Whose Joy? Whose Sadness? Building Livable Communities

How do we build inclusive, joyful communities? I believe that building communities where flourishing, livable lives are possible are important projects for us to undertake. But the ideas of joy and sadness are not given terms.

* * *

Todd May recently weighed in on L'Affaire Cogburn.  In his comments, Todd May wrote:

As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.

Sure, I remember that, from his preface to the english edition of Anti-Oedipus. But May's interpretation here (and perhaps in Foucault's original stance), this assumes we know what joy and sadness are, and that they might be the same thing for the same people.

Let's look at two quick footnotes from Steven Shaviro's excellent book, Without Criteria:

This implies that Whitehead rejects Spinoza’s basic principle of conatus, the claim that “each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being,” and that this striving is “the actual essence of the thing itself” (de Spinoza 1991, 108: Ethics, Part III, propositions 6 and 7). For Whitehead, things strive not to persist in their own being, but rather to become other than they were, to make some alteration in the “data” that they receive. An entity’s “satisfaction” consists not in persisting in its own being, but in achieving difference and novelty, in introducing something new into the world. (p. 19, n3)

And:

Whitehead’s rejection of Spinoza’s monism in favor of William James’s pluralism goes along with his rejection of Spinoza’s conatus in favor of James’s (and Bergson’s) sense of continual change, becoming or process, or what he also calls creativity. (p. 22, n6)

We could potentially affirm that both are true, that for some joy consists in preservation of the self, and for others joy (or satisfaction) consists in difference and becoming otherwise. And all of this, of course, will change what you see as sad, or joyful, militancy. If you see joy as persisting in your being, than anything that seeks to change how that being interacts and relates, and anyone who seeks to create new relationships, can only be perceived as killjoys.

* * * 

I have written before about Sara Ahmed's provocative and compelling essay, "Feminist Killjoys and other Willful Subjects" (the essay was expanded in The Promise of Happiness, and, Ahmed has just published a new book entitled Willful Subjects).  Ahmed wishes to "take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously." She goes on to argue:

The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, of how happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods (a social good is what causes happiness, given happiness is understood as what is good). As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely "it is always easy to describe as happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others]." [...] To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. Even if we are struggling for different things, even if we have different worlds we want to create, we might share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus unhappy archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of "the happy housewife;" Black critiques of the myth of "the happy slave"; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as "domestic bliss." The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon. [...] We can consider the relationship between the negativity of the figure of the feminist killjoy and how certain bodies are "encountered" as being negative. Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. As she puts it, "it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation." To be oppressed requires that you show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. For Frye "anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous."

You can see two currents here. The first is that the feminist killjoy, or more generally the activist killjoy, is the one who is constantly struggling against situations that are declared to be happy. The second current is that oppression often demands that the oppressed declare their happiness in their own oppression (we will return to this second current later). The first current allows us to examine May's original quotation in greater context. It comes as part of this whole paragraph:

To add another example, I know people whose general commitments I would call feminist reject that label because they see feminists as angry man-hating types who just want to make men feel bad. Now, of course, I don't lay all that at the doorstep of feminists. The right does an excellent job of slurring feminism. But I have had the experience of being language-policed when it seems to me inappropriate (ex. by people who would never have escorted women into abortion clinics, as I have). And I think this does not do us credit. As Foucault once remarked, one does not have to be sad in order to be militant. One can go further: a sad militancy is one of those ways the left has developed whose major contribution seems to be to increase our marginalization.

The rather odd thing is the lack of transition that takes us from the discussion of feminism to the discussion of sad militants. He does not do the work to posit why someone challenging his discourse (even someone who lacks May's ethos), leads to sadness. But someone is sad here. Is it May? It is the feminist who "language-policed" him? There exists an ambiguity of where the sadness comes from, and who it is affecting. This leads us to this great blog post by Ahmed. In it, Ahmed argues that when someone points out a problem, it is often the person who perceives the problem who is then perceived by others as the problem. Another long quotation:

When you expose a problem you pose a problem.  I have been thinking more about this problem of how you become the problem because you notice a problem. For example, when you make an observation in public that all the speakers for an event are all white men, or all but one, or all the citations in an academic paper are to all white men, or all but a few, these observations are often treated as the problem with how you are perceiving things (you must be perceiving things!). A rebuttal is often implied: these are the speakers or writers would just happen to be there; they happen to be white men but to make this about that would be to assume that they are here because of that. And so: by describing a gathering as ‘white men,’ we are then assumed to be imposing certain categories on bodies, reducing the heterogeneity of an event; solidifying through our own description something that is fluid. For example: I pointed out recently on Facebook that all the speakers for a Gender Studies conference were white. Someone replied that my statement did not recognise the diversity of the speakers. When perceiving whiteness is a way of not perceiving diversity, then diversity became a way of not perceiving whiteness. [...]  This is why the feminist killjoy remains such a negative stereotype (we affirm her given this negation): as if feminists are speaking out because they are miserable; or if feminism is an obstacle to our own happiness, such that she is what is in the way (feminism: how women get in the way of ourselves). It is implied that you would become well-adjusted if you could just adjust yourself to this world. Smile! The task then becomes self-modification: you have to learn not to perceive a problem; you have to let things fall. 

This last point from Ahmed is interesting and useful. Namely, there is something strangely perverse about the demand that people be joyful in intolerable situations. Of course, such demands for resilience are rather commonplace these days.

* * *

Resilience is rapidly becoming one of the key ways of understanding present ways of governing the world. Robin James has taken up the concept of resilience in understanding how feminism and anti-racism on social media is seen as 'toxic' and 'vampiric.'

A similar claim has been (in)famously leveled against “feminism,” especially “intersectional feminism”: it vampirically drains the lifeblood of the progressive, radical left. [...] Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction. [...] In both essays, feminists, especially feminists of color, are tasked with manufacturing the raw materials–negative affects like guilt or anxiety–on which “good” subjects labor, and, through that labor, generate human capital (e.g., radical cred, moral/political goodness, proper femininity, and so on). They bring us down so we can then perform our upworthiness for liking, favoriting, clicking, sharing audiences. Resilience is part of the means of production, and the “toxicity” of WOC feminists is the first step in this supply chain. Black women do the labor of generating the toxicity that then becomes the raw material upon which white women work; white women do the affective/emotional labor of overcoming, which then translates into tangible employment (writing gigs, etc.)

