So What Is “Pragmatic Radicalism” Anyway? Composing, 03/08/2016

The wonderful photo SERRC published with my last piece.

Last week, I published a new essay at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. I thought of the idea in response to an essay by my colleague and long-standing argument partner Steve Fuller, “Prolegomena to the Deep Sociology of Brexit.”

Now that I’ve returned from the wild woods of central Quebec,* I wanted to start the month with a breakdown of that essay – so you can see what I’m doing with it, and how that work expresses my newly-formulated mission statement as a writer and researcher.

* It was a very pleasant and necessary vacation, thank you, but I really am quite happy to be back in Toronto and returning to my work. More like my many works.

I’d say I learned two things from my time at this May’s Canadian Philosophical Association. 1) Progressive politics among academics lags far behind the actual activists developing new ideas, approaches, and outreach methods. This was more of a re-confirmation than a discovery. 

But most important was 2) There doesn’t really seem to be a place in the academic community for voices that aren’t affiliated with professorial positions in universities. I had a lot of very good conversations, but I was essentially an alien among this crowd. 

Even in seminars where my contributions went over well, some attendees appeared completely unable to process what I was – a researcher unaffiliated with a university who wasn’t at all jockeying for a university position anymore. Just someone here to share their research, able to write, publish, and speak on the same level as the university-based folk.

I had a guiding ideal of what I suppose
became pragmatic radicalism when
writing my last book, but I couldn't
get its publication out of academic
marginalization of high prices and
the catacombs of libraries.

So I’ve begun developing a brand for myself as a public intellectual whose institutional home is in activist communities and political parties. A blue-collar scholar, if you want to put it in a rap.** Part of that brand and identity is developing a philosophical language that addresses immediately relevant public issues while simultaneously crafting complex concepts.

** Please don’t do that. It would be terrible.

That’s what my “Pragmatic Radicalism” essay is. A work of philosophical creativity in response to an occasion. I mean ‘occasion’ in the sense of, “the event that occasioned this response.” An event in our public life of such a significance and complexity that it prompts a public work of philosophical reflection and creativity.

One thing that frustrated me about philosophy as a discipline, from the time I started work on the project that would be Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, was the disconnect of its creative thinking from the concerns of the world. 

In turbulent times like these, we need contributions to our politics that encourage thought – not thought instead of action, but thought that is one with action. Protest that generates policy. Creativity in harmony with activism.

I’m developing a new brand of blended philosophical research and creativity with worldly activism and social engagement. And my essay at the Reply Collective, “The Pragmatic Radicalism of the Multitude’s Power,” is both a sketch of what that writing style would be, as well as an example. 

How it’s an example I’ve already explained: a work of abstract philosophical creativity, produced on an occasion. But what’s the concept? What is pragmatic radicalism?

When I first floated the title to Fuller, he told me it sounded paradoxical. And that’s definitely part of its spark. A paradox – broadly speaking – is the juxtaposition of several ideas that don’t typically fit together. To me, there are two kinds of paradoxes. 

Vicious paradoxes confuse, frustrate, and arrest thought. But creative paradoxes let you work through a new way of thinking while you figure out the logic by which the juxtaposed ideas make sense together. A new harmony emerges from a dissonant collision.

Pragmatic radicalism is fundamentally about expanding
the realm of the conceivable in your society's public
conversations and thinking.

Pragmatic radicalism sounds paradoxical. Radicalism is a pure idealism, usually thought of as a refusal to compromise, the refusal to give up on anything but your opponents’ total capitulation. A radical’s hopes are usually so distant from the real world that their achievement seems impossible, but they’re committed to them totally anyway.

Pragmatism appears the precise opposite. You have ideals, but you’re prepared to accept compromise with opponents or askew allies – to make allies from opponents – to achieve some progress toward those ideals. Pragmatism is political realism, while radicalism is a refusal of the real’s resistance to your ideals.

Pragmatic radicalism embraces ideals, but also acknowledges and pushes against the resistance of the world as it is to achieve those ideals. It is the admission that practical achievement in politics can take other routes than compromise alone. 

Pragmatic radicalism is philosophical in that it develops new and revolutionarily different frameworks for our political and social institutions and relationships. It’s pragmatic in its resolute focus on material action to achieve those goals. Not compromise, but community organizing to bring these radical ideas to public discourse and make them seem ordinary.

Our current political climate is full of pragmatic radicalism, for both democratic and fascist ideals. One impressive achievement of the Trump campaign has been rapidly bringing ideals of white supremacism and strongman leadership to mainstream political discourse. Though it took much longer, UKIP has been successful in not only making Britain’s exit from the European Union popularly plausible, but apparently a coming reality.

