Don't Praise the Machine: AI and the Destruction of Three Ecologies

 

I was asked to speak at an AI and Ethics panel at my university. What follows is the outline that I am using for my talk.

Do Your Own Damn Research: The New Episteme of Trump 2.0

I have been thinking a lot about the resonance between the current moment and this book

I am going to state this as clearly and as succinctly as possible. This is my thesis: the administration of Trump 2.0 is attempting to institute a new episteme, a new standard and idea of truth. This can be seen in the assaults on the funding and institution of higher education, on the cuts to funding scientific research through NIH and NSF, and in the undermining of vaccines and public health through RFK jr.'s management of Health and Human Services. All of these actions not only undermine the existing episteme, with its layers of expertise and legitimacy, but effectively enshrine a new one, a new practice of what constitutes truth and how it can be found and established. 

Automatic Against the People: Reading, Writing, and AI

Over the summer I posted a rant online (below after the jump), which was circulated enough that I was invited by my university to take the con position in the debate should students be encouraged to use AI in the classroom. This is what I wrote in response to that question. It is an an attempt to think about what is lost when we automate the acts of reading and writing. I am not really sure if what I wrote works, or if anyone will read it, I decided to share it here as well. 

My position is that so-called AI or Large Language Model (LLM) technologies such as ChatGPT should not be used for preparing writing assignments in college classes. There are multiple arguments that one could make against using such technologies. I am not going to address the ecological impact of AI, except to say in passing that it is substantial enough to lead companies like Google to completely reassess or scrap their objectives for lowering carbon emissions. I am also not going to address the ethical and legal issues brought up by the fact that all of these LLMs (and image generating software) are trained on published and copyrighted works. Those issues are best dealt by people who have expertise in that area. What I am going to address is what I know, and what I worry about, and that is what we lose when we automate or outsource reading and writing to technology. I am also not going to address the products of these technologies, the texts, images, and conversations that they can produce. I freely admit that they can be impressive as final products. My concern is not with the product, but with the process—with the process of reading and writing as part of education.

Our Cultural Revolution: Or, the Enshittification of Culture

Thanks to Ron Schmidt for this image 

In John Maynard Keynes essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" one can find the following formulation of the cultural transformation of post-capitalism:

"I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. 

For a least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

Differences and Differends: One More Note on the Politics of Education

 

I know that I should not even bother to engage with such things, but I saw someone retweet this from Christopher Rufo on X-Twitter. I think that it is revealing about two fundamental different ways of thinking about diversity and differences in a university. First, as Judith Butler states in the video posted below (11:49), that classes in women and gender studies are filled with debate and discussion. This is something that I think anyone who has been in a classroom would probably agree with. I would argue that it extends that it goes beyond gender studies to other subjects of supposed indoctrination such as critical race theory or even Marxism. Christopher Rufo's response to this is to focus not on what happens in such classrooms, he has probably never been in one, but to cite some supposed fact that faculty in gender and interdisciplinary studies are 100% left. I am not sure what he means by that, or if he is including all interdisciplinary programs, but I am going to assume that the left he is referring to is voting patterns, since that is an obsession of many critiques of higher education. 

Other Scenes: The Ideology of the Economy/The Economy of Ideology

One of the most pernicious effects of the Marxist schema of base and superstructure is that it posits the economy and ideology as two separate and distinct levels. The base is where the economy does its work, silently and materially, and the superstructure does its work reproducing the relations of production by remaining entirely separate and distinct from the economy, by addressing morals, religion, the nation, everything but economic necessity. This rigid division makes it difficult to think of the ideological dimension of the economy and the economic dimension of ideology. 

Florida, Man! The War Against Higher Education

 

Alligator has to be the best University Mascot

“What is happening in Florida will not stay in Florida." From the AAUP's Report on Florida

There is no shortage of critical responses to what is happening to higher education in Florida. There is the report from the AAUP cited above, and the podcast I co-host even dedicated an episode to it. In many, but not all of these cases, these responses have dovetailed with DeSantis' political career, focusing on the person, the policy, and the overall strategy. See for the example the great episode of Know Your Enemy. 