This narrative of overcoming can be seen in the way that those who are concerned with inclusive language are labeled as policing language, engaging in newspeak, score-keeping, and political correctness. This posits those who are attacking inclusive language as being rebels, truth tellers, concerned about the issues and philosophy. And the failure of social justice movements get laid at the feet of those who want inclusivity. Yet, I really do believe both groups want to create joyful communities.

* * *

The struggle to build communities that create livable lives is not an easy one. And I do believe that many complicated questions about how to go about building such communities are ahead of us. But, a lot of this discussion is centered around the notion of calling out. Let us look at Todd May's last paragraph:

This last bit should not be taken to mean that we should never confront people on their language. My point is rather that in the question of whether to confront, a little judgment is called for, and perhaps a little fellow feeling for people whose behavior actually puts them in the right (i.e. left) camp. It's one thing to call out a racist who uses an offensive racial stereotype. It's quite another to call out someone who aligns her behavior with a sensitivity to LGBT issues and, among a set of like-minded friends, calls something "gay." We are none of us moral saints (thank goodness), and, if our politics are in the right place, I think we can afford to let some things go. (To be sure, language can shape perception. But not all instances of it do.) And alternatively, we need to be aware that not letting certain things go is no substitute for committed political work.

I want to address the last point, first. I am not sure how many people confine their only work to not letting things go on the internet. I am sure there are some. But because many of us primarily only meet each other in our words (I have only briefly met in person only one person I have cited or talked about in this post), it can seem like all we do is reflect on language. Building communities can never be about just getting the language right. I agree with May on this point. But I do believe if we are going to create the sort of inclusive and joyful communities we want, we have to affirm the right to be to those we include. And for people that society has systemically learned to unhear, unsee, and unknow (or to only hear, see, and know in particular pregiven narratives), creating spaces where different narratives can be understood is not a given. And sometimes it is going to require getting the language right. But let us look at May's other point, that we shouldn't call out people whose politics are in the right place, maybe the dialectic is not one of either calling people out or letting things go.

A comment on the original blog post by Cogburn written by "anonladygrad" suggested an article, "Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable," written by Ngọc Loan Trần and published on Black Girl Dangerous. They write:

Because when I see problematic behavior from someone who is connected to me, who is committed to some of the things I am, I want to believe that it’s possible for us to move through and beyond whatever mistake was committed. I picture “calling in” as a practice of pulling folks back in who have strayed from us. It means extending to ourselves the reality that we will and do fuck up, we stray and there will always be a chance for us to return. Calling in as a practice of loving each other enough to allow each other to make mistakes; a practice of loving ourselves enough to know that what we’re trying to do here is a radical unlearning of everything we have been configured to believe is normal. And yes, we have been configured to believe it’s normal to punish each other and ourselves without a way to reconcile hurt. We support this belief by shutting each other out, partly through justified anger and often because some parts of us believe that we can do this without people who fuck up. But, holy shit! We fuck up. All of us. 

I fully admit to having been called out (and called in) on all sorts of statements, beliefs, and behaviors in my life. Sometimes it has been over stuff that I still passionately think I was right on. Sometimes it has been stuff that was incredibly awful for to have said or done, and I have mumbled excuses and apologies, and felt more than a little shame. And sometimes, I have been called out on stuff, and been sure of my rightness, that I got very defensive. And it wasn't until later that I realized I was in the wrong. In general, I have been gifted with friends, colleagues, and mentors who have been incredibly generous to me. They have understood my mistakes, and have often called me in. They have put up with my bullshit, or confusion, or the sort of epistemic parallax that does not let me understand the weight and scars of certain histories, words, and knowledges. And because they are truly generous, they didn't just put up with, but worked to change me, and in so doing gave me the sort of joy and satisfaction that comes from difference and becoming otherwise. They didn't have to do that. Far too often we expect the most marginalized members of our society to have to constantly explain and justify the necessity of their existence. And I hope we can fumble together, to build different worlds, different futures, and different narratives.

We do not all desire the same futures

After the last 24 hours, several of you may be more interested in disability studies. There are many excellent places to start, but I might suggest you start with Alison Kafer's beautifully written Feminist, Queer, Crip.

Fellow rehab patients, most of whom were elderly people recovering from strokes or broken hips, saw equally bleak horizons before me. One stopped me in the hallway to recommend suicide, explaining that life in a wheelchair was not a life worth living [...] Although I may believe I am leading an engaging and satisfying life, they can see clearly the grim future that awaits me: with no hope of a cure in sight, my future cannot be anything but bleak. Not even the ivory tower of academia protected me from these dismal projections of my future: once I made it to graduate school, I had a professor reject a paper proposal about cultural approaches to disability; she cast the topic as inappropriate because insufficiently academic. As I prepared to leave her office, she patted me on the arm and urged me to “heal,” suggesting that my desire to study disability resulted not from intellectual curiosity but from a displaced need for therapy and recovery. My future, she felt, should be spent not researching disability but overcoming it. [...] If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed, it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future. The presence of disability, then, signals something else: a future that bears too many traces of the ills of the present to be desirable. In this framework, a future with disability is a future no one wants, and the figure of the disabled person, especially the disabled fetus or child, becomes the symbol of this undesired future. To want a disabled child, to desire or even to accept disability in this way, is to be disordered, unbalanced, sick. “We” all know this, and there is no room for “you” to think differently. It is this presumption of agreement, this belief that we all desire the same futures, that I take up in this book. (pp. 1-3). 

The burden of canons & the freedom of philistines: Undoing Eurocentric civilization

"Go out upon the street; choose ten white men and ten colored men. Which can carry on and preserve American civilization?"
The whites.
"Well, then."
You evidently consider that a compliment.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: Toward An Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 146.  

I am teaching two sections of Intro to Philosophy this semester. I recently sat and figured out that half of the days I am teaching material written by women and/or philosophers of color. I was kinda proud of myself. But, you know, it is not like white men make up anything close to 50 percent of the global population, nor have they produced half of the world's philosophy. The only way one could feel proud of producing a syllabus with 50% non-white men is by adopting the worse standards of what should be included. That is to say, the standards of including what everyone else includes, which got us here in the first place. And yet, I will admit, it was kinda hard to get to even 50%. I feel constrained by what I feel I should be teaching my students, and feeling like everyone expects them to have read things that other people will recognize as important texts in intro. I feel sometimes like I would be letting down my students if they left my class, and couldn't at least talk about some of the stuff everyone would expect them to have read. They should be able to have at least something in common with everyone else in philosophy. At least a few things--a little Plato and a little Descartes, spiced with Nietzsche.

