gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee

Ignatieff’s Bad Judgment

August 6, 2007

adrienne rich, politics, war

In yesterday’s New York Times magazine, Michael Ignatieff, the professor-turned-politician, almost acknowledges that he made a terrible mistaking in supporting the U.S. invasion into Iraq. Recall that Ignatieff was one of the leading liberal intellectuals who bolstered the Bush administration’s case for war. Along with the liberal journalist Christopher Hitchens, he helped lend a veneer of legitimacy to the U.S. invasion. If liberals supported the war, then what’s the problem, the right all but said.

Well now the massiveness of the problem is something even conservatives have a hard time denying. And now that he is a member of the Canadian parliament and the leader of the liberal party, Ignatieff says he sees things differently from before. The difference, he says, is between being in a position of making political judgments and being in the academy making academic judgments. “In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with,” Ignatieff writes. “In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources.”

Who listens to an academic from Harvard, anyway, he feigns? Who? How about the Bush administration as it tries to grab legitimacy wherever it can find it? Ignatieff’s collosal mistake is in thinking that what an academic thinks and writes is of little or no consequence. But as the poet Adrienne Rich wrote in her poem, “North American Time,” we are responsible for everything we write: “These are the terms, / take them or leave them. / Poetry never stood a chance / of standing outside history.” And neither do the writings of an academic from the Kennedy School.

Despite the essay’s title — “Getting Iraq Wrong: what the war has taught me about political judgment” — Ignatieff never admits he was wrong, much less does he apologize. He seems to simply regret that now that he is a politician he has to be accountable. And he denies that he did anything wrong as a professor or that he has any responsibility for the political consequences of his academic writing. Strangely, he doesn’t seem to see that there are indeed political consequences for what we academics say in our writings. “In private life, we pay the price of our own mistakes,” Ignatieff writes. “In public life, a politician’s mistakes are first paid by others.” Oh, for the days, Ignatieff seems to long, when one could write without consequence. Forget such dreams, Adrienne Rich implores:

We move but our words stand

become responsible

for more than we intended

Whether we speak and write in the private realm or the public realm is inconsequential. What is of massive consequence is the quality of the judgments we make in a world with others on matters of common concern. For that we are all responsible.
Rorty and the way things “really are”

July 22, 2007

pragmatism, richard rorty

The New York Times book review ran a very nice essay by James Ryerson on the recently departed philosopher Richard Rorty. It largely confirmed much of what I wrote in a recent post commenting on Rorty’s reputation as the “bad boy” of philosophy, the one who dared to call into question so many of the presuppositions of mainstream philosophy today, including the presupposition that there is a truth “out there,” waiting to be discovered. As Ryerson puts it, Rorty was willing to do without the idea of The Way Things Really Are. (That’s a great way to put it for those uninitiated in the hubris of contemporary theories of reference.) For Ryerson, this willingness to let go of this idea was the source of Rorty’s countenance in person, a countenance that defied his cheerfulness on the written page. In person, he was gloomy. I too noticed this the one afternoon I spent with him. He did indeed seem weary and beaten down. But was it because, as Ryerson suggests, that he had given up on the idea of The Way Things Really Are?

Ryerson’s essay is terrific, but I think he has a different take on Rorty’s attitude toward metaphysics. I think for Rorty, as for other pragmatists, it’s not a matter of there being no reality. It’s that reality is always shaped and given a meaning in accordance with the perceiver’s own particular purposes, perspective, and experience. Truth is not nothing. It’s what works. And in fact, and for sure, a given view of “what things really are” will work in some situations and not in others. Truth may be relative, but it’s not willy nilly. It’s not arbitrary. There’s no reason in the world to think that pragmatism leads to nihilism.

Rorty certainly got that. But I don’t think Ryerson has. Yet, anyway. He was certainly a friend of Rorty’s, and that makes him a friend of mine.
David Brooks on Interconnectedness

July 20, 2007

conservatism, David Brooks, Hegel, liberalism, pragmatism
The New York Times columnist David Brooks today sounds a little Hegelian. Commenting on Douglas Hofstadter’s account (in his recent book, I Am A Strange Loop) of his connection to his late wife Carol, Brooks is taken by the interconnection that Hofstadter continues to feel with her. Looking at a picture of Carol, Hofstadter recounts, “I felt I was behind her eyes and all at once I found myself saying, as tears flowed, ‘That’s me. That’s me!’”

And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that wielded us into a unit…. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it had lived on very determinedly in my brain.

