How Can We Teach What Folks Have to Learn? Jamming, 02/02/2018

It's been a few kind of rough days, and that’s okay. But I wanted to take a break from the more hardcore philosophy I’ve been on for the last few days and apply some of these concepts to some of our contemporary situations.

This is a conversation about the labour movement. What there is of it today, anyway. Let me start with my own material position on this issue – I’ll lay my cards on the table.

I’m a district association vice-president in the New Democratic Party here in Canada. I chair our policy committee, which makes me a kind of central coordinating philosopher, if I can be pretentious about it.

When I was watching the Ontario college instructors' strike last Fall,
I saw dedicated activists wasting their time when the government
understood that defeating them was a matter of waiting them out.
When enough students became frustrated with the strike, they
blamed the unions for choosing to strike instead of the government
for refusing to compromise. It seemed no one in OPSEU
understood that this was a possibility, when it's exactly what's
been happening at York University for decades now.

If you know the history of the New Democratic Party, you know that the NDP is, in many essential aspects of its development, the party of the labour movement. Now, the NDP is much more than the party of the labour movement alone these days, but those organizational tensions are for another day.

I'm an ally and a friend of the labour movement – but the movement has to adjust to two new realities if it’s going to thrive as it did a century ago. 1) The working class is too diverse for any necessary solidarity to develop. 2) Anti-union interests know exactly how to defeat the old union methods of bargaining and strikes.

See, while I’m not a marxist, I work in the political party and write Utopias embedded in a tradition of thought where Karl Marx’s works are important and influential. The theorists most influential on my own political thinking were Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Antonio Negri. Their works are positioned clearly in the marxist tradition.

That said, none of them are what you’d call orthodox marxists. If you want a summary of the fundamental premises of orthodox marxism, read the last two posts from earlier this week.

The key lesson you can take from there is that the world is fundamentally contingent – so the processes that were driving your social movement aren’t necessary. New technologies that never existed in Marx’s time and were barely imaginable transformed every aspect of human civilization.

One of those changes that computer, internet, and robotics technology did was fragment the nature of labour. Many different categories of worker exist now – factory floors and mine shafts, the home offices and Slack forums, the smartphone notifications delivering $8 shawarma.

Have you ever tried to get any of these people to talk to each other? Yes, they can all agree that their jobs stink. But they have nothing in common in their personalities.

We in the New Democrats have a beautiful attitude toward Tommy
Douglas, the founder of our party in bringing together the
farmers' socialist movement with the Canadian Labour Congress
and their supporters. But we can't let ourselves be limited by what
we've inherited when the world has changed so radically.

Here’s an example of the working person’s solidarity. When I was on strike in 2009 as a teaching assistant at McMaster, I spoke to a contract electrician who was driving through one of our picket lines. He said he had a son, so I told him one thing we were on strike to secure was more coverage in our benefits plan for parents of small children.

And he told me to go fuck myself because he never had a benefits plan in his life, already a decade longer than mine.

On top of that, look at the example of the big college instructors’ strike in Ontario last year. It was a failure on so many fronts, and I can’t help but blame the instructors’ union itself. Not in the sense most people mean by this, that their claims were unreasonable. No, the instructors’ concerns were valid, important, and vital.

I blame the instructors’ union in the sense that I’m incredulous that they walked into such an obvious trap! It was amateurish.

The union made their first offer to the provincial government months before the Fall semester started. The government didn’t respond until classes were well underway. They made such unreasonable proposals to the union that refusal was the only rational response.

At this point, a union official in Toronto – where the union-administration battles of York University have become legendary over the century – should see that he’s being set up. Yet OPSEU walked right into this trap, filling their public relations messaging that expected solidarity from everyone – especially the students.

We’re working people on strike! Of course the people will support us!

Nonsense. The strike was broken by the first student union coming out to say that instructors should back down and take what management will give them.

The people are too fragmented for solidarity to come through the old-fashioned vectors. Singing “Solidarity forever” only reminds people outside the local that your solidarity is not for them.

Now let’s look this problem in the face and deal with it.

From Simple Beginnings a Jungle, Research Time, 30/01/2018

I at first didn’t intend to follow yesterday’s post. I’m still not, really. I’m picking up a thread from a photo caption of all things, spinning it into a new point.

