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    • The 2016 Election and Racism, Soft and Structural

      Foucault famously proposed that biopolitics – the power to foster life, or allow it to die – tended to produce its own outside in the form of state racism: not only might life be allowed to die, but there might be those who must die, literally or metaphorically, so an inside “we” could live. That is, it is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Society must be Defended, 254).  Note the subtle elision: there is life that is allowed to die, and then there is also life that must die.  Thus, “if you want to live, they must die” (255) becomes the message.  In other words, biopolitics produces two forms, almost simultaneously.  Foucault is thinking of 1930s fascism, where (for example), the German emphasis on the health of the ethnically-German population was coupled with the extermination of European Jews.

      But there’s an analogue, however imprecise, in the Presidential election last week.  In it, we saw two versions of biopolitics.  On the one hand, Clinton ran on a campaign of building a better life together, with a particular emphasis on fostering the lives of children and families.  The Affordable Care Act would be improved.  Paid leave for working parents.  And so on.  Even her negative ads against Trump emphasized the positive biopolitics: our children are watching.  What kind of President do you want them to see? On the Trump side, we saw nothing but Herrenvolk biopolitics: Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans and women were taking over, making America not great.  This had to stop.  Law and Order.  Our country is at its nadir, thanks to an ineffective, losing President who was probably born in deepest, darkest Kenya anyway.  He also somehow founded ISIS, which by the way is winning. China is winning.  Everyone but America is winning.  But if we keep the Mexican rapists out, and all the Muslims, maybe something good can happen.  We will be strong.  We will win again.  In Messianic tones that Masha Gessen reminds us (this piece is a must read) we should take very seriously, he proclaimed that “I alone” can save you.  That almost none of that narrative was true became irrelevant, in the same haunted house in which Clinton’s email server somehow became a darker mark against her character than his many business failings, tax evasions, failures to pay subcontractors, etc.

      Two version of biopolitics.  In Foucauldian terms, Trump was advocating the return of state racism.  At one level, this is an obvious point, given his endless racist rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims in particular.  But liberal commentators, including myself, have tried very hard to explain the Trump victory in other ways.  I have decided it can’t be done.  The Trump election is fundamentally about the maintenance of White Supremacy, something that women and people of color said a week ago.

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    • Two Quick Thoughts on the Election

      Leiter's post-mortem is worth reading, as is the analysis he links to by Ian Kerr.  If Trump does what he ran on (and what in his speech last night he said he wants to do: build infrastructure.  And really, he's right that our infrastructure is a national embarrassment), it's going to be very interesting to see how he intersects with the Republican party in Congress, since they don't want to spend money on things like that, or any of the other populist parts of the Trump agenda.  And his supporters are going to be very disappointed that he can't constitutionally do a lot of what he promised.

      Here are two things that I haven't heard mentioned that need to be talked about.

