‘Walking With Zeke’: Friendship and Mourning Beyond the Limits of Man

This paper was written for a course in the East Asian Language and Literature department titled “Friendship and Mourning.” I’m a bit happier with this paper though it is certainly in need of expansion as well as a more rigorous engagement with the theoretical texts — oh, and the conclusion is a “wtf?” kind of moment.  I essentially wrote this paper three times: the first 7 pages I lost when my computer decided to finally crash and pages 7-14 were lost because of my unfamiliarity with PCs.  But, I got it done and now I can share it here:

Certitude dismisses the fractal structure of the world, paves it over, turns meadow into concrete slab and then ignores the grasses struggling up through the cracks…At times I imagine a world laden with a trillion untold tales, entombed in silence.  All those who once remembered them are long gone.  They are a blanket on the earth.  They push their way through the sodden ground in spring.  - Chris Clarke, Walking With Zeke

In the summer of 2009 I held in my arms a thirteen-year-old Cocker Spaniel, Samantha, afflicted with a malignant tumor the size of a football on her right underbelly, as the veterinarian injected a high dose of pentobarbital into her front right paw.  It seemed that before the shot was complete, Samantha indolently ambled across that indistinct border between life and death and the death of this dog, this dog I barely knew, crippled me in mourning – a mess of tears, wailing, and snot.

There are certain strains of Heideggerean thought that would suggest that only I, as human Dasein with a relation to finitude as such, could relate (or, better, respond) to the death of this dog.  This is, however, a problematic proposition – if not logically, at least experientially.  A few months prior, in a bout of unusually intense depression, I lied on the couch in my partner’s living room staring at the stucco of the ceiling searching for consolation in at least one absurd figure in its relief.  Samantha, who until that moment had seemed indifferent to me, not by choice (at least I hope not) but because she was deaf and nearly blind, walked across the living room, that tumor as oppressive as ever, and nudged my shoulder.  I tried to ignore her.  She barked.  I turned and she licked my face and lied with me until my spirits returned and we both resumed our daily routines of eating, sleeping, and playful mischief.

The purpose of this anecdote is to raise questions about response, affect, and relationality in inter- or trans-species relations.  I avoid the term “inter-subjective” because, as Jacques Derrida has noted (1991), it has almost always functioned as a variant of “inter-human.”  I argue that by thinking through the categories of “friendship” and “mourning” in a non-anthropocentric analysis (that is, in contradistinction to the traditional “friendship among men”), we are able to develop a richer context from which to think about such ontological structures and themes as co-relationality, co-affectivity, and co-responsivity; of a coeval constitution of subjects through an Other that is not only human, but a whole series of indeterminate beings.

Is it the Person or the Object that is Barbaric? The Production of Property and Subjectivity

Well the quarter has ended and, with that, I have papers to post.  This first paper was written for an Anthropology course titled “Theories of Property.”  I am not particularly happy with this paper — first, because it is in definite need of expansion and, second, I can’t say I performed as well as I could have in the course.  I think it starts relatively strong but, as it progresses, begins to lose hold of whatever it had a hold of in the first place.

In her book The Vanishing Hectare Katherine Verdery argues, “Property, being a relation among persons with respect to values, is a critical component of how persons are defined” (Verdery 2003: 172).  Taking her ethnographic subject, the people of postsocialist Aurel Vlaicu in Transylvania, Verdery notes the constitutive effect property has in person-forming so that “recovering land [in the wake of postsocialist decollectivization] meant reasserting those ways of being-in-the-world for Vlaiceni” and “recovering it enabled them to be somebody again” (Verdery 2003: 173).  While not her central concern, Verdery hints towards an interesting dynamic between property and subjectivity: if property, as C.M. Hann argues (1998), should direct our attention to complex networks of cultural and social relations in which material objects are recognized and personal as well as collective identities are made (Hann 1998: 5), then the question stands as to what forms of subjectivity enter into and exist within these complex networks?

Discussion Points and Questions

The readings this week for my Friendship and Mourning course were Derrida’s essays “The Politics of Friendship” and “On Hospitality” as well as a piece from Allan Silver titled “Historical Moments of Friendship Ideals in Western Culture: Warrior Society, the Renaissance, Liberalism”. I’m one of three who had to create discussion points and questions for this week’s class meeting. I focused on Derrida’s “The Politics of Friendship” as I felt it framed the course, and some of the questions we were asking last week, really well (if you’d like to read these essays, let me know and I can email them to you – and, of course, contribute to conversation if you can!)

To begin, I’d like to bring attention to Derrida’s citation of Montaigne’s citation of Aristotle, “O my friends, there is no friend,” and reflect on the differences present in this saying, especially in the plural address “friends” and the singular general category “friend.”

