The Unexpectedness of Editorships, A History Boy, 02/11/2017

A short post today. I took the first of this month off, because instead of composing Wednesday’s post Tuesday evening, as I usually do, I was tired. A few things in my professional life are unexpectedly in flux at the moment, and I needed to take Halloween night to relax watching Cult of Chucky with my fiancée.

One of the nice changes happening in my professional life is that I’m taking over editorship of the Reply Collective. I’ve been part of this group pretty much from its inception, and I was pretty surprised when I got the offer to be the Patrick Troughton to Jim Collier’s William Hartnell.

I ended up as an early member of SERRC – I was talking with Jim in 2011 about coming to Virginia Tech’s Science and Technology Studies department for a post-doc. When I didn’t get the funding, I thought that would be the end of it.

But at the same time, Jim was rolling out this open-access companion website to the journal Social Epistemology. It seemed like a really cool thing to be part of, especially because I wasn’t within spitting distance of a teaching or research job on my own.

Since then, SERRC has been my intellectual home more than any other institution. I’ve regularly published there, contributing original essays and reviews, replies, conversations, collaborations. They’ve been better than any regular old journal would have been when it comes to my more experimental pieces.

Knowledge can't just stay in university desks and archives anymore.
We have work to do.

Here’s a story about how much SERRC means to me. When I attended the Canadian Philosophical Association conference in Victoria a few years ago, I did so to present a panel on my book Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. At the time, I wasn’t working in a university or a college.

Honestly, I was working at IKEA. $13/hour. Booking and processing furniture deliveries for people. Had a couple of contingent communications contracts, but that was actually my main source of income at the time.

But I’d seen how people are ostracized when they write “Independent Scholar” on their nametags at academic conferences. I wasn’t about to do that. So I put on my nametag the name of the institution my name was most associated with.

“Adam Riggio. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.”

I got a few “What the hell is that?” comments. But I’ve always loved breaking people’s brains, much more than I could ever enjoy being treated like shit on the bottom of a tenured professor’s boot.

Let me take an institutional view. SERRC is open access. It’s free for everyone to read. Sometimes, our articles can get really technical. But for the most part, we encourage contributors to write in a style that any half-intelligent person will be able to follow. Platforms like SERRC are, if you ask me,* is the future of research.

* And it’s my blog, so I’m just going to tell you.

The heavily paywalled model is dying. The academic publishing companies may still be profitable, but that’s only because their massive subscription prices practically hold university libraries hostage.

More and more libraries are turning down journal subscriptions – there are too many journals, and universities face too many funding cuts to maintain subscriptions. As a researcher, I always wanted to have my work read by the general public as well as colleagues in my fields.

So it never suited me to spend hundreds of hours of work on article submissions to elite journals that few people could even access. Today, higher education is under threat from politicians and revanchist social movements who consider their research either useless or actively hostile.

We aren’t going to defend critical knowledge production institutions and networks from radical reactionary politicians and governments by publishing technical papers in journals no one can access. That makes us elitists, and everyone hates those people.

I’m not going to say in detail what I plan to do with the SERRC once I take over the editorship. That’s going to be one very contentious email thread.** But we live in very difficult, dangerous, contentious times.

** Mind you, first thing I have to do is get updated emails from everyone. The number of bouncebacks I got tonight kind of ruined my emotionally-loaded tribute to my William Hartnell.

Through a platform like SERRC, it’s possible for intellectuals who believe in freedom of knowledge to take a public stand. So necessary.

Kill Your Idols I: Followers, A History Boy, 07/08/2017

When I first started blogging my early research for Utopias, I was concerned to stay away from conventional marxism. I was going to write a very left-wing book, but it wasn’t going to stick to the typical answers of the left.

Yes, I was concerned about oligarchy, just as I am now. I’ve since developed a more communitarian side to my political thinking – the strength and resilience of social networks and bonds of brotherhood throughout a community are the foundation of a healthy culture.

All the typical nationalist idols – religion, ethnicity, language, beliefs in national myths – don't mean shit, if I can put it in technical terms. Solidarity is built from actual friendships among people – from working, playing, clubs, school, partying, volunteering, whatever. The resilience of a society’s networks are its strength.