      1. Libertarians.  Gary Johnson got more votes than Trump's margin of victory in a lot of places, if my memory of late last night serves me well.  What percentage of those votes came from Clinton versus from Trump?  We'll never know, but in a very concrete way, libertarians own the Trump presidency.  When Nader was informed that his candidacy cost Gore in 2000, the response was a smug "well, Gore should have been a better candidate."  No doubt he (and Clinton) could have been better (I'm going to say something about that in point #2).  But that argument fundamentally misunderstands what it means to live in a majoritarian system.  In a parliamentary system, vote for the 5% candidate!  You'll get a seat in parliament, and maybe even a part of a ruling coalition.  But in a majoritarian system, if you vote for a candidate who can't win, you are indicating your acceptance of whoever does win.  You don't care, you can't tell a difference, whatever.  Because you take away a vote from the candidate you regard as less evil.  This isn't strategic voting or anything like that.  This is a structural feature of the system.  Don't blame the parties.  Blame the Constitution.  Anybody who voted for Johnson in a state more of a battleground than California or Texas needs to know that they played a non-trivial part in the Trump victory.  And Trump has indicated hostility to rights: during the campaign, he showed complete contempt for the 1st, 4th (and probably 5th), and 14th Amendments.  And women's rights are next, given that he's going to get Court appointments.  The Contrast with Clinton was very stark.  A Johnson vote in a battleground state was at the level of "what's Aleppo?"
      2. The Auto Bailout.  I had to go out and get milk this morning, and had a moan with the cashier at the grocery store.  She said that she couldn't believe he won Michigan, given the auto bailout.  And then it struck me.  Obama made a very high-risk, unpopular decision to bail out the auto industry – and in the process saved thousands and thousands of largely-white, working class jobs in places like Michigan and Ohio.  In other words, he took a huge risk to help the sort of people who voted for Trump.  Did he help them all?  Of course not.  Did other things he do hurt them?  Probably.  But the rust belt would have been in much, much worse shape without the bailout.  And I didn't hear Hillary mention the auto bailout even once during the campaign.  When you're looking for something to say in Ohio and Michigan about how democratic party elites stand up for working people without college degrees, you should probably start there.  It's an actual achievement, and it took some courage to get it done.

       

    • Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and the APA’s “Code of Conduct”

      by Edward Kazarian and Leigh M. Johnson

      A little over two years ago, more than 600 philosophers petitioned the American Philosophical Association to “produce a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of Philosophy.” The immediate motivation for the petition was several high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by philosophers, which together amplified what many viewed—rightly, in our estimation—as a widespread and endemic culture of hostility, predation, exploitation, and intimidation within the profession.  Shortly thereafter, in March 2014, we co-authored a piece entitled “Please Do NOT Revise Your Tone,” articulating our concerns about the problematic effects of tone-policing, generally, and about the drafting and institution of a “Code of Conduct” by the APA, specifically.  In that piece, we argued that there was good reason to worry that such a Code would:

      1) impose a disproportionate burden of changing their behavior to "fit in" on those who are members of out- (that is, underrepresented or minority) groups within the profession; 2) likely be applied disproportionately against those expressing dissenting views or criticizing colleagues for lapses in judgment or perception; and 3) tend to reinforce or provide opportunities to reiterate the structures of privilege and exclusion already operating within the profession. 

      The Executive Board of the APA subsequently decided in favor of producing the document and, earlier this week, published the final version of the discipline’s official “Code of Conduct” here.

      Reading that document over, our original worries remain unassuaged and unabated, if not also intensified. We are especially concerned now that this quasi-official document—which elaborates a set of norms, but does not include any mechanisms for enforcement, adjudication, or sanction—will inevitably be used at the local (department-, college-, or university) level in unofficial, ad-hoc ways to undermine or sabotage already vulnerable members of the profession. Worse, we worry that this document will provide pretext for attempts to pressure APA members by complaining to their employers that they have in some instance or another behaved ‘unprofessionally.’ We recognize that any law or regulative code as such allows for the possibility of perverse application, but we maintain that the current iteration of this Code of Conduct is particularly susceptible to manipulation for a number of reasons.

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    • Quiet Neoliberalism: K-12 Edition

      One of the important parts in understanding neoliberalism as a particular dispositive of power (or perhaps a mode of biopower – that sort of distinction doesn’t matter here) lies in understanding the various techniques it deploys.  After all, there is no “neoliberalism” or “neoliberal power” existing in the abstract; as Foucault repeatedly demonstrates, power can only be fully understood by digging down to the mircro-level, to all the little practices and techniques that add up to a particular social regime of power.  Attention to these details has been one of my interests  for a while (for example, in the case of privacy notices, or the emergence of best practices).