More details at the website.

Thankfully, the Sanders campaign achieved a similar miracle in returning social democratic policy to America’s mainstream discourse – even embedding these ideas in the policy platform of the previously horrifyingly compromised Democratic Party. 

Most importantly, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought its radical critique of America’s police, court, and prison systems to the realm of mainstream plausibility. BLM has launched several concrete policy platforms for institutional reform, first the policing reform packages of Campaign Zero, and recently the larger policy framework of Movement 4 Black Lives.

The Arab Spring – and its ripples throughout the Arab world, as well as the refugee movements from the Syrian Civil War and Iraq’s war against ISIS – was similarly a movement of pragmatic radicalism. An explosive moment of democracy’s becoming conceivable in the Middle East. 

Communication – networked community organizing and cultivating social media communities – is the essential medium of pragmatic radicalism’s transformation of political possibilities. Practicing that communication of simultaneous advocacy and philosophical creativity is the task of the contemporary public intellectual. 

Maybe it won’t be the university or the academy that will product these thought leaders. It seems there’s a wider community of well-educated activists and organizers driving this model of politics and social transformation.

Maybe the occasional blue-collar scholar.

Vectors of Oppression – Freed in a Wave, Research Time, 06/06/2016

So what does probably the most pretentious title for a post in the entire nearly-three-year history of this blog mean? Other than my getting more pretentious tonight. After a long day at the day-job, I feel like I’ve earned it. And frankly I still feel enough energy as I write to pound this out pretty quickly. 

The last panel I attended at the Canadian Philosophical Association in Calgary was titled “Cultural Racism,” and my favourite paper there was the first one. Alia Al-Saji presented a paper on the process of racialization – the social forces at all scales of oppression and marginalization that constitute people as a race.

I've probably learned most about the everyday experience
of oppression from activists' experiences. Definitely not my
own. And the one that's had the most effect on me has
been Black Lives Matter. Following the feeds of people
like Johnetta Elzie can teach more about real liberation
than a hundred philosophical books. The philosophy can
still be a good hand, though.

I was happy to meet Al-Saji, since she was one of the people whose work I had used in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. In particular, I used some of her work on Maurice Merleau-Ponty in my sections on the nature of perception. And while the paper itself was very insightful, I told her that it had one nagging problem.

Compared to how a lot of other academics were treating the nature of race, it was actually a very forward-thinking argument that races are entirely socially manufactured, with no essential underlying physical substrate. That the marginalization of communities economically and socially goes hand in hand with stigmatizing them with ugly, cruel stereotypes. 

Marginalization and stigmatization equals racialization. If I can put an absurdly and blatantly simple gloss on the concept. 

And I move in a social media world where a ton of people already understand this concept intimately and work against it in their activism and communication. The real world seems to have surpassed the debates of the community of academics. 

Now, I’m not exactly surprised. But I’m saddened that a profession that – on the whole – thinks itself literal thought leaders* is now falling being the times. I used to think a position here could position me in the leading edge of progressive ideas. I no longer think so.

* As in, leaders in thought itself.

Antonio Negri talks about the nature of racialization, specifically intersectionality. It’s a matter of liberation. Intersectionality is, in most discussions, about how different oppression vectors can co-exist in a single person. Like the black lesbian in the wheelchair.

But intersectionality is also – and most importantly – about how all those oppressions are ultimately the same process. Gender oppression, for example, is no different than racial or religious oppression in the social process that actually constitutes it. Successful activism has to accept this.

Now, the reason Black Lives Matter has moved me so
much is that I was probably most ignorant about the
different vectors of racial oppression that black people
in America experience. I used to be one of those people
who complained that protestors never accomplished
anything because they were all so violent, believing
everything I heard in media. Paying attention to
DeRay McKesson, for example, taught me so much
about where all those vectors were. Before online
media let me share their experience, I couldn't have
had any of those brutally educational experiences.

Thankfully, this is another way that real-life activists have progressed beyond the so-called thought leaders of the university system. So many in online communities understand their own struggles as intersecting. That you can’t win against one vector of marginalization without progress against all of them.

Negri notes the example of the American union movement. It was focussed on class marginalization and workers’ rights. Liberation for people alienated because of their wealth and social castes. And it succeeded for a while.

One of the places where the union movement in America foundered was as the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movement kicked into gear. Worker activists could never – overall – get behind movements against racism. 