In conjunction, we could read the following passage:

“…I still do not know if what exists between us is philia or homonomia, nor how one should distinguish here among us, among each one of us, who together would compose this as yet quite indeterminate ‘us’” (“The Politics of Friendship”, 633, my emphasis)

In reading this passage in conjunction with the first we should mark Derrida’s hesitance, a hesitance demonstrated throughout his works, to attempt to capture heterogeneous series (in this case the audience) under a general singular, i.e. “us,” “the friend,” etc.

Now, what are the implications of this hesitance when approaching the concepts “friend” and “friendship”? Well, from looking at the etymology of “friend” last week we saw, and I will only speak of the Greek philia due to familiarity, various idealizations of what a friend is. That is, these were analytic determinations of what constitutes a friend (ex.: “she has always been there for me, so she is a friend” and “he stole from me, therefore he must not be my friend” etc.). What these ideals of friendship attempt to do is capture or freeze an entire spectrum of possible relationships in advance, that is, to give a set of criteria which you then impose on the other person in order to determine whether he/she/it is your friend or not.

Already we have seen the problems that arise with this way of thinking about friendship, i.e. that friendship can only occur between men but also consider the implications for racial, national, class, species (etc.) exclusions in these ‘systems of friendship’.

So if Derrida has taken from himself the tool of analytic determination, how does he expect to think friendship?

Let’s look at his rhetoric: there is consistent use of words meant to designate a sort of coming before-ness, i.e. “before even haven taken responsibility” (633), “in relation to the Other prior to any organized socius” (644), “a sort of originary sociality is a law” (634), “The very possibility of the question, in the form of ‘what is…?’, seems always to have supposed this friendship prior to friendships, this anterior affirmation of being-together” (637), etc.

It seems then that Derrida is pushing us back before our commonsense and formal understandings of friendship (which he calls “that strange violence that has since forever insinuated itself into the origin of the most innocent experiences of friend or justice”) to force us to think of the conditions of possibility for friendship to ever occur in the first place. He writes, “Behind the logical game of contradiction or paradox [isn’t this a nice characterization of analytic determinations?], perhaps ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ signifies first and last this surpassing of the present [both temporal and “present” in the sense of “presence” as being before me] by the undeniable future anterior which would be the very movement and time of friendship” (637).

It is important to note, then, that Derrida views analytic determinations of friendship as too late to the scene and, in fact, as an erasure or covering over of an originary relation.

For discussion (with the assumption that we are on board with Derrida to this point):

1. Stated explicitly on page 638, Derrida narrows in on what he calls “the question of the response” and “answering”: “what does it mean to respond or to answer and to whom or to what are we responding to?” are Derrida’s questions. We should discuss the dimensions of his meditations on responding and answering, i.e. to answer for, to answer to, and to answer before, and why he argues that “to answer before” appears “more original, more fundamental, and hence unconditional” (638).

Statement of Interests and Purpose

Here’s the first assignment for my anthropology course, “Theory of Property.” The professor, Dr. Julia Elyachar, wanted us to write up a brief statement of our research interests and purpose for taking the course. Here you go:

Through my interests in Critical Animal and Environmental Studies there inevitably emerges questions about the tactics and strategies of animal and environmental liberation. Often these tactics involve, not only the rescuing of animals used for experimentation and consumption, but the destruction of laboratories, meat and fur farms, logging factories, equipment, etc. These tactics have been labeled as violent in political, legal, and vernacular discourses, often invoking a connection between the property destroyed and persons — even if the term ‘persons’ is only meant to designate a nebulous network of corporate entities. However, as the current literature in the anthropology of property demonstrates, this is anything but a necessary and self-sufficient connection. Furthermore, the appropriation of animal bodies and entire ecological networks as property is itself a practice worth questioning — all the more so given our current ecological crises and their effects on nearly every domain of political and social life.

My purpose in taking this course is to ground my academic, as well political, interests in the anthropological literature on property; my intended goal being to take from these resources a more concrete and material understanding of the social and political usages of property.

Tribute to a Friend

Well, the quarter has finally started and I’ve been given my first writing assignment for a course titled “Friendship and Mourning” taught by Dr. Hu Ying of the East Asian Languages and Literature department. The idea is to write, with no restrictions, a tribute to a friend that is both a reflective and aesthetic response. I decided to use the eulogy I wrote for my father in 2007. It’s personal but this is why I started this blog.

I have always found it difficult to speak about, and even more so for, someone. It has always been, for me, a question of doing justice; a task, that as I speak before the ashes of my father, is made all the more difficult: he had always been, to my mind, both supremely righteous and supremely flawed.

