Assembling a Piece at a Time, Composing, 03/05/2017

I’ve never written a big book of philosophy before Utopias without it being my full-time job. That’s not as much of a transition as it seems. I’ve only written one other big book of philosophy. And writing it was my full-time job – as a doctoral candidate, my main task was to complete that dissertation.

I did more than most students on a dissertation. My first, largely stonewalled attempts to publish what became Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity saw editors at academic presses, encouraging me to read pamphlets like From Dissertation to Book, thinking my work was pretty typical.

Most dissertations are over-technical, hyper-specialized, and geared to the research concentrations of the three or four people on your committee. So the pamphlet’s goal was to guide a young academic through the process of making such a market-less document into something that a relatively intelligent general audience might want to read.

In 2013, I had already written a manuscript that demonstrated the needed research and analysis abilities. I just wrote it in a style that used straightforward language. I intended it from the beginning to reach a fairly wide audience. And I banged out the whole manuscript in two years, with only two years before that solidly researching.

James Joyce has been a touchstone for me in
building my self-image and identity as a
writer and artist. When he set himself an
ambitious project, he was prepared to take a
long time if it was needed to get things right.
Finnegans Wake took 17 years.

A couple of months from now, it will have been four years since I started work on Utopias. I haven’t written much of the manuscript, and only recently completed a full outline from beginning to end.

As I develop the manuscript, that outline will grow internally – more steps and arguments within arguments, as are needed when it comes to massive philosophical projects.

Yesterday, I finished the broadest shape of Utopias’ outline, and wrote a short paragraph from what will be the third part of the book. The paragraph was about Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the state of nature being a description humanity’s existence as pure capacity. Shot through with awful colonialist and racist imagery, but ultimately about the material nature of capacity for civilization and society.

I could research and write Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity in about a four year period because McMaster University – and for the last couple of years Ontario Graduate Scholarships too – was paying me to do that pretty much full time.

For the past four years, I’ve worked for several different companies and clients on a short-term basis, entered and finished an intensive college business program, and networked my way into the start of an arts career, recently while working at a physically and mentally draining low-paying part-time in a massive furniture store.

It’s why I pared my research style down to classics and recent primary, creative texts. Why I largely shied away from secondary and tertiary material in conventional academic journals. Not only is that research too packed with expensive paywalls to take part in as a non-faculty writer, most of its content consists of spiralling rabbit holes of commentary and counter-argument that loses its connection rapidly to real-world relevance.

Even with that restriction to the best possible and widely available sources, this has been a long journey. After four years, I still have plenty of research left to go on Utopias, and I’ve only just begun the first jabs at writing the manuscript.

I hope now that things can move a little faster in my philosophical and artistic production now that I’ve finally landed a steady teaching job that won’t cause me the undue financial stress of all those short-term, underpaying positions I’ve had since 2013.

I wrote just one paragraph of prose for the manuscript last night. But I think it’s good. One paragraph at a time. We’ll see how the next four years go.

How to Think How to Write and How to Teach, Composing, 15/06/2016

I’ve had a lot of ideas lately for posts here, which is a shame that I’ve been so busy since coming back from Calgary, I’ve only been able to update sporadically. 

I’ve finished reading Commonwealth and wanted to add some thoughts wrapping up my long engagement with Antonio Negri’s trilogy. I also started reading Louis Althusser’s For Marx, and have a few ideas about how we understand history that I want to work out here. And I’ve been thinking about the medium of messaging apps, mulling over the mechanics and meanings of how we interact with chatbots. 

But I discovered something very disconcerting a couple of days ago. My old employer, McMaster University’s Philosophy department, was accused of racist practice by a former Master’s student in a pretty bold forum.

The home building of my old department was also one
of the oldest and best looking buildings in the otherwise
drab and brutalist McMaster campus. Plenty of green at
that university, though.

Udoka Okafor wrote a piece on Huffington Post alleging mistreatment and a lack of respect from the professors in McMaster’s department. A PhD student at the department, Jorge Humberto Sanchez Perez, wrote a response that was posted at the less mainstream* venue of Brian Leiter’s blog.

* A blogging space exclusively for university-based philosophers, and quite a controversial one in that community, thanks to Leiter’s creation and stewardship of the “Gourmet Report” rankings and his indefensible defence of formerly-Northwestern University’s Peter Ludlow after his sex scandal. I’ve already written about all this mess.

You can read Okafor’s piece online and download the .rtf file** of Sanchez’s hit job – I mean rebuttal! – to read yourselves. You’ll be about as well-informed of their characters as I am. Both joined the department well after I left my position at McMaster, and I think after I left the city of Hamilton as well.

** Seriously?!

But you can tell where my sympathies lie. If you take Okafor at her word – and you have no reason not to – you see an ambitious young thinker. And I’ve never been one to cut away at ambition. 