In many cases, too many workers remained hostile to black liberation and entry into the same social circles as whites. The same goes for their attitudes to women. The only thing close to a rational concern – other than falling back into unthinking prejudice (“I won’t work with n___rs!” “We don’t do women’s work!”) – is fear that increased competition will drive down their wages and make jobs more scarce.

Those attitudes completely ignore the macro-scale reasons for liberation. The more people are wealthy and able to produce wealth, the wealthier society will become. More people will spend money and produce things, relationships, and ideas that can grow wealth.

I see the same danger for the union movement and contemporary environmentalist movement. If union leaders and activists stick only to short term thinking and ignore the intersection of economic and environmental violence, they’ll see industrial shifts as risks to their jobs. Too many already think this way.

What makes that a problem is that all oppressions – gender, race, class, religion, ability, culture, sexuality – are the expressions of the same process. Racialization – to marginalize and stigmatize the marginal. So all liberation has to happen at once.

Philosophy Back From Calgary: A Walking Demonstration of the Future, Jamming, 03/06/2016

This actually will be just a short note today, published late after a tiring day of travelling back from Calgary. Four hours straight on a plane can make a guy’s knees seriously stiff.

If I could say there was one take-away from this conference, it's that a lot more people can feel the rot setting in. This isn’t true of everyone. 

I admit that I probably have some selection bias in who I spoke to – the younger researchers who’ve managed to scrape into a more secure position, the younger researchers considering waitressing as a long-term career goal given the anemic and shrinking faculty job markets, the cooler researchers who spent their early lives partying at the Chapel Hill indie rock scene. 

Even something as small as a name tag
can be a demonstration of new
possibilities.

As well as some of my older mentors and friends who are happy to see me still working on these writing and artistic projects. I didn’t tell them about some of the psychologically tougher, stressful, doubtful times. This week was about optimism and creativity.

But I hope Gwen Bradford’s fascinating book on the nature and moralities of achievement can find a mass market accessibility and a mass market price. I went to a wonderful seminar on its ideas the other day, but I found several of the critiques drifting into the over-technical and purely disciplinary. It seems like it could be a popular book, but it needs to get out of the high paywalls of the academic library system.

Something I also think about my own Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. My own panel on the book had a pretty small attendance, but an intrigued audience anyway. As I said, part of what I wanted to do was simply get it on the schedule, an act of recognition that people outside the university system had something to contribute to the growth and development of human knowledge. 

My own presence there – specifically my name tag – was a quiet punk gesture. It was the name of an institution, yes, but not of a university. And it didn't read "Independent Scholar," a term that more often invites dismissal, and communicates a kind of pathetic dependency on an institution that keeps rejecting you. Looking at me provoked questions, inquiries. A couple were dismissive when I explained the nature of the SERRC, but many more were intrigued, and glad that such a forum existed.

It provoked excitement. I was a walking demonstration of possibilities for knowledge production beyond grovelling to monopolistic academic journal publishers, budget-slashing administrators. Quite important for folks in my generation, for possibilities beyond grovelling for adjunct positions paying barely above poverty wages as if it were normal.

Why wouldn’t you consider relocating across the continent for a four-month, $5000 appointment at a university that won’t even cover your moving expenses and has no guarantee of stability? That’s just how things are done!

There are other ways.

The Skeleton of a Performance, Composing, 01/06/2016

A mostly graphic post today, and a late one. I delivered my panel on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity this morning, to a small but appreciative audience, with the commentary and input of my friends Sanja Dejanovic and Jenn Primmer.

Our discussion departed quite a bit from the slides that I made – which were always more my speaking notes than a strict guide to the performance. But I wanted to post them here, as part of the promotion of the book, and to mark the occasion. Maybe let me know what you think, readers.

Philosophy in Calgary I: What Exactly Am I Doing Here? Composing, 30/05/2016

It’s a legitimate question. I’m at the Canadian Philosophical Association conference in Calgary for the next few days. And a fair number of people at the conference – some people, but not a lot – will wonder, when they see me, what precisely I’m doing here.

Some might ask me where I’m working. And I’ll tell them that I’m a writer with a day job at IKEA. Which I am. And I’m doing quite a few other things. 

I’m planning a series of workshops in conjunction with the Toronto area district associations of the New Democratic Party. Those workshops are on the LEAP Manifesto and environmental policy and ethics more generally. They’ll apply a lot of the concepts I developed in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to practical political organizing.

I’m developing two independent feature films, and working with the Syria Film Festival, which has become a vibrant and multifaceted arts / human rights advocacy organization. I may also employ some of the connections I make through working with the festival to build my crew for those films of my own.

