Mark C. Taylor and the Tenure Controversy

(See follow-up post here.)

With due respect to those who are 'attempting to think after Hegel', I find I have no trouble at all doing such a thing. I do it everyday, often in high spirits. Sometimes I arrive at conclusions; sometimes I discard conclusions to which I'd previously been attached. It's fun, and, while I won't say it's easy, it's certainly not made any more difficult by the intervention of an academic mandarin from 19th-century Germany. So I'm really having trouble understanding what a whole generation of French academic mandarins, along with a subsequent generation of their American epigones, are getting at when they worry about how we are to think after Hegel. I am tempted to borrow here a well-known slogan from a well-known athletic shoe's advertising campaign.

This week I had meant to be thinking-after-Hegel about an article I'm supposed to be writing on diet and virtue as related problems in late-17th-century mechanical philosophy, but I've been bumped off course by Mark C. Taylor's recent end-of-career proposal to retire the entire institution of tenure along with himself. This has caused me to think about things I would have preferred not to be thinking about, including the oeuvre and career trajectory of Mark C. Taylor himself.

My interest piqued by what struck me as his highly dishonorable proposal to dismantle the very system that had enabled him to thrive, I decided to go back and see what in the way of research this enablement had yielded. Here is a bit of what I read in Taylor's 1987 book, Altarity:

"Altarity" most closely approximates "alterity;" the difference between them is nothing more and nothing less than the difference between an e and an a. A strange, nearly foreign word in English, "alterity" (Latin, alteritatem (sic)-- being outside (sic)) means "the state of being other or different; diversity, otherness." The more common French term alterité, is the contrary of identité and specifies otherness or that which is other. "Altarity" folds into "alterity," even as "alterity" is implicated in "altarity." Though recalling the Derridean gesture of substituting an a for an e, the writing of Altarity is not a simple repetition of the translation of différence into différance. Altarity evokes dimensions of difference and aspects of otherness overlooked, excluded, or repressed by the notion of différance (xxix).

At least it can be said that Taylor seems to be having a good time. While "altarity" would not in the end make its way into the lexicon, in those optimistic days one can understand why an English-speaking deconstructionist would have supposed that there was room for a homegrown misspelled-word-that-is-not-a-word. Taylor's wordplay offers an interesting window into an earlier, in some ways more innocent and carefree period of American Derrideanism, when the style of it had not yet become the butt of so much ridicule, and its exponents were free to play in ways that today they would likely try to avoid for fear of serving up more inadvertent self-parody to their opponents.

Altarity took me in turn back to Derrida's 1974 Glas. What struck me again was most of all the possibility of measuring up the work in terms of the relative permissiveness of the time and place that brought it forth. And my goodness, what a time and place, 1970s France, when the truly radical and dangerous aesthetics of sundry littérateurs, notably Burroughs and Genet, would come to find a faint echo in the career output of civil servants whose primary concern was the preservation of their own institutional status.

I am personally very sympathetic to the analysis of Chomsky and others, for whom a certain variety of philosophical obscurantism results not just from sloppiness or from lack of intellectual rigor, but is indeed an intrinsic part of its proponents' strategy for protecting their racket. The usual line of criticism approaches the phenomenon of French obscurantism with the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy (a measure by which it is doomed in advance), when what is in fact needed is sociology. It has often struck me that much American 'continental' philosophy depends on a total ignorance of the social milieu of the Parisian professoriat, and on a consequent inability to detect that what looks like the difficult expression of difficult ideas in writing is in fact just rarefied sociolect. Now sociolect, whether among carnies or professors, helps a group to cohere, and this helps it to survive. For Parisian professors as for speakers of carnie cant, all the better if outsiders are unable to understand.

But Derrida, for his part, likely would never have wanted to see his way of speaking, and the institutional privilege that it helped to assure, disappear along with his own mortal self. I seriously doubt in fact that any member of the Parisian professorial elite ever wonders for a second whether the order in which they are employed is anything less than an eternal one. And this is where Taylor really stands out not just as a mediocre and epigonal scholar, but as a dishonorable character: having failed to make altarity stick, having lived to see that his once high hopes for creating an insider sociolect of his own have quite fizzled, he now thinks that the institutional privilege that such a sociolect might have helped to sustain itself needs to be eradicated. 

This difference in the two cases probably has to do with the impossibility of translation of French philosophy into what the French have taken to calling a 'United-Statesian' context. And this impossibility, in turn, is probably rooted in the difference between the free-agency of American academics on the one hand, who operate, like NBA stars, within a free-market context of individual self-advancement, and on the other hand French academics, whose own self-understanding is as members of a highly elite class of civil servants, where membership is conferred by the Republic itself. For this class to disappear would be for a cosmos to implode. When Taylor's class looks to be under some threat, by contrast, or when it fails to have the sort of membership roster he would like to see (as is intimated in his particular hostility to the very existence of the NYU and Columbia philosophy departments), he finds within himself reserves of American industriousness that would be unimaginable among the Parisian intelligentsia: he announces that it's time for his old business to declare bankruptcy, and moves right into the burgeoning online education industry.*

--

*From Taylor's personal website: "In 1998, he co-founded a company named Global Education Network, whose mission was to introduce high-quality online education in the arts, sciences and humanities to anyone, anywhere in the world."

Comments

[Stephen Menn]

When I was in Germany I noticed that Germans tend to speak of deconstructionism as an American movement, not a French one. And I recall a quite well-known French philosopher telling me, I think with specific reference to Derrida, "philosophy is like beer--some of it is bottled for export." The much lamented Lingua Franca (did you used to read them?) had a comment on the situation, which I'll try to reproduce roughly from memory: "It was perhaps inevitable that the philosophy of the endless deferral of meaning should find its most receptive audience in the land of the junk bond, the leveraged buyout, and the pyramid scheme, where the bottom line reads 'BREAK THIS CHAIN OF SIGNIFIERS AND YOU DIE.'"

