Here Let Me Give You an Example, Composing, 24/07/2017

So I've drafted an introduction and an outline to an essay I’ve been meaning to write for the SERRC since the end of May.

Between a busier than expected schedule at my new job, a documentary to arrange (and now finance), my work with the local New Democrats designing a policy survey for members, and actually being able to relax and have a life once in a while . . . I’m sorry, but what was I supposed to be doing again?

You get the idea. But I pitched an idea to Jim the coordinator of the SERRC, and he said bring it to me whenever you want. So I’m going to bring it to him by early August. Still less time for a response paper than the average academic journal would take to process.

I think the story of Rachel Dolezal blew up as big as it did because it
was a surreal, deranged kaleidoscope of fractal and fractured concepts
at the intersection of so many different contours of the most
polarizing ideas of our time. But it was so messed up that very few
people could actually understand it. Especially since the form of
most of our media means that people rarely get more than a sentence
at a time to argue for or against any idea or perspective at all.

So I’m writing a piece that responds to a short and fascinating essay Robert Frodeman published back in May. It probed, from another angle, the major theme in his work – the critique of disciplinary structures in the academic university system.

This time, he was looking at the tradition of philosophy, its academic and punk styles. There’s the tradition of Western philosophy – dominant in university circles – that it’s a knowledge discipline with particular ranges and subordinate ranges of expertise.

At the same time, there’s the conception of philosophy as a tradition of free-thinking rebels against the authoritarianism of thoughtless conformity. Think of the Sophists as the experts teaching lessons and Socrates as the freethinker critiquing all that received, common-sense wisdom.

The example that inspired him on this reflection was the dustup earlier this year over Rebecca Tuvel’s essay in Hypatia on the possibility of being transracial. Frodeman focussed on the aspect of the debate where everyone was fighting over who had the proper expertise to make the calls they did.

He was primarily concerned to fill in an alternate perspective on arguments like that. He asks whether philosophical knowledge can also be for provocation as well as instruction. For asking important and (therefore) uncomfortable questions as well as providing answers to inquiries.

My response to Frodeman will be, essentially, to tell him that there’s still more to be done – the duality of answers/expertise v questions/provocation isn’t enough to describe all that philosophy can do.

I wonder how many people who watched Eddie Murphy's old "Black
Like Me" sketch on Saturday Night Live understood that it was also
a brutal mockery of white fears of the black people who can pass as
white. I wonder how many of those people who didn't get it were
themselves white. You have to think of yourself as an identity to
conceive of your identity as under threat. Of course it's much more
fun to conceive of yourself as an identity and practice
miscegenation anyway. Miscegenation is fun, and the way of the
future.

I’ll do that with a deeper example of Tuvel’s essay. Oddly enough, reading it provoked a question in me that made me understand that her essay and the controversy surrounding it* as an even better example to show the transformation that our boring, decadent academic establishment needs.

* And surrounding Rachel Dolezal, the woman whose demented appearance in the spectacular freak show of Western media provoked a popular conversation about the nature of transracial identity in the first place.

See, unlike most of the critics of Rebecca Tuvel’s essay about transracial identity, I actually read the whole thing. And it was dry, turgid, uninteresting prose. It examined the arguments about the possibility and morality of transracial identity in a didactic tone, and from a perspective completely detached from the visceral nature of reality.

Tuvel’s essay did everything in an academician’s playbook to suck the vitality from an intense, multifaceted political conflict. I contrast this with the most illuminating piece of writing I’ve ever read on Dolezal and her perspective itself, Ijeoma Oluo’s article in The Stranger based on their conversation.

You could call it the difference between armchair and field philosophy, to run with another of Frodeman’s terms. Tuvel produced a bloodless, tone-deaf consideration of fiery concepts from a position of total abstraction. Oluo analyzed what concepts Dolezal’s own personality and sense of mission expressed.

Oluo was a truly empirical philosopher. My own creative argument flows from this point.

Anything more would be telling.

Socrates and All the Ladies, Jamming, 24/05/2017

Every now and then, I throw an article up on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. They’re a wonderful global community of social scientists and humanities researchers and writers, which I’m proud to have been part of since its early days in 2011.

I most often write book reviews. These like to get experimental. I most often do odd formal things. I reviewed an against-the-mainstream book about Plato’s political philosophy, in the style of a conversation between myself and Socrates. I think that could have gone through another draft before I submitted it.

Who could forget my review of a Steve Fuller’s book Knowledge a couple of years ago? A months-long chapter-by-chapter walkthrough running as long as a book itself, composed as a conversation with Fuller himself. Probably the most maximalist thing I’ll ever do, except maybe for Adam Writes Everything.

Sometimes it’s their content, like when I reviewed Phil Sandifer’s still-incubating Neoreaction: A Basilisk. That book has only gotten stranger since its publication. Its original draft was composed under the presumption that Donald Trump would lose. It’s apparently had to change radically now that we’re in a political era explicitly dominated by neoreaction.

I got a grey kitty, a white one, and a tabby too
And a big orange guy who puts snakes in my shoes
Mad MC skills, leave you struck
I roll with my kitties and I’m hard as fuck
I’m down with Plato and Socrates
And I love to get busy with all the ladies

So its finished form may eventually be so different from what I read that Phil may have made my review a Borgesian shadow, reviewing a book that not merely no longer exists, but has erased its own existence. Which means – Thank you so much for that, Phil, it’s genuinely awesome of you.

But then there are the replies. One article – either in Social Epistemology the journal or on the SERRC website itself – will spark a chain of replies, rebuttals, defences, addendums, and spiralling conversation. Often, they move too fast for me to throw my hat in the ring, even if I’d like to. The replies expand faster than I can think of my own response.

