is the sort of frightening future I imagine when I think about the Tea Party or I watch Fox News for too long; this, I believe, is the sort of future that we ignore when drawing sweeping analogies with ‘fascism,’ and a possible future of which the teabaggers seem to be wholly ignorant. To be sure, I think that we must be on the lookout for direct and obvious lineages from these earlier forms of totalitarianism, as seen in the policies of Bush II and his neoconservative allies. But the Tea Party represents a very different sort of movement from the intellectual one called neoconservatism. Indeed, in many respects it formed as a reaction to that movement, and it comes with its own distinct set of problems. Pace von Hayek, there are many roads to serfdom, and we must not let the ease with which we can draw comparisons to one, particularly Fascist, road blind us to other possibilities.

But I came across this piece recently in the WSJ, and I wanted to link to it and comment, but it was simply too far removed from the other blog.

I think it speaks to the necessarily situational character of political commitments, and why it’s wrong to identify oneself univocally with a given party. (Not many of us know that many founders of many contemporary democractic states were deeply suspicious of political parties – but that’s somewhat beside the point.) Dorothy Rabinowitz writes quite critically in this piece of Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate who recently stood in the election for the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, specifically questioning her judgment with regard to the case of Gerald Amirault. In 1984, Amirault was convicted in the famous Fells Acres Day Care Center trial and sentenced, along with his mother and sister, to a lengthy prison term for the sexual abuse of children. This may be regarded as of a piece with the various sexual abuse hysterias of the 1980s, wherein a wide array of bizarre accusations were made of vicious sex acts performed on children, orgies, devil-worship, animal mutilation, and so forth, all occurring at day care centers and all in the absence of any supporting physical evidence.

The difference between Amirault’s case and the many similar cases which were prosecuted around the same time, was that Amirault’s conviction was never really overturned. This in spite of the evident absurdity of the accusations against him, which Rabinowitz describes as follows:

Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet [his mother] had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with “a magic wand.” She would be convicted of these charges. Cheryl [his sister] had cut the leg off a squirrel.

Now such cases of hysteria are fascinating enough in themselves, and as one example amongst many of North American culture’s peculiar, schizoid relationship with the sexuality of children. They are also testament to the suggestibility of children as witnesses. In many of these cases the process of getting testimony was described as “getting blood from a stone,” as interviewers would cajole children ’suspected’ of being abused, often over a period of months, to detail the sexual crimes committed against them.

Where Coakley comes in is at the very end, just as Amirault might have seen justice:

In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor’s Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald’s sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the “extraordinary if not bizarre allegations” on which they had been convicted.

Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board’s findings. District Attorney Coakley was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board’s ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.

As a result, the governor rejected the Board’s findings, and Amirault remained in jail for two more years; now, released on parole, he is forced to wear an electronic tracking device and report his whereabouts. He is also restricted from entering certain areas – as apparently befits a so-called ’sex offender’ in our day – and, of course, his prospects of employment are effectively nil.

This story makes me think about a lot of things, but most immediately it makes me think that Coakley is a horrid bitch, and one whom the United States Senate is lucky not to have. The republican who beat her, Scott Brown, may be an awful human being for all I know, but he would have to really work at it to surpass Coakley in this regard. And though my political leanings are generally liberal, in many ways far to the left of the mainstream Left, I would almost certainly have voted Republican in this election. (Had I been an American, that is. And in this regard I also would have been trying to send a message to this ‘President Obama,’ who in spite of the world’s hopes has proven to be awfully well-spoken and telegenic but essentially just that: in other words a façade, one who is the inverse image of Bush, but who plays precisely the same role in the US political machine.) Then it makes me think the aforementioned and afore-alluded-to thoughts about how fucked up the contemporary treatment of children’s sexuality is: fucked up to the point that in even mentioning the topic in such a tone, I’ll probably convince many people that I’ve got pedophilic tendencies of my own. I’ve got no interest in children as sex objects per se, but I am academically interested in how various cultures have constructed and construed child sexuality: how did we get from the wackiness of Ancient Greece to the Puritanism of the nineteenth century and on to the confused secular morality of our day? (where, one hardly needs to mention, the hysteria over pedophiles exists alongside the insane world of Toddlers and Tiaras?) It’s obvious that children need to be protected from sexual exploitation by adults – and, we may note, the Greeks had their own social norms that served this function – but cases like Amirault’s show that there is often something pathological and downright evil at work in how the justice system deals with sexual offenses. Then, finally, I think how awful it must have been for the guy wrongly accused of abusing children, living for years in prison, and I think about how much, in his shoes, I would hate the whole apparatus responsible for putting me there, and continuing to prevent me from leading a normal life.