Clearly moved by Hofstadter’s account, Brooks writes that “Carol’s death brought home that when people communicate, they send out little flares into each other’s brains. Friends and lovers create feedback loops of ideas and habits and ways of seeing the world.” Though Carol was dead, her self lived on in her widow’s mind. Anyone who experiences or understands this phenomenon has to profoundly rethink the meaning of a self. A self is not an individual, isolated unit but something that “emerges from the conglomeration of all the flares, loops and perceptions that have been shared and developed with others.”

Brooks lays out the political effects of this alternative conception of the self:
- “it emphasizes how profoundly we are shaped by relationships with others”
- “it exposes the errors of those Ayn Rand individualists who think that success is something they achieve thorugh their own genius and willpower”
- “it exposes the fallacy of the New Age narcissists who believe they can find their true, authentic self by burrowing down into their inner being”
- “it explains why it’s so hard to tackle concentrated poverty” because, given that people are permeable, “the habits that are common in underclass areas get inside the brains of those who grow up there”
- “it illuminates the dangers of believing that there is a universal hunger for liberty” because as “embedded creatures” the way we perceive such a value depends on the context”
As Brooks notes: “There is no self that exists before society.”

Spoken like a true Hegelian! And of that group, count me in.

What I find so interesting about this is that Brooks’s understanding is as compatible with his own neoconservatism as it is with my poststructuralist pragmatism. The usual distinction of liberal versus conservative just doesn’t make sense here. Many conservatives today are free-market individualists who barely heed our indebtedness and obligations to others. But free-marketeering is quintessentially a liberal (as in Lockean) phenomenon. Other conservatives, like Brooks as well as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, lament the modern era’s renunciation of ties of community and tradition — just as most avant-gard thinkers understand that there is no self prior to community.

We’re interconnected, and in a global society, more interconnected than ever. If you’re reading this blog, and you’ve never met me, Roger that one. This interconnection is not just due to new digital technologies. It goes all the way down. What scientists and scholars are finding, Brooks notes, “is a vast web of information — some contained in genes, some in brain structure, some in the flow of dinner conversation — that joins us to our ancestors and reminds the living of the presence of the dead.”
Lady Bird

July 13, 2007

Lady Bird Johnson, Wildflowers

I have to say that I am sad that Lady Bird Johnson has passed on. In Austin, where I went to school, she was always a hovering presence, somehow softening the other LBJ’s legacy, monumentally inscribed in that library on the other side of the University of Texas campus. I saw in my lifetime Texas roadsides transformed from billboard clutter to wildflower beauty. Just think, every road trip we take in this country, down highways of green and petals, allows us all to witness her grace. So long, Lady Bird.
More on the ESF Rankings

July 12, 2007

philosophy, rankings

In my last post I expressed concern about the European Science Foundation’s ranking of philosophy journals, a reputational ranking that seems skewed toward a narrow spectrum of philosophy journals. The Feminist Philosophers blog has information on how to weigh in on this ranking. The blog reports that the ESF welcomes feedback and that it has changed its rankings in the past in response to such feedback. Go here to share your thoughts.
GIGO or the new rankings of philosophy journals

June 29, 2007

analytic philosophy, philosophy, rankings

It was a philosopher, Charles Babbage, who first coined the term “garbage in, garbage out,” a term invaluable in understanding that computers only work as well as what is plugged into them. And now the term is coming back full circle to philosophy, at least if one wants to make sense of the latest misbegotten ranking in philosophy: the recent ranking of philosophy journals put out by the European Science Foundation.

I found these guidelines for how the index was compiled. It doesn’t look like a straightforward A to C grading scale. To get on the list at all, a journal has to meet the “normal international academic standards” like being peer-reviewed, etc. C is for local regional journals. A and B are for international journals. A is reserved for “high ranking” international journals and B is for “standard” internaltional journals. That difference is worth worrying over. Hypatia, the leading journal of feminist philosophy in the English-speaking world, gets a B. How the hell can that be? Also, the rankings are based upon the judgments of a small select group of “experts” and I’m sure the philosopher experts aren’t expert in continental or feminist philosophy.
John McCumber is terribly wary of this ranking, as am I. See his recent post to this effect. I have additional concerns. I think that any ranking based on the input of a select group of philosophers will only tell what that select group thinks. So it is entirelly bogus to think that this one group’s rankings say anthing beyond what that group thinks. Or, as statisticians put it, the results are not generalizable. In other words, it’s just X in, X out. As to whether X is garbage or gourmet findings, the index itself is silent.