As a matter of fact, it becomes really hard to imagine a course that reduces white men (and white people in general, and men in general) to something resembling demographics of the world. Or perhaps harder still, it is hard to imagine the sort of person who would design such a course. What person could get rid of all the beautiful texts that inform the culture around us?

* * *

I have increasing become interested in what could be called negative conceptual personas. These are ways of understanding the world that consist of figures and attitudes that have normally been abjected; seen as beings who must be repressed, resisted, and preferably destroyed. To cite at least a few examples there is the clown of Adorno, the idiot of Deleuze and Guattari and furthered in Isabelle Stengers, the concept of stupidity in Avital Ronell and furthered in Jacques Derrida. These are figures that can serve to slow everything down, that can ask questions whose answers everyone knows and that goes without saying. The idiot, for example, might be resistant to the urgent syllogism of the national security state. You know the one, "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done."  But there is more that such negative conceptual personas might allow.

Often, when I am telling colleagues that we need to include less eurocentric work in our introduction to philosophy classes, and undergraduate classes in general, I am often told things like, "No one here knows how to teach outside of the Western tradition." Or I am told things like, "It is great that you are bringing in all of those different traditions, but I am not trained in that." They say it like it is destiny, like a law of nature. They say these excuses like there is no way to change. I am not asking them to do scholarship in those areas (though, it would be nice), or to provide graduate courses on these areas (though, again). All I am saying is to incorporate diverse thinkers and texts in your undergraduate courses. But I realize that for many of these people, what they are afraid of is transforming from the sage on the stage into the fool on the hill. That is, they are not just saying they don't really think those areas and thinkers matter, and that they are unwilling to spend even a little bit of extra time to make a more pluralistic syllabus. They are also deeply afraid of appearing stupid in front of their students. Sometimes things don't change without a bit of a stupidity and an army of fools.

One of the works that I have been obsessed with since it came out, is Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche. This is a book in which the main protagonists are all negative conceptual personas. The heroes of the book are the losers. Indeed, Bull challenges us to read like losers. He explains, "In order to read like a loser, you have to accept the argument, but to turn its consequences against yourself. So, rather than thinking of ourselves as dynamite, or questioning Nietzsche’s extravagant claim, we will immediately think (as we might if someone said this to us in real life) that there may be an explosion; that we might get hurt; that we are too close to someone who could harm us. Reading like losers will make us feel powerless and vulnerable" (p. 36). Another hero of Bull's book is the philistine. As Bull reminds us, the anarchist and atheist were originally created by others as terms to attack their enemies. Originally, no one self-styled themselves anarchists or atheists. "In the sixteenth century, therefore, atheism, like philistinism today, was everywhere condemned but nowhere to be found. Yet by denouncing atheism, theologians mapped out an intellectual position for their phantom adversaries that was eventually filled by people who actually espoused the arguments the theologians had given them" (p. 8). The philistine, for those of you who remember your Nietzsche, "is the antithesis of a son of the muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture" (Untimely Meditations).   But I want to follow up the question that Bull asks later (though our answers will be different from his), "Could something as inherently unpromising as philistinism be an opening to anything at all? And if so, where are philistinism's new seas?" (p. 26).

* * *

Back in February (I know in blogging time that is the dark ages), Jon Cogburn at NewApps asked for reading suggestions for trying to get analytically trained philosophers to understand some of the stakes of what is going on in continental philosophy. Here is the original thread, and here is the follow-up thread.  A somewhat sad and predictable pattern occurs at first, with almost exclusively male and white names being suggested for being read. However, this changes as Robin James, Peter Gratton, Ed Kazarian, and whole host of excellent anonymous commentators suggest a variety of readings, and make a strong case for prioritizing diversity in readings, rather than reducing the analytic and continental divide as the only one in philosophy, and a debate that is principally between white dudes. Jon Cogburn explains that he is "Let me reiterate that in the extended sense of 'pluralist' I think that a pluralist reading group would not be nearly as helpful. Since we're all busy, we don't have time to study everything under the sun. Given these strong constraints it makes sense to read books that will help analytics best understand the maximum number of talks at SPEP that they would otherwise not understand given their poor training in so many important areas of philosophy. Philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, American Pragmatism, feminism, or the new pluralist philosophy of mind (all things suggested above) in general would be poor subject matters with a group with this as an end-goal. German Idealism and Phenomenology are very good subject matters for this end-goal." I know, right? But, at the same time, I recognize here the very same arguments that constrain my own syllabus designs. The desire to create philosophical commons, the belief that teaching too much stuff outside of the canon is to do a disservice to your students (or colleagues). It is to open up your students to ridicule for not really understanding the stakes of most philosophical discussions. This is why I wanted to include a discussion of the very possibility of syllabuses for Ferguson.

There were many smart responses to this, and I suggest reading the comments. However, here is part of one of my comments from those threads: "This goes back to the post here on New APPS about citation practices, as well. The names that we immediately think of, and think of as important, are bound up with a whole history that ignores why we cite some names instead of others. I agree with Robin James, sometimes we got to knock 'em down and rebuild. [...] And maybe Fanon or Arendt or whomever are not as canonical (maybe?), but how cool would it be if your reading group just pretended they were? What if one of the analytic folks were talking to a SPEPer one day and said, "Well, I haven't really read Husserl, but I read this great book on Fanon, and I was wondering...", or "you mention Derrida on play and difference, and I haven't read him, but Maria Lugones argues..." that would be a better philosophical world. And if the SPEPer hadn't read seriously Fanon or Lugones as important intellectual figures, it would be a great kick in the rear." It is a bit of a utopian impulse, but it is also one that requires a type of philistinism. It requires someone who honestly does not understand what the culture is suppose to be, what is normally counted as great, or foundational, or enduring. In the mixed up world of the philistine, the ephemeral becomes the lasting and the marginal becomes the central. The philistine designing her syllabus is not interested in preserving and carrying on the civilization around. Perhaps because she knows that is not a compliment.