I can only imagine what I’d think. I can only imagine what I’d do.  But in any case, it wouldn’t be pleasant.

The officer, a seven-year veteran, recognized Mr. Clemmons “immediately,” Mr. Diaz said, and noticed that the suspect was trying to pull something from one of his pockets. He ordered Mr. Clemmons to put his hands up, but he refused and began to move away from the officer. The officer shot at least twice, Mr. Diaz said. Mr. Clemmons was pronounced dead at the scene.

I remember as soon as I read about those four policemen shot dead in Washington, I thought to myself – whoever the suspect turns out to be, they sure as hell aren’t going to be brought into the station in handcuffs. Ah well. Whatever noise we want to make about due process, this is more or less par for the course in any conflict between groups of armed thugs.

The first being that the Canadian government has passed not one, but two official resolutions concerning the inventor of the telephone. The first of these established the contributions of one Antonio Meiucci to the invention of telephony; the second responded to the previous bill, essentially stating that while Mr. Meiucci (an Italian), did contribute to the invention of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell (a Canadian), was the official, federally-recognized inventor of the telephone. Gee, thanks, federal government.

The more interesting part is that the wiki page on the second resolution links to images of both Bell and Meiucci, which I reproduce here for your edification.

The first of these images is Graham Bell, the second is Meiucci. How similar can two men look? What is it about being a bearded, white-haired man that makes you want to speak to people across great distances? These are the questions presently occupying my mind.

What you think of as offensive is hilariously tame by the standards of the Internet. Your standards of decency are positively Victorian to the new generation of people who have grown up with and on the Internet.

What am I talking about?

If you’re like most average folks, you’ll say ‘fuck’ and ’shit’ from time to time. Perhaps if you’re in a real mood you’ll say ‘cunt’ or ‘motherfucker.’ Maybe you are open to watching a bit of pornography, and certainly you’ll joke about sex. You’re not racist, but you might laugh at racial humour – especially if you’ve had a few drinks and the person offering said humour is of the race being mocked, or otherwise distances themselves from the old-fashioned, scary kind of racism.

What this means is that you are fucking tame. By this I mean that there is a whole world behind the scenes online with a communal ethos that is positively disturbing, even if you consider yourself not-easily-offended. This world goes by many names – 4chan, ‘/b/tards,’ ‘Anonymous’ … the list goes on, and of course the polymorphous core of anonymous wackos that populate these sites has its tendrils spread out all the way across the Internet. Wherever you see a commenter on a website expressing bizarre, apparently contradictory opinions, denouncing ‘fags’ and ‘jews,’ or talking about ‘drama’ and ‘lulz,’ you have likely encountered one of these peculiar individuals. These are ‘trolls,’ of course, that subspecies of Internet denizen who lives off daily infusions of schadenfreude, taking the utmost pleasure in the irritation and anguish of others; but Anonymous takes this pursuit of ‘lulz’ to a whole new level.

The image macros that originated on this site have popped up all over the Internet since it (ie, the site) started up. But the communities themselves have popped into public awareness in a bigger way over the past few years –  starting perhaps in 2006 with Jason Fortuny’s posting of some 100+ men’s contact information and photographs obtained from Craigslist to Encyclopedia Dramatica. This led to a lengthy hand-wringing article in the New York Times about ‘trolling,’ where mega-douche Fortuny tries to justify his actions, and thereby proves himself to be a key part of the cancer; this article also detailed some of the movement’s defining moments, such as the drama they provoked by mocking a child who killed himself (allegedly after losing his iPod), first on his MySpace page, and then in an escalating series of confrontation with his family. The movement got still more press from its Guy-Fawkes-mask-wearing protests of Scientology in 2008, when it first took up the mantle of ‘Anonymous.’ Then it showed up again when someone claiming affiliation with Anonymous hacked Sarah Palin’s email and posted some of its contents online; since then it’s been associated with ‘raids’ in Second Life and other virtual communities, the apprehension of alleged pedophiles, and any number of other bizarre scenarios. Of course, just as there’s no way to tell on 4chan between the ‘real’ possessor of a given nickname and impostors, there’s no real way to tell which of these claimants are ‘actually’ part of Anonymous, or which are part of a given subset of this group (ie, boards on 4chan, other -chan sites, ED, etc.). The whole movement is decentralized and deindividualized to the point that the question stops making sense. Sort of like the Bittorrent of social movements, I suppose.