Translating Transclass: Or Teaching Eribon in America

Since this is a post about class, family, and returns

I thought that I would illustrate it with pictures illustrating

the fact that I now live in the same neighborhood my mother lived in, 

but the neighborhood has changed except this old fishing/gun store

 

I have often considered teaching to be a kind of translation and not just because much of the history of philosophy is written in different languages. Part of what one does in teaching is try to take the questions and concerns of a different time and figure out some way to bridge that gap, while at the same time being faithful to its original sense and meaning (just like translation). These thoughts occurred to me again when I decided to teach Didier Eribon's Returning to Reims.

Boiling Frogbooks: Education's Past and Future

Portrait of the author as a Hampshire Student

I graduated from Hampshire College. Not only that, but I credit Hampshire for much of my early education. It is for this reason that I have followed the news about its current troubles very closely. Hampshire's troubles, and the possibility that the college could close, feel not just like the future being cancelled but the present as well. It is like watching one's very own condition of possibility disappear. I felt the same way about the elimination of the Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture program at Binghamton University. It is like that scene in Looper where the character in the future is literally dissected by the past. 

Exceptions that Prove Rules: Lordon and Jaquet on Reproduction

The Working Class Goes to Heaven

Years ago, during my final year of graduate school, I taught a class at SUNY Cortland called "Race, Class, and Gender," or something to that effect. It was a required course meant to teach kids from Long Island and upstate New York about the reality of racial domination, capitalist exploitation, and sexist oppression. One student who hated the class turned in a paper that was just a list of names, everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Ellen Degeneres; her point was that this list, a list of prominent African Americans, women, and gays and lesbians, proved that racism, sexism, and class did not exist. It was not even a paper, just a list, but it reflects a way of thinking that is all too common. Anecdotal exceptions negate the reality of structures of domination and marginalization. 

What Does the University Say? On Macherey's La Parole Universitaire

The fundamental structure of Macherey’s book on the university is familiar to readers of his recent publications on “everyday life” and utopia, as well as anyone who has followed his website “Philosophe au sense large.” As with those works (and courses) a central idea or problem, in this case the idea of the university, is subject to a broad thematic investigation that encompasses philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Heidegger), sociology and psychoanalysis (Bourdieu and Lacan), and literature (Rabelais, Hardy, Nabokov). This is “philosophy in the largest” sense, to borrow the name of Macherey’s course; the different registers and disciplines and knowledge problematize and negate each other as much as they expand upon the central topic. 

Strong Interpretation: Citton’s L’Avenir des Humanités

It is perhaps a matter of common knowledge that the humanities, philosophy, literature, classics, art history, as well as history and the “soft” social sciences, are under attack. This attack is generally framed in terms of the general logic of austerity, which views the idea of any education that is not directly and immediately job preparation, as something which we as a society could afford once but can afford no more. The humanities are seen as luxuries of more opulent times, a claim that may surprise anyone who has actually worked in the humanities. Against this brutal logic of austerity, which also views retirement benefits and dental plans as “luxuries,” there have attempts to defend the humanities. These defenses generally take two forms: some accept the premise that argues that higher education is job preparation, arguing for the marketable nature of the core skills of the humanities, such as critical reading, writing, and thinking; while a second set of arguments rejects the premise of marketability, arguing instead that higher education has lofty goals than just preparing workers. Critical reading and writing train political subjects, the citizens rather than employees of tomorrow.

Kampus Life: The University in the Age of Austerity and Neoliberalism

Once, years ago, I happened to read a science fiction novel called Kampus by James Gunn. I am not sure why, other than the fact that I used to read a lot of science fiction. I probably picked it up at a used bookstore, enticed by the cover. 

Debt Collectors: The Economics, Politics, and Morality of Debt

Any philosophical consideration of the politics of debt must perhaps begin with the fact that the entire rhetoric of debt, owing and paying one’s debts, is at once a moral and an economic vocabulary. This point is related to, but opposed to, Nietzsche’s well-known argument in the Genealogy of Morals. Whereas Nietzsche argued that morality, guilt, was simply debt, a payment in suffering for those who could not pay the price, an examination of debt reveals how much paying ones debts, paying one’s bills, is a moral imperative as much as an economic relation.