A syllabus on the very possibility of #FergusonSyllabus

Recently, Leigh Johnson has started putting together a draft of "Ferguson Syllabus for Philosophers." I highly suggest going, looking, and commentating. It was inspired by the rather compelling "Ferguson Syllabus" created by Sociologists for Justice.   I think this is important work, and I am glad to see it being done. I hope this, at the very least, gets philosophers reading important work in the philosophy of race, decolonial philosophy, and africana philosophy (especially considering the numbers of black philosophers in the profession). However, with all of that said, there is an interesting and important literature base about the role of philosophy to think race, the problems and challenges of multiculturalism, and the way diversity and institutional life can intersect. I think some of these questions are just as important for us to understand. So, in that vein, here are some texts that are important on these issues. This is just a small list. Like Leigh, I would ask for any suggestions, additions, corrections, or general comments.

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.

Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.

Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy.

Top Humanists of the last century, plus a contest.

Over at Adrian's place, he has created a not super scientific but still super interesting list of the most cited 'humanists' who wrote and lived in the last century. The number one hit will surprise exactly no one. Go check it out. He has also announced a contest (which I am currently winning) of finding names who are not on his original list. Read the post and comments to learn more about both.

Increasing the number of female submissions at your conference

Over at Feminist Philosophers there is an interesting post/thread on putting on conferences in line with the goals and aims of the GCC. The GCC, for good reasons, has focused on the keynote and invited speakers at conferences. And the Feminist Philosophers have provided some helpful strategies for avoiding an all-male or mostly male conference.  What I am interested in is the other side, how to increase female applications to your conference. This is particularly focused on smaller conferences. The type that that may have one or two invited speakers (if any), and might get 20-50 abstracts (if even 20). I've organized or help organize a few conferences of that size and scope, and I have never had any real issues with mostly all male submissions. So, what follows are some strategies I believe may have lead to that conclusions. More ideas, and criticisms of my ideas, is very much welcomed. This is list is numbered in no particular order of importance.

(1) When writing the CFP, explicitly invite women to submit papers.
(2) Do you do that thing in your CFP where you suggest possible themes to be addressed, or possible thinkers to think alongside/against? Well, make sure to include feminist themes and women thinkers in those lists.
(3) Okay, your cfp is written. How do you send it out?  Think about posting in places you know feminist and women philosophers might be more likely to see it. Think about posting in SWIP-L if it has specific feminist overlaps. Find listservs, websites, blogs, facebook groups, and newsletters that may not be where you would normally post your cfp, and that can expand the diversity of the applicants to your conference.
(4) Like many CFPs, there are mass distribution channels (as I just talked about), and there are more informal social network channels. Social networks, particularly professional ones, often become gendered. If you are dealing with a field that is already heavily gendered, that is even more true. As Matt Yglesias explained so well:

Unless you can say that your personal network is well-balanced between men and women, then you need to take some moments to step back and look beyond that circle to find some women who'd be well-suited to the job. Otherwise a "gender blind" search process will, over the years, put women in an entrenched position of disadvantage.

This means when you look at who you send your CFP too, you might need to do a bit of research, and send it to people who might be strangers. So, if you are running a conference that you know will be geographically small (like a small state philosophy conference) make sure to send your CFP to female professors and instructors within that geographic region. Encourage them to share the CFP. Encourage their students to apply. If your conference is narrow in terms of focus, look for women doing work within your focus. Send the CFP to those women, encourage them to share, and for their students to apply.

(5) Encourage your female students (if appropriate) to apply. Encourage your colleagues to have their female students apply. 

(6) Have you thought about arranging child care for your conference? Look into it, and if possible, make it happen, and put that on your original cfp.

(7) If you are going to have one or two keynotes, try to make sure they are female keynotes. I know that with the funds of your conference, that might not be possible. But before asking that guy you know, and are sure will say yes and for cheap, think if there are women you can at least ask and try to coordinate with. Maybe it doesn't work, but it is a good idea. 

(8) I am just going to steal this from poster "mm" at the Feminist Philosopher thread I indicated before:

Suppose you are soliciting papers for a conference and these papers will be anonymously reviewed prior to acceptance. Suppose you have slots for 8 papers and receive 80 submissions. Don’t select what you take to be the top 8 papers and stop. Rather, first select the top, say 15 papers. In my limited experience, when there is a sufficiently high number of submissions I have very little confidence that the small subset of papers selected is in any sense “the best”. But I am usually pretty confident that a larger subset consists of papers all of which are worthy of being presented. Once you have selected that larger subset, then de-anonymize them and then narrow the selection further by considering factors like inclusiveness.

In general, these ideas can be boiled down to three major ideas: (1) Invite, and be inviting, for women to send abstracts to your conference. (2) Break out of your normal social network and places for posting conference materials, and try to find places that will draw upon a diverse group of philosophers. (3) Make diversity an avowed goal in your conference planning. 

Inappropriate environments is bad for female students (The no duh edition)

One of the links I posted yesterday was to an excellent post by Samir Chopra. There was a comment on that post, that she has responded to today here. I suggest reading them all in full, but I just wanted to add an additional point.

The original comment suggested:

Since that time, I’ve considered ANY interaction with a female student as a potential minefield to be avoided if possible. I certainly kept my office door open during consultation and only met with female students during office hours. I was a little more casual with male students, sometimes meeting them at a campus coffee shop if, for example, they had class during my office hours. Ironically, then, I suspect that ‘male anxiety’ does not foster more equality, but is more likely to result in preferential treatment of male students by male professors. I still consider my policy a prudent one, but it’s unfortunate that female students had less access to my time than did male students. Sadly, however, the practical effect of male anxiety might be that female students don’t get the best out of male professors which may contribute to an already existing problem: the dearth of women in the discipline.

Okay, let's give all of that the benefit of the doubt (I plan to come back to it shortly). Let's add another point. Say there is a male professor who is known to engage in inappropriate 'banter' in the classroom (maybe often repeating the same middle school jokes about manicures). Say there is a male professor who is known to hit on students at parties, or has been known to have sex with female students. Would a female student feel more or less comfortable having these out of classroom experiences with such a professor? I don't want to generalize this, but I have known female students were downright afraid of going to open-door office hours with a professor because he had a reputation for sleeping with other students in the department. I have known female students who had a male professor crack an inappropriate 'joke' while making a point about her paper. That student froze, never went to see the professor for help again, and was worried she seemed unintelligent to the professor after freezing. I am sure that I can give other examples. Even if things are as bad as the original commentator suggests, having male students enjoy extra coffee shop time with the professor just is not as bad as female students being unable to access the professor during office hours. This is a really simple and obvious point, but inappropriate environments are far worse for the outcomes of female students than the world where you have a slightly more informal relationship with your male students. This is where the arguments made by Louise Anthony and Samir Chopra are completely on point, such objections are just ways of re-centering male anxiety.

