Carl, over at the marvelously named Dead Voles, has an interesting post up on the so-called “new philosophy” and its relationship to the history of philosophy. As Carl writes:
As I’ve remarked recently, finding repetition in history is subject to a variety of difficulties of fact and interpretation. Context matters, and we may also recall Marx’s quip in The 18th Brumaire that while the first time is tragedy, the second is farce. Still, while philosophers as such are under no obligation to take history seriously, for historians of philosophy it’s important that philosophical ideas claim universality unlike almost anything else in history, so taking philosophy seriously also involves putting decontextualized comparison in play. This procedure does reveal some striking similarities; it seems that folks have been asking roughly the same questions and coming up with roughly the same answers for a long, long time. Apparently none of them have been fully satisfactory.
For historians this is no worry; we find our kicks in context and we’re not so much concerned with what Truth Is as what people think it was at particular places and times. For reflective philosophers who aren’t just interested in joining an intellectual gang it may be more concerning, although in the several thousand years of recorded philosophy any number of soothing ideologies have been invented to cope with its disappointments. And there’s always context to make the difference. As for Mikhail, Graham asks “Could it be that philosophy is starting over again?” There you go, Mikhail. Just be patient. If you wait a couple thousand years, we’ll come back around to Kant again.
Read the rest here.
I’m gratified to hear reference to a “new philosophy”, rather than the conclusion that those developing these positions are just a few crackpots on blogs and out of the way places. I think Carl hints at something important in this post without quite making it explicit. In other word, in addition to approaching new philosophical movements at the level of their content and philosophical claims, I think it’s important to approach philosophy as a social assemblage embodied in entities called universities, colleges, journals, and conferences, that link people together in a particular way and which strives to (re)produce certain form of thought among those lodged in these networks. In short, philosophy should not be examined simply as a body of texts and dialogues, but also as a set of institutional practices that vary from milieu to milieu, historical setting to historical setting. We should take the manner in which job interviews are organized at the APA, how journals function, what bodies are brought together, etc., as we should the texts which are discussed and written.
read on!
I think a lot of what’s going on is difficult to understand without understanding the institutional context in which it’s taking place. I am not suggesting that this is the only explanation of the emergence of new orientations of thought, but it is an important one that often gets ignored by philosophers due to their discursive mode of thinking which tends to displace the sociological and institutional as a relevant dimension of analysis. Here I think the sorts of analyses folks like Gramsci, Foucault, and Bourdieu (especially the sublime Distinction and Homo Academicus) do are highly relevant to understanding what is going on.
For me, Kant is not the real target, but rather social constructivists and linguistic idealists, whom I believe to be descended from a certain Kantian tradition. However, while there are real philosophical disputes in this issue, a lot of the things Mikhail is sensing have less to do with straight philosophy and philosophers, but with how Continental philosophy is taught in the United States and the Anglo-Speaking world. It would be no exaggeration to say that graduate students are literally terrorized by the history of philosophy over the course of their education. They are taught to be careful readers of texts in the history of philosophy, to write articles on thinkers in the history of philosophy, to present papers on the history of philosophy, etc.
Moreover, Continental journals and conferences are set up in these terms as well. It is very difficult to get anything published as a Continentalist if it is not on Heidegger, Kant, Deleuze, Husserl, Sartre, etc. Where students get into philosophy because they want to grapple with certain sets of questions and problems, they end up having to filter all these questions and problems through another thinker in order to have any place in the academy. Moreover, Continentalists, unlike Analytics, are not taught to develop arguments or concepts, but rather to take positions through another thinker. That is, you are enjoined to side with Heidegger or Kant or Hegel or Husserl or Deleuze, etc. Generally the Europeans provide the philosophers (i.e., those authorized to do philosophies) and Anlo-American Continentalists are required to be scribes that comment on these master-thinkers, expanding and developing their thought in a variety of ways.
