From an essay by philosopher Justin Smith (Paris VII):
The political philosopher Jake McNulty reminded me recently of a wonderful observation of Adorno’s: that it was not the artists with firm political convictions expressed through their art, such as Bertolt Brecht, who ended up truly revolutionizing their historical moment, but those such as Samuel Beckett, whose work is infinitely ambiguous, non-committal, and open to endless interpretation. The one gave us Tin Pan Alley retrofitted with revolutionary slogans, the other gave us his own sort of revolution. One fears that the closest thing we have to intellectuals today are so disengaged from even the ideal of an avant-garde that they know only how to scan a work for its manifest content, and thus today’s descendants of Brecht are deemed good because they are “on message”, while today’s descendants of Beckett, if there were any, would be deemed irresponsible for failing to state explicitly enough their commitment to antiracism.
I see this variety of philistinism most vividly within the tiny world of Anglophone academic philosophy, which for years I have been trying to disown, but which keeps dragging me back into it like the dysfunctional family it is. Here I think I understand the historical causes fairly well. For decades analytic philosophers were convinced that they did not have to engage with the political. In effect they moved to the suburbs, often literally, but always metaphorically. Over the past years, with the latest American Protestant Awakening, the political has reasserted itself with a vengeance, and analytic philosophers have recognized that they must engage with matters of social relevance in order to have any kind of adequate grasp of why they themselves think what they think. But they are returning with an entirely suburbanized mentality, one that enables them to talk about society, but leaves them unable to talk about culture. Thus they take the social impact of a given entertainment, say, how well the latest Marvel movie scores on the Bechdel test, and presume that attention to such things exhausts what might be understood by “cultural criticism”. The idea that there might be a vanguard of cultural production, that doesn’t just nitpick the latest mass entertainments but instead operates in total freedom from these entertainments, seems to belong entirely to a forgotten world.
An equally significant transformation has occurred among those other philosophers, sometimes called “continental”, who were attentive to politics and to culture long before our present moment. Years ago there was a prevailing attitude among the “theory”-adepts that, whatever their actual political allegiances, shared something of the disdainfulness for the common and the simple and the straightforward that we often, rightly or wrongly, associate with right-wing elitism. I can well remember a feminist-theory conference I attended in 2000, where the Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers spoke, using the occasion to explore the various ways in which Black American identity is rooted in such concrete folk-cultural expressions as family recipes and hair-stylings passed from mother to daughter. With my broadly Herderian-Boasian disposition, I responded well to all of this. I found what Spillers was saying to be true and interesting. My white feminist-theory peers who were in attendance, by contrast, could not conceal their disdain, and after the conference was over did not even try to conceal it. They got into this business for the heavy weird stuff, the stuff that alienates grannies with their recipes, not the stuff that “includes” them. They wanted “political theology”, and words written sous rature....
If you try to express this dire fact about our situation in an online venue, you will be told that you are failing to take into account the vibrant communities of mutual-support and encouragement that have emerged in recent years to promote the creative work of members of marginalized communities, as if there could be no other purpose of art than to lift up marginalized voices, as if there were no distinct function for the sort of “difficult” work a Beckett produces alongside the proliferation of vernacular forms. It is for just this sort of distinction that Danielle Rose, formerly poetry editor of the well-named Barren Magazine, had her association with that revue terminated, when she dared to write that poetry is unimportant for the great majority of people. Rose intended this as a frank confrontation with a sad truth. She was told in response that there is no place for such sadness, or such truth, in our current reality. The correct line is that poetry is doing great, and the correct emotion in the face of this great state of things is glee.
I do think Anglophone "analytic" philosophy is in pretty bad shape right now, but it is striking that online the main message is "philosophy is doing great" and we should all be giddy with appreciation. (Anyone who doubts this pessimistic assessment might consider the stunning number of jobs seeking "ethics of computing" (and variations on that), compared to the number showing any interest in, say 19th-centry European philosophy, the most intellectually, culturally, and politically important era in the modern period other than the Enlightenment, yet one that most departments continue to neglect.)
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