So it seems that I’ve drawn the attention of the luminary Brian Leiter. In response to my gloss on The Domestication of Humans, Leiter writes a post entitled “I’m Not Sure if This is a Joke”. Leiter writes:
I am hoping it is. An excerpt:
Inverting the way we commonly talk and think about domestication, the book will explore how grasses, grains, various animals such as wolves, cows, cats, goats, and microbes, as well as technologies have conspired to domesticate human beings for their own ends. Throughout North America and other parts of the world, for example, grass cultivated humans to be beings that love lawns and large grassy areas for their sports so that humans would spread grass all about the world, thereby getting itself replicated. Likewise, cows, in a sinister plot against other herd animals, cultivated humans to have a particular love of beef so that they might get replicated and spread across the globe, cornering the market on prime pieces of grazing land.
(Thanks to a pseudonymous reader for sending me to this, shall we say, unusual blog.)
Alas Brian, it’s not a joke, though I will confess to a bit of strategic hyperbole. In what context does such a project make sense? Well, in the context of continental theory where my work is primarily situated. What might motivate such a project within the framework of continental theory? Well, the fact that most continental theorists argue that humans in some way or another construct reality. Among the continentals we have the Kantians that argue that the mind structures reality, the phenomenologists that argue that intentionality structures reality, the linguistic and semiotic idealists that argue that language and signs construct reality, those that argue that power and discourse constructs reality, and the hermeneuts that talk about how history constructs reality. Everywhere we have continentalists arguing, in a manner that repeats the story of Adam in the Garden of Eden, that humans are sovereigns that construct reality.
My little project, which perhaps suffers from hyperbole (but how else do you draw attention to an important point), merely tries to draw attention to the role played by nonhumans in the development and construction of humans and their societies. What role did grains play in human development? How did it influence the structure of our societies? What role did the bubonic plague play in the development of humans and society? What role have domesticated animals played in the development of humans and our societies? What role have technologies and modes of communication like writing and the internet played in the development of humans and society? In other words, my project tries to draw attention away from the obsessive focus of continental philosophers on mind (as construed by Kant), intentionality (as construed by the phenomenologists), language and power (as construed by the French crew of ’68), to the role played by geography, technology, animals, plants, weather, and microbes in the development of humans and their society. Therapeutically (and as a Nietzschean I’m sure Brian can appreciate the idea of philosophical therapy), such a project hopes to draw attention to extra-human factors in the development of humans. Moreover, as a staunch defender of Darwin, I’m sure that Leiter can appreciate my attempt to treat humans as among other entities in evolutionary processes, rather than granting them a privileged theological place.
In an update, Brian shares an email he received from one Mohan Matthen who is a philosopher of mind and biology at University of Toronto. Matthen writes,
It’s a wacky idea, but not without a sane and sober (and brilliant) precedent.
Grasses coevolved with humans: certain grasses became nutritious so humans would consume them and excrete their seeds all over so that the grasses themselves prospered. (Jared Diamond discusses this case in Guns, Germs, and Steel. He also observes that natural selection acts oppositely on fruits and seeds: fruits evolve to be good-tasting to attract animals to eat them; seeds within the fruits evolve to be hard or bitter or even poisonous so that they are not chewed up, but are rather spat out or excreted whole, to reproduce.) Fruits coevolved with old world monkeys: the fruit developed colour so that they are easily visible to these monkeys; the monkeys developed colour vision so they could spot the fruit. The monkeys found a source of nutrition; the plants that grew the fruit got propagated wherever the monkeys went. (J. D. Mollon has developed the co-evolution thesis for colour vision.)
Of course, in the above cases, there is natural variation on both sides, from which the mutual benefit can evolve. Some plants of a species have attributes that make them apt to be taken up by humans in a way that aids their reproduction; others have these attributes in lesser measure. Similarly, among humans there are some who are prone to eat the grass and fruit with such attributes and others who do not. The former of each kind prosper. That’s co-evolution, and if it can be described as the domestication of plants, then the opposite description is equally apt. But I didn’t see much about co-evolution in the blog that you linked.
