Oh wow this looks awesome. I'll hitchike there if I have to.
This year's Summer School is organized by Michael Forster and Markus Gabriel (discussed briefly in this post), and in addtion to Gabriel, Willem DeVries, Paul Redding, and Robert Stern will all be lecturing.
I'm in the middle of two Stern books and they're just dynamite, After Virtue level dynamite where you start reading at eleven and then realize it's four in the morning and don't know where the time has gone.
Imagine for a minute how you might respond if I were to insist that Cornell West can only be understood as a black philosopher and presented my own work in terms of the necessity of overcoming black philosophy. Imagine that my work involved understanding the history of philosophy in terms of a contrast between black and Greek philosophy and moreover understood different black philosophers in terms of their place in this contrast. Moreover, imagine that Cornell West repeatedly publicly stated that he hated my reductive understanding of his work as merely being epiphenomenal aspect of some black racial essence, yet I continued to hector him with it.
Would it be hyperbole to say that I was being racist?
Is it hyperbole to say that the homologous aspects of François Laruelle's work are anti-semitic ("black" being "Jewish" and "Cornell West" being Jacques Derrida)? I write this because I feel bad for snarkily responding to a comment by "APS" to this post. The fact is, I had no idea what she was talking about when she wrote:
So is this what OOO does now? They just write posts about how they are unfairly maligned and treated poorly while their major figures go around accusing people of anti-semitism? Neat. Really makes me want to take you guys seriously.*
APS' comment was not only surreally uncharitable to my post, but I just had no idea who is going around accusing people of anti-semitism. This has prompted quite a bit of e-mail discussions to try to discern what she was talking about. Yesterday we figured it out.
A nice week for all things Carnapia:
Cool Stuff!
Anyhow, please check out Eric's post and new blog. He's allowing comments, so I'm doing the unborglike thing* by closing comments to this post.
[Notes:
*And pre-empting any Pacino turns.]
Full disclosure: I met Jeremy Gilbert at a Deleuze conference in Wales in the summer of 2008. He gave an interesting paper on Deleuze, Guattari, and Gramsci and I ended up talking to him at pub. The conversation was one of shared interests that went beyond Deleuze, it was a Deleuze conference after all, to include Simondon, transindividuality, and the broader problem of reimagining collectivity in individualistic (and individuated) times. As anyone in academia knows, the experience of meeting someone with shared interest is often ambivalent. There is the joy of finding someone to talk to, of feeling less alone in the wilds of academia, coupled with the sadness of feeling less original, less insightful. The latter feeling is of course intensified by a publishing culture that is predicated less on collective projects and more on developing a highly individuated name for oneself. In the years since then, as our projects progressed (his made it to print first) we joked about constituting a new school of thought, Transindividual Ontology and Politics (TOP)?
It seemed appropriate to begin a review of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism with such a story, one that illustrates the way in which commonality of interests and ideas intersects with an institution geared towards individuation and competition. That we live in an “age of individualism” perhaps goes without saying. However, such a judgment raises as many questions as it answers. At what level are we to locate the individual? Is it, to borrow, words from Foucault, an “illusion,” an “ideological effect,” or a real functioning element of society? In short, are people deluded into seeing themselves as individuals, or is individuation a real material effect?
I think that a lot of people in the straight world* react weirdly to disabled people for a couple of reasons. First, they recoil at just how much effort it takes the person to accomplish some task ("Jesus Christ, that person's killing himself just to get into a chair!"). Then, the imaginitive placing of themselves in the disabled person's body leads to a further feeling about how humiliating it would be to be like that.** There might also be some instinctive recoil based on the fact that it is initially harder to discern many disabled people's intentions just from scanning their posture and face. But one of the nice things about humans is just how easily they get past these reactions, not just cognitively but phenomenologically. The most ignorant clod will start to see people with Down Syndrome completely differently after a few days working with them. Now consider this bit of rock awesomeness:
Zimmer is amazing in part because nobody has to spend time with him to see beyond his disabilities. It's just impossible to ignore his beauty when he's playing drums.
Slate's Mark O'Connell (here) highlights one of the main virtues of Nardwuar the Human Serviette:
One of the most interesting things about watching a lot of Nardwuar’s interviews (and if you watch one, chances are you’ll end up watching a lot) is the way that they tend to reveal aspects of artists’ personalities that we’re not accustomed to seeing. His aggressive uncoolness—the silly hat, the grating manner, the relentlessly pursued obsession with minutiae—amounts to a kind of challenge. The respect he gets from people like Big K.R.I.T., Grimes, Brother Ali, Pharrell, Snoop Dogg, Joanna Newsom, El-P, Questlove, and Ian MacKaye reflects the extent to which these people are, in their different ways, smart and empathic enough to see past the geeky, gimmicky surface to the value of what he’s doing.