It’s why I don’t normally throw in, unless I have something of a curveball. Robert Frodeman – anarchist of the ivory tower’s disciplines that he is – is one of my favourite writers to follow in our circle. I have some pretty firm feelings about academia’s state of decadence, but Frodeman has done the empirical research for me to call it a conclusion.

When he writes an article about the lost influence of Socrates as the universal model of a philosopher, I’m going to read it. And be intrigued.

A Socratic thinker is a seeker of wisdom and a critic of false or inadequate pretences to knowledge. Such a thinker is a questioner, exploring and arguing over ideas to gain deeper understanding, but never expecting a univocal, straightforward, totally satisfying answer.

Yet most professional philosophers* are institutionally ratified experts. They have a disciplinarily-bound or influenced body of knowledge – the canon, the history, the primary texts, the current debates – and their job is to pass this knowledge to interested and paying students.

* University professors every one, as if that were the only place to create philosophy at all!

Philosophy, in other words, is now institutionalized as the domain of what Socrates would have called the sophist, the resident expert guide. Having those Socratic punks around is necessary – they provoke the discipline out of its doldrums.

There’s a third alternative, I think. The conceptual writer. For instance, what I did yesterday. You try to build – through argument, analysis and interpretation – a new concept that lets you understand the world differently than before. With this different understanding, you'll be able to act and think in ways you never thought would have been possible before – because you literally aren't able to conceive of it.

I’ll think on this a little more this post.

More Than Field Philosophy, Composing, 10/05/2016

Recently, my colleague at the Reply Collective, Robert Frodeman (along with his partner Adam Briggle), has been embroiled in a fairly controversial discussion about the future of philosophy. It’s been fun to read, and not just because I don’t feel so lonely as if I was the only one making fundamental challenges to the future of a major knowledge tradition.

Frodeman has been writing about field philosophy for quite a while already. Six years, minimum. I’m not here to give a play-by-play of the whole debate on Reply Collective. If you want to do that, take a lunchtime longread starting from here, and continuing at this link. And this one. And this one too.

There really are quite a lot of links. Between the New York Times articles and the followups at Reply Collective and elsewhere, there’s some seriously complex controversy. 

One of the inevitable first moments of any conference is figuring out where
the hell anything is on the host campus.

What I want to write about today is my own relation to this idea of field philosophy. Because the idea I’m developing through my recent pieces at the Reply Collective like “Beyond the Academy” and “Can We Redeem Academia’s Worst Contempt?” is a cousin of Frodeman’s concept.

His idea of field philosophy is an extension of epistemology, the study of knowledge. It’s a partnership with scientists in their own projects to discover more about our universe. That’s a considerable departure from how philosophy of science has been done in the field in North America.

Back in my academy days, I met philosophers of science whose methods are the most intense job shadowing you'll ever see. One professor I know – a colleague of my old friend Johnny-Five’s at University of Waterloo – trained herself in such depth and detail in molecular genetics that she could pass as one at conferences. It’s total immersion in the discipline and styles of knowledge of a scientific field.

It’s a seriously impressive achievement.

That’s not what Frodeman’s field philosophy is. To my relatively limited knowledge of the topic so far, it’s a more collaborative form of knowledge building as philosophy of science. Working geologists, chemists, physicists, ecologists, and scientists generally would become partners with the philosopher in exploring, systematizing, and analyzing the knowledge production processes and structures of their own disciplines. 

Without letting yourself get too impressed with how
swank the University of Calgary is.

It’s a wonderful, fascinating project that could massively reorganize the structure and production processes of human knowledge as a whole. I mentioned it – and some other activities of his department at University of North Texas – as an example of an innovation that philosophy as a discipline sorely needs more of.

Because Frodeman’s project isn’t what I’m doing at this panel or in these meta-disciplinary articles. Frodeman’s project, as I said, is for philosophy of science and the study of knowledge. What about fields like ethics, morality, or political theory? What would be the field philosophy of these topics?

Scientific disciplines – speaking so broadly that the sides of barns become thin as needles – have a mission of investigating the world. A scientist discovers how the world is, and philosophy of science and knowledge figures out how we discover that.

Political theory, ethics, and moral philosophy all have one very different component that you can’t get away from in the end. They’re all about analyzing and figuring out how to make the world the way it should be. They’re essentially integrated with the attempt to change the world.

So what is the equivalent of a scientist in a relationship that an ethicist or a political theorist would build in the field? An activist. Someone dedicated to changing their world through the slow, plodding work required in their own communities. 

Very rarely, many forces converge on some group of dedicated people to make them seminally influential and powerful in changing the world on a large scale. Think of the protestors against neoliberalism in Greece, the demonstrators of the Arab Spring revolutions, or Bernie Sanders becoming a key figure in American history after decades as a lonely voice of social democratic conscience in the legislature.

I told you I was onto something.

The work of the community activist is the practical, field component of all the philosophy of ethics and morality. That’s what studying environmental philosophy taught me because that was the field of philosophy that actually began as political activism. The philosophical writings were just as much works of activism as works of knowledge.

So it makes sense that the next step of a philosophical investigation that began with Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is to bring those ideas to an activist movement. 

That’s why I’m glad the LEAP Manifesto dropped when it did, because it’s an excellent opportunity to engage the public in conversations about environmentalist ideas. And I’m part of a social organization that just committed to a thorough discussion of LEAP, environmentalism, and how to integrate environmentalist values into our society, economy, and minds. 

It’s not meant to be signed on to literally like a pledge. It’s literally a conversation piece about the energy economy, ecology, and a transformation of our values. This summer, I’m going to be leading public workshops and discussion groups whose purpose is literally “the transvaluation of values.”

I think that’s called philosophy.