On opinion-having BBQ Dads and college students vs. thinking
Critical thinking is heralded by contemporary education as one of its chief objectives—just go to the end of the chapter in almost any textbook and there is sure to be a “critical thinking checklist” or series of exercises. Yet the students being produced by this system are hardly any more critical than their barbeque dads.
In defense of barbeque dads, the origin of this stereotype is in dads who work full time keeping most of their opinions to themselves in the workplace, finally having an opportunity to speak freely on their off time. Standing around the barbeque on a Saturday, this castrated man of modern suburbia finally has the opportunity to unload his “opinions.” They’re his opinions and, goddamn it, it is his right to have them!
Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but this is his house, so you bet your ass you’re going to hear what he thinks.
The obstinacy of an opinion-haver asserting one of the opinions that he has can be seen as one of the primary characteristics of the American attitude. “I have a right to speak my mind, so I’m going to!” Not only do you have this right, but you are told that to not exercise this right is to forgo its privileges. Not only do you have the right to speak your mind, you are responsible to do so. Insofar as you are a good citizen, you have your feet firmly planted in an ideological position that is sure to advance its takes on whatever the issue is. Our very democracy depends on you having opinions on everything, especially whatever is current in the news, and then expressing those opinions in the most entitled way imaginable.
But is the barbeque dad, much less anyone else, really speaking his own mind? Are these scripts being exchanged around the barbeque, at the barber shop, or in the sports bar, really “thoughts” at all? Or are these just second hand memes downloaded through whatever he saw on Facebook, heard on his radio, or watched on Tucker the other night?
Like most stereotypes, you can probably think of a few personalities or situations you avoid that more or less confirm that there are indeed people who, when the opportunity presents itself, clearly get some enjoyment airing their predictable and scripted opinions as though these are original and profound. But as I said, I aim to be fair, even to the peak BBQ dad.
Maybe we should all cut ourselves some slack, for fucks sakes. What kind of absurd combination of pressures and lifeworld conditions factor together to produce this historical oddity? I already alluded to one of the contributing roles of full-time employment, which usually requires that the traditional father stereotype in question keep his opinions to himself most of the day. Having touched on “enjoyment” as well, anyone who has been paying attention lately should have heard this with its French connotation, i.e. “jouissance.” But beyond these or the expectations of democratically informed citizenship, there are bigger factors:
Structural stultification of timenergy, something unpacked throughout my book Waypoint, has only been touched on this year on my Substack through the related concept of “functional illiteracy.” Functional illiteracy is when a person is able to read but hasn’t learned how to read, i.e. ask real questions, or come at a text from a variety of perspectives that can only be developed through reading outside of any one worldview.
The functional illiterate is in many ways more disadvantaged than the actual illiterate because at least the latter understands he doesn’t know how to read. The functional illiterate thinks he does, because he is able to read whatever his biases have chosen as gospel, but is incapable of seeing the textuality of the text that is taken as transparent and obvious.
Structural stultification, timenergy, and schooling
Timenergy is “structurally stultified” by its fracturing by, and reduction into, labor power as a standing reserve (Bestand).
1 Timenergy is the precondition of being able to do anything worthwhile, long-lasting, or fulfilling, so it is of the highest value to an individual who wants to explore possibilities and self-actualize. With that said, timenergy is fractured and stultified by disciplinary institutions that reduce the possibilities and habits of subjectivity to nothing more than labor, its management, or identarian consumption.
We find ourselves in a world where “timenergy” is rare, but we certainly have time or energy, i.e. time-without-energy (garbage time) or energy-without-reliably-repeatable-blocks-of-time. How is it that so many of us spend so much of our lives without ever having regularly reliable large blocks of energy-infused-time? This, the most precious resource of all, is necessary for having strong or deep relationships, much less for building any kind of skills that are good-in-themselves, i.e. the liberal arts, martial arts, or any kind of community sport.
The barbeque dad went through an education system of drills, rewards, and punishment, i.e. discipline, that regimented time in a militaristic fashion while forcing him to focus on arbitrary goals and deadlines chosen by authority figures who told him, either explicitly or implicitly, that his success in life depends on how well he negates his own interests for the sake of those subjects selected by the schooling institution. If he couldn’t learn to say what the authorities wanted to see him say on a million different prompts, during a specific period of the day, or by whatever deadlines they set, then he would not deserve a job fit for an adult.
A schooling system set on fracturing timenergy and then subjectivizing its students as some kind of qualified labor power is thus the basis for why I said, at the beginning of this post, “the students being produced by this system are hardly any more critical than their barbeque dads.” For college students and barbeque dads are both a product of this system that uses the pretense of an education as its excuse to institutionalize us through compulsory, age-segregated, and disciplinary schooling.
If anyone gets an education through the schooling system, that is secondary. Its primary goal is to divide the population by atomizing its subjects in a hyper-competitive system that socially constructs “peer groups” that are ranked on the basis of how well these so-called individuals cope when cut off from family, community, and timenergy. How well you cope is graded on the basis of whether you are able to spend most of your waking moments, for the most formative years of your life, prioritizing the arbitrary interests of others when they want you to, so that you are capable of passing exams by the deadlines they have chosen.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but will anyway: I am not against education, nor do I think the schooling system could just be abolished. However, we cannot think of what it is to be a human today without considering the fact that the overwhelming majority of people we know have been subjectivized by a schooling system that aims to produce ideal workers or professionals and managers. The professionals and managers are the ones who did good at school and are therefore convinced that they are of the deserving vanguard in society, burdened with the mission of “influencing” social reform or revolution. The good workers are those convinced that the reason they don’t deserve shorter work weeks or higher pay is because they were 1. not good at school, 2. systemic inequalities on the basis of a marginalized identity, or 3. because this is the cost of having chosen an alternative lifestyle that is impalpable to the mainstream.
