Reformism and Bad Faith (and Desire)

The other night, my local NPR outlet broadcast an episode of Fresh Air where Terry Gross was interviewing some hack from The Marshall Project, a completely astroturfed ‘nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system.’ It’s not really a mystery how of all the people – hell, all the local to Philadelphia people – who Terry could have interviewed to speak to questions of police violence in the present moment, she instead ran with this utterly sold out nonentity.  Fresh Air is, in times like this, The New Yorker of the radio: it is here to tell us what the correct view is, the correct sentiment, the appropriate way to feel about this.

(I’m cribbing this last, half remembered, from a brilliant piece on The New Yorker that I once read, but cannot now find.)

But anyway, it was in exactly this vein that the conversation advanced to the point where Terry plaintively asks her guest — I really never caught his name, and cannot be bothered to go look it up — whether there are any models for how police can deal with protests ‘without clubbing people,’ ‘without tear gassing people,’ etc.  ‘Dear expert,’ who’s really a journalist and so, in many ways, the opposite of an expert, but somehow as the subject being interviewed, now occupies the place of the expert – the sujet supposé savoir, or something – ‘please tell our audience, are there models?’

Models.

To put this is vastly more polite terms than I did last night on Facebook, let’s just say that this, dear reader, is the ideological moment in all of this: asking for models for how police can avoid doing things that are 100% within their voluntary control avoid doing.

Leaving aside the way that this also feels like the logical endpoint of the press’s habitual discussion of police violence in the passive voice, wherein the police never shoot people, but their weapons discharge and people are struck by however many dozens of bullets that no one shot at them, it seems important to talk about how how there is a particular hesitation at work here in that is central to maintaining the reformist posture in general, at least with respect to the various components of the repressive state apparatus in the US.

It works like this.

Either a) you think these actions are involuntary, and so that the police are completely out of control or b) you acknowledge that the police are doing these things deliberately, that these are the actions of self-directed agents.  But in either case, the request for models is utterly pointless. And yet, instead of following either line of reasoning to its conclusion – which is that the police must go – the conversation is directed, via the appeal to ‘experts,’ via the search a particularly specious kind of procedural model, into this bad faith bait and switch between two half-formed thoughts. It is an almost perfect example of what Barthes called ‘myth,’ a moment where the instituted, the decided, is presented as natural and inevitable.

And in this case, the reformer gets what they really want, the ability to keep affirming the existence of this institution in which they are clearly far more invested than they are in any of the things they claim to value, that seem to animate the plaintive tone of the interviewer’s request to the expert to help her see, things like human life, human rights, or just generally anything at all but the repressive state apparatus.

It would help if people could admit to themselves and others how much they are invested in this thing, if only because if they did, they might be in a position to stop pretending that the it makes some inevitable, necessary kind of sense.

More to the point, it would help if we’d start interrogating just why so many people find things like the abolition of police or prisons to be ‘unimaginable.’ They are not, in fact, logical impossibilities. There is nothing remotely incoherent about thinking of societies without such institutions. Moreover, there is nothing about different political and social orders, or significant historical change, that is really beyond our imaginations. Hell, we have whole flourishing genres of literature, film, and television devoted to imagining all kinds of variations on exactly these sorts of things. But suddenly, we’re supposed to believe that it’s impossible to even imagine a couple of institutional changes?

I think, in other words, that we need to interrogate the role of desire here. What is it that many of us want, and want so badly that they refuse to even imagine something else?

Félix Guattari interview broadcast on France 3 Régions, April 20, 1987 – in English

Introduction

Last week, the good people over at Revue Chimères shared on Facebook a link to a short interview with Guattari that was broadcast on April 20, 1987 as part of an hour-long program devoted to “the thought and heritage of Freud at the end of the 20th Century.”

The interview was conducted by Sylvie Steinbach, and the broadcast helpfully includes a transcript, which I’ve translated into English below.

Generally, what Guattari says here will be familiar to those who’ve spent time with Deleuze and Guattari’s other published discussions of psychoanalysis. What is interesting here is primarily how Guattari inflects the significance of their critique, and how he identifies its target. Rather than representing a break with psychoanalysis per se, he claims, he and Deleuze should be understood to have broken with structuralism — or perhaps a Lacanian orthodoxy that in his mind was producing an increasingly impoverished version of psychoanalysis.