De te fabula narratur: Reflections on Middlesex

For the past week I have been preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed, with Middlesex University’s decision to close its internationally recognized program in philosophy. This is in part because I know some people affected. I have been fortunate to meet some of the faculty, graduates, and students at Middlesex, all of who have impressed me with their intelligence, passion, and generosity. More immediately, as someone who teaches philosophy, I know students, or former students, who have aspirations to attend graduate school at Middlesex. All of these people will be immediately affected by this change.

My preoccupation with this particular tragedy, and I can think of no other word, to describe it, extends beyond the immediate effects on friends, colleagues, and students. First and foremost I see the loss of Middlesex (and the center and journal that it hosts) as a loss to philosophy, specifically to the study of contemporary continental philosophy. One of the positive developments of the past ten years (such things do happen) has been the development of an immediate global context for philosophical discussion: conferences go up online as they are taking, or are at least quickly summarized in blogs and online discussions. One no longer has to wait for journals and proceedings to learn what is being thought elsewhere. Middlesex has been an important node in this network, relaying crucial discussions and conferences, and often serving as a transfer point between francophone and English debates and discussions. Its loss will thus be immediately felt. Beyond this I fear that this particular UK case, despite its idiocy and the fact that it is caught up in the specific and somewhat arcane bureaucracy of the UK university system (summarized in part here) is but a portent of a global situation. As Marx once wrote to his German, readers regarding his own analysis of a specifically British situation, the rise of the factory in the early industrial revolution, “De te fabula narratur” (the story concerns you).

The current conjuncture in terms of both its immediate crisis of capital and long term restructuring has lead to an assault on higher education. Of course the immediate crisis and long term restructuring can only be separated heuristically, only in the sense that we face both immediate cuts, cuts justified in and through their immediacy (No time to talk, to discuss, to plan, we need to cut now!) and long term transformations, as the university becomes less and less a place of reflection and research and becomes more and more of a job training center, or some supposed miraculous engine of growth. The latter has been going on for some time, and is part of both neoliberal restructuring and the changing dynamics of labor in post-fordism. The current crisis has only exasperated this tendency, creating a sense of urgency and scarcity, the idea that everything must go into fixing the economy. Thus, making the short-term crisis an alibi for the acceleration of the general transformation, for the general reduction of everything to an economic logic of competition. It is worth noting that things could have gone otherwise (and still could) the economic crisis could lead to an interrogation of precisely what counts as knowledge in these fields. Instead all we got were some vague ideas of teaching ethics at business schools.

Middlesex was not the first philosophy program cut and it will not be the last. Moreover, this trend is not just limited to philosophy, but includes classics, literature, women’s studies, and basically everything that cannot justify itself in terms of grant money and private donations. The question that we need to ask is how best to counter this tendency. How best to fight it? What actions and words can we use? As far as I can see there are three strategies.

The first is to claim that the skills taught in the humanities, in the liberal arts, critical thinking, various literacies, reading and writing, etc., are useful for the world of business. They are the cultivation of the general intellect as intellect in general: the development of flexible skills that can be applied to any situation. This strategy seems to be incredibly shortsighted, and risks losing the war to win a few battles here and there.

The second strategy is to make an appeal to tradition, to the ideals of the university as free inquiry, and citizenship. This liberal tradition has stronger tactical merits than the former strategy which accepts, but inflects, neoliberal justifications. There is something to be said for the claim that a university without a philosophy program, without languages, without literature, and so on, is not a university at all. However, these words, citizenship, liberal arts, seem to be empty in the mouths of the very people who utter them. Moreover, they risk contributing to the general division between schools that will be concerned with such lofty goals and those that will dedicate themselves to practical matters. What is so striking about the Middlesex case is how quickly the administrators in question dismissed any claim of its excellence.

Finally, there is a third strategy emerging from the sites of struggles themselves, from the takeovers in the University of California system and from the response to Middlesex (see the picture above). This strategy is to see the university not as some exception to society, as an ivory tower, but as fully a part of the social factory, of the production and reproduction of knowledge, which is to say wealth, in society. Thus, in the short term, the struggle for the fate of the university cannot be separated from the immediate question of how the crisis is paid for: the slogan “we will not pay for your crisis” encapsulates this nicely. More importantly if we are living through a knowledge economy then there is no separation between the struggle over knowledge, who gets to learn, who benefits, etc., and the general struggle for the economy, for the production and circulation of wealth. To put it briefly the contemporary university is an object lesson in the inseparability of the economic and the political. Cutting funding, increasing loans, immediately curtails curiosity, steering students towards those subjects that will supposedly guarantee an ability to pay loans back: academic freedom without resources is meaningless. The existing struggles go beyond this lesson in what Balibar calls “equaliberty” to become a crucial site for the construction of a commons, of an economy based on openness and access rather than scarcity and competition.

