uncomfortable outside

It was already an unpleasantly hot day. Then the sandstorm hit. Then I discovered that I had inadvertantly brought an ominous, weird-looking flying ant back into the house in the shopping bag. It obviously wasn’t able to sting, but there was something terrifying about its strange appearance. And I don’t like harming living things, including insects, unless they assault me directly (such as mosquitoes). Luckily, I was able to get it out of the house with surprising ease.

Why is this incident worth mentioning? Simply because it was fascinating. And I do think that one of the keys to intellectual method is to learn to identify the things that truly fascinate us, however humble. That in itself takes some doing, because we are so used to looking at ourselves through the mediation of pre-existent intellectual usages and pretending to ourselves that we are interested in things that we don’t really care about at all.

But if you can figure out what *really* is of interest to you, in both intellectual and everyday life, then you have some grains of reality from which larger thoughts can be built.

Most critique is insincere, and that is my objection to it. Go to a lecture, and a good number of the questions are obviously showboating, devil’s advocate, or hairsplitting contrarianism. It is a good principle of critique, already stated on this blog, that the critic should stick his/her neck out as much as what is being criticized. You should be standing for a different and positive principle, not just for the negation of the other person’s proposal.

I’ve been reminded of that this week in academic politics as well. There are certain faculty members who think that their primary job is to say “no no no no no” to anything coming from an administrator. But this is pointless, because the administrator has a job to do, and if the only feedback is “no no no no no” then the faculty will simply be circumvented and ignored. That’s not the way to interact with those who have “power” (Latour has suitably ridiculed the meaninglessness of this word). The way to negotiate, intellectually or politically, is to identify the most detailed point on which you both agree. Start with that positive point, then fight it out on that basis. People are fully willing to hear debate and criticism as long as you’re not trying to take everything away from them.

Naysaying is an inherently conservative gesture. It defends the status quo in any area by senseless carping at all attempts to do something. It is nothing but intellectual heckling. It may allow you to strut around in front of your fellow hecklers and act like a big shot, but they’re too busy with their own strutting to even notice what you are doing. And moreover, the decision makers will simply ignore you, because they are in a position where they need to do something, one way or another, and you’re not giving them any alternative options to work with.

Now I’m a half-time administrator. But even before that, I always generally trusted the decisions of administrators more than of faculty bodies (except in the case of rotten administrators; those always exist in large numbers, of course; I’m talking about average administrators vs. average faculty bodies). I realize that this is an unfashionable position in many quarters, but the principle is this: some people have to act, and acting means having to take responsibility; others get to be “critical thinkers”, which means they can pose as too pure to do anything, and they can always strike an unearned pose of moral superiority. And given that intellectuals have been nourished on a couple of centuries of the knee-jerk dogma that to think means to oppose, many faculty members have picked up the bad habit of thinking it profound to say no to absolutely everything that is proposed, no matter what it is. “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

That’s why it is often an easy and deadly rhetorical move simply to ask them what they want– because they usually don’t want anything, except to say no to whatever you want yourself.