       At least since Althusser, we’ve been accustomed to recognize the schools as part of the ideological state apparatus, and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish underscored the point.  The locus classicus of neoliberalism in K-12 education is of course the rise of standardized testing regimes such as those imposed by No Child Left Behind.  Another area of focus has been the rise of semi-privatized charter schools.  Here, I want to take note of another, more subtle: the use of online homework assignments.  Recall that one of the central aspects of neoliberalism at work is the erasure of the work/home boundary and the devolution of technological minutiae to employees; the result is what Ian Bogost calls “hyper-employment,” and the necessary parallel rise of what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs,” a phenomenon brought about by the fact that we don’t actually have 24 hours of useful work a day to do. On the job, workers are subject to nearly unlimited surveillance, and things like employee wellness programs extend that surveillance into the home.  It is only to be expected that this surveillant, time-wasting product of the neoliberal thought collective will be visited on our children.

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    • Tenure-Track Philosophy Jobs vs. Philosophy PhD Graduates

      How has the academic job market for philosophers changed in the recent past? I noted last year that it looked as though fewer tenure-track or equivalent jobs were being offered year to year from 2013 to 2015. This job market has just started, and if we look at the period of August 1st to October 20th in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, 2016 seems no worse off than 2015, but both years have fewer jobs listed in that period than in the previous two. To get a more complete picture, I decided to compare tenure-track jobs listed over the full year, from January 1st to December 31st, to the listed graduates in APDA from 2013 to 2016. Two things are worth noting here. First, 2016 is not yet complete, so there are fewer jobs listed in that year for that reason alone. (I suspect its numbers will end up being similar to those for 2015.) Second, PhilJobs has a great many job listings, but not every job listing, so the number of tenure-track jobs are likely somewhat higher in reality (but I do not have an estimate of how much higher). Keeping those details in mind, this comparison doesn't look too bad at first, with 1,486 graduates to 939 jobs, or a TT placement rate that could be as high as 63% (if all of those jobs went to graduates of that time period, which is very unlikely as many of these jobs are "open rank" searches). 

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    • Storytelling in Philosophy Class

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      One of my regular TAs, Chris McVey, uses a lot of storytelling in his teaching. About once a week, he’ll spend ten minutes sharing a personal story from his life, relevant to the class material. He’ll talk about a family crisis or about his time in the U.S. Navy, connecting it back to the readings from the class.

      At last weekend’s meeting of the Minorities And Philosophy group at Princeton, I was thinking about what teaching techniques philosophers might use to appeal to a broader diversity of students, and “storytime with Chris” came to mind. The more I think about it, the more I find to like about it.

      Here are some thoughts.

      * Students are hungry for stories, and rightly so. Philosophy class is usually abstract and impersonal, or when not abstract focused on toy examples or remote issues of public policy. A good story, especially one that is personally meaningful to the teacher, leaps out and captures attention. People in general love stories and are especially ready for them after long dry abstractions and policy discussions. So why not harness that? But furthermore, storytelling gives real shape and flesh to the abstract stick figures of philosophical abstraction. Most abstract principles only get their full meaning when we see how they play out in real cases. Kant might say “act on that maxim that you can will to be a universal law” or Mengzi might say “human nature is good” — but what do such claims really amount to? Students rightly feel at sea unless they are pulled away from toy examples and into the complexity of real life. Although it’s tempting to think that the real philosophical force is in the abstract principles and that storytelling is just needless frill and packaging, I think that the reverse might be closer to the truth: The heart of philosophy is in how we engage our minds when given real, messy examples, and the abstractions we derive from cases always partly miss the point.