Clearly I am in support of the third strategy, a strategy and politics that is already underway without my meager support. It is perhaps the most difficult, the most radical, but paradoxically it is also the most practical. After all, the connections are already there.

UNmasked

When I started this blog almost four years ago the advice I received from nearly everyone was to keep it anonymous. I was told that as a nontenured faculty member a blog was career suicide. (In this case the title of the blog could become all too true) At first I rigorously stuck to that advice, even earning the name "Un" from some of the blogs that referred to me, a nickname that I liked. Gradually, however, the wall began to break down. First, there were a series of citations that referred to me by name. Then I set up the link to facebook, put up the lecture on The Wire, and so on, to the point that it became an open secret. Now that I have tenure I have decided to give up the last remnant of secrecy and openly declare my identity (updating the profile to the right).

I doubt that this will have much of an effect. My fantasies of becoming the focus of some right wing talk show will probably never come true. It should, however, remind me to proofread these posts a little better. Although, I have to admit that part of what I enjoy about blogging is the opportunity to quickly get something out to produce something, anything. It is often a break from teaching and the frustratingly glacial pace of my other writing. Deleuze's citation of Godard, "Not ideas that are just, just ideas," seems to apply blogging more than anything else.

Everyone is Educated




This is not exactly the Bunny Colvin scene from The Wire I was looking for, but it will have to do for now. The scene that I was looking for is where Bunny discusses his impression of the Junior High School. Against the common impression that the kids are not learning, Bunny responds that the kids are learning just not in the way that the teachers imagine. The kids are learning lessons that are relevant to their world, to the world of hoppers and corners; they are learning how to negotiate the world of rules and authority, to get away with stuff, before breaking those rules have any real consequences. As Bunny makes clear, in the scene I am thinking of, as well as the scene above, the kids are always learning, but what they learn and how reflects previous lessons. Education always already begins before the school bell rings. The educator must be educated.

It is admittedly quite a leap from the inner city school depicted in The Wire to my experience at a state university. Despite that difference I found myself thinking of Bunny’s remarks this week. We are in the final weeks of classes, and the final philosopher we are reading in my “intro to political philosophy class” is Paolo Virno. This follows a semester of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Arendt, and others, all of which sets up Virno: a philosopher that I consider to be offering both an interesting summation of that history and an engaging take on the current conjuncture. Class went well. I reviewed Aristotle, Marx, and Arendt in order to set up Virno’s argument about contemporary labor and its connection with politics. I could tell that they were struggling however, especially with Virno’s idea of “intellect in general,” the diffuse intelligence underlying production.

After the class I had a bunch of students who wanted to talk to me about their final essay. Some had actually questions, but others wanted extensions or wanted to figure out how to get through the essay with as little work as possible. It occurred to me that this is what many students learn in college: how to negotiate the bureaucracy, how to get by, how to brown nose a little, and how to navigate the structures around them. This lesson will probably serve them more than reading any “great mind.” For most students college is bureaucracy 101. This education, the education in how to follow rules, bend rules, and keep up appearances is perhaps what will best serve them as future employees. What I wonder is how they learned to learn this, I suppose that it is the lesson of all education.

The irony of it all is that the very students who were struggling with Virno’s concept of cynicism in theory demonstrated in practice that they understood it all too well.

Lost, Found, Recycled

This evening, while in the midst of trying to do some actual work, my mind wandered to a presentation I gave years ago; so naturally I stopped working and looked for it on my computer and in my files. For a brief moment, panic sank in, I could only find partial and incomplete drafts. However, I did eventually find it, and after a brief reread decided to post it here. Why? Because it is one of those punchy little roundtable things that never make it into a publication, or see the light of day after being presented, and secondly, it is content, it will fill a blog entry, and I am desperate for content now. It is not that I do not have thoughts, just no time.

