Why I am not an OOOxian

Philosophy often involves a radical conversion in which our understanding of everything changes. There is nothing wrong with this, it is often a positive phenomenon. The problem comes when the conversion amounts to a drastic reduction of our vision and an impoverishment of our life. In my case, I was converted to philosophy at roughly the age of 12 (in 1966), and since then it has been the guiding passion of my life, determining most of my leisure, my thoughts, my reading, my academic path, but also my choice of country to live in and even my sport.

My conversion to pluralism as an explicit idea came much later, in 1972, when I read the first version of Feyerabend’s AGAINST METHOD, published as an essay in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science volume IV. I proceeded to read everything that Feyerabend wrote, and as much as I could of what he had read. Unfortunately, my philosophy department became dominated by an Althusserian Push, and I was totally marginalized. Everyone who was anyone was Althusserian, or they quickly got the message and, for the most part, dropped out of the department. Althusserian Marxism became a powerful tool for synchronising students’ spirits and the explicitly avowed goal of influential staff and students was to turn the department into an apparatus for « producing » radical (ie Althusserian) intellectuals.

The Althusserians were committed to the scientificity of Marxism, and so to the importance of scientific practice (so Marxism could be important) and its engagement with real objects (so Marxism could be realist and objective). This ontology of real objects was fairly empty, as scientific practice produced its own objects, the theoretical objects, as its way of cognizing the real objects. Everyday common sense objects, and even perceptual objects, were of course sham objects, produced by ideological practices that most often were « humanist », in the sense of giving priority and centrality to the human subject (individual or collective) and its relation to the world. Science was non-humanist, objective, freed from the problematic of the subject both epistemologically and ontologically.

A consensus was formed thanks to convergent teaching by the most vocal and pushy group of staff. Dissertation topics were almost always of the form: Althusser and phenomenology, Althusser and Wittgenstein, A Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Problematic of the Subject, A Materialist Ethics etc etc. As I said, those who did not conform to this formatting mostly dropped out. Even Liz Grosz, who was one year ahead of me, was an Althusserian feminist and an Althusserian Lacanian at this time, though she was partly responsible for the change in the situation as she gradually (and far too slowly to my taste) deconstructed herself out of this doxa.

Aside: so I can bear witness that Liz Grosz (because some people like talking about her as some sort of symbol) was at least from around 1974, always a materialist and a realist, and rapidly became a very successful very popular teacher, and an ever curious and passionate thinker. None of this crap about being squeezed into a corner by discursive idealists, although macho marxists did try to contain her and failed.

I became very depressed at seeing such vapid incoherent slogans being promulgated and applauded and I very nearly dropped out, like various friends and sympathetic students. But I held on and wrote a  Feyerabendian critique of Althusser’s epistemology and ontology that anticipated much of what Rancière had to say on this subject, but that was untranslated at that time. The only one who supported me was Alan Chalmers, and I am forever indebted to his openness and his encouragement.

So I have seen this sort of thing before: a pushy movement based on empty slogans and incoherent ideas given seeming plausibility by programmatic texts and a practice of mutual admiration and citation, ignoring or ridiculing and caricaturing adverse ideas and arguments, ganging up on dissident voices, mocking and bullying possible rivals, while incarnating a siege mentality, firejerking (= firestorm affects + kneejerk stereotypes) and quarrelating.

Why bother talking about ideas that I reject? Because I discovered these thinkers when I was in search of a democratic dialogue on the internet, and they were talking about themes and authors that interest me. I initially thought that a fruitful conversation was possible but the only result was to be ignored, or worse jeered at. Yes, I was so shocked at being treated like that (even the Althusserians never descended so low, and they were intelligent and philosophically cultivated adversaries, people like Wal Suchting and Paul Patton), so I jeered back a little. But I mostly read and thought a lot, which as anyone who does philosophy knows takes time and energy and money. So I do not accept the little cliquish monologue, and I will give my motivated and argued opinion on whatever I care to, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

PS: I noted that Peter Gratton rather timidly questioned the factual basis of one of Levi Bryant’s siege sermons and was promptly taken to task in a rather condescending manner by Bryant. He trundled out one of his usual arguments, that given his penchant for manifestos and such I am tempted to call the fallacy of manifest concreteness. Let us see Bryant’s rebuttal: « You talk a lot about sovereignty and whatnot, but not anything about roads, waterways, and rivers ».

Now it so happens that I am an English teacher in a French technical college specialised in building and construction, so I do in fact talk every day about roads, waterways, dams, tunnels, bridges, rivers, deserts, skyscrapers, geological strata, climate change. Levi does not “talk” about these things at all, I could not use his writings in my classes, he “meta-talks” about them, which is far different, saying how important they are, using them as examples of what needs to be talked about, but in fact saying nothing. Nor do I think that this is in itself negative. Feyerabend, who I admire, has next to nothing to say about such matters. But I do find it curious to use such a feature as some sort of amazing super-weapon. In my English classes, with students who have done at least one year of philosophy (philosophy is compulsory for the last year of senior high school, and technical students have 2 hours a week, science students 3 or 4. I have both sorts in my tertiary classes), I cannot use Bryant’s texts. I have, however, used extracts from Andrew Pickering as he is more concrete and attentive to real processes and decisions.