As to who were the “inputs” for the study, note the following and think about how much they may, or may not, represent philosophy today, especiallly the burgeoning work going on in continental, pragmatist, and feminist philosophy. I thank John McCumber for compiling this list

Philosophy
François Recanati (Chair), Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS/EHESS, Paris (FR) (Barrry Smith,below, is also associated with the institute Nicold)

http://www.institutnicod.org/notices.php?user=recanati

Après des études de philosophie à Paris (agrégation 1974), Récanati a poursuivi son apprentissage philosophique à Oxford, et il a étudié la linguistique à l’EHESS. Lui-même chargé de conférences à l’EHESS, il y a enseigné la pragmatique linguistique et la philosophie du langage de 1975 à 1990. En 1990 il a participé à la création du DEA de Sciences cognitives (EHESS/Paris VI/Ecole Polytechnique), dans le cadre duquel il enseigne toujours aujourd’hui.

Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Universitat de Barcelona (SP)

http://www.ub.es/grc_logos/people/garciacarpintero/index.htm

Doctor in Philosophy by the Universitat de Barcelona (1988), and professor in the Departament de Lògica, Història i Filosofia de la Ciència of this university since 1984.

Interests
I am currently working on a book on reference, defending a certain form of a neo-Fregean picture from the criticism of new theorist of reference. That picture takes modes of presentation prototypically to be components of semantic presuppositions in the ordinary speech acts, like assertions, on which singular reference is involved. The book will make use of and elaborate on views which I have presented in already published papers, including views on the nature of the logical properties, on the semantics/pragmatics divide, and on the nature of phenomenal consciousness. It will also argue for the historical appropriateness of describing the view as Fregean.

Diego Marconi, Universitá degli Studi di Torino (IT)

http://hal9000.cisi.unito.it/wf/DIPARTIMEN/Discipline1/Professori/Diego-Marc/

Diego Marconi was born in Torino in 1947. He graduated under Luigi Pareyson in 1969, writing a thesis on Wittgenstein. At that time, he shared the existential-hermeneutic orientation of Pareyson’s philosophy. Later, he did graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh with Nicholas Rescher, Wilfrid Sellars, Richmond H.Thomason and others. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis (1979) on Hegel. The thesis was an attempt at tracing the origin of so called “dialectical contradictions” in Hegel’s use of language. Afterwards, Marconi has been working within analytic philosophy, which he conceives not as a doctrinal body but as a philosophical style. He wrote or edited four books on Wittgenstein (1971, 1987, 1988, 1997), edited a reader on the formalization of Hegelian dialectics (1979), and published many articles in logic and philosophy of language.

Kevin Mulligan, Université de Genève (CH)

Click to access PostContinentalPhilosophy1.pdf

“Born eighty years ago, Continental philosophy is on its last legs. Its extraordinary career has been helped along by an almost total absence of interest on the part of analytical or other exact philosophers in what the Australian philosopher David Stove calls “the nosology of philosophy,” the explanation of the manifold forms taken by bad philosophy….The Gallic gallimaufry and galimatias alluded to in ¶1 are symptoms of sickness from the point of view of philosophy as a theoretical enterprise.”

Barry Smith, Birkbeck College, University of London (UK)

http://www.bcsmith.org/

Barry Smith’s central interests are in language and mind. His particular focus is on knowledge of language and its relation to other aspects of the mind. He has been developing a position which can do justice to both the interpretationist (Davidsonian) view of the normative nature of belief, desire and meaning and the theoretical (Chomskyan) account of our knowledge of grammar even while it accommodates first-personal knowledge of meaning and mind.

In Gender Studies, though I am unfamiliar with their work:

Gender Studies

Gregory Woods (Chair), Nottingham Trent University (UK)
Ülle Must, Archimedes Foundation, Tartu (EE)

Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, Universitetet i Oslo (NO)
Jens Rydström, Stockholms Universitet (SE)
The Bad Boy of Philosophy

June 12, 2007

philosophy, politics, pragmatism, richard rorty

Last Friday, at age 75, Richard Rorty died. Yesterday both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran nice obituaries, highlighting his youth in a socialist family and his adulthood as a renegade philosopher who’d splashily divorced analytic philosophy in order to embrace American pragmatism. The break-up began in the 60s. “He was a restless intellectual for much of his career,” the Washington Post‘s Adam Bernstein wrote. “While editing the 1967 book ‘The Linguistic Turn,’ he expressed doubts about the idea that analytic philosophy had made great progress by recasting traditional questons about the relation between thought and reality as questions about how language manages to represent the world.”