Apart from the sheer fascination of paging through a site like Encyclopedia Dramatica, mouth agape at the depths of offensiveness plumbed therein – from ‘an hero‘ to ‘furfags‘  - Anonymous offers quite a bit of material for those interested in new technologies and their unpredictable effects. All of the most distinctive attributes of online culture collide here: the tendency of anonymity to induce extreme brands of antisocial speech; the capacity of bulletin-board sites to function as an ‘echo chamber,’ amplifying and retransmitting memes; and the fostering of idiosyncratic, unorthodox modes of linguistic and visual expression. Let’s go through these point by point:

1) It’s felicitous that they chose the name they did, because in the first place, Anonymous is a movement predicated upon anonymity. It started out on sites like 4chan, which simply offer no way to preserve a dedicated username and link it to one individual: all postings on this site are effectively anonymous, and those who aim to construct a distinctive persona for themselves can readily have it hijacked and taken for a joyride in pursuit of lulz. Lulz is the raison d’etre of the Anonymous community, and for the uninitiated, Schadenfreude works about as well. Lulz (a corrupted pluralization of LOL – see point #3) is the kind of laughter that overtakes you and you stifle immediately; Lulz – to cite a prime example I’ve already mentioned twice – is when you can’t help but laugh at the idea of a teenager killing themselves over a lost iPod. Except where you or I would snicker a bit and then feel bad, Anonymous would post 1500 messages to the dead teenager’s Myspace, and then start trying to find his parents’ phone number so they could torment them. This is the kind of behaviour that is typical of the community, and it’s inconceivable without the cloak of anonymity granted by the Internet.  And anonymity is also what makes Anonymous so polymorphous and contradictory: to ask who is really a member of Anon. and who isn’t, is fundamentally to miss the point. When considering anonymous texts from the nineteenth century, for instance, as I’ve been doing lately, it makes sense to think of their authors in terms of ’shallow’ and ‘deep’ anonymity. Some authors published anonymously, but those ‘in the know,’ who travelled in the right circles, all knew who they were; others were wholly anonymous, and took every precaution to ensure that only their closest friends and family could find out their identities. But in both cases, one was confronted with a text that could be ascribed to a single author, with – one could presume – a roughly consistent outlook. This certainly isn’t true of contemporary anonymity. Anonymous represents a new kind of anonymity: Anon. is legion. To some, the individuals who make up the community are well-known; to others, the identities of individuals are totally unknown, or so fluid as to be impenetrable. Thus Anon. is a many-in-one, a non-hierarchical unity in which any individual can presumably speak for the entire movement, and which in no way demands any kind of internal cohesion or external appearance of consistency. Essentially the only means by which Anon. polices its boundaries are its ridiculous, over-the-top offensiveness and its bizarre jargon. The offensiveness is simply a means to an end, like that of the 1970s Punk movement: the Sex Pistols didn’t wear swastikas because they were fascists, and Anon. doesn’t riff on ‘faggotry,’ ‘Nigras,’ or Zionist conspiracies because as a movement it is homophobic or racist (though its very nature means it can’t preclude those sorts of individuals from joining in). Like the vicious, disgusting pornography that is scattered around 4chan and ED, the antisocial speech is just a way of excluding all those who don’t ‘get the joke.’ If you’re the easily offended type, you click away to another page, clucking your tongue. That’s how Anon. wants it; that’s why their hangouts look the way they do. If, instead, you rise to the bait, then you quickly become a target. While Anon. is by no means a group of ‘hackers’ – as some mainstream media have absurdly described them, even though they often use publicly available information and tools – they will readily make use of technology to strip away the anonymity of their enemies, and to unleash all manner of communally-delivered hell upon them. So anonymity here is fundamentally asymmetrical.