The basic idea of this series of posts is: If you want to
progress your society, and how you understand the
world, you need to kill your idols.

When I started this blogging project four years ago, I was still sorting out my more political ideas. At the time, I often said I very much wasn’t marxist, for a variety of reasons.

Here’s one anecdote from the time. When I got my proposal reviewer’s notes from Palgrave on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, he kept on talking about marxism, and telling me I should include more marx in a book about environmental philosophy.

He did that because the word ‘alienation’ is really important in a lot of environmental ethics approaches. They’re talking about the different ideologies and concepts humanity has used to separate our self-image from nature. We literally make ourselves alien to the Earth.

But this reviewer kept thinking I was a marxist. All he knew of the idea was Marx’s conception of alienated labour.

At first I was nervous that my book would be rejected because of this misunderstanding. But I got some good advice from my colleague who’d connected me with Palgrave. So I gave my usual response to reviewers who clearly didn’t know what they were talking about. I told the book series editor that the reviewer had no idea what he was talking about.

The bigger question is: What does it mean to be a marxist anyway? I don’t think I’m one, but most folks on the right wing of politics today would call me a cultural marxist.

See, I’ve met some self-identified communists and marxists over the years who are kind of genuine in their very doctrinaire belief in the very basic processes Marx himself was describing. Some see the economy as continuing to cleave into producers and proletariat. Some believe that they can affect a revolution of the working class from an academic’s office.

But people in the communist movement believed all this in Antonio Gramsci’s own time, nearly 100 years ago. They thought that all of Europe was going in the direction of the Russian revolution because they believed in a very doctrinaire marxist theory of the totally deterministic nature of human history.

They ended up being horribly wrong, and a lot of them – including Gramsci – paid the price with their freedom and their lives. Why would someone believe something just because it’s in a theoretical, scientific book?*

* That’s a very complex, multifaceted book that’s open to many interpretations. Most of these folks were following a blueprint from Capital, and Capital was never meant to be a straight blueprint in any universal sense. Yet it still became one.

Here’s the truth about social change. Revolutionary change can come from anywhere in society, if the particular conditions are right to enable some class or community to understand that it can act, then actually act.

Civilization is dynamic, always open to change, never clockwork in that too-simple sense of how people used to think about reality. Am I giving people too much credit by not presuming them to believe in a clockwork reality? . . . To Be Continued

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.

Sometimes It Just Isn’t Worth Including, Composing, 26/01/2015

I was back to editing Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity at the end of this weekend, though most of my time was spent dealing with the logistics of my move to Toronto. That will be next weekend. As of Thursday, the blog probably won’t hear from me until a few days into February.

I posted this image in one of my earlier posts, but that
was over a year ago, and I think it just looks really cool.

But I made a significant cut to chapter seven Sunday evening. The original dissertation version included a brief passage of about three paragraphs where I analyzed a concept in a book called The Natural Contract by Michel Serres. My supervisor, Barry Allen, recommended the book as an interesting source of ideas when I was originally researching the project. While it’s a brilliant book, the concept I discussed in the dissertation had its problems.

It was the concept of an environmentalist scientist-philosopher-sage called The Third-Instructed, or Le Tiers-Instruit if I can formulate it in a language where it makes some grammatical sense.* I wrote about Serres a few times on the blog, because I was reading his book Le Tiers-Instruit (its title was translated into English as The Troubadour of Knowledge) in the early months of Adam Writes Everything.

* Serres is a brilliant writer in his native language, able to use many of its grammatical and semantic subtleties to communicate some fascinating ideas. The problem with this brilliance is that it’s so difficult to translate because his subtle points play off connotations that are idiosyncratic to French. 

Aside from my general interest in Serres’ thinking, I ordered this book during my first post-graduation round of revisions of the ecophilosophy manuscript because I thought I had dealt with this concept of Le Tiers-Instruit too quickly in the dissertation. I mentioned it briefly, over a mere three paragraphs, in the last major chapter, where I dismissed it as a concept with some potential, but which was limited because it was still described using the language of opposites. 