It’s a tricky thing, talking about Karl Marx. In a way, I pity the writers of Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, and anyone else who specializes in academic Deleuze scholarship.

I mean, I pity all academics who devote their entire creative lives to the scholarship and interpretation of one or a small few number of historical authors. Do we need more commentary, or do we need more inspiration? Need we separate the two so radically at all?

The entire process looks immensely well-ordered, a perfect balance
among so many complex parts and processes. Of course, the most
perfect balances are also the easiest to disrupt. One shift too far, one
change at just the wrong place and time – the entire system flies to
pieces through the same energy that kept it all together.

You probably know where I fall on that question.

Marx wanted to stand Hegelianism on its feet – put the conceptual and analytic frameworks of thinking to work. His exploration of the dynamics of England’s industrial-imperialist economy literally invented a new kind of science – empirical philosophy.

Scientific research on social and economic relationships, understood according to Hegel’s frameworks of thought. Identify the true contradiction among all the forces that constitute a society, analyze how those irreconcilably-opposed forces could bring their conflict to the highest intensity.

It turned out that the problem wasn’t how you orient your Hegelianism – it was with the whole theoretical toolbox. Social structures and systems* are assembled in very complex, contingent ways.

* Or pretty much any structure or system in the world, but let’s just talk about the social ones for now.

They fall apart from chaotic processes too – one little change interacts with everything else going on, as if it were some Rube Goldberg machine that builds itself as it collapses to pieces and brings down the whole house around it.

So you understand how societies transform not by looking for high-intensity contradictions – that’s more like understanding how societies explode, if anything. Societies transform much more frequently, and much more subtly. Though even the most subtle transformations can eventually constitute entirely different worlds.

What was one revolutionary transformation that happened from Marx’s time to ours (or at least to Deleuze’s)? Labour differentiated. In England’s 1870s economy, working people were miners and factory workers. That’s it. Dirty, scruffy men who live horrible, soot-covered, ash-breathing lives before dying of lung disease. Plus all the slave labour around the colonies who did all the same stuff, but in the sun dying of heatstroke.

I suppose you could say that every technology is as convoluted as a
Rube Goldberg machine, and maybe just as unnecessary. What would
that gain you, though?
I ask that as a serious question.

Now, we have a ton of different working jobs. The factory workers, the miners, yes. But also the retail workers, the taxi and rideshare drivers, medical trades, waiters and bartenders, communications contractors, paid-by-the-post bloggers.

The key with the current labour system, so goes this essay on Marx and Deleuze, is that none of these different groups see much in common with each other. Few of them really have much in their identities and lives in common – other than worrying about their finances.

But the class consciousness that was so easy when Mordorish factory workers made up the bulk of working people? That’s long gone. Why? Because things changed. Economic and technological conditions diversified the number of ways you could get stuck as an underpaid wage slave.

And I’m just talking about the mostly-financialized Western economies. Leave aside the extra complexity of a globalized world whose parity is improving daily.

The world need not have changed in such a way. Maybe it only did so because all the communist revolutions across Europe between the two World Wars were put down, and because Stalin took the only successful such revolution into totalitarianism.

But that’s what happened. The capitalist territories survived the catastrophe of the two world wars, and developed computer technology that diversified their economies. Class solidarity evaporated because there was no longer enough in the identities of the different working people to say they could even be in the same community.

Take a 24-year-old punk rocker girl working at Dollarama for minimum wage. A 50-year-old lifelong steelworker who’s lost his health insurance. An overstressed 32-year-old ad copy writer who might make $4000 one month, then $400 the next (and maybe the next too). What do they have in common?

You can give them lots of good answers. What are the chances they’d believe it?

Subtle Doctors for Subtle Differences, Research Time, 29/01/2018

Pretty much everyone who writes on Gilles Deleuze as a scholar ends up engaging somehow with the ideas of Hegel. Not because Deleuze was a Hegelian in any way,* but because his work was threaded with profound and cutting critiques of the whole Hegelian way of thinking.