But that uncoolness brings out a lack of basic decency—a shabbiness and stupidity—in others. A 1991 interview with Sonic Youth, for instance, was especially difficult for me, a Sonic Youth fan, to watch—first for how it reveals their stunted and clichéd conception of what it means to be a bunch of cool people in a cool rock band, and then for how it reveals them as just standard-issue schoolyard bullies. Lee Ranaldo breaks a rare 7-inch record Nardwuar has brought them, and then he and Thurston Moore (then age 33 and 35 respectively) grab him and pull his T-shirt over his head as he struggles and shouts. “You idiot!” he screams at Ranaldo. “You fucking piece of shit!” It’s a grim spectacle, but worth sitting through as a reminder of how shallow and transparently fraudulent the performance of countercultural cool can often be.
Next week, I will be teaching my first tutorials at Oxford University (the subject is philosophy of cognitive science). For those unfamiliar with the format, tutorials are one of the forms of teaching at Oxford that every undergraduate has. A lecturer and a student (or a small group of students, maximum 4) convene every week, and the student is guided and gets intensive feedback on the fruits of their independent study. A common procedure is that the student writes a brief paper each week, which they present at the start of the tutorial. The tutor suggests further reading, urges the student to think and to read on the basis of what they have said. There is no lecturing as such going on – it is rather a form of guided self-study.
Tutorials are sometimes misunderstood as a form of hand-holding or spoon-feeding the student, but in fact the format encourages independence and responsibility. The student has to make sure to do all the reading, digest it, and be able to do the final exam on the basis of it. As it's one-on-one (up to four) it is hard to hide and resort to shortcuts instead of actually doing the reading and the thinking. Tutors get support and training in how to guide students on the right track if they slack or lose motivation; timely interventions make sure the attrition rate and failure rate is very low.
Oxford's vice chancellor says the system will ultimately become too expensive, as tutorials cost more per student than the yearly tuition fees, which are capped at 9000 GBP . Educating an Oxford student costs about 16,000 GBP per student, which leaves a gap of 7000 GBP which is filled by various money-sources such as the endowments of colleges. His suggestion is to increase tuition fees – we know the outcome of unbridled student tuition fee increases – and it is a grim prospect. So one may wonder whether the tutorial is an institution worth preserving, given the costs.
The biggest failing in my generation is the inconstancy of our affections, driven by an inconsistent mix of ironic detachment and fear of being uncool.
Think of poor hair bands like RATT, on tour in 1991. In the exact same weeks as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" starts its relentless climb up the charts RATT suddenly finds themselves playing to stadiums that are not even half full. Gen Xers' affections are so inconstant that poor RATT went from the Beatles to Spinal Tap in two weeks.
And then when grunge did get over almost everybody was too scared to really be fans. What if these Nirvana guys end up like RATT?* Far better to mark an arbitrary point where the band "sold out" and claim to only like stuff before that (for Nirana fans Bleach and the material later released on Incesticide, for Soundgarden fans everything before Superunknown, for Nine Inch Nails fans everything before Downward Spiral, for REM fans everything before Warner Brothers debut Green, etc. etc. etc.).
Punk was in part supposed to be about freeing oneself from the hegemony of cool. Grunge was supposed to be a return to this, but it wrecked itself on the shores of a generation embodied by the content-free irony that characterized the television show Seinfeld (laugh track and all) at its best. Irony becomes not the appropriate response to certain aspects of life, but rather a detached way of engaging with everything.
One of the skills philosophers-to-be must master is how to negotiate the ins and outs of getting their papers published in journals. Of course, the main thing is learning how to write good papers in the first place, but as we all know, writing a good paper is not a sufficient condition for achieving publication. As the years go by and I move steadily from ‘young, up-and-coming philosopher’ to someone with responsibilities for training other people, I’ve found it increasingly important to guide them in the process of finding the right home for their papers. Obviously, learning to do so is a never-ending process, and we ‘old people’ are still prone to making strategic mistakes; but there is a thing or two that we learn through experience regarding how to select the right journal(s) to submit a paper to. In this post, I’ll elaborate on some of the ‘strategies’ I’ve been passing on to the people I supervise; many of them will sound obvious to more experienced members of the profession, but I hope they can be useful to those still learning to navigate the seas of the publishing process.
One well-known heuristic is to follow the order of a certain ‘hierarchy’ of journals, from top to bottom. So you start aiming as high as you can, and then go one step down the ladder if your paper is rejected. Now, while this is generally speaking a sensible approach, there is much to be said against it. For starters, it may take a very long time until the paper is finally accepted somewhere, and if you are a young professional in the job market, this is definitely something to be avoided. Moreover, some of the so-called top journals are known for taking much too long before getting back to authors, and this is a luxury that many cannot afford.
New APPS 