Interview

Interviewer [Sylvie Steinbach]: In 1972, you wrote Anti-Oedipus with philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Was this a rupture with Freudian orthodoxy?

Félix Guattari: Yes of course, but after all there were many others who had made this rupture, while speaking of aligning themselves with orthodoxy.  There was in particular Lacan and the Lacanians who made a rupture with Freudianism but who do not want it recognized, that’s their business.  But us, it was perhaps more a rupture with structuralism than psychoanalysis. That is to say precisely, we spoke of it at the beginning, the fact of reducing the productions of the unconscious to facts of language.  And of reducing analysis to a work relative to language.  And for that matter to a work that is very poor in the end because very often, sadly, structuralist psychoanalysts content themselves with listening without ever intervening, by basing an entire theory on the fact that it is like this that it must happen, only by listening and silence.  For my part, I don’t believe it at all. But after all this, we’re not going to get into this whole aspect of things.  So, rupture, because at bottom we were told [nous on disait] yes it was indeed very important this unconscious subjectivity, beyond norms, beyond ordinary frameworks [cadres].  But then, it is not only something that one is going to encircle, that one is going to grasp in the psychoanalyst’s office, above all with the turn that things have taken.  But it is something which arises just as well no matter where, in a class.  For example there is a whole current of thought around Fernand Oury in the wake of Célestin Freinet, who said that one can do a sort of psychoanalysis in school, in certain types of school.  The problem of analysis also arises in institutions like health care institutions for the mentally ill.  It also arises in cultural life, in the theater, in cinema, it arises all over.  And it will even arise more and more as and when subjectivity is flattened [écrabouillée] – if you will permit me the expression – by the system of mass media, by advertising and by these enormous collective equipments which produce the subject like they produce automobiles or shoes.  So, the problem of rediscovering not only a mastery but the sense of the singularity of one’s relationship to life, of one’s relationship to existence, well this is a problem that will arise more and more. More and more people will have less and less assurance in their work, in their social life, and will have more and more need to shape their own personalities [se construire], to fabricate themselves.  And this is the analytic problem par excellance.  So our attack against Freud and against Lacan is finally in the name of the psychoanalytic discovery.  This is why analysis continues and why it does not get stuck in this dogmatic quarrel, in these schools of thought [chapelles] which in the end present us a practice of analysis that is more and more impoverished, more and more sterile.

Interviewer: In other words it’s necessary to leave the office a little?

Guattari: Yes obviously.  And even when staying in the office, to leave the office, which is to say at least to open the windows of the office and to be prepared to hear all sorts of things, all sorts of other problems than the problems strictly of identification with the father, with the mother, the interfamilial problems or all these machinations [cuisine] that one calls the mathemes of the unconscious, such as the structuralists have developed.

Trapped in Cephalus’ House: Academics, Trolls, and Politics

By now it has surely come to seem somewhat banal to quote Socrates’ remarks at line 31d of the Apology when considering the question of a philosopher’s relation to politics. If not, it probably should, as much of the point of those remarks—at least absent considerable interpretive gymnastics—amounts to fairly standard-issue complaints that a) functioning as a public official means one has to abandon a serious commitment to justice; and b) that participation in politics as a speaker of truth (as Socrates has, of course, constructed himself since the beginning of the text (17c), exposes one not only to the risk but to the virtual certainty of death.

There is actually quite a bit to say about the second of Socrates’ claims. Foucault, for instance, has given us a tremendous amount of contextual material, in his studies of parrhesia, on the basis of which to interpret this claim, and even to ask to what extent Socrates’ very act of placing himself manifestly in danger as a result of his speech was supposed to function as an epistemological (and not merely a rhetorical) guarantee of the truth of what he had said.

But such interpretations already operate on a level that presumes another point: political speech, even and especially insofar as it carries the value of truth, often has little or nothing to do with attempts to produce knowledge or belief. On the contrary, political speech often presupposes one or the other of these, or at very least formations of sympathy, experience, sensibility, etc., that more or less predictably and reliably dispose people towards (or against) knowledge or belief.[1]  On this basis, political speech seeks to assemble, organize, mobilize, direct, assert, claim, assent, give notice, etc., or alternately, to decompose, block, interrupt, deny, withhold, refuse, etc.[2] Such speech is not, by any means, always agonistic. It is perfectly possible for it to be broadly cooperative—and much of what takes place under the sign of political struggle is preceded by the development and extension of various forms of cooperation. But the forms of agon—the forms of struggle—which are certainly one of its the key modalities typically exist at a very significant remove from those which are frequently at work in philosophical practice—and, more broadly, in academic and scientific discourses and the institutions and practices that have been built around them.

Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and the APA’s “Code of Conduct”

by Edward Kazarian and Leigh M. Johnson

A little over two years ago, more than 600 philosophers petitioned the American Philosophical Association to “produce a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of Philosophy.” The immediate motivation for the petition was several high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by philosophers, which together amplified what many viewed—rightly, in our estimation—as a widespread and endemic culture of hostility, predation, exploitation, and intimidation within the profession.  Shortly thereafter, in March 2014, we co-authored a piece entitled “Please Do NOT Revise Your Tone,” articulating our concerns about the problematic effects of tone-policing, generally, and about the drafting and institution of a “Code of Conduct” by the APA, specifically.  In that piece, we argued that there was good reason to worry that such a Code would:

1) impose a disproportionate burden of changing their behavior to “fit in” on those who are members of out- (that is, underrepresented or minority) groups within the profession; 2) likely be applied disproportionately against those expressing dissenting views or criticizing colleagues for lapses in judgment or perception; and 3) tend to reinforce or provide opportunities to reiterate the structures of privilege and exclusion already operating within the profession.

The Executive Board of the APA subsequently decided in favor of producing the document and, earlier this week, published the final version of the discipline’s official “Code of Conduct” here.

Reading that document over, our original worries remain unassuaged and unabated, if not also intensified. We are especially concerned now that this quasi-official document—which elaborates a set of norms, but does not include any mechanisms for enforcement, adjudication, or sanction—will inevitably be used at the local (department-, college-, or university) level in unofficial, ad-hoc ways to undermine or sabotage already vulnerable members of the profession. Worse, we worry that this document will provide pretext for attempts to pressure APA members by complaining to their employers that they have in some instance or another behaved ‘unprofessionally.’ We recognize that any law or regulative code as such allows for the possibility of perverse application, but we maintain that the current iteration of this Code of Conduct is particularly susceptible to manipulation for a number of reasons.

Etienne Balibar – Laïcité or Identity – English Translation

Today in Liberation there appeared a short piece by Etienne Balibar devoted to the question of the principle of laïcité in contemporary French political life — most recently manifested in the ban imposed by several municipalities on the wearing of burkinis, which was overturned last week by the Council of State, which is the highest administrative court in France.

Balibar welcomes this ruling, but also argues that there is a more serious matter at stake, and worries that the principle of laïcité, historically vital to the preservation of civil and personal freedom in France, is — in the ‘identitarian’ version that is currently in the process of being articulated — coming more and more to serve exactly the opposite function. He traces a philosophical genealogy of the notion, and then shows how in the current conjuncture it is being deployed in a way that is profoundly dangerous and indeed both drifts in the direction of a legitimation of “States of exception” and tends to be drawn into what he calls a “mimetic rivalry with the totalitarian discourse against which, at the same time, French politics pretends to guard itself.”

Given the interest of this piece, and its short length, I took the liberty of translating it quickly for the benefit of non-French speaking readers. Below you can find my draft translation (corrections and suggestions are always welcome). Please note that I have left ‘laïcité’ and related terms untranslated, since the English equivalents ‘lay’ or ‘secular’ are either frequently awkward or confusing given Balibar’s use of ‘seculaire’ in several places in the article in a non-technical sense.

Guattari, Institutions, and … Utopias?

I’ve been thinking about Guattari and institutions a lot. More specifically, I’ve been thinking that part of what is interesting about Guattari is that a large portion of his thought is devoted to questions not only about the ways in which subjects are constituted by and in relation to institutions, but also about how relations between subjects and institutions can be rearticulated in order to give rise to real and lasting transformations of both.

Such questions are eminently practical for Guattari, arising out of his political and his psychiatric practice, both of which involve institutional relations at very basic levels—he was a hospital psychiatrist and an activist whose political work was always carried out within a network of highly instituted contexts (Trotskyist militancy, the Youth Hostel movement, various periodical publishing collectives and research groups, etc.).