Serres described this troubadour of knowledge as “archaic and contemporary, traditional and futuristic, humanist and scientist, fast and slow, green and seasoned, audacious and prudent.” But he never progressed the idea beyond this union of opposites, which can only gesture at progress instead of actually pushing you toward it. Philosophical writing that unites opposites is all too often counter-productively vague.

I seriously couldn't find any decent
images of Serres through a Google
search where he looked younger
than 70 years old. It made me
wonder if he's always been an
elderly man.

Then I discovered that he followed up The Natural Contract with a book that explicitly focussed on Le Tiers-Instruit. This was a massive potential embarrassment, for me to have critiqued Serres’ concept without even considering the input of the book that spent 200 pages discussing it.

But when I read The Troubadour of Knowledge, I found that Serres had developed the concept more as a philosophy of education instead of the openly ecological and environmentalist direction it had in The Natural Contract. It was an appropriate development, but it made a full account of the concept at that point in the manuscript very inappropriate. 

What’s more, I only included Serres in the dissertation manuscript where I did because it was in a chapter that dealt largely with concepts from the influence of Serres’ contemporaries and fellow-travellers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. How I dealt with the concept, critiquing the vagueness of its oppositional language, better suited my critiques of vague language in environmental philosophy more generally, in the earlier chapters. But because Serres developed the concept into a completely different context than this, discussing it in the context of environmental philosophy’s problems wasn’t appropriate either.

Why is this a Composing post instead of A History Boy, then, given how much time I’ve spent talking about my own history with Serres? Because of the result of this reflection on how limited the concept of Le Tiers-Instruit was in my manuscript, how its limitation came from working only from a book where it was treated briefly, and that the book which specifically focussed on it set the concept in a context that was completely different from the ecological philosophy I’m working in.

I cut it entirely. There are now no references to Michel Serres in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. 

When you write philosophy, you can reference a lot of whole bunch of stuff. It’s a complex tradition, and many different writers have dealt with similar concepts in different contexts across the last three thousand years. And I’m just talking about Western philosophy. Including Asian, Indian, African, and Amerindian traditions complicates our conceptual heritages even more. 

Serres is a better role model for me as a writer than in
his particular philosophical ideas and the problems he
explores. He uses language brilliantly, and weaves
concepts together with incredible subtlety. We're just
interested in different things.

When you write a dissertation, there's institutional pressure to include as much of what you researched as possible, because part of its goal is showing your committee the scale of research you can do in the program's time frame. 

When you're writing professional academic philosophy in other contexts, like journals, there's a similar pressure to include as much stuff as possible. Reviewers tend to default to a very obvious criticism: Why didn’t you include author X? Clearly, this paper is inadequate and not worth publishing because you didn’t include author X. 

Sometimes, this is a legitimate point because X is an important figure in the particular tradition that you set yourself in, so missing him is a genuine blind spot.

But academic publications, especially journals, operate in a prestige-based market. Part of a journal’s prestige lies in its rejection rate. And the more prestigious a journal is, the more submissions it will receive. So a reviewer will be under pressure to reject a submission at all costs. So he may think of any other writer who has dealt with a similar concept as you and your research background, and fault you for not mentioning this historically tangential but conceptually convergent figure. Not a morally blameworthy act on the reviewer's part, just the pressure of the institutional position. 

So sometimes, you have to take control of a creative process when you have the power to do so. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity has been accepted based on a proposal that focussed on its conceptual originality, not as a historical work. What matters is the clarity of the concepts. In this case, cutting Serres improves the clarity of the conceptual argument. Better leave him aside entirely than treat him superficially.

So this is one of the few Composing posts where I actually have some direct advice about writing. Who ever thought that would happen?

My Future in Philosophy and Philosophy’s Future: The Optimistic Case, Jamming, 24/05/2014

You didn’t seriously expect I’d just plain give up, did you?

What are you trying to say, I'm crazy?

When I went to your schools, I went to your churches,

I went to your institutional learning facilities?!

So how can you say I'm crazy?

