Letting the Resentment Settle In, Research Time, 09/05/2018

So I mentioned the other day that Paul Patton established his professional reputation by shifting a lot of folks in the North American academy’s community of Continentalists.*

* These are the researchers who specialize in pretty much any philosophical writer from the European continent from Hegel onward. This is the slightly disdainful label they’re given in the North American mainstream of university philosophy. In Cultural Studies departments, they’re just called profs.

There's no need to take affront on his behalf.
Deleuze never took affront at anyone, as far as
I know. The occasional awkward moment, but
never affront. He was very consistent that way.

Patton was trying to shift the whole field’s centre of gravity – from Jacques Derrida and deconstruction to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming and production. That’s great. But there are some passages of Deleuzian Concepts that make me cringe – the tone of his writing makes his critique feel uncomfortably personal.

Not personal in the sense that it involves a particular person in Patton’s circle, about which he has biases or excess sympathy. Aside from Gilles Deleuze, of course.

See, there was one event that kind of dropped the ball on Deleuze and Félix Guattari's international public relations. It was a conference at Columbia University in 1975.

Total disaster. There was a group of radical feminist activists who were so essentialist about the nature of gender that hearing Félix Guattari give a talk about how any essentialism would send them into a frenzy.

Up next, Félix Guattari discussing how all forms of essentialism are utter failures as theories because they include no possibility for change. A man will always be phallocentric in all aspects of his existence – ridiculous, when we are all processes, changing all the time.

Really, gender is changeable as both a social and physical construct, so there can be as many genders as our ingenuity and self-discipline can successfully create.** They refused to hear it and heckled him all lecture.

** TERFs. Félix Guattari was heckled by a bunch of TERFs. You do know, right, that the philosophical basis for all TERF activism and ideology is this utterly obsolete, bumbling theory of gender essentialism? It’s a theory that has failed as knowledge because reality is utterly different from how it says the world should be.

Then a bunch of guys from the local Lyndon LaRouche society started interrupting Michel Foucault’s closer, screaming that he was paid by the CIA. Yeah, that Lyndon LaRouche.

If he's in the CIA, then the Maidan protestors were all gay fascists
working for the Americans, whose government is funded by
George Soros and the Freemasons' cabal whose Grand Wizard
is Barack Obama. Here to our newsdesk at RT to explain why
all this makes sense, aside from government orders to believe it,
is respected American economist, philosopher, and activist
Lyndon LaRouche.

Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault were all so upset at how they were insulted all though the conference, that they all decided they didn’t want to go back to America again. Foucault overcame his initial disgust more quickly.

The next time he did an appearance in New York, another dick from the LaRouche society asked him about the charges that he was CIA. At least he had the decency to wait until question period. But Foucault immediately goes on the warpath.

“Yes! Yes, I am CIA! And she’s CIA! And he’s CIA too! And everyone in this room is CIA except you. You work for the KGB!”***

*** Michel Foucault. You know how to deal with crazy fascist internet trolls when the internet was still secret military tech. We lost you too soon, old man.

But Deleuze and Guattari themselves hardly went back to America. It took that extra generation of mostly Canadian philosophy researchers who first translated and wrote on Deleuze to bring him to the prominence he has in the North American academy today. Paul Patton was part of that generation, even if he does suffer from being Australian.

It was a public relations screw-up. The conference let too many extremists in, when they needed an audience of thoughtful nerds. Like the generation of Patton, Boundas, Genosko, Massumi. But Deleuze and Guattari were too pissed off about it to bother going back to America. They presumed they’d get the same reception.

That is painful in so many ways, paths, vectors. Sports teams need
therapists to help players deal with their own-goals.

Own goal, guys.

Yet when Patton writes his remarks about the feminist and postcolonial misinterpretation of Gilles Deleuze, including the 1975 conference, a bitterness seeps into his tone. And it isn’t necessary.

He’s trying to make an important point – don’t take Deleuze’s words like ‘becoming-woman’ or ‘nomadism’ as metaphors, but as literal descriptions of thought processes in the most abstract language he and Guattari could muster.

Patton seems bitter at the misinterpretation, as if it was an affront to be misunderstood. That somehow these feminists and these post-colonial writers were foolish, inadequate thinkers for taking Deleuze to be writing metaphors, saying that disruptive thought is merely “like” a bedouin nomad.

He strings well-meaning, professional, thoughtful theorists with extremist radical TERFs. I don’t think Patton would like it if I said explicitly what I don’t like about this part of his book.

Don’t make me say it. I don’t want to say it.

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.