When I set out to write Utopias, it was early 2014. I put the outline
together, in a very rough form. That gave me my research guide. I
knew and I know that I'd never have been able to be comprehensive
enough to satisfy everyone – that no one would be able to ask a
question like, "What about what X has to say?" An inescapable
question. I gave myself eight years – I'm now at the halfway
mark, and I have this blog. Manuscript drafted by 2022.

* But if I were ever to come across an academician’s argument that Deleuze actually was a Hegelian, I’d be impressed by its daring and desperation. Daring because it stands against so many of Deleuze’s most explicit motives and goals. Desperate because the scholarship must be overflowing with so many disparate takes that only derangement can distinguish you. Unless it’s character assassination.

I want to see if I can get a very quick but accurate assessment of the Deleuze–Hegel relationship in the next few hundred words of this blog. It’ll be an exercise in the kind of fast yet insightful writing required when philosophy’s history is a tool for a more creative purpose.

When Deleuze’s work was first blowing up in French intellectual circles – the mid-late-1960s – damn near everyone had some element of Hegelian thinking in their philosophy. What does that mean?

A typical mainstream philosophical thinker in France – whether linguist, psychiatrist, social scientist, or socialist – considered the most critical dynamic in any situation the contradiction. Real developments hinged on contradictions – perfectly opposed conflicts, as intractable as A + not-A.

In the marxist politics of the era, for example, contradictions were seen as the engine of revolutions – all the constituents of an industrial society came together in the contradiction of the owner-capitalists and the worker-labourers. The conflict between those two classes determined every other aspect of a society – all other relationships and dynamics depended on how that opposition played out.

Sometimes, I feel constrained by that timeline. As though I could never
squeeze enough work into that time period to achieve a book with the
creative potential I think Utopias can have. The blog has kept my
research on track, and kept it organized. This was unexpected, but a
great benefit – it's helped keep me in step with the times too. Even
the most prestigious professors can't devote all their time to
research and writing – they have teaching, administration, and
promotional work to do. At least my own years conceiving of
Utopias were spent in the chaos of today's contingent labour.
I didn't have to work too hard at keeping my feet in the real world.

All the subtle differences in a society are functions of that contradiction. So if you understand the contradiction’s own dynamics, you’ll be able to understand all the subtler differences in your society. You just deduce the subtle and complex from the simple contradiction.

How do you find the contradiction? Two steps. First, identify the dominant trend in society – its most ascendant feature, if you can follow the analogy. Then, work out what a precisely opposing force would be. If you’re thinking sociologically, it might be a very small, underdeveloped phenomenon.

An example. Think back to marxism. The Shropshire farm boys first coming to the city for the freedom of making good money on those factory floors had no idea they – or at least their class of people – would be so historically pivotal. But those underpaid, spat-upon factory workers were the other half of the dynamic whose back-and-forth would determine how all of English society would develop.

The story itself is inspiring. But that’s not actually how society develops. Same goes for any process – the differences that make a difference aren’t contradictions. They could be contradictions – but contradictions are just one among a vast number of kinds of difference. No by their nature more important than any other.

There might not even be a society whose conflicts have any common theme at all – no less a society for all that messiness.

That said, I knew one thing from the beginning – I was not a
marxist. And I'm still not. Because so much of the marxist
tradition was dominated by the rigidity of Hegelian
thinking that marxist politics became disastrous. Antonio
Gramsci's critiques of his own radical movement haven't
been heard by people today on the front lines. Union
leaders today think solidarity will come naturally from
every group in society outside the masters. But some
interests matter more than others, and what might look
like a glaring, powerful contradiction is really a play of
ineffective surfaces.

Go back to that example of England, where Karl Marx did his first sociological and economic research – that dedicated scientific Hegelian. He found a society whose values were dominated by class superiority – the alliance of landed aristocrats and industry millionaires whose political compromise was to keep the poor in their place.

Not only did the rich dominate the lives of the poor, but popular moral dogma – in informal culture and formal education – taught that such an order was right. Marx saw that same dynamic inspiring absolutist racism in the colonial economy.

The rich have right over the poor – so the poor Englishman would always feel rich compared to the colonized and enslaved African. So racial dynamism is determined by the structure of the fundamental contradiction.

The society perpetuated the very division that would tear it down. The conflict between rich and poor becomes irreconcilable, sparking a revolution that would be humanity’s aufheben. The contradictions are preserved, but transformed so that they reconcile.