Now, none of this to say things have to be as bad as the original commentator suggested.  I think being conscious of the ways we treat male and female students differently is a really good start. Then, the next step, is try to figure out how to confront those realizations in ways that promote and produce a good environment for all of your students.

Women in philosophy: The Hannah Arendt edition

Recently, The Stone at The New York Times has published five female philosophers--Sally Haslanger,  Linda Martín Alcoff, Rae Langton, Louise Antony, and Peg O’Connor--on issues and conditions of being a woman in philosophy. There has been some excellent discussion over at Feminist Philosophers, see here, here, here, here, here, and here (also see this post by Samir Chopra). Also, a while back, Jennifer Saul had a piece in Salon on the topic, and she and Helen Beebee discussed this on the BBC show Women's Hour. Okay, I don't have much to add to this discussion, but I want to add some earlier comments from Hannah Arendt. These comments might not have much to do with the current conditions and issues, but I happen to be reading this as all of this was going on, and just thought it was worth sharing. This comes from the interview that was conducted by Gunter Gaus, and I am citing from Essays in Understanding: 1930-1945.

"Gaus begins the conversation by saying that Arendt is the first woman to take part in the series of interviews he is conducting; then he immediately qualifies that statement by noting that she has a 'very masculine occupation,' namely, that of a philosopher. This leads him to his first question: in spite of the recognition and respect she has received, does she perceive 'her role in the circle of philosophers' as unusual or peculiar because she is a woman?
Arendt replies: I am afraid I have to protest. I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory. I neither feel like a philosopher, nor do I believe that I have been accepted in the circle of philosophers, as you so kindly suppose. But to speak of the other question that you raised in your opening remarks: you say that philosophy is generally thought to be a masculine occupation. It does not have to remain a masculine occupation! it is entirely possible that a woman will one day be a philosopher....
GAUS: I consider you to be a philosopher....
ARENDT: Well, I can't help that, but in my opinion I am not. In my opinion I have said good-bye to philosophy once and for all. As you know, I studied philosophy, but that does not mean that I stayed with it.
(pp. 1-2, emphasis added, ellipses in the original).

The whole interview is here, German with English subtitles:


So, not only does she disavow the role of philosopher (and she spends a bit of time explaining why she doesn't), but also, she argues that philosophers as such would not accept her! Moreover, that there is not yet a woman philosopher (and again, one wonders if she means that a woman philosopher accepted by men philosophers).

On this very interview, there is an interesting EGS discussion between Judith Butler, Avital Ronell, and Larry Rickels. You can find the videos here (though, NB: some of the videos seem to be missing. If someone knows of a more full version, I would love the links).

One of the more interesting times that there is this discussion of why Hannah Arendt might not feel accepted into the circle of philosophers begins at the beginning of the sixth video with Judith Butler, but that is not the first or last instance of discussion of this issue. You can see the sixth video below.

Poseur Alert about Poseur Alert

I have been thinking of writing a blog post about Dominic Pettman's wonderful review of Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking. I might still, but I instead I feel compelled to write about something else. I noticed today that Andrew Sullivan has listed the review as part of his poseur alert series. For those not familiar, Sullivan occasionally quotes something, and usually without commentary, labels it a poseur alert. As he has explained, "Poseur alerts are awarded for passages of prose that stand out for pretension, vanity and really bad writing designed to look like profundity." And sometimes I agree, like Colin McGinn's horrible justifications for his sexual harassment. But usually it just refers to some subject being subjugated to intellectual interrogation that Sullivan does not believe merits that attention. Often done in the cadences of American cultural and media studies, and/or continental philosophy. So, not just Pettman, but also people like James Williams. You get the idea. One has the impression that if you gave Sullivan the collected works of Freud, he would scribble 'poseur alert' on their spines. Or, hell, he probably did that on the first critique of Kant. Here, I'll do it for him:

Poseur Alert

Our apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive, and therefore is always varying. Hence through apprehension alone we can never determine whether this manifold considered as object of experience is simultaneous or sequential. We cannot determine this unless something underlying in experience is there always--i.e., something enduring and permanent of which all variation and simultaneity are only so many ways (modes of time) in which the permanent exists. 

Actually, "pretension, vanity and really bad writing", hmm... .

And that is part of the point, here. It has been a trend of certain people to use what they feel to be bad writing to reject taking seriously intellectual positions. As someone who has done a lot of work on Judith Butler, I find this pretension beyond annoying. If I have to hear one more time that Butler won a bad writing award, I think I will lend them a copy of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and say, "If you want some bad writing!". Look, I think writing matters. We should probably strive to be good writers (though, I think I have bigger spectrum for styles that count as good), but the quality of writing is not an intellectual reason to denounce a thinker.

Lastly, there is no way to write a post on poseur alerts, without doing something that looks like a poseur alert, so here is mine.

Whenever I hear the word poseur, I am immediately transported back to high school. I was a teen in the 90s, of the goth/punk/glam variety. It was a common insult in those groups to refer to other people as poseurs. Basically, we had grown up before Hot Topic, listening to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. As we got older we discovered The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc. This all seems so terribly silly now, but what comes next is even sillier. We of course labeled as poseurs all those younger goths who shopped at Hot Topic, and listened to Korn and Slipknot and whatever else it was they listened to. This is was a time period when a band you heard of the day before, you used to look down your nose at someone who haven't already heard of them. What, you like NIN but you haven't heard of Skinny Puppy?! That sort of thing. See, calling someone else a poseur was all a part of the pretension of that subculture; it was all a part of boundary maintenance and hiding our fears of incompetence. When I hear grown people refer to someone as a poseur, I can't help but immediately think, What are you afraid of?.  This is clearly not just a problem of Andrew Sullivan, but of a broader mentality that attacks certain styles of writing. You know the kind I speak of.