As some readers of my blog know, I teach at a two year college. It is a very good and unusual two year college with terrific colleagues (especially in philosophy), but a two year college nonetheless. Right out of the gate in grad school, I received a number of interviews from universities with graduate programs, and I have received interviews with graduate programs every subsequent year that I’ve applied for positions. However, if I was willing to take a position at a two year school, it wasn’t simply for money and a stable position– though that was certainly a serious consideration –but also because I would have absolute intellectual freedom to pursue my thoughts and interests as I saw fit. In other words, I would no longer have to worry if my approach fit with the primacy of the history of philosophy dictated by the Continental conferences, journals, and presses. I would no longer have to worry whether my interest in psychoanalysis, sociology, media studies, rhetoric, etc., fit with the Continental institution and was relevant to getting tenure or getting published (generally these things have very little place in philosophy departments around the country, with notable exceptions like Johnston). I could do what I wanted. It’s notable, in this connection that a number of those worked up about the “new philosophy”, are either in exile or out of the way places with respect to the most prestigious Continental positions, or are outside of philosophy altogether. There’s a reason for this, and I suspect it’s not a philosophical reason.
I believe that my book on Deleuze, Difference and Givenness, shows my bonafides where the history of philosophy and, in particular, Kant, are concerned. There I tried to show that the real hero for Deleuze is not Hume or the British Empiricists, but rather Kant’s critical philosophy. In short, I tried to show how Deleuze’s thought was a radicalization of Kant’s transcendental idealism, that went beyond this position while working through it. This required a close analysis of much in Kant (as well as a number of other philosophers from the tradition). But at a certain point one grows extremely weary in speaking through others. This is not to say that my thought is original or new, that it isn’t influenced, or that it doesn’t reinforce the wheel, but at least it’s my piece of shit and tries to speak directly in my name. It’s better, after all, to have your own piece of shit than to always linger on about the shit of others. In other words, at least what I’m trying to develop addresses the sorts of questions I asked myself when I first began studying philosophy at the age of fifteen, rather than constantly trying to find other philosophers asking the sorts of questions and developing the sorts of answers that I would like. In other words, I can sleep at night, even if what I’m developing is facile through and through. And none of this precludes influence or taking the history of philosophy seriously. It does preclude writing books like Difference and Givenness.
In addition to this, as far as philosophical alliances go, I think there are a lot of extra-philosophical considerations that go into which philosopher or philosophers a graduate student decides to dissertate on. In this respect, I’m proud of my decision to write on Deleuze, because it was pretty much career suicide and therefore marked a genuine interest. There is generally very little place for Deleuze in philosophy departments around the country. If you’re a Continental, your prospective position will either be at a four year school in a “sleepy little liberal arts college” where they basically want you to be capable of teaching existentialism, phenomenology, the history of philosophy, and some nebulous thing they sometimes advertise as “postmodernism”, or you have a shot of being a superstar and landing a position at some place like Penn State, Suny Stoneybrook, and a host of others. The latter schools tend to be dominated by Germanists, such that French thought, with the possible exception of Derrida and a few French Continentalists, are relegated to lit departments or language departments. Game theoretical reasoning becomes predictable. If you’re going to land a position you must either work on some canonical figure that will be marketable to programs that have a strong history of philosophy component (Plato, Aristotle, various medievals, rationalists, empiricists, Kant and German Idealism, or respected and canonical phenomenologists). There are always exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between. The net effect is that in order to do philosophy as a Continentalist, you have to make a detour through some other figure in the history of philosophy because you have to consider what will allow you to eat or land a position. The devil’s wager you make is that once you finally land the position then you’ll be able to set to work “doing” philosophy. However, you then face a grueling six odd years of trying to land tenure, when again you have to give your pound of flesh to the history of philosophy machine to land your tenure. By the time you’re done, after doing seventy hour weeks in your chosen area of research, after reading everything that has ever been written on say Husserl and by Husserl, you have forgotten how to think in anything but these sorts of terms because writing and research are processes of individuation that create particular forms of subjectivity. In addition to this, you become extremely defensive against any form of thought and research that does not proceed in this way because, perhaps, you remember what first drove you to enter philosophy in the first place and harbor resentment towards a machine of subjectivization that required you to sacrifice that, while also recognize that your livelihood and being are dependent upon that institutional apparatus. This problem is exacerbated at the interview level. Because Continental philosophy is organized around texts and thinkers rather than problems and questions, potential candidates face a daunting situation in which they must be capable of explaining very singular texts and thinkers to an audience that is thoroughly unacquainted with that work (for example, small liberal art school committees that aren’t aware that Continental thought continued after Sartre and Heidegger). As a result, there is a feedback effect where philosophical projects have to be explained in terms of canonical figures that cross the Analytic/Continental divide and that any educated philosopher is reasonably acquainted with. So it goes.