The procedure makes perfect sense in conventional logic. And Hegel’s book Logic too. But it isn’t actually how real differences in the world work.

That was Deleuze’s contribution – Hegel put simplification first, because formal logic proceeded in simple functions. But logic is a tool, which we invented. What’s primary is the material mess from which we emerged. That a tool helps you understand the world better in the best places to use it, doesn’t mean that tool is how you see the world’s essence.

Our universe is one of contingency, complexity, feedback loops, interference, chaotic collisions where small, innocuous events can explode in their significance through nothing in their own makeup.

Look at imperialist England. Yes, you can reduce the racist culture of white supremacy to a symptom of the rich-owner/poor-worker dynamic – and our current culture of white supremacy was an ideology designed to make the poor European worker accept his own slavery by making him master of another kind of slave.

But once assembled, the cultural process of white supremacy can develop through the dynamics of its own components and affects. Its relationship to the economic dynamic of centre-periphery is no longer as its function, but as a participant in feedback.

Whether an event or a dynamic ends up having world-shattering significance isn’t a matter of logic, but luck. That’s Deleuze’s rebuttal to the Hegelian way of thinking. Embrace our contingency, our fragility. Build an ethic for fragility.

No Rest in This World or the World to Come, Research Time, 25/01/2018

If you're wondering why the puppy is here, it'll
become important later. Right now, the puppy
wants to remind you of an old Talmudic saying
which was the closing sentence of one of
Salomon Maimon's first books.
Scholars of wisdom have no rest in this
world, or in the world to come.

You know what I love about Salomon Maimon? He was a dirty, smelly, drunk who sat in a bar for years, barely employed, pretty damn poor – but he could still get an essay out to one of the leading philosophers of the era to make an incisive critique of his work that still stands up centuries later.

Maimon was a scholar of Torah and Talmud for most of his life – teaching, writing essays on the great Jewish theologians, commentary on Kabbalah, textbooks on the Jewish religion and the Hebrew language, and works of original philosophy.

But Christian-descended people know him best for his critique of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Why his critique became so famous is actually a beautiful story.

Maimon was a fairly minor figure in German intellectual circles of the time, but knew some of the well-connected folks. Maimon knew a guy named Markus Herz, who also knew Immanuel Kant. Maimon read the Critique of Pure Reason shortly after it was published, and had some brilliant critical things of his own to say about it.

He wrote these ideas in a fairly long letter, which Herz passed along to Kant. Kant read it, and it blew him away. He publicly thanked Maimon, and praised him in public appearances as one of the only critics of his new work who was actually picking up what he was throwing down.

That any intellectual at the top of his game in creativity and public profile would do that is remarkable. That Kant would do that to a pretty obscure Jewish person – in 1780s Prussia, where Jews were pretty deeply racialized and persecuted – is a moment of ethical beauty.

I'm not exactly a Kantian, or a devotee of his philosophy. But I have a lot of praise for him as a person.

Maimon is the subject of an essay in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, the book that’s been inspiring my last few posts – even the ones that got more than a little weird and creative. So what was the main idea in Maimon's thinking that could be said to have influenced Deleuze’s thinking most?

After a fashion, we can't see it if it doesn't move either.

It’s an understanding of how perception works that broke radically with what was taken for granted in the intellectual and scientific culture and knowledge base of Maimon’s time, the last decades of the 18th century.

Kant’s discussion of perception – and pretty much every philosophical and scientific discussion of perception – rested on an assumption that appears pretty common sense. Assume that you see things in the world.

I'm not making some kind of skeptical argument. I’m talking about objects. I see a tree. I see a bus. I see a field of grass. I see a fence. I see a puppy. I see a person. When I see a puppy, I immediately experience the puppy as a whole.

Each of these wholes in our perception – the puppy, the fence, the tree, the bus – is a stable identity in our experience.

Here was Maimon’s alternative. We don’t see wholes with stable, unambiguous identities. We perceieve actions, movements, fluctuations of differences, changes, that our perceptual apparatus – the sense organs and nervous system – assembles into what we perceive as objects.

A puppy comes into our room. We first perceive the puppy through changes. Where there was silence, there’s now skittering and yipping. Where there was an empty room, there’s now this beige-and-white speckled vision. A faint odour of dog breath creeps into your nose.