Quite right. Matthen is right that in my post I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to co-evolution (the book will), but otherwise his observations get right at the heart of the project I’m proposing. While there are glimmers of light here and there, an analysis of these dynamics in the development of humans and human societies are glaringly absent in the linguistophilia of contemporary continental theory. Is the title of my book a provocation? You betcha! Is it a necessary move in a body of decadent theory that’s so blinded by narcissistic love of the human that it is unable to recognize that humans are among the rest of beings and that we don’t rise above those beings? Absolutely! I’m flattered by the attention that I’ve received from a celebrity like Leiter today and impressed that he did the update. This has been a banner day for a blog that ordinarily only receives between 1500 and 3000 hits a day. I’m glad to have the attention and hope Leiter will follow the project as it develops over the next year or so.
December 22, 2010 at 4:30 am
Who the hell is Brian Leiter?
December 22, 2010 at 5:50 am
Although I am all in favor of a non-anthropocentric perspective is not your own proposed book still a bit anthropocentric?
You ask questions such as “what role did the grains play in human development? How did it influence the structure of our societies? What role did the bubonic plague play in the development of humans and society? What role have domesticated animals played in the development of humans and our societies?” etc
It seems that all questions concerns how other objects affected us/humans/society. Although all other objects are diverse, humans remain a homogenous category here. In short: the objects are all centered around how they affect humans. Focusing on the grain throughout the whole book (how it affected animals, soil, erosion, etc. throughout a whole book where humans only are a minor part would be a non-anthropocentric perspective. However, to include a multitude of diverse objects to explain how they all have affected humans suggests to me that the humans still are in the center.
December 22, 2010 at 6:00 am
Johan,
That’s all true. When I think anthropocentrism I think a focus on how humans structure everything else, not simple discussion of humans. In my view it’s important to make the sort of argument I’m trying to make so as to move beyond that sort of unilateralization. I don’t think humans are a homogeneous category but change with different environments and technologies. Pointing out how this takes place, I believe, is a step towards a post-anthropocentric ontology.
December 22, 2010 at 7:11 am
[…] LEVI’S OWN WORDS. Nice response. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment » […]
December 22, 2010 at 10:57 am
Have you ever read Terrance Deacon’s book on the co-evolution between brain and language?
He argues that the evolution of grammar has physically transformed the way our brains are shaped. If true, that’s like a marriage between the post 68 “discourse produces reality” people and the OOO stuff.
This raises a question which has always dogged me about OOO. Isn’t the big world beyond us also within us? Not just grammar, but bacteria and tissues and the rest. Which then leads to the question, where does the ‘us’ or the ‘I’ end and the object world begin? Or how much do we share? I am sure the OOO crowd already have (varying) answers to such questions. But I am not aware of them.
December 22, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Personally, I’m sick and tired of the self-proclaimed humanists passionately pleading for everyone to take the ‘human’ seriously. Good grief! We’ve done that for 40+ years. It’s a surprise anyone wants to go into the natural sciences anymore. We’ve done our best to show that natural scientists are ‘evil, masculinist, patriarchal, oppressive, naïve.’ It seems one must have a cynical attitude towards everything they do. If it’s not the philosophers constantly reminding us about the importance of human beings, it’s the damn social scientists reminding us that everything is a social construction. Well, whoopty Fu**ing Doo!
You’d think this Brian Leiter fellow would realize this and appreciate what you are trying to do.
December 22, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Honey-Bunny!
Wait till they find out you’re planning on recuperating mangy ole Sartre?! Tar and feather all over your laptop!
“…those that argue that power and discourse constructs reality,…” Sometimes sujects and verbs (lighter, Goodson, lie to her, light her, you pick)really and truly do disagree.
December 22, 2010 at 6:49 pm
I’m a professor of rhetoric, fan of Latour and Levinas, and supporter of your project; “strategic hyperbole” is a great term. Congrats for the attention boon!
December 22, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Well done, Levi. This is a solid response. It also lets Leiter and his boys know that if they are going to respond it is going to require thought and not just snark.