Though, the fact that Andrew Sullivan once included himself in the poseur alert was nice. I still thinks he should stop calling people poseurs, and just go listen to some Nine Inch Nails (or, whatever).

Update: Hi Andrew Sullivan readers! I will add that I appreciate his tendency to post dissents on his blog.

Animals are more than good to think with, part 1.

It seems almost mandatory that nearly all special journal issues on animal studies include the quotation from Claude Levi-Strauss that animals "are good to think" with. What is weird, though, is that is not exactly what he said.  The is an odd issue, occasionally, of misquotation here, as well. As far as I can tell, this is a reference to Levi-Strauss' comment in Totemism:

 We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" [bonnes à manger] but because they are "good to think" [bonnes à penser]. (p. 89 in the English translation]. 

Edmund Leach, who translated that work into English, had this to say in a footnote in another article [this one, .pdf]:

Several critics have rebuked me for mistranslation, but in fact I cite Lévi-Strauss' own words to avoid this imputation. Literally, bonnes à penser means "good to think," bonnes U manger "good to eat." But "good to think" is not English, and the adjectival plural of the French is untranslatable. It seems  to me  that  here,  as so  often, Lévi-Strauss  is  playing  a verbal  game. Totemic species  are categories of things, and it does in fact convey the meaning better to refer to them as "goods" than my critics would allow. (n. 8, np). 

What is odd is that the way this quotation is rendered is doubly wrong. There is the common move to lose the wordplay and go with the grammatically correct "good to think with", which isn't necessarily wrong, as much as a translational interpretation. But often the quotation is wrong in another way, shortening the idea of natural species into simply animals, and ellipesizing all that is in-between. Thus, we get "animals are good to think with". You can, for example, see this in the Wikipedia entry for Animal Studies (go there before they change it!). And while I don't really mind calling out the anonymous contributer to Wikipedia, I will certainly maintain that this misquotation is used again and again in academic publications. Occasionally you will see other variations, and even other citations (I have seen The Savage Mind cited a few times. I don't have a copy of that with me, but it doesn't seem to be the case in google books). Often you will see the move, like I did in the beginning, and just put the quotation marks around "good to think" or "good to think with", and put the animals before it. This is, of course, entirely acceptable, and these are not the citations I am talking about. This isn't to speak ill of the people, some of whom are friends and scholars I respect a lot, but more of just a comment about this misquotation. Especially following up with the recent discussion of the common misquotation of Adorno.

I have more to say on this quotation, and on Claude Levi-Strauss' work on animals, but that will have to be for later.

Animal Studies Book Series

This post is meant to both make sure that I have a complete list, so please let me know if I am missing any, and also so that people looking into book series, either for buying books or submitting manuscripts, might have a list. This list will be alphabetical by publisher.

AK Press: While clearly not an academic press, and often focusing more on cookbooks than animal studies, AK Press still turns out books dedicated to a radical animal studies.

Columbia University Press: Has published several key books in Animal Studies, and obviously continues to publish more. Wendy Lochner seems to be the editor for animal studies.

Lantern Books: While not a press that is specifically academic, it has several important works, and keeps publishing important works, in animal studies.

University of Minnesota Press: Has the Posthumanities series, edited by Cary Wolfe. While not dedicated specifically to just animal studies, animal studies is obviously an important and frequent subset of the books that come out of this series.

Palgrave Macmillan has a the Animal Ethics series, edited by Andrew Linzey and Priscilla Cohn.

Penn State University Press has the new Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures series, edited by Nigel Rothfels and Garry Marvin. I had a chance to briefly talk to Nigel about this series at The Non-Human Turn conference, and he said the hope was to publish books that were about something in particular, rather than a purely philosophical of theoretical treatise.

Reaktion Books has the unique Animal series, edited by Jonathan Burt. 

Rodopi Press has the Critical Animal Studies series, edited Helena Pedersen and Vasile Stănescu. It is a series dedicated to specifically to books that take seriously issues of animal oppression and emancipation.



Honorable Mention (these are presses that frequently, and currently, keep publishing heavily in animal studies, without having a dedicated series or editor):

University of Chicago Press

Continuum Books

Fordham University Press

Oxford University Press


So, what did I miss?

On hating humanity

I went to a lecture yesterday on Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Locke. I asked the speaker a question about potential limits of the phenomenological basis of Levinas' ethics in regards to beings who are not yet (the ethics of fighting global warming for those who do not yet exist), and also I asked about what happens when there is a disagreement about being called by the face of the other, specifically about animals. The speaker began his response this way:

"A French philosopher, I don't remember whom, once said that loving nature is really hatred of humanity." And the answer went downhill from there. A few things: (1) I assumed the speaker was referring to Luc Ferry, but when I checked, I realized Luc Ferry is quoting Marcel Gauchet. (2) I am honestly shocked every time I run into an educated person who does not believe in global warming. (3) This seems like a good time to remind people about this post.

I really do wish I had been able to ask him something like, "So, to prove your love of humanity, do you try to destroy nature as much as possible?" Sadly, that seemed grossly inappropriate at the time.

Initial issues with the grad program listing.

There are already a lot of issues to think through with the grad programs friendly to critical animal studies project.

(1) I have generally been very open with the idea of working on animals. I have included people who have published, people who are teaching, and people who are just beginning doing these things. The goal of the project is to try and identify programs where students would find an atmosphere that might allow them to do the sort of critical animal studies work they want to do, without feeling always intellectually alone.

(2) But I have already run into the problem about the ambiguity of critical animal studies. Usually I enjoy the ambiguity, taking it as a good coalitional term. But there are two problems I am faced with here.

(A) Does CAS just refer to animal studies that intersects on some level with theory (a poorly defined term itself!)? In this, I mean is there any reason, for example, to exclude the animal ethicists working in the analytical tradition? Or the people doing quantitative work on human-animal relationships (if, indeed, anyone is doing that work)? I honestly do see any reason to, say, not list Princeton with the work of Peter Singer.