By the late 70s, with the publication of his book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the divorce was complete. As the Post’s obit aptly notes, “The book sought to dispense with what he considered the grandiose and fruitless attempts to seek out the foundations of knowledge and ethics—presented over the years as timeless truths. Instead he wanted to focus on what was often called a nonfoundationalist philosophy that combined teachings of Dewey, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.”

As someone who’d helped renew interest in the works of the American pragmatist tradition, he could have been a hero for contemporary pragmatist philosophers toiling away in colleges and universities throughout the states. But this was never the case. For nearly a decade now I’ve been a member of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, and more often than not, when his name is mentioned there, it is to discredit his views on pragmatism. It’s true that he nearly invited the epithets slung at him: relativist, provacateur, flat-footed, cynical, irresponsible, nihilistic, denier of scientific truths. He did overstate things, often it seemed just to get a rise out of people. At the same time, though, he was a central figure, especially in the 90s, in developments in political thought. Just read Habermas’s book Between Facts and Norms, and Rawls’s book, Political Liberalism, to see how he was a major interlocutor in thinking through democratic self-government.

When I was finishing up my dissertation, I had a side job as an occasional guest host for a public affairs program for the public TV station in Austin, Texas. I scheduled an interview with Richard Rorty. At the appointed hour he walked into the darkened studio, put out his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Dick Rorty”— as if I’d respond, “Hi, Dick, I’m Noelle McAfee.” I did nothing of the kind, much too in awe of this world-renowned philosopher who had already profoundly affected my own thinking to call him by his first name. I loved his essay, “Solidarity or Objectivity,” which showed why solidarity was a much better ideal than the impossible ideal of having a view from nowhere. But I was still concerned about the political implication of his work, that there may be no basis for talking across cultural divides. If there’s no foundation for our own thinking apart from the way we are raised and the tastes we cultivate, how could we ever appeal to people from different orientations? If our own beliefs are the result of our own upbringing, and little more, how do we come to reflexively criticize and improve our own culture? In the interview, I asked him these questions, and he didn’t seem to have an answer. That might be okay for “gotcha” journalism, but I sincerely wanted to know how to answer those questions. Today they seem more pressing than ever.
Citizen Journalism

June 8, 2007

citizen media, interactive journalism, Uncategorized

Dan Gillmor is doing good work with his new Center for Citizen Media. This is one of the directions that civically-minded media has gone in the past few years. New technologies seem to put the citizen in the driver’s seat. But what does this mean for the profession of journalism? What is the meaning of a profession in a digital age, when nearly anyone can find out anything and distribute this information globally? Are professions defunct? Or is there something more to a profession than a monopoly on some select sort of knowledge? I still think we need the editor’s judgment. Still I think Dan Gillmor’s work is terribly imporatant. Check it out.
Political Crimes

June 7, 2007

Uncategorized
I love this excerpt from Rajeev Barghava’s essay on truth commissions. He explains the difference between a political cirme an an everyday crime. A political crime aims to undermine someone’s sense of or title as a member of a political community, as someone worth hearing and heading. Such seems to be at work in instances of racism, sexisim, et cetera. The root problem is, as I think Barghava suggests, not bigotry per se but the attempt to silence all who challenge the prevailing power structure.
- A person who is robbed on a highway or systematically exploited on agricultural land or in a factory is a victim, but not a political victim. Political victims are those who are threatened, coerced, or killed because of their attempt to define and shape the character of their own society, and to determine the course of what it might become in the future. When political victims suffer violence, they are not merely harmed physically, however. The act of violence transmits an unambiguous, unequivocal message, that their views on the common good—on matters of public significance—do not count, that their side of the argument has no worth and will not be heard, that they will not be recognized as participants in any debate, and, finally, that to negotiate, or even reach a compromise with them, is worthless. In effect, it signals their disappearance from the public domain. (Bhargava 2000, 47)
Democracy and Higher Ed

June 6, 2007

democracy

Just back from a very intense three-day meeting on higher ed and democracy. We — theorists and convenors of deliberative democracy — were brainstorming a network that would focus the academy’s attention on deliberative democracy. To turn a phrase of the Kettering Foundation, “What kind of higher education does a public need in order for democracy to flourish?” By democracy most everyone meant more than the apparatus of voting; we meant the kinds of participation in which members of a political community could have a hand in shaping their common world. It is so easy to get absorbed in the usual way in which politics is conceived — as a matter of what governments do, not what publics do — that it’s easy to think of democracy as something “over there,” not right here in the ways in which we are always already involved in making our common world.