I must add that it’s been far more fulfilling– and surprisingly peaceful (why is that?) –to debate about whether a particular position is coherent, whether it can deal with a particular phenomenon, whether a particular implication follows, etc.; than to argue over whether one would be better served in siding with Deleuze, Badiou, Kant, or Heidegger, whether Lacan offers more than Foucault or Bourdieu, and so on. I am not sure why this is so much more fulfilling, but minimally it seems that rather than maintaining tribal lineages (the Deleuzians against the Lacanians against the Badiouians) it’s a question of working through problems where some or all of these thinkers might be relevant and important in some respects, but where the issue is squarely focused on trying to make sense of the world and our place in it.
Larval Subjects . 
January 27, 2009 at 4:02 am
Great post. If you’re a “crackpot” it would only be in the good way…
I don’t really have anything substantive to add. For the most part, I think your diagnosis is accurate. I will suggest one thing and it’s regarding the “relevance” of philosophy, which is a theme I have noticed around LS for a while, e.g. political questions, for one. And certainly, one might point to the last 100 years of philosophy. I know this is going to sound reactionary, but really, many of the recent philosophical trends, not least deconstruction, part of the general “turn to language” in the 20th century–a movement, as one of my friends would argue, that began with Hegel–seems on the face of it to be largely irrelevant to the concerns of the larger population. And why not? Let’s take the “recent deconstruction phenomenon” for one example. In one (albeit reductive)sense, isn’t “deconstruction” simply the continual clever manipulation of words, syntax etc? This points to another question that gestures back to Aristotle, do philosophers in the “academy” concern themselves with the “good life?” Or other forms of life? One might even ask if philosophers in the academy are actually philosophers in this sense?
And this points to another problem often discussed over at PE and elsewhere and what you are touching on here: the vast amount of secondary literature that is produced, is on the whole, solely produced to be a line or two on the cv. Cynical? Of course, but come on, the publish or perish attitude promotes this, which in fact is flooding libraries, the internet, bookstores and databases with largely monotonous, narcissistic mediocre academic drek (I include myself. Anybody who has written a dissertation knows this awful monotony, especially with a “difficult” figure in which one needs to “introduce” the language etc peculiar to said thinker. I wonder what it would mean to refuse this structure. After all, philosophers weren’t bona fide professionals until the late 18th or 19th century.
So, all that said, I too have certainly felt much of the “backlash” you describe throughout and would agree that the logic rears itself rather ugly in particular throughout job interviews/job talks. I wrote a dissertation that was rather iconoclastic and although I wouldn’t have described it as career suicide, it would appear we are in the same boat teaching at similar institutions. My problem is finding the time to juggle my 5/4 load and all the other duties with my research interests that reach across disciplines, but at least I don’t have to give into the institutional structure you describe above.
I could go on, but I’m far too distracted by the Aussie Open…
—Shahar
January 27, 2009 at 6:51 am
I too am grateful for this post and the quoted one as well. I must admit that the ‘camping’ of philosophical thought greatly troubles me… I cringe at the idea of being called a ‘Derridean’ or a ‘Deleuzian’, even though my whole orientation draws from them immensely. As Deleuze once wrote with Claire Parnet, ‘philosophers have always been something else, they were born from something else.’ It’s refreshing to see that others have serious questions about our roles in institutions and within different assemblages.
Let me ask you then, do you think this is largely a problem stemming from the academicization of philosophy or is it a deeper social problem, or both? I always took Deleuze and Guattari, much from even their own interviews, to viewing their work as having a largely temporal gesture; one arms oneself, with others, with various weapons, textual or otherwise, to produce and create war machines, retained and abandoned with the changing socio-political-economic-libidinal field(s). And these interventions and productions can develop new, or different meanings, with different configurations through time and history, but these interventions, always already political in nature (yes, I think ontology, or instance, given the other post, is inherently a political question) are tied to art in direct protest to the concept of art that Plato gives in the “Republic.” Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger and particularly Derrida (in my opinion) were all incredible writers too. I’m not saying I’m any of them, but how do we create, produce, engender or nurture these kinds of spaces? Can this be in the institution? What is the role of the teacher in philosophical study? Does it have a political role? Should philosophy be an institutional practice? If so, how so? This questions are ones I give a lot of thought to, it’s good to see others are also having this conversation, better even with each other.
cheers.