(B) The other problem has to do with the level to which the work of people listed are for animal welfare, animal abolition, pro-veganism and/or pro-vegetarianism, etc. For example, Kathy Rudy is obviously not pro-vegan or pro-vegetarian, but still considers her work pro-animal welfare. Do we list her work? And what about all the more ambiguous cases? If someone is publishing on, say, Herman Melville and the animal, we might have no good sense of that person's position on vegetarianism/veganism, abolitionism vs. welfarism, etc etc etc. It would be terrible if this list turned into some sort of weird witch-hunt, in which people email into me that so-in-so actually was seen eating animal flesh or whatever. Anyone interested in critical animal studies knows that there is a constant stream of rumors and gossips if certain academics are vegetarians. Or if they are more than vegetarians, but also vegans. Lastly, there is a real limit to my knowledge. I just cannot possibly know everyone's work in every field and discipline, and I cannot know all their positions.

These two issues makes me wonder if a list about critical animal studies is at all possible. Perhaps, all I can do is a list about human-animal studies. I would really like some feedback on all of this.

(3) Should I continue to list graduate certificate programs along with MA and PhD programs? My gut feeling is yes, but I don't have a good reason for that one way or another.

(4) Eric pointed out that I need to add which professors are working on animals in this list. That strikes me as a good idea. Is there any reason that I should maybe avoid this?


Lastly, all of this is taking absurdly more time than I already thought it would. Which is fine. But I have a dissertation to finish (among other things). So the idea of even having a decent Beta list for this application season seems impossible. Still, the goal is to have a strong initial list, at least for North America, by the start of Fall 2012. And that will mean lots more working. I have only gotten a few suggestions so far. Please keep them coming.

Help me generate a list of graduate programs in Critical Animal Studies

I tried to start this once before, but it didn't work out.

Since I made that post, I have gotten increasingly more hits of people interested in this material. I think this is information that will be important for many people. Here is what I am working for: Graduate programs, in any discipline and in any English speaking country, that would be seen as being friendly to critical animal studies. My guess is that we can determine two different levels of friendliness. First, programs that have some sort of specific or stated affinity toward animal studies. Second, programs that have at least one faculty member that is interested in critical animal studies. (If anyone has any objections to these, let me know. If anyone has any other ideas, let me know). Please either post in comments or send me an email. Furthermore, please let me know why you are including the programs you are suggesting. This year's graduate school hunt is already upon us, but I want to try and get some sort of Beta list up by the end of this month, if that is possible. Then hopefully before Fall 2012 begins, I would have a stronger list up, and then I would try to keep it updated as long as the list seems relevant.

Other relevant comments:
(1)This is in no way a ranking list, and I have no desire to start a ranking system.
(2) Critical Animal Studies here is meant in its broadest, most inclusive sense. We can work out if there are issues with this after we have gotten the data.
(3) I am open to any advice or criticism in all of this.
(4) As always, self-promotion is welcomed.

Here is the immediate data I have so far. All the programs listed have faculty that are working on the issues of animals. The schools offering programs in animal studies, are obviously offering programs in animal studies. Also, Colorado State also have an animal studies working group of some sort.
I will certainly have some obvious and embarrassing omissions in what follows. Help me fix those. These schools are being drawn from things other people have mentioned in the past, or I have written down for some reason. This current list is completely devoted to the United States, because that is what I have. I will try to do one on Canada tomorrow (I have a lot less for Canada). I have almost nothing for other countries outside of North America. Send in other stuff, and I will expand the list.

Tell me what I missed. Who has schools where people are teaching and/or publishing on animals, and have graduate departments.

United States

Animal Studies/Animal Public Policy

Humane Society University (MA only).

Michigan State University.

Tufts University (MA only).

Anthropology

Cornell University

Classics

Stanford University

English

Arizona State University

Brooklyn College (MA only)

Colorado State University (MA only)

Columbia University

Northwestern University

PennState

Portland State University (MA Only)

Rice University

Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville (MA only)

UC-Davis

University of Chicago

History

Cornell University

Northwestern University

Interdisciplinary Studies

Stanford University (Modern Thought and Literature)

UC-Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness)


Philosophy

Emory University

DePaul University

Penn State

University of Oregon

Vanderbilt University


Political Science

Colorado State University

Rhetoric

University of South Carolina (MA only)

University of Texas at Austin


Sociology

Colorado State University

University of Colorado at Boulder


Women's Studies

Duke University (Graduate Certificate Only)

UMass Amherst (Graduate Certificate Only)

Interdisciplinary Teaching and the Job Market

This is a question mostly for those of you who have been on hiring committees, or are fairly familiar with thought processes of people on hiring committees. Any discipline or type of university welcomed to respond (though please let me know your background if I don't already).

What is the reigning thought on interdisciplinary teaching? To be a bit more specific, if you have a candidate with a home discipline, but has done extensive teaching in all sorts of different disciplines, how do you weigh that? What are the factors that go into examining such a background? Does it help or hurt if this is seen as a larger aspect of interdisciplinary publishing, conference attending, and education?

If anyone feels more comfortable with just shooting me an email, feel free. Or if anyone wants to post anonymous, go ahead, just give us some idea what discipline you are talking from, and the type of university (SLAC, Research, etc.) that you are coming from.

Really? (UPDATED)

So, it's Saturday. I went to a recruitment fair. I am alternating working on changing the debate budget in response to across the board budget cuts here, and at the same time editing a chapter. Frustrated with both, I made the mistake to check my google reader.

The SPEP resolution passed. Jon Cogburn, in response to Peter, had this to say:

[...]will prove to be concretely harmful [...] to graduates of SPEP programs trying to get jobs in non SPEP dominated departments (do not underestimate how destructive this will be). [...] And now they have sacrificed job prospects of their own students.

Really? Really? (side note, I am not reading this as Professor Cogburn as advocating such a position as a good idea. I know from reading his blog is that he wouldn't adopt such a position personally).

Now, I can't say exactly what Professor Cogburn means here, but I really cannot understand it outside of some of the claims of some outrageous behavior (again, not on Professor Cogburn's part). Namely, that schools will decide to blacklist graduates from certain schools, for things these students/graduates probably had nothing to do with. Can we all slow down a bit and recognize how anti-intellectual, insulting, and plain stupid such a response would be? Can we also admit that such a reaction really only goes to further a view that a certain strand of analytic philosophers (as opposed to analytic philosophy) uses their clear and obvious institutional strength to act as childish bullies? Can we all take a deep breath, and admit all of that?

Look, most of this blew up over the summer, when I was on my honeymoon, or moving, or whatever. So, I have never followed this issue to the degree I feel I have a good sense of what is going on. But even if the Pluralist Guide is the Devil herself, a blacklisting on hiring from people not involved is absurd, more than absurd.