As you can see it is very much in keeping with some of the obsessions that fuel this blog. In fact it is depressing to see how little my thought has progressed in the few years since I presented it. So here it is, pretty much found as is, a conference presentation from years ago.

In attempting to speak as a former student of this institution, I wanted to begin from a quote, a little bit of wisdom passed on, some little statement that made up part of my education. However, the particular statement in question could not be found in any of the folders and binders of notes I have kept from my classes; kept, yes, but have not consulted since I left defended my thesis in 2001. Not only could I not find it, but in my searches it became harder and harder to remember who exactly said it and in what context. (Perhaps, it was never said, at least not in so many words) Anyway, what I remember to have been said was something to the effect of “research requires infinite patience and demands infinite impatience.” (Not exactly elegant, I know, thus you can see why I was compelled to look through those yellowing sheets of paper, with the hope that somewhere what I remembered was said better in some sort of pithy formulation.) Infinite patience, because, as you all know, to work on any specific area of thought, within any discipline, on one of the specific figures that constitute respectable areas of specialization and competence requires a great deal of time, more time than one would like to admit. In the six or seven years it takes to complete a doctorate there is perhaps only enough time to read, to really read, a dozen or so works, or understand a half dozen or so authors. Of course, in the same time it is possible to pick up those basic thumbnail sketches of other authors, and other works, to be able to say a few intelligent things about most of the proper names, and schools of thought. These tidbits and snapshots are in many ways the “coin of the realm,” they will perhaps get you through your “comps” and some of the more awkward conversations at any job interview. However, to coin a phrase, such tidbits “are not yet thinking.”

From this, from one half of those lost words of wisdom, it is possible to sketch a caricature of most academic work, at least in philosophy and other humanities. Tidbits, and thumbnail sketches, are the very matter and material of most the academic community, they define competence—the “academic common sense” of the various disciplines. At the same time, however, one’s research is supposed to be, nay must be, a deviation, from these sketches and thumbnail pictures. It is the unwritten rule of every dissertation, whether it be on Spinoza, Marx, Heidegger, or Irigaray, that it begin with the following implied proposition, “forget everything you know about Spinoza, Marx, or whomever,” and from this some new idea, a new reading, is advanced, and with it the discipline supposedly advances. Yet despite the fact that this happens, that novelty is the condition for worthwhile research, the thumbnail sketches, those snapshots and reductions, persevere; survive long after they have been definitively criticized in multiple dissertations, articles, and books. Research, the production of new readings, with its use-values for this and that political and ethical project, a “new Nietzsche,” a feminist Heidegger, a Marx for our time, exists alongside the exchange value of what everyone knows. They form the two sides of the commodification of academic labor.

The coexistence of these different versions, one pertaining to general competence and the other to specific knowledge, introduces an odd sort of noise or dissonance at the heart of most academic communication. This in part due to the affective economy underlying the more overt economy of professionalism. The various specializations of research that are, in my field at least, often identified by the proper name of various philosophers, must simultaneously struggle for their legitimacy and their uniqueness; that is, one must argue for the usefulness of reconsidering, or rereading, Sartre, Althusser, or Montesquieu, while simultaneously producing a new perspective on the philosopher in question. The struggle for legitimacy accounts for the various contests over intellectual hegemony; the battles that pit Marxists against post-structuralists, Heideggerians against Deleuzians, and Socialist Feminists against Queer theorists. The claim of uniqueness, means that the more one succeeds in this struggle the more one loses; if one actually ever convinces the enemy on the other side to switch camps, as it were (has this ever happened?) then one produces only other professionals, other publications that one will have to differentiate oneself from. The situation is similar to what Spinoza described with respect to the affective economy of ambition. One struggles to have one’s object of love recognized, and thus have one’s love free from the ambivalence of the affects, but success in this only produces jealousy (EIIIP31Schol). The more one succeeds the more one loses: the battle for intellectual hegemony is re-staged. Only now the battle lines are drawn “within one’s own camp,” against the incorrect readings of whatever philosopher, or theorist, one has convinced others to reread or reconsider. There is now not just one book, one panel, on that author, but a series of books, and a whole conference, and the arguments only become more intense, more focused. To take one particular glaring example, first one argues for the relevance of Deleuze in a field dominated by Heidegger, then, once one succeeds, one argues for the relevance of this particular Deleuze, the Spinozist Deleuze, the Bergsonian Deleuze, the scientific Deleuze, etc.