I then consider it a matter of luck that just months before his death I had had a crisis in my academic life, questioning the power and strength of philosophy in general, and philosophers in particular, to provide us with novel reflections and insights into the so-called “big questions.” I had come to suspect that philosophy was simply the sophisticated articulation of what, at least some of us, experienced in our daily lives. To test this suspicion, I had intended to ask a series of staple philosophical questions of my father to which he would respond either in writing or in conversation. Due to his deteriorating health and to the reason we are here today, his death, he was only able to respond, in writing, to one question: “Who or what am I?” Absolving me of the task to speak about or for my father, this is what he wrote:

I am my mother. For better or worse, I am also my father and the three stepfathers who followed him. I am the three years I toured in Vietnam, the friends I’ve made in my 59 years, and every dog I have loved and has loved me.

As a hobby, I have always been a miner and so I suppose I am earth, I am quartz and, in more ways that one, I am fool’s gold.

I am my sister, though I’m sure she’d hate to hear that, my three sons, my two beautiful girls, and my wife, Vicky, who I could never begin to compensate for her love – and yes, I am even my first wife.

I am every job I’ve held, every boss I’ve had, every co-worker and customer I have cooked for. I am Barstow. I am the desert. I am the Santa Fe railroad and swimming down the Mojave Narrows collecting soda bottles for pennies.

I am unbelievably lucky.

I find it absolutely remarkable that my father understood that when we ask the question “Who am I?” we cannot answer without being spoken through: we are, as it were, only “I’s” insofar as we are composites of our life experiences, the others we come into contact with and who constitute us (whether that be persons, dogs, or deserts). My initial hesitance to speak about or for my father, your father, your husband, your friend, your brother, your tío, your abuelo, was perhaps too hasty: Carl Edward Goebel III already speaks through all of us, this is why we are here, why we mourn, and why we love.

Depopulating Deserts: Ecological Nihilisms and Finite Frontiers (Abstract – 2nd Draft)

Cary over at Racing the Horizons and I are submitting an abstract to the 2012 UCLA comparative literature graduate conference, “Spheres of Influence: Navigating World, Globe, and Planet.” The blogging culture we discuss will primarily engage the blogs of Chris Clarke, Ruth Nolan, and Shaun G.  After a humbling amount of feedback, for which Cary and I are infinitely grateful, this is the second draft. We’ve decided to focus on the minor literatures and nix the genealogy for time constraints (though, if we try to publish this paper, it will certainly be included), updated some factoids, and reworded parts for clarity and force. As always, feedback is appreciated:

Since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, nine utility-scale solar developments have been fast-tracked for approval in regions of the Mojave Desert, exposing over 50,000 acres of public lands to intensive development.[1]  While the arguments that have supported these massive investments of public resources have not been homogenous, they have nonetheless orbited within a certain constellation of thinking about the desert as such.  In October of 2010, at the groundbreaking of Brightsource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stated, “Some people look out into the desert and see miles and miles of emptiness […] I see miles and miles of gold mine.”[2]  However, the two positions – the desert as emptiness and the desert as gold mine – are two sides of the same ecological nihilism, effacing the infinite complexities of desert ecologies: desert tortoise populations, 500 to 800 year old Mojave yucca groupings, and the myriad of other organisms that inhabit these lands are reduced to a narrative of human use-value in general, and profit in particular; therefore, continuing a tradition of westward expansion at least as old as the 19^th century in which the American deserts were viewed as the “Creator’s dumping place”[3] and “an unbroken waste, barren, wild, and worthless.”[4]

The purpose of this paper is to provide a rich account of those minor literatures, including the emergence of a blogging culture by so-called “desert rats,” that contest these empty and destructive desert ontologies.  Pejoratively labeled NIMBYs[5] by proponents of Big Solar in order to brand them as “small-minded” and selfish, caring more about local aesthetics than an imagined “global good,” we argue that these literatures take place, not simply on aesthetic grounds (though this is a justifiably strong influence), but also with deep scientific, political, and ontological commitments; with a fidelity to deserts as complex, diverse, and necessary ecosystems; and within a more robust, extra-human notion of what it means to inhabit desert worlds.

Depopulating Deserts (Zwinger Passages)

Cary over at Racing the Horizons and I are currently working on formulating an abstract and writing a paper for a Comp Lit graduate conference at UCLA. I’m going to save describing the project for a later time as I just spent three hours transcribing passages from Ann Zwinger’s The Mysterious Lands into a word doc (it’s a library book and I don’t have a scanner, such are my troubles). The passages are beautiful and I hope you enjoy them: