Cogburn on my post on celebrity philosophers

A comment by Cogburn HERE. He’s one of the real counterexamples to my toast to the analytic/continental divide: the co-translator of Tristan Garcia and someone who’s simply interested in good thinking no matter where it is.

I should also have added the additional caveat that it’s not entirely true that there cannot be “celebrity” analytic philosophers, since along with the obvious counter-example of Wittgenstein (whose magnetic personality played a large role in his celebrity) there is the more relevant counter-example of master public intellectual Bertrand Russell, whose books sell in droves even now.

But more about Russell some other time. My basic point remains: continental philosophy tends toward the production of celebrities, not because continental philosophers are frivolous and vulgar publicity worshippers, but because continental philosophy is deeply rooted –for intellectual reasons, not vulgar pop culture reasons– in the “star system” in a way that analytic philosophy is not. Yes, there are also stars in analytic philosophy, but they are stars in the sense of being extremely influential and respected in their field, not stars in the sense of aspiring to the status of sweeping spokespersons for a total intellectual outlook. Simply compare the public image of Foucault and Derrida to that of someone like Quine or David Lewis. It’s very hard to imagine an art or architecture movement, for example, inspired by either of the latter two.

Another interesting point is that the celebrity system in continental philosophy is often mistaken for Francophilia, which then makes an easy fit with the reputation of Paris for being a fashion-generating center in ways that go beyond clothing and food. But this seems to me to be an accidental result of the post-war dominance of French philosophy.

And here Žižek is a fascinating counterexample. If you took a vote among young continental philosophy types as to who is the most important living thinker in our field, it’s quite likely that Badiou would be the winner. But I would still say that Žižek is the dominant figure, and has been ever since Derrida’s death– for his ubiquity, his whirlwind energy, his immediate responses to calls for public comment on virtually anything that happens. And when was the last time the dominant figure in continental philosophy was neither French nor German? It’s been a very long time, I would say– indeed, perhaps it has never happened at all since continental philosophy began a kind of separate life from other types of philosophy. In this respect, Žižek reminds me of Pope John Paul II (a fun irony, since he otherwise reminds me a lot of Giordano Bruno).

Kate Hayles speaking on SR today in San Diego

Winston Churchill once said that there is nothing more exhilarating than the experience of being shot at without effect.

The most recent time that phrase came to mind was when (the intelligent) Alex Galloway published his surprisingly lightweight piece in Critical Inquiry linking object-oriented philosophy with the abuse of object-oriented programming by corporate rent-seekers. There really wasn’t anything more to Galloway’s argument than that initial pun. It was a pun in search of an argument.

I’m now disappointed (but also exhilarated, in Churchill’s sense) to read the following abstract for Kate Hayles’ talk in San Diego today:

“What do speculative realism and speculative finance have in common?  Probing beneath the surface reveals startling similarities between philosophy Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO) and that branch of speculative finance concerned with derivatives, options, and futures. In the fact of pervasive anxieties about our two major fears — global financial collapse and global ecological collapse — OOO performs a pivotal cultural function. This talk will explore the similarities between OOO and financial derivatives and posit some hypotheses about why they occur and what they reveal about hidden pathways between the ivory tower and the trading pit.”

Yes, it’s just an abstract. But it’s an unusually frank one. And moreover, I heard Hayles’ similar critiques of speculative realism in Basel last September (and was just as startled by them then).

Hayles, like Galloway, is an intelligent person with a considerable following (my friend Ian Bogost knows and speaks highly of both). But also like Galloway, she gives us a pun in search of an argument: “Metaphysical speculation sounds a lot like financial speculation. And since we all agree that the latter is bad, we ought to shun the former as well.”

I’m also surprised at the continued claims of capitalist complicity by object-oriented philosophers. We built this object-oriented wave cheaply, with blogs and indie presses and good ideas, and Levi Bryant and I (if not the others) live far out along the periphery of Western academia. But Galloway and Hayles are, respectively, in lucrative positions at NYU and (tobacco-endowed) Duke. Where’s the real trading pit, and who is the real resistance?

I agree with this

NY Times on “celebrity philosophers”

While looking over at the NY Times philosophy blog, I also noticed for the first time THIS OLDER PIECE on the “celebrity philosopher.” It’s a thought-provoking topic, though I disagree with most of what is said in the post. Two things I want to say:

1. “but Rothfeld thinks that working in this ‘liminal space between the serious and the farcical’ may be the key to Zizek’s allure.”

Slavoj Žižek is a serious philosopher. Period. The fact that he is comically entertaining disqualifies him no more than it disqualified Giordano Bruno or Diogenes. His occasional lapses of taste in comically entertaining us may be unprecedented, but I hardly think that’s important given how often his comedy hits the bull’s eye. We might not see another Žižek for a few centuries or more (and none of us will be there to enjoy it even then), so let’s appreciate him.

2. I think it’s completely misguided to approach the “celebrity philosopher” meme in terms of vulgar mass culture and trendy, superficial audiences, as if one had to explain some mysterious riddle of how a serious philosopher could lapse into the professional lifestyle of a comedian or rapper.

It’s generally analytic philosophers who scoff at the “celebrity philosopher” concept. And frankly, this simply points to one of the weaknesses of analytic philosophy– the fact that, for all its extremely smart practitioners, virtually none of them have any sort of public charisma. The reason for this is not that they are serious researchers while Žižek is a trendy impostor. The reasons are that: (a) analytic philosophers write primarily for each other, and have a severely limited audience outside philosophy departments, and (b) analytic philosophy is basically committed (à la Kuhnian “normal science”) to a model of philosophy as piecemeal technical progress rather than as a sweeping style or worldview that leaps across disciplinary boundaries.

We can argue the respective merits and demerits of this view of philosophy, but one obvious consequence is that analytic philosophy is unlikely ever to produce any “celebrity” philosophers– not due to superior seriousness and intellectual probity, but simply because professionalized piecemeal technical progress is a recipe for forming a small inward-looking elite of professionalized masterminds little known to the broader public. And this is a pretty fair description of the culture of analytic philosophy as we know it.

The continental model has its own strengths and weaknesses. But it is one of its strengths (not weaknesses!) that it produces thinkers that are of intense interest across numerous fields other than philosophy. Continental philosophy works more like the fine arts, in which a handful of styles end up having the widest influence across the world, and in which it’s difficult to pinpoint what “progress” means. The real weakness of this model is the demoralization it creates for those who feel like they’ve failed. One can slip into a career of writing book reports on the great masters rather than philosophizing in one’s own right: hence the frequent (and often accurate) complaint by analytic philosophers that continentals are just historians of philosophy. Analytic philosophy is more democratic in that sense, just like the natural sciences– you don’t have to be a world-historic titan to have measurable impact in analytic philosophy, just as is true in the hard sciences.

It’s a much more interesting theme than people realize. The conventional wisdom is that the analytic/continental divide either never made sense in the first place or that it no longer makes sense. I couldn’t disagree more. The schism in the discipline results from a rather profound duality in human knowledge, and two completely different models of what thinking means. Moreover, I still think it would be premature to reunify the two, since I don’t think the root of the problem has been addressed by anyone yet.

So, am I the only one hoping for another 50 years of the analytic/continental divide? If it’s reunified now, all that means is that everything becomes analytic philosophy (though the continental tradition could still live on in disciplines other than philosophy, as has often been the case anyway).

I’ve often quoted the following remark reported to me from the Rorty archive. Rorty joked that “every 10 years or so, a book is published with a title something like ‘Beyond Realism and Idealism.’ And it always turns out that what’s beyond realism and idealism is– idealism!”

I feel much the same way about those who claim to be “beyond” the analytic/continental philosophy distinction. If that happens, it’s simply going to mean all analytic philosophy, with a sprinkling of ambitious ex-continentals who think they can pitch Deleuze or Derrida in ways that analytics will find sensible.

So, allow me to propose a toast to the analytic/continental divide. (With one caveat: we really ought to be reading each other more. There’s always room for that.)

 

 

Lovecraft book briefly mentioned in the NY Times

HERE.

Žižek on Thatcher

Click HERE.