So given the current transformation of the university system along Thatcherian principles, I do believe that philosophy’s continued existence in this system is doubtful. The discipline has had a wonderful run ever since Kant’s day when it was first institutionalized in the modern disciplinary university system of Germany, whose framework provided the template for modern educational/research institutions. At the time, it was the natural home for higher learning — in elite institutions. The democratization movements of the 20th century brought these elite institutions to ordinary people as taxpayer-funded public services. But the institution has changed as its priorities have shifted from public service to profit-making. We’re all familiar with the other conception of ‘institutionalized.’ After all, the system is getting more than a little crazy.

So if institutionalized philosophy has already begun its long, painful road to being squeezed out of a university system that has no place for research that can’t be monetized, where should the discipline go? Just because this particular practice of philosophy is running out of resources doesn’t mean the tradition itself should disappear. Philosophy has great social value as the incubator of critical thought, dissent, fostering ideas and plans for justice in society, and creating new concepts to understand the world. It had a home in universities for a long time, so long that many practitioners (including myself for quite a while) thought that the only way to practice philosophy was in a university setting, and that the only way to continue philosophical innovation was through engagement with academic discourses.

After the Ghost of Thatcher in the job market and the departmental downsizing of contemporary academia hit me in the face last year, I slowly began to formulate a response. A discipline is a specific set of norms for the reproduction of research, evolving through a slow process of piecemeal modification and segmentation into sub-disciplines, usually within the framework of an institution. A discipline that loses its institutional home is dead. But a tradition is much more amorphous, and so more immune to attack.

One thing we often forget in our disciplinary pursuits in philosophy is all those people who enjoyed our classes, may have done well or decently, but ultimately decided to pursue some other course in their lives that doesn’t necessarily have much to do with philosophy. But they still find it interesting, still read, and would still like to read about concepts and theories to understand the world. A discipline speaks only to an audience of other disciplinary professionals. But a tradition talks with anyone who’s interested, and continues through that interest.

That’s why I plan on finding work in publishing over the next year. I think a lot of people in my graduating generation of doctoral philosophers (and in other academic disciplines as well) are leaving university work entirely for other careers. The website Versatile PhD is a gathering place for people with doctorates who are trying to transition into non-academic work. It can be quite useful, but one of my first visits was a very demoralizing read through a forum thread about people joyously selling off their personal libraries and shredding or burning all their old notes and other research material. 

This is a shame, because these are the people who, if my new plans for the next few years work out, would be the sources of books that I would publish. With my own career as a fiction writer beginning, I’ll be like a lot of authors who haven’t hit a Franzen-level public profile of sales figures: a writer with a day job. I think there can be philosophers like that too, researching and publishing engaging books on traditional and new philosophical problems that are conceptually provocative and can be read by other professionally trained people as well as those folks that we would have been teaching, who are interested in reading philosophy, but do something else for a living. 

This audience wouldn’t read some of the books that clutter too many academic presses today, those which are little more than a series of responses to a series of quibbles directed at a previous article that a major journal published. I would like to publish and promote genuinely creative, accessible philosophical works, books that create new concepts to live one’s life and understand the world where we live.

Spinoza, a former political radical who wrote philosophy
and corresponded with the leading institutionalized
figures of science while working a day job, may be the
best role model to continue philosophy as a tradition.

This isn’t about publishing Timecube Men across the country, which is probably the first derisive comment I’ll hear about this idea. There are already plenty of intelligent people with the research skills and careful thought and expression to write credible works of philosophy from outside the university system. The last couple of decades of overproducing graduate students has resulted in thousands of people who have the personally disciplined research and writing skills to produce genuinely engaging works of philosophy. We should not let Slavoj Zizek and Steven Pinker be the only best-selling philosophers in the world. Not that there’s anything essentially wrong with their books, but they could use a little competition. 

There are few groups of people with more potential to upset the established order of things than a generation of energetic, dedicated youth who have had their opportunities and ambitions upended. Part of what I’ll be doing at the CPA this coming week is running this proposal by young philosophers, and veterans who are better established in the university system, whose support we’ll need to get started. We’ll need to start organizing contacts with publishers over the next few years, and in some cases (like mine), training in the publishing business and starting work with these companies. Despite the neo-liberal assaults the discipline of philosophy will face over the next generations that will likely do it irreparable harm, the tradition of philosophy can continue.

Who’s with me?