And I’m in Calgary hosting a panel on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. This is the most prestigious role I’ve ever held at a Canadian conference. As a graduate student, I was an invited speaker at an international multi-disciplinary conference in Switzerland. But that was another day.

This isn’t just attending as a journeyman commentator, as I did at my first CPA in 2009 in Ottawa and my last one in 2014 in St Catharine’s. I’m not just presenting a single paper of my own, as I did in the other four such conferences I attended. 

This will be a three-hour panel of free form discussion about a book that I wrote and published with Palgrave MacMillan, one of the most significant academic presses in the West. For even full-time tenured or tenure-stream professors, this is a big deal.

So why am I doing this? When a person leaves academia, they aren’t supposed to take part in its rituals and institutions anymore. Independent scholars are roundly mocked and symbolically spat upon whenever they appear.* But I’m not just an independent scholar, because independent scholars are themselves still striving for a place in the university system.

* I admit that my own blog post tonight is purposely provocative. I kind of hope other delegates will read it and become offended that I’m here.

I don’t really care about whether I earn a place in the university system. But I still care about philosophy as a tradition. If you want to know why, read my recent article “Beyond the Academy” at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. 

The shortest version is: I believe that the humanities, as they exist in the university system, are slipping from public relevance, and these knowledge traditions must transform themselves if they’re to have real social impact or even survive. 

But there’s a more egocentric motive wrapped up in this concern for the future of philosophy as a tradition. The simple matter is, I have more to say. I may not have a university position, but I’m not done with philosophy. 

And if I’m there, then there are other people like me who deserve to contribute to the tradition. Maybe it won’t be conventional writing and scholarship, but folks like me who don’t have to follow the disciplinary strictures of the academy can write more experimental, interesting works. Like my recent critical article that, in my own words in the pitch session, went the Full Borges.

As my friend and colleague in indie publishing Phil Sandifer said, we were reading books by people like Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida in graduate school, but God forbid if we ever tried to write with the same experimental fervour. I want to help build a tradition where that kind of experimentalism and openness is ordinary, accepted, and encouraged.

That’s part of what I’m trying to do this week. . . . To be continued

This Is a Showdown, Composing 09/05/2016

At the end of the month, I’ve going to host a book panel at the Canadian Philosophical Association about Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. So I thought I’d post the proposal itself that I sent to the CPA back in Fall 2015. The prose is a little more academic than I usually post on the blog, but I think it expresses well the ideas that I want to bring to the conference.

As I prepare the slides that I’ll include in my panel (and coordinate soon with my co-presenters), I’m going back through the text of my own book, looking for the best things to emphasize in the discussion. 

Basically, what I want is to mount a two-pronged challenge. As a book of ecological philosophy, it’s a challenge to the entire shape of modern industry. It’s a challenge to industrial capitalism, to the globalization that pollutes so much and fragments so many communities. 

But it’s also a book that lays out how environmental philosophy inspired political activism, and how activism can now inspire philosophy. I’ve been writing lately about a crisis point in modern academia – as labour gets cheaper and the pool of jobs shrinks, the best researchers are being driven out of the sector. 

And the book argues that philosophers can do more good for the world outside of the academy. I’m not sure how many people at this conference would like to hear that.

• • •

My proposed panel addresses the central topics of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, and multiple contemporary issues in academic philosophy in doing so. So the panel will discuss my book itself, its arguments, central principles, and in the words of perhaps some critics, conceits. 

But we will also explore its implications beyond the walls of the academy: Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity offers a framework for engaging philosophical discourse with the gritty reality of political activism, and a future program for philosophy’s development outside the walls of the university system. The panel will consist of four discussions, following each other in series. 

1

Early chapters of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity examine the strengths and weaknesses of the common approach of examining environmental philosophical problems as searching for moral principles: the rights of nature and human responsibilities toward nature. 

But this framework faces a double bind. Granting non-human bodies and systems human-style rights treats animals, plants, bacteria, and ecosystems too much like humans, papering over real differences. Conceiving of human responsibilities toward or for nature alienates humanity from nature, which most environmentalist moral philosophers agree is the exact attitude at the heart of the global ecological crisis. At worst, this alienation draws accusations from liberal humanist critics that environmentalism is essentially misanthropic.

2

In Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, a philosophical analysis of the central concepts and principles of ecological science provides the framework for an environmentalist philosophy that avoids the problems of discussion (1). 

Gilles Deleuze is one of the central influences
on my first major book of philosophy.