What all these institutions have in common is that they are at least potentially revolutionary—though in both the case of the hospital and the case of the party, there is also the constant risk of stagnation, blockage, or constraint. As a result, working within institutions requires constant attention. But given this attention, and a certain amount of institutional skill, Guattari also clearly believes that the institution, as such, can function both as a site and an enabling condition for the emergence of new and better forms of life. In the psychiatric context, for instance, the transversal relations that can be set up within the institution allow it to function as a rich and flexible diagnostic and therapeutic instrument.

Guattari is by no means unique among his contemporaries in seeing the creative power of institutions with respect to forms of life.  Foucault, of course, must be credited with a similar insight.  And the very early Deleuze also seemed to have been thinking in terms of institutions as mechanisms of satisfaction, rather than exploitation or constraint.  But Guattari frequently inflects the point differently, and especially optimistically.

In this respect, it seems worth asking what might be gained by reading Guattari in relation to the Utopian tradition.  Already in More we can find envisioned a manner of organization in which the institutions of society should be capable of producing, at least in most cases, a profound alteration in the affective constitution of subjectivity—such that, for example, the desires for property, luxury, or visible status should be purged from the citizens of his island.  Moreover, the organization of work and the distribution of tasks in Utopia is clearly aimed at fostering in each individual a continual process of development precisely on the basis of maximizing his or her opportunities for intellectual, scientific, and creative endeavors.

But it may be less to More’s canonical text and more to the experimental communities that were set up by many socialists in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and which may have to some extent been consciously or unconsciously repeated in the hostelage movement, that it may be profitable to compare the relatively closed, or at least deliberately circumscribed and programmatically organized (and reorganized) space of the clinic to which Guattari devotes so much of his early theoretical energy.

At very least, this seems worth following up.

Letter to the Trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, re: Steven Salaita

Christopher G. Kennedy, Chair, University of Illinois Board of Trustees
Hannah Cave, Trustee
Ricardo Estrada, Trustee
Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Trustee
Lucas N. Frye, Trustee
Karen Hasara, Trustee
Patricia Brown Holmes, Trustee
Timothy N. Koritz, Trustee
Danielle M. Leibowitz, Trustee
Edward L. McMillan, Trustee
James D. Montgomery, Trustee
Pamela B. Strobel, Trustee
Robert A. Easter, President
Thomas R. Bearrows, University Counsel
Susan M. Kies, Secretary of the Board of Trustees and the University
Lester H. McKeever, Jr., Treasurer, Board of Trustees

Dear Trustees and Other Officers,

I write to express my dismay at the conduct of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the case of Steven Salaita, who by all common standards and past practices at your institution (and throughout the U.S. academy) was hired as an Associate Professor of American Indian and Indigenous Studies at your institution, only to see his appointment revoked weeks before he was due to take up the position.

This action was taken in violation of established procedures of shared governance, which give faculty in individual departments and the academic authorities of their colleges control over the decision of who to hire. Salaita’s candidacy was thoroughly reviewed by his prospective colleagues, who found him acceptable, as did other university authorities. He was offered a contract and signed it. For Chancellor Wise, apparently on the basis of trustees’ expected refusal to give final approval to his appointment (heretofore an entirely pro forma step in the process), to terminate his appointment at this stage without any due process is a gross violation of the well established norms of shared governance, and in particular of the principle—set forward by your own accrediting body—that “the governing board delegates day-to-day management of the institution to the administration and expects the faculty to oversee academic matters” (see Section 2c4 of http://www.ncahlc.org/Criteria-Eligibility-and-Candidacy/criteria-and-core-components.html).

Further, the basis for all of this, namely the fact that some people were upset by some of Salaita’s public statements regarding events this summer in Israel/Palestine and lobbied the administration and the trustees, is a gross violation of established norms of academic freedom. Salaita’s statements have no bearing whatsoever on his professional duties at the university—regardless of the specious and deeply disingenuous arguments that have been constructed in order to make it appear that they might. Again, there is an ample body of evidence regarding Salaita’s conduct in the classroom, which was duly considered by his hiring department during his candidacy. By all reports, he is an exemplary teacher—one who is held in the kind of nearly universal esteem by his students that most of us could only dream of. To prefer the baseless insinuations of parties who have never encountered the man in a classroom to the reports of his colleagues and students in order to manufacture a pretense for removing him is absurd.