2) The memetic amplification effect is responsible for the bizarre, spiralling character of sites like ED; ED and 4chan, in turn, are responsible for many of the memes which have since entered the Internet mainstream – Rickrolling and LOLCATs are only the most recent and well-known examples. This seems to be a way to build on the internal cohesion of the group (everybody loves sharing an in-joke!), and while the offensive character of its discussions seems to aim more at policing the entry of external elements, all three of these factors can probably be interpreted as strengthening the group in both directions, contributing both to internal cohesiveness and to the exclusion of external influences. The denigration of mainstream incarnations of these memes only serves to further strengthen the communal bond, and to preclude any kind of co-option. (Much could be said here about the economics behind this community’s preferred online hangouts, and how this has led them in large part to maintain a distributed web presence and co-opt other sites

3) As a constructed ‘minor language’ of sorts, the jargon the community fosters likewise works in both directions. For those ‘in the know,’ it’s both a creative outlet and a source of lulz – most all of us have experienced at one time or another the formation of a quasi-private language between oneself and a friend or group of friends – while for those on the outside it is a considerable impediment to participation in the community. To ask what someone means when they’re using one of these expressions is to invite mockery, or worse. (As in the paradigmatic ‘HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS‘). And rest assured that with phenomena like LOLcats and other image macros, they are indeed creating a new dialect and a new grammar of words and images, both of which will slowly but surely filter into the English language as spoken and written in more respectable quarters. Just as assuredly, though, the folks who originated these memes will claim total disgust for their more mainstream incarnations.

Those three factors seem to have contributed to the construction of a strangely enduring and influential, though fluid and inconsistent, online social formation. I don’t point out its existence purely out of a juvenile fascination, though I can’t entirely disavow a certain puerile element as part of my own interest in the group. I also don’t necessarily agree with their language, their viewpoint or their methods, though in general I appreciate the strategy of extreme offensiveness as a means of maintaining a ‘counterculture;’ but it’s silly to think of this group as having one unified ideology or methodology. Instead I just wanted to sketch out a few general ideas about this phenomenon and perhaps bring it to the attention of a wider and more detached audience, since I think it’s by far the most distinctive and interesting of the many social groupings fostered by the Internet.

I mean, here is a site which shamelessly caters to contemporary individuals’ love for the feeling of having a group of friends, without any of the pesky responsibilities commonly associated with having such a group. High-frequency, low-commitment interaction: the ideal type of postmodern sociability, if such a notion is even coherent.

It’s pretty clear though that what has animated the bizarre public phenomenon called Twitter is the fact that famous people use it (even if they’re not always really them). I mean, really, nobody cares about the masses – without idiots like these, do you really think that we would be in the weird situation of having more words said about this damn site in the mainstream media than it’s really possible to say on the medium itself?

Yet in spite of my tone I do think that this opens up some wond’rous possibilities. I have thus far resisted the temptation to join up myself – given my penchant for undue verbosity, and my loathing of the ‘LOLZ 4 U’ grammatical paradigm, it doesn’t seem like it’s for me – but there is nevertheless all kinds of fun stuff you can come across by voyaging through the site. Such as for instance the Twitter feeds of certain well-known pornographic actresses, which occupied a good hour of my morning. The particularly fun part is that you realize from these sites that these are not cyborg Amazons from Mars, but relatively ordinary girls who – if, like me, you’re a 25 year old male - are three-to-five years younger than you are, who take pictures of themselves in the mirrors of their messy rooms wearing oversized clothing, and who in fact appear to spend a silly amount of time responding to the comments of their fans.  They just happen to get plowed in various orifices for public display, and maybe sometimes they suck eighteen dicks in a row, and probably they do more drugs than you do, but in other respects they are quite normal.

The coolest part of all this though are the weird interactions that you can track through Twitter. Obviously on these feeds there is a considerable amount of social-network back-and-forth between porn actresses, and news about public appearances, and communication with obvious, obsessive ‘fans,’ but it’s the little gems like this that make Twitter-stalking celebrities conducting this kind of ethnographic study worthwhile: ‘axiomvv’ is a Christian, football-obsessed, community college student, who between posting the results of Stanford games and looking to Rick Warren for affirmation, is in regular communication via Twits with several porn stars. Who would have thought that A) someone is online telling Faye Reagan and Sasha Grey directly that ‘God has a plan’ for them, and that B) such actresses would warmly engage with such a correspondent on a regular basis?