At this point my caricature has collapsed into out an out satire, and perhaps even cynicism and bitterness. I think, or at least I would hope, that some in the audience are thinking to themselves, but wait…there is more to research, to the world of academia, than the drives of professionalism, intellectual hegemony, and ambition. This is precisely my point, or rather my question, what is that something more, that which is irreducible to these drives for power and prestige, what is it that calls for thinking? By way of an answer, I would at least like to consider the final half of my initial misquote “research requires infinite patience and demands infinite impatience.” I have discussed, infinite patience, and how this patience to really work through ideas, can itself be warped by the existing structures and economies of research. Research also requires infinite impatience, a connection with the immediate exigency and demand of some practical question. At first glance this does not sound too different from the caricature above, I already mentioned that the drive to produce a new and different understanding of this or that philosopher is usually placed in the service of some political or ethical project. “Infinite impatience,” or what I am gesturing at with the phrase infinite impatience does make a difference, or at least strives to, perhaps not at the superficial level, we are still talking about research, about a politics of thinking, but at the level of the affective economy underlying research. It is a matter of replacing “ambition” with its various struggles over hegemony, with interest, and its struggle for something to communicate.

I am borrowing the word “interest” from Isabelle Stengers, who uses it to describe the pragmatics of scientific practice. Scientific statements she argues struggle to interest other scientists; interest here is derivative of interesting, and is thus relatively distant from the individualistic and economic connotations of the term. At first glance this may not seem to be that different from the struggles for hegemony indicated above, and I must admit that I am not doing justice to her theory here, but I only intend to borrow the word for what it connotes. What strikes me about the term interest is that it suggests something that rarely happens in the humanities, a communication of the “what” which someone discusses against the “how.” There are moments of this, in fact I would go so far as to argue that Bill Readings book The University in Ruins is a book that provokes interest, when I have read it and heard it discussed, I do not hear a focus on its particular theoretical orientation, if I remember a combination of Althusser, Lyotard, and Bourdieu, but on that word “excellence,” empty yet ubiquitous, which does not so much define as the contemporary university as point to a problem at once institutional and existential. In general interest would mean that it would be possible to speak to each other across the difference of specific projects, specific researches, and the singularity of a question posed without recourse to the banalities of “intellectual common sense.”

What would this look like you ask? I think that this is the task and the question. If we are going to make the work carried out in the university matter before it is too late, before it is gone, we are going to have to learn how to surrender not only the struggles over intellectual hegemony (almost everyone at least claims to do that) but also the fundamental comportments and affective investments, which continue the struggle long after we have given it up. We need to cease to write, talk, and think as if we a proposing a new common language, and find the common in the interstices of our singular researches. It is a matter of a community founded not on ambition, which can never have what it wants, but on what Spinoza called “reason.”

We Scholastics: Or, Disciplining Thought

Spinoza tells us that there is a kind of joy associated with thought, a joy based on the affirmation of our own power to think. For me this joy comes in moments where I am thinking on my feet. Sometimes this happens in the classroom and sometimes it happens when writing or reading, but somehow things click and I can see things coming together in a new way. It is probably the reason that I am in this business, the reason that I sit through departmental meetings, grade piles of papers, and have given up any control over where I get to live.

These moments have been few and far between as of late. This is in part due to the classes I am teaching this semester. For example: one class I am teaching this semester is Medieval Philosophy. It is the first time I am teaching this course, and I do not have the background or confidence to really entertain any new interpretations; so I stick to my notes. Of course this is in some sense keeping with the spirit of the medieval philosophy, which was in some sense all about respecting the established authority of not only scripture but whoever came before, the endless commentaries on Aristotle, Porphyry, Lombard, etc.

I do not want to be too glib, but there is an odd similarity between the medievals and us. We too have our commentaries, our volumes of writings that exceed the originals. I am teaching Boethius’ and Abelard’s commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge (itself a commentary on Aristotle) while I at home I am editing essays that discuss Negri’s commentary on Spinoza and so on. I would be tempted to make some kind of meta-comment about the particular social and historical conditions that produce such insular self-reflection.