There is, in other words, no justification for removing him. More, to do so in the manner in which your institution has conducted itself is to violate core principles of due process, shared governance, and academic freedom—bedrock principles of university life. The degree to which this is true is evidenced by the extraordinary number of academics—including myself—who have agreed to boycott your institution until this decision is reversed.

Before closing this message, I also want to ask you to consider another aspect of this case which has been less frequently remarked upon, namely that what is happening to Salaita—the invocation of a standard of civility as grounds for excluding a scholar from a university community—fits an old and ugly pattern. Salaita, as I am sure you know, is Palestinian-American. Those of his statements which some have contested are not simply the speech of any generic individual, but the speech of someone whose own community was profoundly and directly affected by the events that he was discussing. This speech expresses a grievance. But this has been obscured in much of the discussion, which has simply painted him as generically ‘uncivil.’ And precisely this operation of obscuring the speaker’s position in order to facilitate labeling him or her as ‘uncivil’ has all too frequently been used to shut down aggrieved speech by members of marginalized groups against the systems (or the agents thereof) that marginalize them. In the American academy, this tactic has been all too common, having been used against generations of non-white scholars, non-male scholars, queer scholars, scholars demanding equitable treatment for those affected by disability, and so forth. (If you think about it for a moment, you should be able to recognize the stereotypes of the ‘angry black man or woman’, the ‘angry feminist,’ etc., and see how they work here.) Labeling the claims of those folks (and their conduct) as uncivil and unprofessional serves simply to divert attention from the substance of those claims and the necessity of acknowledging or answering them. It also prevents us from recognizing or acknowledging the position—and the anguish—of the speakers. That it frequently leads to the exclusion of the folks so labeled from the academic world as such is, of course, part of the point of such labeling. And to the extent that you have accepted that label as it has been applied to Salaita, you are reiterating this pattern once again.

What, then, are the stakes here? This tactic, the degree to which it is all too often successful, is a crucial part of why the U.S. academy remains, for all of its nominal or rhetorical interest in ‘diversity,’ a space that is dominated by logics of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, etc. We are very far from really achieving the diversity that we supposedly seek—and which the same document setting out the Criteria for Accreditation under which your institution operates articulates as one of the values that it is bound to foster. The choice which faces you is thus not merely a choice regarding principles of shared governance and academic freedom, but it is also a choice about whether you will make the substantive commitment to applying those principles to all members of the academic community, and will actively seek to foster a community that is genuinely inclusive instead of reiterating once again an old, tired pattern of exclusion.

For all of these reasons, I encourage you in the strongest possible terms to approve Steven Salaita’s appointment. Doing so is the only possible path toward resorting the position of your fine institution within the international academic community.

Yours,

Edward Kazarian, PhD
Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies
Rowan University*

*I list my institutional and departmental affiliations only for the purposes of identification. I do not speak for the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies or Rowan University.

Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Obituary of Jean Oury [in English]

Sadly, Jean Oury died several weeks ago at the age of 90.  What follows is my quick translation of Elisabeth Roudinesco’s short obituary, published in Le Monde on May 16, 2014.  The original text is here.

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Jean Oury, Leader of Institutional Psychotherapy, is Dead

by Elisabeth Roudinesco

French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jean Oury, internationally known for being the leader of French institutional psychotherapy, died the night of May 15, at the La Borde clinic in Cour-Cheverny (Loir-et-Cher), his student and friend Pierre Delion, professor of child psychiatry at Lille, has announced.

The life of Jean Oury, born March 5, 1924 in La Garenne-Colombes, tends to become confused with his work at the La Borde clinic, a place which he founded in 1953 and which he was known to keep alive despite all difficulties.

Analyzed by Jacques Lacan

Jean Oury was not the founder, but the inheritor of institutional psychotherapy. This current of psychiatry, of which he became the most famous incarnation, was based on a global approach to madness resting on the idea of psychic causality of mental illness in opposition to theses privileging purely physico-chemical causes. It aimed to reform the institution of the asylum by privileging a dynamic relation between caregivers and patients in sites of care said to be “open” to the outside world.

The term institutional psychotherapy was employed for the first time in 1952 by Georges Daumezon. In France, this approach, which already existed elsewhere in the world, had developed starting in 1940, under the Occupation, in the Saint-Alban (Lozère) psychiatric hospital, where there were mixed together pell mell members of the resistance, the mentally ill, refugees and passing intellectuals such as Paul Eluard or Georges Canguilhem.