The book’s analysis of ecological principles implies that the best grounding for environmentalist moral and political principles is a conception of everything in the world as fundamentally interdependent and integrated. Interdependence can only make sense if we accept a process-based ontology. 

Thinking in processual frameworks lets us easily understand human existence from ecological (and even cosmological) processes, foregrounding the self-destructiveness of environmentally destructive activity. The practical result of this ontological conclusion is a moral imperative to change human society along environmentally sustainable lines to prevent our own destruction and that of many other unique creatures and ecologies. 

This discussion will confront the challenge of the naturalistic fallacy: the objection that practical moral conclusions about what right action is, cannot follow from ontological principles about the nature of existence.

3

The central influence in the major argument of discussion (2) is Gilles Deleuze’s model for how philosophy can engage with scientific principles. In the North American academy, the more prevalent view is that Continental philosophy offers the completely wrong path to engage with the philosophy of science. 

I take the contrary argument that the Deleuzian approach probes scientific methods, ideas, and frameworks to understand what universal ontological principles they can imply. Though its experimental writing style often belied its innovations, A Thousand Plateaus was the paradigm-setting work in applying this approach to ecological science. Successors include his collaborator Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis, as well as Isabelle Stengers’ Cosmopolitics series, and Deleuze-inspired approaches to media theory in the works of Brian Massumi and Gary Genosko.

4

The last discussion of the panel is an institutional critique, examining the ultimate conclusions of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. The book’s last chapter examines how philosophy can rebuild its relationship with transformative political activism. 

So is Félix Guattari, a writer who I always thought never
gets the kind of recognition he deserves for the originality
of his own ideas, since he's often overshadowed by his
collaborator Deleuze.

This relationship has frayed thanks to two main causes: a) the increasing specialization and fragmentation of the academic discipline of philosophy, and b) the acceleration of neoliberal governance and human resources policies in universities that discourage researchers from devoting energy to public activities that rarely count toward tenure and promotion criteria. 

I argue at the end of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity that philosophy can best aid progressive social movements – for environmental causes as well as others – by developing concepts that people can use to build a complete, comprehensive world-view. Philosophy supplies the conceptual building blocks of a model to inspire new approaches to daily life, which proliferate throughout social networks. 

This requires stepping outside the institutions of the university system. Many philosophers are doing so anyway, simply in reaction to the growing precarity of labour as a university instructor. Since universal security in the academy for philosophy doctoral graduates now seems an impossible goal, this closing discussion will explore whether philosophers should develop ways to work in the tradition so that it can thrive outside. 

Myself, I contend that, in the face of philosophy’s fragility in the neoliberal university system, philosophy should seek to become a broad-based intellectual tradition: a progressive discourse among industry, government, the academy, activism, and popular culture.

Highs Lows and Prospects for the Future, Jamming, 30/05/2014

After four straight days of philosophizing and networking whose average working length was eleven hours, I needed something of a break. For one thing, the blogging symposium that ended the CPA’s sessions for me was generally too exciting and filled with interesting conversation to take any time during the session itself to blog. 

My thanks to Kathryn Norlock, Patricia Marino, Samantha Brennan, and Tracy Isaacs for getting that symposium together and leading a conversation about taking philosophical discourse and ideas into a public forum that escapes the disciplinary echo chamber. All their experiments in blogging have found interesting ways to articulate philosophical ideas in new ways, and I’m glad that I can now add my name to that community.

Most of the posts that I published during the CPA were largely composed during sessions that grew slightly boring for me. There was one presentation in particular on Monday that, ostensibly defended that there was a ‘right to be ruled.’ I found this title quite provocative, though I knew nothing of the other work of the speaker. Given the title and my presuppositions from my own work, I thought I was going to see a robust defence of subservience to one’s state come hell or Glenn Greenwald. I was looking forward to a vibrant discussion, my intense disagreement with which would fuel some of my own thoughts for the Utopias project. 

But I ended up listening to a rather dry legal theory talk that spent a lot of time discussing the implications for obedience norms of our tendency to voluntarily submit to the decision of legal arbitrators. It’s entirely possible — and by that, I mean it’s really quite likely — that I’ve missed some more important implication. But the whole paper struck me as rather pedantic.

I'm one of those people who read people like
Jürgen Habermas for fun. If you've been reading
this blog, you shouldn't be surprised.

This contrast is my way of saying that no conference is ever absolutely perfect. Sometimes the conversations with your friend who studies a lot of Jürgen Habermas is more enlightening to you than the formal presentation you both had just seen about the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas. And it puts the idea in your mind that you should read some more Habermas sometime soon, if only just for fun, so you have a better grip on some of his concepts and approaches. 