January 27, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Let me join the cheers, Levi, I think you’re right on the money vis-a-vis continental tradition, history of philosophy and arguments – having stepped out of the tradition on one or two occasions (say in my interest in neuroscience and general philosophy of mind tradition), I have noticed the huge difference in style.
January 27, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Amazing post, I completely agree without knowing much about the specifics of the interview process and differences between continental and analytic institutions. I can only speak from my personal experience as someone who, though very interested in it, avoided philosophy in school because of the preconception that it would entail recycling thinkers who had very little to say to me. I used Deleuze & Guattari in at least one paper for nearly 3 straight years worth of semesters in college; ironically, this would have been impossible under the philosophy major, where I would’ve been forced to regurgitate Plato, Aristotle, and the rest. To some degree philosophy departments kill the very practice of philosophy itself and I wonder how many students are turned off, or how many simply turn into textual reference machines rather than generators of “new” ideas.
Harman has a post up in response that’s very good as well.
January 27, 2009 at 3:31 pm
I hope no one minds if I add my two cents.
My impression of the institutional scenes of philosophy is something like the following: the most influential philosophers of the last 50 years or so (i.e. within the last two generations of philosophy, so as to include everyone’s supervisor), have been some form of hermeneutician, deconstructionist, psychonanalsyst, etc. That is, the last 50 years has been almost exclusively a textually oriented approach to philosophy and its history (this is obvious in the first two cases, the psychoanalyst is less obvious, but what the hell else would it mean to say that the ‘unconscious is structured like a language,’ or that we’re interested in signifiers and their functions, etc). So, there’s no escaping the stupid linguistic turn for any of us.
and I don’t think that language, or social constructivism, or whatever else have you, is really the problem. The problem is that immanent critique (which all variants of the linguistic turn are forced to use, because language is the whole of possible experience, lived experience, etc, and there no outside to it, etc etc) has been a catastrophic failure at the level of ‘philosophical method.’
In fact, try floating an idea for a philosophical method in a philosophical circle, and see what kind of reaction one is likely to get. The reception of ‘method’ these days seems worse than the reception of ‘system.’ (you can have a system/theory, but you can’t have a method!?).
Anyway, one of the problems of immanent criticism, is that it has no problems. It adopts them, develops them, and transforms them, without of course being able to say ‘I.’
But I don’t want to belabor the point. so I’ll leave off here. Suffice it to say, then, I don’t think it’s a problem with how students are taught, as much as what the history of philosophy actually looks like, that’s the problem. Moreover, it’s hard to see how some of the claims that make philosophy feel so sterile to some folks are really all that wrong. but anyway…
January 27, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Ah, a big party at Levi’s again… Is he out getting some more beer and sausages?
January 27, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Hi Alexei,
While I don’t entirely disagree, I think you attribute too much power to ideas here. Ideas, like anything else, need to pay their way. Or, put metaphorically, ideas are thermodynamic in that they require work. If an idea is to be successful it must enlist actors that will act on its behalf. This process of enlistment involves a number of factors that are extra-philosophical. It requires presses to print books and journals, institutions where it might be taught, professors to teach it, conferences to expand it, dissertation directors to direct the research of enlistees, and so on. These factors do not pertain to the inherent plausibility or convincing nature of the thesis, but are entirely necessary for any idea, plausible or implausible, to perpetuate and expand itself. I thus don’t think it’s plausible to suggest a unilateral causation where the idea of the linguistic turn came to determine all these other factors. Early proponents of the linguistic turn had to fight and gradually they gained territory, appropriating more and more of the institutional apparatus, allowing, in turn, the enlistment of new actors for their idea so as to take over more of the institutional apparatus. The idea that it is the idea itself that does all the work would be an example of what I call the hegemonic fallacy, while the thesis that the expansion of a particular idea involves the body of ideas, institutional apparatuses, actors, events of communication, and so on, would be an example of what I have in mind by assemblage thinking, where a variety of differential factors must be thought together despite their heterogeneity.
