On Plumbing for Capitalism; or, on Indirect Public Philosophy

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a supreme court judge, it is generally understood that your are foregoing your freedom to be, at least publicly, more than a diplomat or a priest or a judge. But the professorial career doesn't rise, I don't think, to that level of vocational self-erasure, where one is no longer free to be more than what one is....There are no doubt countless others who were squeezed out of the academy when they came to understand that staying in would likely require the sacrifice of certain other dimensions of their personhood.

Yet something is happening in the present moment that complicates matters a great deal. All of a sudden, there seems to be a general reversal of the valence of extramural activities undertaken by academic philosophers, from bad to good. There is a hitch however: these activities must be subsumable within the academy under the banner of “outreach”.,,Recently, however, I have been noticing that this writing is being taken up by philosophy peers as a contribution to the broader public mission of the discipline. It seems, now, there's just no escape.

...

But this isn't what the neoliberal academy means when it encourages “public philosophy”. What it is encouraging, rather, is a variety of “service”, as in, that one-third of the promotion dossier that hangs there at the end, the poor cousin of teaching and research. The academy will try, to the extent possible, to subsume whatever creative work one of its own puts out there, redescribing and repackaging our work as if it were done for the sake of the guild. But there is a limit to what redescription can do. It is very adept at absorbing non-fiction prose writing, less so when it comes to fiction.

This uneasy relation to disciplinarily non-specific creation reveals a deep unease about the place of philosophy in the world, and it speaks to the dismal consequences of many decades of retreat from the world by anglophone philosophy that the only means it has to engage with the broader culture is by clunky conjunction...

One thing this dreary arrangement forgets is that there is an old and venerable model for philosophers to engage with culture, not with an “and” but with an “in”. This is what is known as “criticism”. It has often been produced by philosophers, or by people sufficiently immersed in a learned tradition to know as much about philosophy as one would come to know in the process of getting officially licensed by the guild. Lessing did it, Schiller did it, Adorno did it: they wrote about the cultural output of their time, not as a parenthesis in their philosophical careers for the sake of some light-hearted Entspannung, not to show “non-philosophers” that philosophy can be “fun”, but because they were philosophers and it was obvious to them that such endeavours, creative and intellectual at once, were within the scope of their calling. They hated fun, or at least did not consider it something to be valued for its own sake.

I hate fun too, and I have no interest in convincing anyone that philosophy partakes of the fun. I am not some jovial country vicar who, for the good of the parish, joins in for a bean-bag toss or a three-legged race at carnival time. I would be happy to do “public philosophy” in a cultural setting in which the bounds of philosophy and non-philosophy, member and non-member, specialized and popular, were differently drawn. But as things are, no way. I'll do my job, I'll do it well, and I'll clock out when I'm done. And I will resist to the end the neoliberal academy's attempt to claim for itself, aided by the emerging system of surveillance capitalism, what is in fact mine alone.--Justin Smith "Against Public Philosophy" [HT Dailynous]

In analytic philosophy, criticism does not have high status so it is no surprise that, in his Parisian (internal) exile, Justin, himself a very fine essayist, overlooks our very own (Danto, Iris Murdoch, and, perhaps, Cavell) in his list of exemplary critics.* Now, Smith does not pause to reflect on the fact that to be art critic today is not a true (Weberian) calling because its main function would be to add value to the billionaire funded corporate, 'neoliberal' art-industry. The spiritual values, and the bourgeois culture that sustained them, that made engagement with art, even Hollywood, so worthy have collapsed.

Even so, it is useful to be reminded that public philosophy (for complications recall here; here; and on Dotson here) need not be exhausted by (i) the contribution to public opinion in the service of some moral or political cause(s), (ii) the dumbed down dissemination of recent pinnacles of thought to the educated in the life-style section(s), or (iii) engagement with fun, low-brow entertainment (so loathed by Justin). It can also be -- let's grant him this -- (iv) the creative expression of philosophical sensitivity not oriented to the eternal motions of the starry skies above, but rather, as critic, immersed in the shadows of one's time tracking sources of ephemeral light. Despite their many distinct skills, motives, and practices (i-iv) have in common an orientation toward a 'public.' (This is so even though it's possible even if most readers of public philosophy are philosophers and their students in some sense.) This public may be narrow or broad; the very possibility of such a public may be a projective construct of the public philosopher's imagination -- this is very much the case in David Hume's philosophy -- or may, in fact, be dispersed in millions of twitter accounts. Hence, public philosophy is aptly named.

In what remains of this digression, I would like to sketch yet an alternative patsh for public philosophy one that is not directly oriented toward a public. One may think this impossible. For, one may well think that if a philosopher is not talking to herself or fellow (professional) philosophers, now or in posterity, or to the public, there is nothing left. But this is a mistake. A philosopher can also be oriented toward a specialist community. We are already quite familiar with something like this in so far that the so-called 'philosophers of X' (biology, physics, economics, law, medicine, cognitive science, etc.) do not just talk to fellow philosophers, but sometimes contribute to, even constitute, the developments in X (recall my interest in (v) synthetic philosophy.) Some philosophy of x or synthetic philosophy is oriented toward the public, but most of it is to fellow academic experts. I hope this is familiar enough so I don't have to recount it here.