There isn’t just that one change. The whole scene continues to fluctuate. Barks alternate breathing, paws pound the floor in rhythm. The shape of the dog in our field of vision grows larger as it approaches. Its legs and ears flop and fly about. At every instance, we perceive changes.

Our real experience of the material world isn’t the objects in it – it’s the changes in it, the differentials, the fluxes. You look at pretty much all contemporary science of perception – with input from neurology, medicine, biology, robotics – and they’ve pretty much proven Maimon’s argument. At least in a kind of essence.

Our world is material and real, but what’s most material – most easily grasped by an organism in perception – are its changes, its movements.

Clues, Signs, Traces, Imperatives III: Care, Composing, 24/01/2018

So the detective.

There were four qualities of thought in that tentative description I gave of that persona, the conceptual persona of philosopher as detective. Care, attention to detail, commitment to ideals, understanding causes and conditions

Care. In several senses of the word, but I first want to talk about the sense of carefulness. You’re aware of the power of your own words, actions, and thinking. You don’t dismiss what you’re doing at any time as being inconsequential.

A wonderful spin on the detective myth in the last couple of decades
is when the detective's ideals are rooted in the life of her family,
friends, and community. Where she acts to bring justice to her own
world, even when it's the inconsequential scale of a little town.

This is because you understand that any action – no matter how trivial, ordinary, or small it might be – can have wide and massive consequences. Not just any intentional action, but any event at all. Any minor flux in the development of the universe.

As a proverb, it’s the butterfly’s wings that cause a hurricane. “For want of a nail.”

People who act with care are attentive to chaos, mindful of the power that a small difference, a small change, can make in a massively wide web of processes, bodies, and networks. A few poorly stamped punchcards can change the course of human civilization.

Attention to detail. Why do I emphasize this when I’ve already talked about carefulness? Because I don’t want to refer to detail in the world, as you investigate it and discover new aspects of existence. No, I mean attention to detail in your own thinking.

If you’ve ever taken an intro-ish level philosophy course, you probably heard a lot of talk about rigour in writing. Way too many teachers – from the lowliest marking assistant to full professor – think this amounts to meticulous disputation. Argue over every detail, hunt for every flaw, for every suspected flaw, and interrogate it ruthlessly.

That attitude makes it very easy to think you’re a brilliant philosophical debater when you’re in fact a gaslighter. Listen to an argument, think of a way to spin some self-defeating interpretation.

Talking about Sherlock Holmes is almost inevitable when you talk
about detective myths in contemporary culture. His massive
gravity in the development of the myth makes him impossible to
ignore. I liked the stories as a boy, but today, I find the character so
limited. Sherlock has an ethical detachment – no matter how the
portrayal depicts his friendships, Sherlock remains inescapably
a detective who investigates for the joy of puzzle-solving. The
consequences – the ethical heart of the case – are important to
him, but remain in the shadow of his perverse joy of the case as
an intellectual game.

“Couldn't you say that . . .” is a phrase I’ve heard pronounced with the most poisonous smugness, dribbling milky vomit from a mouth onto a seminar table.

Philosophical writing, done best, means that you make every word count. You write with such precision that even your ambiguities are a perfect balance of provocation and befuddlement. Create the space for your readers to finish your argument themselves – the same message each in their own way.

It’s what you should at least aim for, even if you never quite achieve it.

Commitment to ideals. See the paragraph above. You rarely, if ever, achieve the best that you’re capable of – a perfect push to your limits. But if you always try for it, you’ll avoid your very worst and do better than if you’d lived and thought without ambition.

I don’t just mean your character, though I certainly am talking about your character. I’m also talking about all your values, everything you want for society. Fail if there’s no other way out, but you’ll fail with dignity.

Better than nothing, I guess?

Understanding. Accountability to yourself. Always know what you’re doing. Not just in its potential consequences in the chaos of life, though there is that. Not just in living with integrity, the dignity that manifests in commitment to ideals, though there’s definitely that.

There must always be a pathos to the detective – caring about the
world because he's part of the world, the fundamental
interconnectedness of all things, including himself. A union of
knowledge and chaos that inspires joy and love.