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    • Case Study for the Academic Boycott Question: North Carolina’s HB2

      This piece is in response to the discussion over at Daily Nous here.  You should read it first; I’m posting here partly because what I’ve got to say is longer than would reasonably fit into a comment, and partly because I want to think a bit about how difficult the question of whether to launch a boycott is, and Justin wanted to avoid that topic (I may be a little slow in approving comments the next couple of days, be patient).  Since I live in Charlotte, NC, I do however think my subject position gives me some space for speaking on the topic.  And to be honest, I have very mixed feelings – David Wallace’s first comment on the Daily Nous post (that we need to know the details) seems right to me.  Here’s an example of why: One might boycott Charlotte on either of two grounds: the police shooting of Lamont Scott, or the state’s passage of HB2.  I want to leave aside the police shooting for the moment, because the politics behind HB2 lend support to the difficulty of deciding whether to boycott, and if so, what to boycott (plus, police shootings are an aspect of the boycott idea, and it remains to be seen whether the protests in Charlotte manage to get anyone’s sustained attention about the city’s deep racial problems).

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    • On the Police Shooting in Charlotte, and being Ordered to Remove a Post

      For those who haven’t been following the news, there was a police shooting in Charlotte the night before last.  The facts of the case are still being investigated: the police claim that the black man who was shot had a gun; his family says he had a book.  I’m not sure the distinction matters, as North Carolina is an open carry state, so “he had a gun” isn’t obviously relevant.  There were violent protests both last night and the night before.  Yesterday afternoon, I put the following statement on the Ethics Center’s webpage (including the italicized portion marking it as my own).  I woke up this morning to an email ordering me to take it down, and to call my dean.  I am not going to die on this hill, so I removed the post.  But we live in a world where University Ethics Center directors are not allowed to attempt to exercise moral leadership in the communities they serve, even as those universities claim to commit and recommit to their communities. And where Ethics Centers are forced to be strangely silent on moral issues like HB2 and police violence.

      I reproduce the statement in its exact form below, in case someone may find it useful. Systemic violence against people of color is worse than the loss of our universities – including public ones, as I was sternly informed UNC Charlotte is – as places of intellectual engagement.  But the latter is not trivial or insignificant, as the steady collapse of meaningful public discourse is a disaster for any viable understanding of democracy.

      UPDATE (9/22): There is dashcam footage of the shooting, which the CMPD has.  The family has seen the video, and wants it made public.  Earlier in the day, the CMPD chief had declared that the video would not be made public, because "The video does not give me absolute, definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun."  Unless this is a misstatement (but this is the exact quote I have seen, in several sources), this means that the CMPD Chief has essentially refused to release the video on the grounds that it does not clearly exonerate his officer.  Someone please show me how I am misreading this statement!   In any event, there are already too many issues to discuss here, but the national conversation has to include discussion about what to do with video footage of shootings.  North Carolina has passed a law that generally suppresses the public availability of that video.  It takes effect Oct. 1.  I do not know what the legal situation with the footage is now, but the conflict between the CMPD Chief and the family on whether the video should be released is important.

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    • How Often Do Mainstream Anglophone Philosophers Cite Non-Anglophone Sources?

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      Spoiler Alert: Not much!

      I estimate that 97% of citations in the most prestigious English-language philosophy journals are to works originally written in English. In other words, the entire history of philosophy not written in English (Plato, Confucius, Ibn Rushd, Descartes, Wang Yangming, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Foucault, etc., on into the 21st century) is referenced in only 3% of the citations in leading Anglophone philosophy journals.

      Let me walk you through the process by which I came to these numbers, then give you some breakdowns.

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    • APDA Update

      APDA has released this year's APA report and has added an application to the website (but we are still working on its auto-update feature, so the data it represents is a few days old as of today). In keeping with our program-specific reports released in April, here are some basic charts on the programs we covered at that time. These are raw numbers for graduates between 2012 and 2016, with only the APDA database numbers reflected in the first two graphs (here and here), whereas the third graph (here) makes use of external graduation data in its "unknown" category (see the note on the 4th graph for details). At the bottom of the page is a sortable chart with percentages for these categories. We have not yet started checking new data (program representatives have added over 400 graduates since August 15th), so there may be some errors (including those noted here). We are currently working on writing up some results from the survey into one or more papers, which should be available sometime in early 2017. Feedback is welcome!

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