[George Gale]

I knew Derrida, Derrida was a beer-drinking-friend of mine; and, Mark Taylor, you're no Derrida.

[S.]

Is "sociology" what they're calling the ad hominem these days?

[Eric Schliesser]

Justin,
Mark C. Taylor deserves all the disapprobation and ridicule you throw at him.

But...you are also throwing cheap shots at the whole of French philosophy (of the 70s and 80s) when you describe its members (without a shred of evidence) as "civil servants whose primary concern was the preservation of their own institutional status." As somebody who has read Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze with interest and some fruitfulness I find this comment completely silly. (Even if it were true it sheds little light on the genuine insights available in their works.)

In your comments you pander to the lowest (and self-serving) instincts of analytic philosophy (which loves to cultivate this image of -- dare I say it -- otherness and un-intelligibility in opposing approaches to philosophy as a way to create its own group identity; first the British Idealists, then Heidegerians, now French philosophy). Your comments give cover to a lot of self-serving, willful ignorance and don't promote the engagement with the published ideas of the French.

[Tom]

I have no sympathy for Derridean obscurantism, but I don't think there's anything straightforwardly dishonorable about a "proposal to dismantle the very system that had enabled [one] to thrive". A proposal to abolish slavery by the child of slaveowners or a proposal to abolish private schools by an alumnus of Eton College wouldn't seem to me to be dishonorable at all. So, to the extent that this is the ground of your complaint about Taylor, I don't think it's a very good complaint. To the extent that the ground of your complaint is that Taylor's reasons for thinking that tenure should be abolished are bad ones, on the other hand, then fair enough.

[Michael]

You write about the "analysis of Chomsky and others, for whom a certain variety of philosophical obscurantism results not just from sloppiness or from lack of intellectual rigor, but is indeed an intrinsic part of its proponents' strategy for protecting their racket." I'm eager to read these analyses but am unaware of the literature. Could you point me to the pieces you had in mind?

[D. Des Chene]

Thanks, Eric. I saw the cheap shot, but I’m tired of answering.

[Nathan Smith]

I'm glad that Justin is being taken to task for some of the above. Just to pile on a bit:

I know you understand that "thinking after Hegel" does not simply mean thinking at some date that happens to appear on a calendar after the time that Hegel wrote, lived, etc. The idea of "thinking after" someone or something means thinking through, incorporating, and responding to that person or thing. So 'to think after' is to attempt to take seriously, incorporate, respond to, and move beyond a person, thinker, or event.

Now, clearly, Hegel is a significant figure to attempt to 'think after'. This is the person who wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit after all. So, it is no obvious task to "think after Hegel," and notwithstanding your impressive mental acuity and breadth of scholarship, I would wager that there are few days on which you think after Hegel in this sense. Perhaps I am wrong about this?

[Cameron]

Tom,

I think an analogy that better captures Taylor's move would be something like this: a proposal to abolish slavery by the child of slave owners, accompanied by an offer of employment in the only other industry in town - incidentally, a sweat shop owned by said abolitionist.

[H.]

What a feeble pile on!

To Nathan Smith - clearly Horace is a significant figure to attempt to "think after" too. He did, as you know, write the Satires. You've encountered satire before, no?

To 'S' - on offer here is an observation that, with judicious rewording, could become a legitimate sociological hypothesis.

To Eric - It is difficult to understand your final claim, as Justin has explicitly not made, or pandered to, the traditional analytic critique.

[S.]

Yes, well, "Nietzsche wore pink panties" could also presumably become legitimate sociological hypothesis, but doesn't seem like becoming one could make it relevant to Nietzsche's thought.

[H.]

If one were to accuse Nietzsche of wearing pink panties (what's wrong with that anyway?) in the course of debating one or another of his philosophical positions, the comment would be out of line - an ad hominem. If the discussion was about, for instance, the Italian influence on the fashion sense of German philosophers in the late 19th century, the comment would be perfectly apropos. Justin's discussion is clearly of the latter sort.

[Julia]

To S and H, I would venture that whether or not Nietzsche wore pink panties could be quite relevant to his work. It's not even such a silly example. Ecce Homo reads like a sociological explanation for his writing and includes mention of what he ate and his physical ailments. Nietzsche speaks often of fecundity; depending on how literally he means this, the pink panties may be a bad idea! Nietzsche lauds a cheerful, playful way of life as important to good thought, so perhaps the pink panties are an outward manifestation of his light-hearted soul!

I frankly cannot figure out why one would oppose ad hominem arguments. A philosopher's thought can far exceed his intentions and his biographical eccentricities, but both of these considerations can also shed light on his thought, especially if, as for Nietzsche, we are all the guinea pigs for our own good (and not so good) ideas.

[Nathan Smith]

J - Don't misunderstand: I'm not saying that one is obliged to think after Hegel, or anyone else for that matter. I'm just saying that most thought chronologically following Hegel's death doesn't think after him in the requisite way. Surely, there are others for whom this is important too. I try to "think after" Descartes most days, for instance. I consider this important.

[Nathan Smith]

Oops, that's H (one key to the left).

[H.]

Nathan,

Thanks for clarifying. I may have read you as making a stronger claim - that, given the significance of his work, we are obliged to think after/through/with Hegel. We would agree, instead, that such significance is confined to whatever self-selecting textual tradition takes Hegel as a forebearer. (Justin makes this point very clear in his follow-up post.)

Really, I'm not sure that I think after anyone in the "requisite way". I'm happy just to think 'about' Descartes or whomever.

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