Develop a sense of personal gravity – always be aware that there’s a very serious dimension to your actions. Consequences of chaotic actions – losing your spare horseshoe nails, poor maintenance on an election punchcard machine in Florida – are not a matter of games.

You don’t just look down on the Earth like some kind of immature god, where we’re all just playthings you watch for entertainment. Destruction has to elicit sympathy if you’re going to avoid becoming a callous, deranged, psychopath.

So I’m coming back to care. A full walkthrough of each of the four domains of philosophical thinking – existence, knowledge, character, and society. If I can get technical – ontology, epistemology, ethics, and morality (or politics, when the crowds get big).

Care now in the typical sense – I care for you, your life and well-being concerns me. I will suffer if you’re harmed or if you become a worse person than you are now. Strength and joy empower you, no matter where they occur and what expresses them. That there is more such strength and joy in the world, the better that world is.

The danger of a life in chaos (existence), the detailed attention of concern (knowledge), which reveals the gravity of your actions (morality), becoming a ground for your commitment to reshaping the world for the better (ethics, character).

The detective whose careful attention to the seemingly inconsequential details of the world reveals a terrible injustice that she cannot ignore without correcting. As an image, it’s a cultural myth. As a concept, it’s a comprehensive philosophy.

Clues, Signs, Traces, Imperatives II: Seekers, Research Time, 23/01/2018

After the last near-rant,* I actually don’t have much more to say. A list of conditions and ideas. In a way, I think that’s for the best.

* Who am I kidding? That was a rant.

One of the most important aspects of Gilles Deleuze’s conceptions of political revolution is what he never said. He described in great detail – in political and ontological contexts – what it means to transform radically.

In a human context, it means transforming your character completely. He and Guattari described that process, but never an end product. Even in their most political works, they never gave a prescription for what kind of person they thought would be the best to emerge.

I always enjoyed the character of the Doctor when s/he was being
something of a detective. Exploring some complex sci-fi setting,
the relationships among characters, their interests and conflicts. To
discover the mystery of what horrible event is happening.

Of course, that defeats the whole structure of what they were doing – an ontological description of how a process can only move freely when it moves without adopting a plan from some other source, when it acts, thinks, and plans immanently.

To give orders and expect them to be followed is overcoding – that’s what despotic societies do. So if you’re going to live by your convictions, you won’t give a prescription for what kind of person you want to emerge from the revolution.

At most, you can say what that revolution would have to satisfy to repair or escape what caused the metamorphosis in the first place. Conditions for success, but whatever you do to meet them is your business.

You don’t even know what the revolution will be anyway. In the 1970s of Paris, when Deleuze and Guattari were composing A Thousand Plateaus, you’d be pretty perceptive for thinking a new communist revolution was brewing.** By the 2010s, I could write a book about what conditions an ecological revolution in thought would have to satisfy.

** Whatever its prospects for immediate success. I’ve read interpretations of Paris’ May 1968 revolution as having lost the battle and the war, but won the culture. You want to call that victory? I’m not sure if I do.

Then you have to leave it up to people to figure their own way there. You live in your world, with your concerns. You can’t just give people a generation or two away, in a world that could be totally different from your own a set of direct orders and expect them to apply. We all have to work out the details as the world changes.

It may not be religious – per se – but I think the myths of human
cultures in the 21st century are the most narratively advanced
they've ever been. We're able to record them and watch exactly
the same story over and over again – so we can search through
it and discover more of what's happening. That's how we can
make myths that critique and take apart themselves.

I’ll put it to you this way. Someone who died in 2010 would have considered Donald Trump nothing but a billionaire asshole game show host.

So on your way to become a revolutionary new person, you have two main concerns. 1) Take the process as far as you can to leave as little of your old, shitty self and world behind. 2) Don’t mess up and become a disastrous failure who aimed for more than you could reach and broke apart.

Yeah, those two don’t exactly fit. Revolutionize your ass! But watch yourself!

Being serious again. What would make the detective a fitting persona for a revolutionary? A combination of care, attention to detail, commitment to ideals, understanding causes and conditions.

Obviously, I’m not talking about real police detectives. I’m talking about the cultural image of the detective, the detective ideal that we see on television – the myth.