Having worked in McMaster’s department for five years, I certainly see why they’d discourage Okafor pursuing such a massive project as a striving-for-completeness comparative study of Western and African legal theory. It’s impossible to do in a single year. 

But if I were in their position, I wouldn’t have outright discouraged her from moving in that direction at all. What would have provoked the best work in the long run is for her to have figured out some kind of preliminary project to the big one. 

Maybe contrasting a Western and African legal theorist whose work, juxtaposed together, reveals an interesting or illuminating idea. Now, I’m just riffing here, but there’s no reason why some similar riff couldn’t have appeared in the few minutes of a grad student’s committee meeting. 

Thanks to Barry Allen, McMaster
has a firm base for new approaches
to comparative philosophy. That
should have made a project like
Okafor's quite at home.

My own supervisor, Barry Allen, has been working on comparative philosophy for about a decade now. He’s written two books on ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy, the general survey Vanishing Into Things and the exploration of philosophy of the martial arts, Striking Beauty. He would have been an excellent supervisor for such a project.

But Okafor was part of the Justice, Political Philosophy, and Law program, over which Allen never really had much influence. That program focussed very much on North American and British legal and political theory, and was largely conceived as a philosophical prelude to law school. That’s how its founders discussed its role when I was there and they were designing it.

That's the local-level set of issues. It expresses the institutional conservatism of the department, a fairly common attitude there, which I think held the faculty back from achieving more progress in teaching, research, and creativity than the good work they did do.

Because at a larger scale – as an expression of trends throughout the academic institution – Okafor describes a group of people operating in blindness to the crisis unfolding throughout the university system and the philosophical discipline in particular.

I’ve written my own perspective on this institutional crisis at the Reply Collective, twice actually. And if you take what Okafor says seriously, you can see another perspective on academic philosophy’s crisis of institutional conservatism. 

One of the most common and most effective ways to hide your head in the sand about serious problems among your discipline’s leaders is to divorce what they say from the context of their lives. Here are some concrete examples to illustrate what I mean.

In November 2013, McMaster’s Philosophy Department hosted Peter Ludlow in a prestigious week-long series of talks – mere months before his career-ending exposé, but well after his condemnation by Northwestern’s Title IX board. One McMaster Philosophy professor who’s been a good colleague and friend to me is a devotee of the disgraced Thomas Pogge's philosophy of mass charity from wealthy to poor countries. 

Now, my own problem with Pogge’s argument was that it smacked of the same imperialist condescensions that were embedded with the creation of mass poverty in the Global South in the first place. It's built on the insulting reduction of the entire formerly-colonized world to a charity case, and puts all agency on the former colonizers, treating the entire non-Western world as a passive receptor of our goodwill. 

I always found the political imperatives of his philosophy
as horribly smug, as if he never questioned if there was
more to the moral problems of a post-imperialist world
than simple differences in material wealth.

More specifically, Okafor describes, in the most problematic of her problems, being taught Pogge’s philosophy without any permission to make an issue of his years of using his Yale position for sexual predation. She wanted to introduce the hypocrisy of his position to problematize his ideas. But she was told that his vile character had nothing to do with the value of his ideas when considered in the abstract.

It makes for a curious parallel of my own problems with Pogge. His abstract ideal of justice as an imperative to restore egalitarian fairness would work out in real application to a repetition of empire as infantilizing charity on a civilizational scale. 

Following Okafor, the appeal of his abstract argument for egalitarian justice suffers when spoken from the keyboards of a man who exploited gender, economic, and post-colonial hierarchies for his selfish sexual pleasure. Real hypocrisy deflates the power of an abstract argument.

In summary, Okafor’s critiques and problems with our former colleagues at McMaster Philosophy have much in common – we both appear able to see the hypocrisies and self-undercutting of abstract arguments for justice and fairness made from a material situation of institutional conservatism.

Having such an eye for that conflict of the abstract and the material makes me think she’d have a good home as a contributor to the Reply Collective. 

As for Sanchez’s rebuttal? Just read the bloody thing. It looks like a condescending, dismissive screed at a young woman as an irrational fool not worth listening to. Appeals to empty buzzwords like ‘political correctness’ that are used to delegitimize movements against racism all over the West. Insulting the genuine need for Western philosophy to embrace a global scope as the mere fetishization of 'diversity.'

The sadly typical huffing and puffing of a grumpy old man.
• • •
Editor's note. A few hours after the post went up, a friend of mine who was a classmate of Okafor told me that the course on Pogge's philosophy took place before his recent exposé, so I can understand why what were – at the time – only rumours were bracketed from its discussion.

But the neo-colonial critique of Pogge still stands (he reminds me of John Stuart Mill's justifications for British sovereignty over India as a "civilizing mission") and Sanchez still sounds like a pig.