December 22, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Leiter may not like it, but your idea does have commonalities with those of another, extremely popular celebrity writer.
Check out the last sentence of this book description:
There’s a documentary version of this book among the netflix watch instantly options. It really stresses the idea that humans have been domesticated by plants.
December 22, 2010 at 7:37 pm
The trouble with the way you are going about this is that you are anthropomorphizing grasses and cows. They aren’t humans. Grass most certainly doesn’t have intentions, and it doesn’t make plots. Cows are animals, and so they have brains, but they aren’t they sharpest critters out there. Evolution isn’t teleological.
Maybe you can take an example of a smarter animal, and one that does manipulate people: canis familiaris, dogs. They know how to make us happy, to get what they need and want out of them.
December 22, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Mark, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of anthropormorphism. Indeed according to OOO that’s what we can’t help doing. Pencils pencilmorph everything in the same way.
Furthermore, as I argue in The Ecological Thought, the charge of anthropomorphism is
1) A blind alley at best and a potentially infinite game of one-upsmanship
2) At worst, a symptom of profound correlationism and thus guilty of what it accuses the other of doing!
December 22, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Mark, if he does that then the force of the thesis is lost.
You first need to prove that “intentions are plots” are necessary in order for one thing to use another for its own ends. Somehow I don’t think Levi’s thesis is that grains literally scheme and plot against us.
In fact, if I were going to read Leiter charitably here (which I’m not inclined to do) I would read them as taking Levi too literally, in just the manner suggested by your comment.
Analytic philosophers as a group are deeply uncomfortable with rhetoric and metaphor. They often choose the most bland, banal metaphors, as if literary style were something that frightened them. Quite often they even say “so to speak” after even the most innocuous metaphors, as if to let all their analytic colleagues that they haven’t gone off the reservation.
So, it’s possible that Leiter really just thought Levi was endorsing a psychotic vision of fully cognitive, scheming grains and grasses, and was ridiculing that as a kind of paranoid Schreberian metaphysics.
But more likely, he was just being a creep.
December 22, 2010 at 8:53 pm
“intentions AND plots”, I mean.
December 22, 2010 at 10:32 pm
Mark, wouldn’t the point rather be that human intentions are overemphasized and that similar types of historical agency occur without intention? In which case, the wording lampoons the idea that only humans shape the world, without being shaped by it.
December 22, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Doctorzamalek makes a good point about ‘analytic’ types taking things too literally. Literary style does seem to frighten those chaps (Recall the now famous, and absurd, line from Fodor about how he is a ‘better’ writer than Nietzsche and Kierkegaard because he is clearer.)
Though with Leiter I think his comments did not have much to do with being unable to enjoy style (he being a fan of some great philosophical stylists). Rather, I think he was still a bit giddy from the recent “Jewish Poker” posts on his site. He is still tingling from that high and eagerly seeking additional examples of ‘crazed continentals’ to point at and laugh.
But it doesn’t seem like he is fond of engaging with a certain strand of what he dubs “party line continentals”. He may just have assumed that Levi is one such example and has written him off as appearing crazy. Such is the problem with some strands of philosophy – without context, nearly everything in this discipline is a howler.
I do wish that Leiter would provide some more substantive postings on why he thinks certain things are quirky or stupid as opposed to merely snarking at them. One, it would save people from unnecessary confusion. Two, it would give people a chance to determine if he is on or off the mark (ex. he seems to have a derogatory view of Badiou, Zizek and others judging by brief comments and quips of his but he has not good explanations of why this is).
Alas, I think he would rather just dismiss such philosophers and their fans and hope that they go elsewhere. Fair enough but somewhat unsatisfying for those wanting some polite engagement.
December 23, 2010 at 1:56 am
here’s the trailer for the pbs documentary:
http://video.pbs.org/video/1220836827/
December 23, 2010 at 8:11 am
Al Roth wrote: “Though with Leiter I think his comments did not have much to do with being unable to enjoy style (he being a fan of some great philosophical stylists). Rather, I think he was still a bit giddy from the recent ‘Jewish Poker’ posts on his site. He is still tingling from that high and eagerly seeking additional examples of ‘crazed continentals’ to point at and laugh.”