I learned this week that University of Toronto's Dan Goldstick has been attending every CPA since 1966. He told me so himself at the conference beer tent. He can't hear as well as he used to, but he's still at the top of his game. We all should hope to be.

I was also glad that the CPA’s paper awards for junior and senior faculty both went to people I knew, and that the papers were so deserving. My colleague from the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective read a provocative piece about the importance of feminine and feminist perspectives in university philosophy departments, and the importance of understanding the difference between those. One of my old professors at McMaster won the senior faculty prize for a tight paper offering a further foundation for her larger project of systematizing collective duties, obligations and responsibilities. She runs at the problem of material deprivation and inequities on a global scale from a very different perspective than my own concerns, theorizing rights and obligations while I focus on networks of material interdependence and ecologically destructive processes. But I think we both share the same concerns, hoping that humanity can learn to exist a little more peacefully and fairly in the world. Apparently, that makes me naive.

So after a hectic four days at an overstuffed Brock University and a relaxing day at home, I’m back to work tomorrow at my editing job. I’ve made some edits to my proposal to publish the Ecophilosophy project, and I’ll start promoting Under the Trees, Eaten throughout the summer, preparing a multimedia show based on its passages, which I hope will launch this Fall. And I started reading Antonio Gramsci, finally. Enlightening already, after only a few brief essays. More thoughts on that tomorrow, I think. Same with what I’ve been reading for fun in African literature.

Maybe you could give some money to my two favourite Kickstarters as well. Reading Rainbow doesn’t exactly need a lot of help, but it's probably the ethically best cause on the whole site. You should definitely support Phil Sandifer’s Last War in Albion project, funding a massive, beautiful, and fascinating study of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison’s contributions to and place in comics and human culture as a whole.

The Promise of Philosophical Entrepreneurs, Research Time, 28/05/2014

The Congress President's reception took place the other evening after the various sessions. I spoke about some of the philosophy that I saw Monday already, which demonstrated that there were still young people and well-established professors in the university system doing remarkable research. But I've also met with several philosophers and historians already who have been doing remarkable work, suited for public consumption beyond the disciplinary audience.

There was one Scarborough-born researcher who had a manuscript about the first uses of personal computers in astronomical science, and a Waterloo-based historian who had a brilliant manuscript on the work and difficult lives of Arctic scientists and military men during the Cold War. The latter, I think, has definite potential for extreme popular success. Some of the stories he told me of these people that was included in the manuscript reminded me of the people you find in Werner Herzog documentaries.

I've also spoken to several people who are secure in the academy, but who understand the economic shifts the university system faces, which is creating this lost generation of scholars and writers. The fact that they nod sadly or with great irony when I use the phrase 'lost generation' is a sign that I have found an ally, someone willing to lend their institutional support to help my project of independently successful and respectable philosophical, cultural, and historical research and writing get off the ground. My SST Records full of doctorates.

I had a feeling the CPA would be an excellent place to find such people, especially as it has become something of an underdog in philosophical conferences of late. Many graduate students submit papers to the CPA and present them there, which according to the traditional measures of academic prestige harms the reputation of the conference itself. Of course, the presupposition of this status evaluator is that the work of those who have not completed doctorates or had not yet won tenure-track positions is inherently inferior to that of those who have. It's a hypocritical view of course: if the younger scholar is so inferior, and lacks the potential to present their work at the same level as established figures, then they presume that all younger scholars are inferior and inadequate to take on their positions after retirement.

Even more than this, the very practice of the CPA's referee system fights such hypocrisy. Part of what genuinely impresses people in other societies of Congress about the CPA is that we actually select papers for the conference by peer review of the whole papers themselves. Most other societies only review papers by abstract. A wonderful-sounding abstract may result in a terrible paper. I've seen, at other associations, utterly boring research that justifies the dismissive attitude toward student work which was accepted because the abstract described a very interesting subject.

But because the philosophical association reviews the entire paper, every final product of an applicant has to pass the same test. This year, the CPA peer review process accepted a paper by a distinguished emeritus professor with a 60 year career and a bright, promising student in his mid-20s. They faced the same test, the toughest possible test, and passed it.

