Against Public Philosophy

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a supreme court judge, it is generally understood that your are foregoing your freedom to be, at least publicly, more than a diplomat or a priest or a judge. But the professorial career doesn't rise, I don't think, to that level of vocational self-erasure, where one is no longer free to be more than what one is.

Nonetheless, it's a damned hard path to carve out: a multi-layered life of different kinds of creative and intellectual output. Those who succeed in forging such a life are both courageous and innately talented-- I'm thinking for example of Adrian Piper (artist and philosopher) or William Gass (novelist and philosopher). There are no doubt countless others who were squeezed out of the academy when they came to understand that staying in would likely require the sacrifice of certain other dimensions of their personhood.

Yet something is happening in the present moment that complicates matters a great deal. All of a sudden, there seems to be a general reversal of the valence of extramural activities undertaken by academic philosophers, from bad to good. There is a hitch however: these activities must be subsumable within the academy under the banner of “outreach”.

I have resented the academy's claims on my time and my soul so much over the years that I have often taken rather destructive measures to distance myself from my discipline, pursuing my own ends, working in non-academic genres of writing. For a long time this seemed to come at a cost. Recently, however, I have been noticing that this writing is being taken up by philosophy peers as a contribution to the broader public mission of the discipline. It seems, now, there's just no escape.

I take the recent rise of public philosophy as an attempt by the neoliberal academy to claim for itself everything we do, to leave us no space for autonomy except perhaps within the privacy of our families. This overreach, of course, is facilitated by the new technologies that also prevent us from ever truly finishing our work day or our work week or our work year, the surveillance devices that pick up traces of our creative activity, convey them to our peers, and let them know that we are not at the present moment reviewing tenure dossiers or grant applications, and this with no legitimate alibi that we are spending time with our family or sleeping. (The current ubiquitous celebration of the family among progressive academics within the neoliberal academy is, I suspect, in turn, an expression of anxiety: work has destroyed our creative autonomy, and it is coming for our intimacy too, as increasingly technology is making it possible to monitor the health of our most private relationships from outside. So for the moment academics tweet about going to their kids' sports events and watching TV with the fam and so on, and they pretend this is down-time from their jobs. But is it really?)

The concern here parallels, I think, Jonathan Kramnick's recent criticism of “interdisciplinarity”. Of course it's good in principle to reach out across disciplinary boundaries and to learn as much as you can from other specialists and create beautiful music together. The problem is with the way this obvious desideratum is instrumentalized by people who really are not interested at all in our beautiful music. They want us to cross boundaries because that is a first step towards our elimination. Water that spills over the edge of a pool evaporates faster. And similarly with public philosophy: something that is in itself an obvious human good is something we need at least to be cautious about when it becomes an institutional good. 

Of course in some sense Gass's or Piper's entire oeuvre is “public philosophy”: the fact that these artists are philosophers informs what they do in fundamental ways. But this isn't what the neoliberal academy means when it encourages “public philosophy”. What it is encouraging, rather, is a variety of “service”, as in, that one-third of the promotion dossier that hangs there at the end, the poor cousin of teaching and research. The academy will try, to the extent possible, to subsume whatever creative work one of its own puts out there, redescribing and repackaging our work as if it were done for the sake of the guild. But there is a limit to what redescription can do. It is very adept at absorbing non-fiction prose writing, less so when it comes to fiction. And it doesn't even bother to try to claim the poetry or visual art of guild members as its own. Piper's parallel career as a visual artist is radical, defiant, and threatening; Gass's career as a novelist is a curiosity. I can think of a number of cases of academic philosophers who are also successful musicians; the academy generally celebrates them, in its own way-- which often means unwittingly belittling their musical work with the inane and impoverishing label of “hobby”. This is a word for control freaks, for domestic abusers who see their partners' accomplishments and passions as trivial, for mid-century misogynist journalists who assumed that Frida Kahlo was the lesser partner in her relationship with Diego Rivera; for institutions that don't want their employees to do anything but work, and that will tolerate other endeavours only to the extent that they are seen to have some restorative effect that improves production the following day. 

This uneasy relation to disciplinarily non-specific creation reveals a deep unease about the place of philosophy in the world, and it speaks to the dismal consequences of many decades of retreat from the world by anglophone philosophy that the only means it has to engage with the broader culture is by clunky conjunction: Spider-man and Philosophy, Breaking Bad and Philosophy, and so on, those awful edited volumes that accumulate in the philosophy section of every suburban Barnes & Noble. I'd imagine there are contributors to the books in this series who make the case to their peers and administrators that this counts as “public philosophy”. Good for them if it helps them to secure their positions, but woe unto the era that sees philosophy as something that can only engage with culture as if across a divide, bringing its “tools” to make sense of a world where it does not naturally belong, for the purpose of low-status service to the discipline, appreciated, but not that much, like heading up the libraries committee.

One thing this dreary arrangement forgets is that there is an old and venerable model for philosophers to engage with culture, not with an “and” but with an “in”. This is what is known as “criticism”. It has often been produced by philosophers, or by people sufficiently immersed in a learned tradition to know as much about philosophy as one would come to know in the process of getting officially licensed by the guild. Lessing did it, Schiller did it, Adorno did it: they wrote about the cultural output of their time, not as a parenthesis in their philosophical careers for the sake of some light-hearted Entspannung, not to show “non-philosophers” that philosophy can be “fun”, but because they were philosophers and it was obvious to them that such endeavours, creative and intellectual at once, were within the scope of their calling. They hated fun, or at least did not consider it something to be valued for its own sake.

I hate fun too, and I have no interest in convincing anyone that philosophy partakes of the fun. I am not some jovial country vicar who, for the good of the parish, joins in for a bean-bag toss or a three-legged race at carnival time. I would be happy to do “public philosophy” in a cultural setting in which the bounds of philosophy and non-philosophy, member and non-member, specialized and popular, were differently drawn. But as things are, no way. I'll do my job, I'll do it well, and I'll clock out when I'm done. And I will resist to the end the neoliberal academy's attempt to claim for itself, aided by the emerging system of surveillance capitalism, what is in fact mine alone.

Comments

[Grant]

I first read JEHS as a satirist writing fiction, and itrigued, tried to read some of his 'philosophical' work; especially drawn to these academic infights.

[Nick]

I have to attend a meeting on "outreach" in a couple of weeks. I'll be bringing this along and reading from portions of it. Thanks!