Okay?

UPDATE: I somehow missed this post by Jon Cogburn over at the APPS. He clarifies his position, somewhat. I have very little doubt he is right that this will make people getting hired from so-called SPEP affiliated institutions at other places harder. Of course, it is already pretty hard. And despite the truth of this that anyone who engages in such blacklisting (either overtly or covertly), is simply engaging in anti-philosophical practices.

Communication Studies and Animal Studies: A request

As most of you know, I am mostly housed in a department of communication studies these days. Anyway, I have been looking around at animal studies within the world of communication studies, rhetoric, etc. I have found some things, but do any of you have suggestions for things for me to look into, syllabi, people who are doing work at these intersections, etc. Also, if any of you are doing the work at these intersections, let me know.

The pro-anthropocentric backlash

I haven't read the interview yet (I plan to), but I want to highlight Graham Harman's post on Andrian Johnston's interview, here.

I've been telling people for the past few months that I feel the anti-anthro crowd, in all various and contradictory forms, is gaining ground within the academy. And because the cutting edge is always to be opposed to whatever the cutting edge is, I assume to see a pro-anthro backlash. I'm not blaming Johnston of any of this. I've never meet him, and everyone I know who knows him says he is a great guy and a sincere intellectual. However, I really do assume that the pro-humanism or pro-anthropocentrism conference is on the horizon. The special issue for anthropocentrism will be coming out in journals soon, In Defense of Humans or whatever will be a title forthcoming book. You know it's coming.

Tricking out your Mac for long-form academic writing (especially a dissertation)

So, many of you are in the process of writing your dissertation, and those of you who aren't, do other long academic writing. Anyway, there are lots of products to help you write with a Mac, and most people I talk to don't seem to use many different products to help with their productivity. A quick note here: If you are being highly productive, besides making sure you back-up your work, there is no real reason to play with other systems. But many of you come here because you are goofing off from your work. So, if you are goofing off anyway, you might as well goof off in ways that can help your long-term productivity. So, some products to help you work.

(1) ALWAYS BACK-UP YOUR WORK! I don't have a lot of smart or specific suggestions here. For example, there are pros and cons to backing up on the cloud or not. I would welcome suggestions in comments for specific back-up strategies for macs. But all of you should be backing up in some form or another.

(2) Word Processing:
The main option is, of course, Scrivener. Fairly cheap at $38.25 (that is the educational license version cost), it is versatile, and also allows you to make documents into formats that other people will actually look at. What makes Scrivener such a fun product to work with, is that it allows you to have total control of writing in many different points throughout a long work. It also is great for giving you control at the changing of different parts of the document. Want to experiment how splitting up a paragraph and turning in two will look? You can type it out and easily switch different views to get a good sense of it. Also, the writing mode is perfect for just writing, shutting out the rest of the computer and everything but a surface for putting words onto.

EDIT: Two additional notes for Scrivener, this post from Charles Stross is pretty useful for learning and describing the basics of use. Also, here is an academic template for scrivener.

I haven't had a chance to use MS Office 2011 for Macs, but I have only heard good things. The one I have is pretty terrible in lots of ways, and is mostly used because the world uses MS Office.

I have used openoffice for Macs, and I have to say I was distinctly underimpressed. It is regularly slow, and causes more pinwheel action than most things I do on a Mac. The price is nice, for you grad students, but there are some other really good options.

I have tried two other word processors, and I want to briefly discuss them. One is Apple's iWork's Pages. I enjoyed using pages primarily for making fliers and image heavy texts. I don't do a lot of work with images in my academic writing, so I haven't really used it for that. However, I hear good things. As a standard word processor, it was pretty strong. But not amazing, and I had a lot of compatibility issues.

The other one is Mellel, which I only played around with long enough to expire the free trial. I really liked it a lot. Fast to load, and really controllable writing experience. I definitely felt like I had more control over the aesthetics of my document. But its lack of compatibility (it doesn't support docx, and only supports doc partially) made it not a good investment for me.

There are plenty of other word processors I haven't tried, like Bean and Nisus Writer. I recently was talking with someone who uses Scrivener for all of her long-form writing, and uses bean for all of her note taking and shorter word processing needs. If anyone has any experiance with other word processors I would like to hear them.

(3) Bibliography/Digital Library: I use Bookends. That is also the only one I have any experience with. It is fairly affordable at $99 or $69 (student), and I really like it. Anyone out there with experience with EndNote, Papers, or Sente? I can say that I found Bookends fairly easy to work with, and have never had the sort of problems to make me go and play around with the others. I have heard good things about Papers, but never really used it.

(4) Spelling and Grammar Check: Most of your word processing software will have some sort of spelling and grammar checks (MS Word's Grammar check is pretty decent these days, honestly). However, I suggest Grammarian Pro2. I know some people who cannot stand it, and it requires some active work in the beginning to get it synced to your particular problems and needs, but I think it is worth the effort.


Okay, what did I forget? Other suggestions or reviews? If I get enough of them I will make a follow-up post. Also, I guess I should say I have gotten no money, or even free products, for this post. But if anyone wants to give me free products to review for them, let me know.

On Blogging: Philosophical Stephen Colbert or Sarah Palin?

There has been a whole host of commentary about academic blogging since my last post. I am sure to miss at least a few, but here are the links I have: Tim Morton's brief commentary on my original post, Place Hacking has a both insightful and visually stunning response, Stuart Elden on why he blogs (pt 2), Craig on blogging as a way extracting surplus-value from academics (I might counter that blogging is a way of overcoming the alienation inherent in many modes of academic publishing), Alex Reid, Tim's Commentary on Alex Reid's post, Adrian has been trying to curb what he sees as excessive reactions or over reaction at his place (here and here), and lastly P+M has some links to various blogger manifestos.

And I was ready to let that be that. However, Ray Brassier did an interview with Kronos, where he said the following:

The ‘speculative realist movement’ exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity.

APPS already responded here. Brassier's comments are, of course, completely over the top. To the degree that I don't know what is going on here. If I was to write a caricature of the anti-blogging position, I don't think I could have done a better job. Is Brassier engaging in some sort of mockery or satire? Or is he, Sarah Palin-esque, making statements that self-caricature without meaning too? I don't know Brassier, so this is a sincere question.