But there is a more insidious dismissal of the CPA that I think the association should wear with pride. At the University of Waterloo conference in 2012, I attended the CPA general meeting, where a major item on the agenda was a public challenge to the association from a very prestigious position. A prominent tenured philosopher and federal research chair at one of Canada's most prestigious universities made the argument that the CPA did not deserve his membership fees. His reason was that, as a wealthy federal research chair and tenured professor at one of Canada's most prestigious universities, the CPA could provide him no helpful services. Being no benefit to him personally, he saw no reason why he should support the association.

At the time, I listened to the conversation more than I took part, but I was hostile to this standpoint without fully understanding why. My experiences over the last two years have helped me shape what I find truly repugnant about this dismissal. If you have such a position as this man, you have essentially won the tenure game. You don't need help anymore. His position was, essentially, that because he no longer needed help himself, he need not contribute to an organization that exists, in large part, to help people.

This is one of the most pure statements of the politics that I have begun to rage against. The Ghost of Thatcher itself could have made him a ventriloquist dummy. A petty, hateful response to success is to say that no one else deserves help from me now that I have benefited from help. The noble, admirable, and upstanding response to your own success is, having achieved so much, to devote some of your energies to helping your younger colleagues achieve their own potential. The victorious and noble do not turn their backs on their fellows, or worse, look down their noses at them.

The Politics of Mind and Agency, Research Time, 27/05/2014

I have sometimes discussed how I left philosophy of mind as a major discipline for my writing of philosophy. One of the many issues that I have with this sub-discipline was that too many conceptions of mind used a template that was rather like the human model. In the environmentalist philosophical discourses that I delved into after leaving mind circles, anthropomorphism in thinking was considered a dangerous thing.

I agree in the case of mind and consciousness. Sean Smith's presentation was on the rudimentary versions of consciousness that one can discover through analysis of the evolutionary ancestors of modern animals. My own account of rudimentary consciousness is in the fifth chapter of my Ecophilosophy project, which understands such rudimentary consciousness as the basic ability to perceive the world and constitute differential relations in that world through one's movements.  I think my own philosophical ideas on this are already more radical than Smith's because this most rudimentary form of consciousness is common to all forms of life and objects able to move by means of metabolic chemical activity.

This is a very slippery issue because we're all so accustomed to thinking of mind and consciousness in terms of the human model. I personally prefer using a more neutral term, like perceptual subjectivity or fundamental agency, precisely because these terms are a little less loaded. But it is part of a larger point that I develop throughout the project that amounts to a radical conception of agency, that foregrounds the capacity for bodies in motion and interaction as the primary producers of new complexities and new bodies or systems in the world.

This is also my contribution to the environmentalist critique of anthropocentrism in an ontological context. It is a conception of the world where a notion of agency can apply to all developments of new physical structures. Environmentalist theorists want a vision of the world where humans are one peculiar part of a massively complex world that is fascinating and beautiful in all the fractally complicated majesty of its assembly.

Such vision, where humans, and a single conception of what humanity is, are not the measure of all that the world can be, is common across contemporary forms of radical political thinking. One of my favourite sessions today was by Kristin Rodier, who, broadly speaking, focussed on the feminist notion of transforming your own subjectivity through coming to know how the world has constructed you, and your feedback relationships in how forces in your environment transforms you. While this concept is firmly rooted in political practice, there are similar political aspects in other genes of philosophical thinking that are less obviously so.

Like the ontology of complexity and assemblage in my own manuscript, or the redefinition of the mind away from human models in the evolutionary investigation of conscience. I think pretty much all philosophy, no matter the explicit context, has these political implications if you let them inform the wider conception and practice of your life.

Our Desperate Misdirected Search for Simplicity, Research Time, 26/05/2014

I attended a couple of very interesting talks in philosophy of biology yesterday. One was my friend Y discussing his research in the history of evolutionary biology, and the other was a critique of Carl Craver's conception of levels of explanation in biological phenomena. If any insight was common to both, it was that intractable problems arise when you develop and employ concepts for scientific interpretation for the sake of simplifying phenomena.

A short version of what I took away from the account of Craver's idea. Organic and ecological systems are ridiculously complex, so it's a good idea to figure out how to simplify and systematize your understanding of them. In this case, Craver described a series of obstacles and difficulties in making sense of causation between micro, meso, and macro levels of biological phenomena. So at one level of analysis, bodies and processes affect each other through causes. But when processes at one level of analysis affect processes at another level, they don't cause these other processes. Instead, the notion is that these processes constitute each other.

Consider the relationships among our cells. These are incredibly complicated exchanges among chemical processes, which, taken as a whole, constitute a whole organism. The processes between the cells are in relationships of mutual causation. All these processes working in tandem constitute the organism called Adam Riggio.