But, and now I am getting to the point, there is also expertise outside the academy. In particular, the modern bureaucratic state -- and the international institutions (IMF, World Bank, WHO, WTO, BIS, etc.) that characterize the liberal regime today-- is full of experts that keep the regulatory and administrative state going. They are also, often, non-trivially involved in the development of the details of policy. These experts serve the public, while generally not contributing to the public (unlike, say, their counterparts in think tanks, NGOs, social movements, and political parties). In fact, as Justin notes above, their professional commitments may even prevent them from doing so--or if they can be oriented toward the public, only in very scripted fashion. On the whole, their work is invisible to the public--treated as technique by even serious thinkers.

Yet, for those of us who may wish to improve our governance and, thereby, improve the institutions that shape our lives, including the lives of the vulnerable and those that lack effective voice, being oriented to these public serving, invisible (non-academic) experts may well be an important way to practice public philosophy.+ Philosophers can develop expertise in a field of governance (e.g., public health, bank regulation, defense procurement, anti-trust practice, social insurance, migration, etc.) and orient their philosophical work toward improving or reconstituting it. This already exists (not surprisingly, somewhat quietly), for example, Ryan Muldoon has helped the World Bank; and Nancy Cartwright is developing a more general framework on how to use research to build better social policies. I think of such efforts as indirect public philosophy.

Such (vi) indirect public philosophy is service oriented because it aims toward improving policy and governance; but rather than addressing the public (although that is compatible with it), it engages and collaborates with (primarily non-academic) technocratic experts behind the scenes.** My interest in (vi) is personal. Through funded research I am quietly working on developing a new normative, governance framework for financial debt. I call this -- cf. Locke -- plumbing for capitalism. Some other time, I'll share more on the practice of indirect public philosophy.

 

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a supreme court judge, it is generally understood that your are foregoing your freedom to be, at least publicly, more than a diplomat or a priest or a judge. But the professorial career doesn't rise, I don't think, to that level of vocational self-erasure, where one is no longer free to be more than what one is....There are no doubt countless others who were squeezed out of the academy when they came to understand that staying in would likely require the sacrifice of certain other dimensions of their personhood.

Yet something is happening in the present moment that complicates matters a great deal. All of a sudden, there seems to be a general reversal of the valence of extramural activities undertaken by academic philosophers, from bad to good. There is a hitch however: these activities must be subsumable within the academy under the banner of “outreach”.,,Recently, however, I have been noticing that this writing is being taken up by philosophy peers as a contribution to the broader public mission of the discipline. It seems, now, there's just no escape.

...

But this isn't what the neoliberal academy means when it encourages “public philosophy”. What it is encouraging, rather, is a variety of “service”, as in, that one-third of the promotion dossier that hangs there at the end, the poor cousin of teaching and research. The academy will try, to the extent possible, to subsume whatever creative work one of its own puts out there, redescribing and repackaging our work as if it were done for the sake of the guild. But there is a limit to what redescription can do. It is very adept at absorbing non-fiction prose writing, less so when it comes to fiction.

This uneasy relation to disciplinarily non-specific creation reveals a deep unease about the place of philosophy in the world, and it speaks to the dismal consequences of many decades of retreat from the world by anglophone philosophy that the only means it has to engage with the broader culture is by clunky conjunction...

One thing this dreary arrangement forgets is that there is an old and venerable model for philosophers to engage with culture, not with an “and” but with an “in”. This is what is known as “criticism”. It has often been produced by philosophers, or by people sufficiently immersed in a learned tradition to know as much about philosophy as one would come to know in the process of getting officially licensed by the guild. Lessing did it, Schiller did it, Adorno did it: they wrote about the cultural output of their time, not as a parenthesis in their philosophical careers for the sake of some light-hearted Entspannung, not to show “non-philosophers” that philosophy can be “fun”, but because they were philosophers and it was obvious to them that such endeavours, creative and intellectual at once, were within the scope of their calling. They hated fun, or at least did not consider it something to be valued for its own sake.

I hate fun too, and I have no interest in convincing anyone that philosophy partakes of the fun. I am not some jovial country vicar who, for the good of the parish, joins in for a bean-bag toss or a three-legged race at carnival time. I would be happy to do “public philosophy” in a cultural setting in which the bounds of philosophy and non-philosophy, member and non-member, specialized and popular, were differently drawn. But as things are, no way. I'll do my job, I'll do it well, and I'll clock out when I'm done. And I will resist to the end the neoliberal academy's attempt to claim for itself, aided by the emerging system of surveillance capitalism, what is in fact mine alone.--Justin Smith "Against Public Philosophy" [HT Dailynous]

In analytic philosophy, criticism does not have high status so it is no surprise that, in his Parisian (internal) exile, Justin, himself a very fine essayist, overlooks our very own (Danto, Iris Murdoch, and, perhaps, Cavell) in his list of exemplary critics.* Now, Smith does not pause to reflect on the fact that to be art critic today is not a true (Weberian) calling because its main function would be to add value to the billionaire funded corporate, 'neoliberal' art-industry. The spiritual values, and the bourgeois culture that sustained them, that made engagement with art, even Hollywood, so worthy have collapsed.