I’m going to spell out those detective myths tomorrow. Here’s one last concept I’m developing about myth. It’s only in note form right now.

Semiotics made us mistake our myths for symbols – we now understand the images and narratives that materially function as myths, as if they were symbols. All the detectives in our televisions, movies, games, and books are different iterations of a myth. A narrative icon of a cultural ideal.

So the detective.

Clues, Signs, Traces, Imperatives I: Change Must Come, Research Time, 22/01/2018

One of my favourite images in Gilles Deleuze’s work is that of the detective. By the end of his life, writing What Is Philosophy?, he’d given such images a different name – conceptual personae.

A conceptual persona is a style of thinking, but understood as the model for the thinker herself to follow. It's the shape you settle into as you fly along the narrative, making it up as you go along – in this particular case – thinking as a detective.

Seeing through chaos. Returning to old models, but offering new
paths to explore. Gilles Deleuze called philosophy catching hold of
chaos in thought. But would an empiricist philosophical practice be
able to catch hold of chaos in the physical world of everyday life,
make a new kind of sense out of what was only confusing,
disorienting, and mysterious before?

Detective philosophers are empiricists – their primary questions are about understanding, in Deleuze’s words, “what happened.” Such an empiricism brings philosophical thinking – whose peculiar styles Deleuze describes as "catching hold of chaos" – with cultural theory and the social sciences.

I think that's a great idea. Philosophical thinking is about the careful creation of new concepts, the analysis of their components, and their relationships with each other. Bringing that conceptual engineering to the empirical research programs of cultural studies and the many branches of sociology can create a powerful new research program – even a revolutionary way of thinking.

Naturally, there are a lot of factors in the way of such a development. One is that it’s – in Deleuze’s words – a minoritarian intellectual movement. It’s a rebellion against the mainstream institutional norms of scholarship – disciplines fragment, but rarely unite.

Academia is an institution whose growth engine is schism, division, breaks, fragmentation into isolated silos of discourse. Create a new journal with an even narrower research constituency. Start creating new departments and hire more contingent adjunct professors to teach their courses.

Doesn’t matter that fewer universities can subscribe to all those new journals, since no journal ever lowers its subscription price in this supply-crowded market. Doesn't matter that new departments will compete with each other and older disciplines for limited pools of research, teaching funding, and student pools. Doesn’t matter that the system is perverse and devouring itself.

Academia needs people to open paths of rebellion and revolution against its vicious incentives. We have a piece going up at SERRC tomorrow discussing this exact need to demolish the most destructive institutional habits of humanities scholarship. So I have this on the mind.

Our images of detectives in popular culture have plenty of
complications – colonialist, racist, sexist, classist. The
implications are everywhere – the detective is, after all, a
police officer. The endpoint of a detective narrative is when
someone goes to prison. The question is how to become a
detective in your thinking that opens a liberatory path.

But I’ve been thinking recently that such a radical change is necessary. Consider this notion. I describe to a friend the idea to combine philosophical conceptual and critical techniques with the historical and sociological methods of cultural studies and the different social sciences.

My friend’s reaction: “That sounds like an amazing inter-disciplinary field!” We apply for research grants, build up a few major methodological works and studies, set up a few offices, start a journal, develop a graduate (and then an undergraduate) curriculum. We’ve ended up creating our own fragmented silo of a narrow discipline.

This is the institutional tragedy of what’s typically called interdisciplinary studies. You first approach the problem wanting a vector that Deleuze and Félix Guattari called trans-disciplinary – a new direction of thinking, writing, and research that explores entirely new territory with an entirely new structure than the academy.

You ended up with another academic department. Shit. It makes you think you might have to leave the university institutions behind to have any real success with these creative new directions. Or at least head out to its limits while still being able to access some of its funding and office space.*

* Or at least office supplies.

What would such a new kind of empiricist philosophy look like? Well, I can start with a brief thought about the institutions. Unfortunately, that thought is that I have no idea what those institutions would look like at all.

Such a research program would have to rely largely on universities for funding. Even if funding could be taken care of independently, the program would still need existing bodies of actual research. There would probably be a lot of online organizing among participants, making it potentially a global enterprise.

But that’s all I’ve got right now. So what would the actual research and writing practice be?