However, levels of analysis aren't absolute. Think about an army who loses a battle because, in the process of assembling itself for battle, suffers a contagious viral infection among its troops, allowing the opposing army to devastate them. The viral infection, despite existing on a micro level relative to the macro level phenomenon of this multi-nation war, has literally caused war casualties. When such viruses are biological weapons purposely released into the opposing army, then the relationship of causation is even more clear.

If you divide causation from constitution by level, then you won't adequately understand the entire event. Even though conceptually, taking multi-level causation into account is very difficult to handle, you have to do it. If the phenomenon you're dealing with is complex, you won't adequately understand it if you simplify the concepts you use to make sense of it.

It's a common platitude in philosophy, and quite often in ordinary life as well, that if you can't make your explanation of some phenomenon remarkably simple to understand, then you haven't done a very good job of explaining. But when the phenomenon in question is as complicated as a meteorological or climatological phenomenon, an organism's internal processes, or a growing viral epidemic in society, a simple explanation will not do. Simplicity is, in many ways, the worst type of error in thought, because it is precisely so easy to understand. When understanding comes to easily to you, it's incredibly difficult to convince yourself, let alone convincing other people, that your concepts are inadequate. That you have cut away too many relevant aspects of the world from your analysis in the name of simplification.

Correcting that kind of mistake isn't just difficult because you can so easily become comfortable in your simple understanding of events. It also requires admitting that you need to do a lot more work. And no one likes making their lives more complicated. Even if it's necessarily complicated.

Being Exemplary Knows No Bounds, Composing, 03/05/2014

This weekend, I’m working on a commentary for someone’s paper at the Canadian Philosophical Association at the end of the month. Now, of course, I’m not going to write about that paper on this blog at all. Everything I’m thinking of regarding the content of the paper has to be kept secret until after the conference. I’d only discuss it after the session is complete, and only with my partner’s permission.

Let me explain to you something about the curious way philosophy as a discipline tends to run its conferences. Each session is devoted to the presentation and discussion of a single piece of work. The main speaker gets about 30 minutes for their headlining presentation. Then a commentator delivers about 10 minutes of prepared reply and response before the floor is opened for general questions. 

This year, the CPA is at beautiful Brock University! So
green, and . . . . rectangular. This building is such a fetching
shade of—well, it's beige, isn't it?

My sociologist friends find this a major shift from their usual style, where three or four people with vaguely related topics read a 15-20 minute version of a paper, and occasionally, a commenter raises a series of brief critical questions about all three of them, before opening the floor to general questions. I think I prefer my own discipline’s style, and not just because I’m accustomed to it, although I am quite accustomed to it. The multi-person panel only has unity because its participants wrote papers with maybe only a few common points. The organizers plonked them all in a session and slapped a vague, thematic name on them because they wrote it as individuals, but have to present it together. You can discover more interesting stuff you didn’t know about more easily from seeing it cobbled into a session with a misleadingly ambiguous title, but  the session can become chaotic and everybody ends up confused. In philosophy, the entire session is pre-planned. Coordinators spend weeks before the conference coordinating commentators, and we write our commentaries weeks in advance of the conference. At least I do.

When I do commentaries, I like to think of the major paper for the session as a collaborator of a sort. After all, their paper is the reason for my commentary’s existence. I’ve created a pleasant new piece of philosophy, and I couldn’t have done it without the first contribution of someone else. Philosophy is often a solitary art, which has its benefits, but also its drawbacks. We can sometimes let our research get stuck in its own world, I’ve too often found. And when I write a commentary, I consider it my contribution to a detailed and stimulating professional conversation.

It’s why I always feel so disappointed when I see a commentary that’s purely antagonistic to the paper. Criticism is a key part of philosophical discourse, and it’s for refining existing ideas and developing new ones. Too many times in our discipline, if we can’t think of anything kind to say, we say something mean. I hate that the tendency to critique is too often mistaken for a licence to argumentative aggression. And when I say ‘too often,’ I really just mean, ‘ever.’

So whenever I ask a philosophical question, but especially when I produce a detailed commentary on another person’s paper, I always try to make my point constructive. I introduce a new angle that the paper’s perspective could address. Sometimes I read the point in a different context. Sometimes I introduce an angle or a source that the paper didn’t mention. I always like my commentaries to give someone something they can use to carry their project forward.

The best compliment someone could pay my commentaries is that I gave them an idea for a new paper. When I present papers, I hope my commentators aim to do the same for me. They don't always, but I'd prefer if they did.