Even so, it is useful to be reminded that public philosophy (for complications recall here; here; and on Dotson here) need not be exhausted by (i) the contribution to public opinion in the service of some moral or political cause(s), (ii) the dumbed down dissemination of recent pinnacles of thought to the educated in the life-style section(s), or (iii) engagement with fun, low-brow entertainment (so loathed by Justin). It can also be -- let's grant him this -- (iv) the creative expression of philosophical sensitivity not oriented to the eternal motions of the starry skies above, but rather, as critic, immersed in the shadows of one's time tracking sources of ephemeral light. Despite their many distinct skills, motives, and practices (i-iv) have in common an orientation toward a 'public.' (This is so even though it's possible even if most readers of public philosophy are philosophers and their students in some sense.) This public may be narrow or broad; the very possibility of such a public may be a projective construct of the public philosopher's imagination -- this is very much the case in David Hume's philosophy -- or may, in fact, be dispersed in millions of twitter accounts. Hence, public philosophy is aptly named.

In what remains of this digression, I would like to sketch yet an alternative patsh for public philosophy one that is not directly oriented toward a public. One may think this impossible. For, one may well think that if a philosopher is not talking to herself or fellow (professional) philosophers, now or in posterity, or to the public, there is nothing left. But this is a mistake. A philosopher can also be oriented toward a specialist community. We are already quite familiar with something like this in so far that the so-called 'philosophers of X' (biology, physics, economics, law, medicine, cognitive science, etc.) do not just talk to fellow philosophers, but sometimes contribute to, even constitute, the developments in X (recall my interest in (v) synthetic philosophy.) Some philosophy of x or synthetic philosophy is oriented toward the public, but most of it is to fellow academic experts. I hope this is familiar enough so I don't have to recount it here.

But, and now I am getting to the point, there is also expertise outside the academy. In particular, the modern bureaucratic state -- and the international institutions (IMF, World Bank, WHO, WTO, BIS, etc.) that characterize the liberal regime today-- is full of experts that keep the regulatory and administrative state going. They are also, often, non-trivially involved in the development of the details of policy. These experts serve the public, while generally not contributing to the public (unlike, say, their counterparts in think tanks, NGOs, social movements, and political parties). In fact, as Justin notes above, their professional commitments may even prevent them from doing so--or if they can be oriented toward the public, only in very scripted fashion. On the whole, their work is invisible to the public--treated as technique by even serious thinkers.

Yet, for those of us who may wish to improve our governance and, thereby, improve the institutions that shape our lives, including the lives of the vulnerable and those that lack effective voice, being oriented to these public serving, invisible (non-academic) experts may well be an important way to practice public philosophy.+ Philosophers can develop expertise in a field of governance (e.g., public health, bank regulation, defense procurement, anti-trust practice, social insurance, migration, etc.) and orient their philosophical work toward improving or reconstituting it. This already exists (not surprisingly, somewhat quietly), for example, Ryan Muldoon has helped the World Bank; and Nancy Cartwright is developing a more general framework on how to use research to build better social policies. I think of such efforts as indirect public philosophy.

Such (vi) indirect public philosophy is service oriented because it aims toward improving policy and governance; but rather than addressing the public (although that is compatible with it), it engages and collaborates with (primarily non-academic) technocratic experts behind the scenes.** My interest in (vi) is personal. Through funded research I am quietly working on developing a new normative, governance framework for financial debt. I call this -- cf. Locke -- plumbing for capitalism. Some other time, I'll share more on the practice of indirect public philosophy.

 

*I ignore his very interesting comments on Glass and Piper--go read the whole essay! 

+This should not be confused, despite the overlaps, with the philosophers as public interest consultant (see here for polemics).

**Obviously, it is quite possible for indirect public philosophy to become public and known.

Comments

[Justin E. H. Smith]

I'm not convinced that whatever it was that once made serious engagement with high and low art has 'collapsed'; I'm not convinced that what it in fact was were 'bourgeois values'; I suspect that 'spiritual values' are not only not coextensive with bourgeois values, but antithetical to them (though I'm familiar with the literature that would lead one to speak of the spiritual dimensions of bourgeois life); and I believe, finally, that even if we suppose for the sake of argument that the worth-endowing system in question has collapsed, it is still an eminently worthy thing to preserve the memory of it and seek to transmit it into the future, like latter-day Isidores of Seville, in the hope that this might help it flourish again when humanity gets through to the other end of this dawning dark age.

So there's a lot we disagree about in the only part of this post that seems to be engaging with anything that concerns me.

And once again, I do not dislike 'low-brow' entertainments. But I do despise the opium of superhero movies, the cynical corporations that are dealing it, and especially the new idiotic culture of 'fandom' as it has developed in the social-media era around things like Marvel Comics and Star Wars, most of all when we find purported progressive intellectuals participating in it. This new culture is stunted and subcritical, and the way it engages with mass entertainment shares nothing with the project of, say, Cavell on the golden age of Hollywood.