What keeps me from being too glib, and hopefully keeps this post from being from another rant against the collapse of philosophy into commentary, is the second class I am teaching this semester. I am also co-teaching an interdisciplinary freshman seminar on “consumer society.” This should be the opposite of “medieval philosophy,” modern, cutting edge, and interdisciplinary. However, I am co-teaching this course with an economist and a professor from English with a background in cultural studies. What I am finding is that this is not without its particular constraints, and disciplining effects. Often, I am called upon to speak “as a philosopher.” In the last few weeks, the economist and I both lectured about Marx, which raised the question how does Marx the philosopher differ from Marx the economist. This is a question that is difficult to answer. It is hard to fit Marx into any generic definition of a philosopher. However, the class more or less requires those of us teaching it to differentiate ours specific approaches. So I end up trying to say something about the philosophical problems underlying “commodity fetishism.”

This has lead me to conclude two things about interdisciplinary and the disciplines of philosophy:

1) Disciplines cannot be simply placed in relation as if they were independent things, because each discipline has its own internal relations to others. (I have to admit that this point is stolen from Althusser’s prescient critique of interdisciplinary research in “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists”: an essay that would perhaps be read more if it did not have such an ungainly title). To take Althusser’s example: one cannot simply combine philosophy and mathematics, since mathematics exists as an internal point of articulation of philosophy. I would add that the same applies to other disciplines. Philosophy may not have a theory of literature as an internal condition, but it does have myriad ways of interpreting texts and reading. At the same time other disciplines cannot be separated from “their spontaneous philosophy.”

2) There is no philosophy in general. Every philosophy worthy of the name rewrites the basic rules of thinking, argument, and articulation. This statement applies not only to such maverick philosophers as Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze, whose philosophy is clearly grounded in other practices of knowledge, but even such “philosopher’s philosophers” as Spinoza and Hegel.

University Experience

This semester I am co-teaching a class on “consumer society,” a class which is designed to inspire and provoke students to critically think about that which is most familiar to them. Already in a few short weeks the class has reinforced a realization that has begun to crystallize over the last few years of teaching. By and large students have no real problem with radical criticisms of the present order. I have taught Marx, Foucault, Negri, Goldman, etc. semester after semester, and generally students have no trouble accepting critiques of capital and the like. The thing is that they cannot imagine any connection between these critiques and their life or life in general. Furthermore they interpret the fact that I care about these things, believe in these criticisms, to be simply a testament to the fact that I do not live in the real world, but in the classroom. In the classroom it is perfectly acceptable to criticize capitalism, but in the real world one needs to find a decent job.

Of course I am generalizing, and not even in a profound manner. My point is this, if for decades the figure of the student was synonymous with social rebellion, with a ruthless criticism of everything existing, this may have less to do with theories than with a particular practice, a particular experience of living. Universities uproot students from their homes, from their familiar and entrenched place in a familial order, and place them in a context that is halfway between communism (collective living, eating, sleeping) and anarchism (the necessity of creating a social order ex nihilo, even if it is only with a roommate). On top of this there is all of the time, free from work and other demands; time to spend in clubs and social activities. There is something radical about student life, independent of the classroom. (In fact one of the things that critics of academia like David Horowitz can never explain, or even address, is the fact that the years that we associate with student activism, the tumultuous sixties, were years of relatively conservative teaching.)

It is this experience, this liminal space of freedom between home and job that is being destroyed. It is being destroyed by the cuts in funding to education. Students today, at least my students at a state university, work jobs, both on campus and off, and worry constantly about making ends meet. Many live at home, and have no time for clubs and student organizations, for practicing politics. They are all theory and no practice, and so theory appears to be lifeless and dead to them.

There is a fairly mediocre science fiction novel called Kampus by James Gunn. Most of it takes place in a futuristic extrapolation of a sixties college campus (Berkeley, I think), with permanent protest between students and administration; a college president who has been kidnapped so many times that he is replaced by an android; and so on. There is a scene in the novel when the main protagonist is on the run, hiding out at a community college/technical school. After a few days of observing the mind numbing conditions at the school, he decides to take action. He gives a rousing speech, imploring the students to rise up and demand freedom to think and live. The students rise up to attack him, however, worried that his disruptions will threaten their grades and job prospects. That is the university of the future, no androids needed.