Jean Oury began his career in 1947 as an intern in psychiatry at the Saint-Alban hospital. At La Borde, he famously worked with Félix Guattari, who died in 1992, who in 1957 took on the administrative directorship of the clinic. A member of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris until its dissolution in 1980, Jean Oury had been analyzed by Jacques Lacan for twenty years. His brother, Fernand Oury, who died in 1997, was the creator of the movement of institutional pedagogy.

—translated by Edward Kazarian    

 

François Laurelle — Le principe de minorité — Foreword [In English]

Introduction

Originally published in 1981, Le principe de minorité, the title of which can be translated as The Minority Principle, is the first in the series of works that Laurelle would eventually designate ‘Philosophy II.’

The following short foreword, subtitled “The Immediate Givens of Multiplicities,” lays out the general plan of the work and announces its major aims. The first of these is a critique and of the major theoretical treatments of “the contemporary problem of Difference, that is to say of continuous and relative multiplicities that it still inscribes in the hypostasis of Being, or of minorities that it still implants in the body of the State—hypostases that it only causes to stretch without daring to break them.” Evidently, the text anticipates important elements of the extended critique that Laruelle would level against Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida, and Heidegger in Philosophies of Difference—though here his announced targets are Nietzsche, Bergson, and Heidegger.

But Laruelle also aims to present an alternative to these inadequate approaches, which he figures under the sign of a type of multiplicity that he distinguishes from two others: the ‘discrete or arithmetic’ type and the ‘continuous’ type, which he associates with the philosophers of difference. The third type, which Laruelle proposes here, are  “dispersive, Unary Multiplicities or Minorities, which” he goes on to say, “are the absolute concept or the essence of multiplicities.” It is this notion which sets him over and against the traditional global categories that are typically held to encompass differences of various sorts: “Being, the Idea, the State, History, etc.” Against these, he argues for “the absolute, non-relative autonomy of parts, differences, minorities, beings [étant], events, singularities, etc.” And from here, he will proceed to argue that in treating these dispersed elements as absolutes, as ‘immediate givens,’ we shall be led to reconcile “a thought of the multiple and of becoming [. . . ] and a thought of the absolute, but of the Absolute as such, a thought of the One, but of the One without unity, beyond the Idea, Logos, Being itself [l’Etre même].” It is in this ‘One without unity,’ this absolute One beyond Being, that, Laruelle contends, we shall find the genuinely “immediate givens” to which the philosophies of Difference ultimately failed to keep its promises at both a theoretical and a political level. And again, readers familiar with the general outlines of Laruelle’s oeuvre will see in all of this an early formulation of themes that remain central to his more recent thought, including texts like Future Christ and its companion, Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains.

Textual Notes and Acknowledgements

This translation is a draft. It has not been reviewed by Laruelle. Please do not publish it without permission. I would also appreciate prior notice if you intend to quote from it or cite it.

I have generally hewed fairly closely to Laruelle’s syntax, and left the original French in brackets where it seemed to me that his meaning might be subject to various readings, or where the original French terms had resonances that were difficult to render adequately in English. Two sentences, especially, proved very difficult to translate and I have supplied the original French in footnotes, which readers are invited to consult.

Finally, this translation has benefitted enormously from a careful review by Tyler Harper. He made a number of excellent suggestions for revisions, many of which I have incorporated in what follows. All mistakes and infelicities are, of course, my own.

The translation follows after the break, or can be downloaded in .pdf form here.

Canards about the University: Three Orthodoxies

Earlier today, Natalia Cecire posted a remarkable intervention into the current debates about higher education on Twitter. She wrote:

@ncecire: Three orthodoxies. 1. There is a “skills gap,” meaning young people aren’t getting enough high-level education.

@ncecire: 2. We need far more teaching than we can possibly provide, which means we need MOOCs. 3. Far too many people are getting Ph.D.s.

My first response to this was to be thrilled, and to send her the link to my first post in this series, which interrogates her number 3 above.  What I appreciated, initially, was how I felt she’d captured something fundamental about the incoherence of the current state of the conventional wisdom, and I told her as much. But the more I think about it, the more I’m tempted to reformulate these slightly, or at least to ask after the conditions under which they frame not an inconsistent, but rather a consistent way of thinking.