Al, I think you’re right about this.
“I do wish that Leiter would provide some more substantive postings on why he thinks certain things are quirky or stupid as opposed to merely snarking at them. ”
So do I, but he’s a notorious creep, and really just the academic equivalent of a hallway bully.
December 23, 2010 at 8:24 pm
There’s a good overview of current state of the understanding of the domestication of plants and animals in Bulliet’s “Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers.” He disagrees with much of what Diamond says, and for good reason, especially on the “undomesticatable species” point.
December 23, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Professor Bryant: Thanks for the clarification of the original post. I’ve added another update, and raised an additional question. I’ve also opened comments there for any further discussion.
Al Roth: if I were really looking for philosophical hacks to point at and laugh about, I’d probably link to the infantile Graham Harman, but the spectacle of him bursting into tears and pouting about being bullied is not one I relish.
December 24, 2010 at 4:58 am
A classic bullying trait: to mock the hurt or indignity of the victim.
December 24, 2010 at 6:49 am
How does this charge of “anthropocentrism” in Continental philosophy square with the professed “anti-humanism” of major figures in the tradition? Heidegger cautioned against humanism because it draws us away from the question of the meaning of Being, which encompasses something much larger. Surely Being must include the “non-human.”
December 24, 2010 at 7:09 am
Brian,
Dasein still holds a central place within Heidegger as that which receives the sendings of being and which relates to other beings in terms of its own care and concern. Moreover, language is the house of being. Anthropocentrism, as I understand it, does not mean that there isn’t reference to nonhumans, but rather that all reference to nonhumans is understood in terms of the human or some human related phenomena such as language. The measure of whether or not an ontology is non-anthropocentric lies in whether that ontology has anything to say about the interactions of entities without any intervention of the human or the human related whatsoever.
December 24, 2010 at 8:06 am
To follow up on Levi’s point, vast chunks of Heidegger’s work is to preserve the centrality of the human in philosophy and thinking. So, Heidegger is always creating these strange distinctions between what humans do, and what other animals do. Harman, in his book Tool-Being, claims that nur and bloß (‘merely’) serves as a term of art for Heidegger. One of the best places to see this is in his distinctions between humans and other animals. Only humans have hands, animals merely have grasping instruments. Only humans die, animals merely perish. There are many more. Stuart Elden has an excellent overview of the numerous places that Heidegger defines the human by showing the ‘poverty’ of the animal. See, “Heidegger’s Animals.” Continental Philosophy Review. 2006;39:273-91.
December 24, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Since Brian is so convinced that Harman is a hack and has nothing original to say, how about he provides some argument to show that what Harman is saying is wrong, that most philosophy has NOT made humans central and sidestepped the rest of reality? Accusations without content and without a foundation in the actual works of Heidegger aren’t worth too much in my opinion.
December 26, 2010 at 7:41 pm
[…] he’s an ecotheorist who has little familiarity with evolutionary theory and the concept of co-evolution. He might wish to check out The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World by the […]
December 27, 2010 at 1:26 am
[…] Humans, followed by some initial ridiculing then back-pedalling by Brian Leiter, then followed by Bryant’s reply, and rounded off by an exchange between Bryant and Gerry Canavan, on whose blog I found the […]
December 27, 2010 at 9:08 am
“…most continental theorists argue that humans in some way or another construct reality.”
Yes, but the ‘reality’ they construct is their own, it is emic not etic reality. Treating ‘reality’ as if it only meant etic reality will certainly make Kant and continental philosophy seem foolish, but it’s a gross misrepresentation of what is actually being said in these discourses.
“…granting them a privileged theological place.”
I’m afraid until non-human animals have sufficient imagination and language to engage in theology, humanity *does* occupy a privileged theological place, namely, the only player in town. :)
As ever, just nit-pickery. I’m in full support of what you’re doing here, but I think perhaps you underestimate the amount of research among scientific (non-philosophic) resources you will need to take on board to treat this subject fully.
Best of luck with it!