January 27, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Thanks for the neat post Levi. I agree with you that most of the value of my original post is subtextual and you’ve offered much more to work with here.
Speaking of work, you make a great point just above about ideas being thermodynamic. It’s not the case that ideas require work at the same rate or of the same kind, however. Maintaining orbit within a gravity well is much less expensive than powering up to escape velocity. Stretching the metaphor, we could see new assemblages as attempts to cut costs by putting together enough mass for another gravity well, the result being not escape but increasingly eccentric orbits.
Back to Bourdieu, the trick I think is to get over the theological/romantic idea of absolute agency and see ourselves as strategizers within structured fields in which some things are possible, others are not, and no choice is without consequence.
January 28, 2009 at 7:17 pm
“Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.
But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/opinion/27brooks.html?_r=1
January 28, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Sure, did anyone suggest otherwise? The problem with arguments like those Brooks’ is putting forward is that they disingeniously argue from the positive characteristics of institutions to the conclusion that institutions should be preserved in their existing form. In other words, Brooks’ is a variant of the fallacy of arguing from tradition, i.e., the thesis that because a tradition exists that tradition is right. A critique of an existing institution is not equivalent to the rejection of institutions tout court, but is instead directed at improving institutions. The question is not whether or not there should be institutions, but how we should organize our institutions and what the aims of our institutions should be. The point of this post is not to denounce philosophy as an institution, but to indicate that in addition to strictly philosophical issues, we need to look at extra-philosophical issues of how institutions related to the practice of philosophy are organized and the consequences of this organization for the practice of philosophy. Clearly as a philosopher I very much want to preserve institutions that assist me in the practice of philosophy.
January 29, 2009 at 3:14 am
[…] Often this involves me saying what they were already saying as if they hadn’t said it. Or more frequently, if it’s a longer post, it may not be that I missed the point at any point in reading, but […]
January 30, 2009 at 4:20 pm
“I think it’s important to approach philosophy as a social assemblage embodied in entities called universities, colleges, journals, and conferences, that link people together in a particular way and which strives to (re)produce certain form of thought among those lodged in these networks.”
But I think the things that will precisely give us the best guides to doing just that are the earliest dialogues from the philosophic tradition itself – those dialogues of Plato (and perhaps the works of Xenophon). Because beyond the statements within the dialogues, the Platonic dialogues are an analysis of the first philosophic community or enterprise, investigating how that community or enterprise works (or doesn’t work), how philosophy is best transmitted, and so on. The Platonic letters could also be useful in this regard.
And I don’t know if commentary is necessarily so debilitating – after all, the very earliest philosophic texts are themselves commentaries (or reinterpretations) on Socrates’ unwritten teaching.
January 30, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Burritoboy,
the suggestion isn’t that we should get rid of commentary, but rather that we shouldn’t make it the dominant or required mode of philosophizing in Continental programs.
January 31, 2009 at 2:02 am
“the suggestion isn’t that we should get rid of commentary, but rather that we shouldn’t make it the dominant or required mode of philosophizing in Continental programs.”
I certainly agree with what you’re saying in it’s narrow, specific sense of the Continental philosophy academy in the Anglosphere. But I think it wouldn’t do to ignore how incredibly powerful the genre of commentary has been throughout the entire history of philosophic writing. Even so un-academic a philosopher as Machiavelli gets into the act with his Discourses on Livy.
January 31, 2009 at 4:20 am
No disagreement here, Burritoboy. Derrida’s commentary on Husserl, Deleuze’s various commentaries, Heidegger’s commentaries, etc., all come to mind. For me it isn’t a question of excluding commentary or work done in the history of philosophy, but of creating a space in which both these sorts of work and more direct philosophy can take place.
January 31, 2009 at 4:31 am
‘Derrida’s commentary on Husserl, Deleuze’s various commentaries, Heidegger’s commentaries, etc. …’
Can these really be called commentaries? Should stammerings (as Deleuze would put it) like these be called commentary? With all due respect to those who do commentary, commentary seems a bit milder a practice than what these three were ever up to…
February 4, 2009 at 9:17 pm
[…] get done; and second, whether I find the conversation and/or conversants compelling. In the case of the new philosophy I’m solid on the latter, which is why I’ve been engaging with it. But I’m really […]