I could go on for quite a while about this joyous serendipity, but no doubt that would start to seem creepy. In any case, I guess this just goes to show that, whatever one’s expectations or generalizations about how people use social media might be, they grossly underestimate the kinds of wacky and unpredictable shit that are made possible by every new mode of communication.

So-called ‘critical animal studies’ is the kind of disciplinary identification that just seems designed to irritate me from the get-go. I mean you have the usual collision of disciplines (according to Wiki, it includes “scholars from fields as diverse as art history, anthropology, film studies, history, sociology, biology, psychology, literary studies, geography,philosophy and feminism or queer theory“), a collection that could be applied to just about every newfangled discipline like this. Certainly everything that gets called “critical x studies.” Worst of all, you have an explicit political aim identified with the movement itself, something that almost always gets associated with something called ‘critical’ but which I think is anything but.

The first few tenets of their little manifesto aren’t hugely problematic, but eventually we get to stuff like this, saying that CAS as a field

5. Rejects apolitical, conservative, and liberal positions in order to advance an anti-capitalist, and, more generally, a radical anti-hierarchical politics. This orientation seeks to dismantle all structures of exploitation, domination, oppression, torture, killing, and power in favor of decentralizing and democratizing society at all levels and on a global basis.

6. Rejects reformist, single-issue, nation-based, legislative, strictly animal interest politics in favor of alliance politics and solidarity with other struggles against oppression and hierarchy.

7. Champions a politics of total liberation which grasps the need for, and the inseparability of, human, nonhuman animal, and Earth liberation and freedom for all in one comprehensive, though diverse, struggle; to quote Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”

Anyway, this kind of stuff all really bothers me. Why can’t we just stick with the idea of ‘critical theory’ that’s served us well enough since Adorno? Why is it that every time a few good books are written by the usual suspects about a given topic (cf. Haraway’s When Species Meet, Derrida’s The Animal that, therefore, I am, Agamben’s The Open) a bunch of people feel the need to get together and imagine themselves a little disciplinary community? Why do we have to associate critique, not simply with a disciplined investigation of the status quo and its construction, but with a very specific and in many ways very problematic set of political aims? Anti-capitalistic and radical anti-hierarchical politics? Whatever one’s own vaguely-formulated political aims – and I should emphasize that I’m more than sympathetic to a critique of capitalism and of hierarchy – I think it’s pretty tendentious to include this kind of stuff in the formulation of what purports to be a field of study.

At the same time, I got to thinking about this so-called field by reading about no-kill shelters and the ethico-political implications of such (I was intrigued to find that PETA opposes such shelters, for instance), and certainly I think that there is a lot of valuable work to be done in this area. So I have to come around and say that I strongly support the aims of critical animal studies, even as I resent the kind of disciplinary fragmentation and knee-jerk radicalism that some of its practitioners’ approaches seem to imply. We have a frightening and indeed schizophrenic relationship with the many animals whose existences we have shaped and integrated into our society, and who have in turn come to structure the lives of humanity in so many ways. There are enough fragmentary disciplines already, though, involving agglomerations of fields like the one I listed off at the outset – many of which are themselves very interdisciplinary – that I think these questions can be treated in the existing frameworks of critical theory, ethics, and science and technology studies. I say the last because I just thought of a wondrous idea: in the spirit of Callon’s ‘Scallops of Brieuc Bay,’ a study of the trajectory of a GMO corn, from seed testing and production to cows and/or HFCS and/or ethanol, etc… It’s problems like these that make me think the questions surrounding animals demand a broader framework. You can’t really consider the ethics and the politics of industrial cattle production, for instance, without considering the whole corn economy in the United States and the way that plant has come to dominate the North American diet. Can critical animal studies be extended to plants?

In any case, whatever the tenor of this ramble might suggest, I don’t begrudge this group of scholars their identification; it’s just one that I personally, resist. Nevertheless I think the questions it addresses are important ones. The question of the animal is a crucial one that’s run through 19th and 20th century theory, and needs to be considered in that context: starting from Bentham and the question of utilitarian ethics as applied to animals, on through Heidegger’s famous analogy of the Holocaust and mechanized agriculture (one that makes one simultaneously question Heidegger’s ethics and the ethics of agriculture, especially if you’ve ever driven past a truck full of pigs on the highway), Singer’s Animal Liberation, Haraway, Derrida, and beyond.

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