An age-segregated compulsory grading system that ranks its members on the basis of how they cope when separated from a timenergy-rich intergenerational cultural context serves to legitimate the system that exists as being a meritocracy. As Bill Clinton said in a December 1992 speech to his “economic summit” cited by Thomas Frank, “what you earn depends on what you can learn.”
2 But the invisible syllabus of the schooling system is not positive knowledge so much as embodied practices, i.e. prioritizing and focusing on interests that are not your own while being de-naturalized from your lifeworld and subjectivized into a specific kind of consumer, either one who represents, influences, and controls, or one who is meant to follow.
As one of the foremost advocates and architects of this “progressive public education” regime we take for granted once said, “We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
3 That’s Woodrow Wilson in 1914. Wilson is the progressive president most responsible for rethinking, along with the Carnegie and Rockefeller Institutes, an education system that would make class consciousness impossible.
Or at least, I should say, that would make “intra class consciousness” impossible. Because this particular system is one that creates class consciousness of a sort, it is just “inter” as opposed to “intra.”
Peer groups cut off from their local culture and convinced that they have more in common with strangers than grandparents or neighbors is not just a social construction, which would be fine if its effects were overwhelmingly positive, but this system is also a historical oddity that arose as a direct response to working class warfare in Europe, and especially Russia, at the turn of the nineteenth century.
I do not have time to lay out the full case for this critique of schooling as opposed to education, not here, anyway. For that, I recommend John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction. He takes most of what’s good from the heterodox discipline called “critical pedagogy” and articulates it in plain speak for your average American parent. An educator of thirty years, Gatto grew increasingly pessimistic about what schooling had become, until he figured out that it is actually working the way it was intended, i.e. the vision for this schooling system was spelled out clearly by the most responsible brokers of power involved in its construction. Take the Carnegie Institute’s statement about molding obedient workers:
In our dreams… people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [of intellectual and moral education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen – of whom we have an ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple… we will organize children… and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
There will be those who have read this far who want to argue with what I have said to this point because they feel defensive about schooling, because they get enjoyment from picking things apart, or because they feel responsible to be critical of whatever it is they read. The question is, is this criticism deep, rigorous, or profound, or is it about as scripted as the BBQ dad’s knee-jerk reactions or second-hand opinions?
This brings us back to the beginning to consider what it would mean to be genuinely critical, as opposed to mere identitarian consumers of opinions from the take-making industry we are all either addicted to, or surrounded by. If we have been subjectivized to not so much think as to repeat supposed facts as though we are trying to pass an exam to impress someone or feel like we deserve something, then learning how to think is surely something worth doing.
They say that college is where we go to learn to think critically. Prior to college you just needed to go through over a decade of institutionalized ritual hazings before you would be allowed to more or less become the manager of your own time, much less pursue a topic or subject-matter because it is inherently interesting to you. The problem with college is that it is not a place where most of us learn to think critically, at least, not any more critically than the BBQ dad.
My opinion of the university scene is my own, and it is biased, thanks to firsthand experiences. However, my opinion is also one I have spent a lot of effort checking and balancing against other perspectives. There are always those who take full advantage of the resources made available at such institutions, and then there are institutions that are more rigorous than, say, a state university, or perhaps a more “soft” discipline.
But as Jeff Schmidt shows in his book Disciplined Minds, even the more prestigious post graduate programs in the hardest sciences of all are not selecting for people who are critical so much as amenable to the stated and implicit disciplinary goals of a university department.
In the last week while working at Amazon I listened to a work by Hannah Arendt’s thesis advisor, the psychologist and philosopher who first read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as “existentialists,” Karl Jaspers. In his The Idea of the University, Jaspers says something that pretty much characterizes the situation that Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds gets at about today’s university:
Selection [by entrance exams and selection committees] may indirectly depend on one’s willingness to assimilate the Weltanschauung [worldview] of a group, membership in which confers status. To achieve status in such a group, the individual has to conform both inwardly and outwardly. It soon becomes impossible to dissociate oneself from the role one is playing. Those who most scrupulously conform to the approved pattern make the best careers. Here, too, specific aptitudes rather than real intelligence are the decisive factor: such as a willingness to be regimented, to make concessions, to show aggressiveness or conciliatory indecision depending upon the group one is trying to please. Both processes of indirect selection illustrate the effects of the presence or absence of rewards set by society on intellectual achievements. So long as intellectual life brings no tangible rewards, social or economic, only those fired by an uncompromising determination will turn to it. To the extent, however, that education and scholarship carry privilege, they become popular with the mass of people. Since most people seek whatever promises privilege and prestige in excess of their actual capacities, social and economic premiums do not actually favor intellectual achievement, but only its external trappings. The human type preferred by the mechanism of rewards is one without interest in anything for its own sake, in leisure and contemplation, but only in the sterile alternation of “working hard” and “playing hard.” To such people everything is but a step up and means to an end: to acquire the social and economic rewards of success with an appetite which increases endlessly.”
The problems Jaspers saw as inevitable tendencies that must be guarded against have only become more pronounced as the university has atrophied. The ubiquitous refrain today, mostly from the right, is that it is the social sciences and humanities that are corrupted, whereas the harder sciences and math remain more or less pure. But au contraire! Schmidt uses physics as his primary example. He is particularly well situated to do so because it is what he studied in graduate school. Of course people assume physics would have the least to do with power, politics, or prejudice, but Schmidt blows such illusions out of the water.
Must you take what I have said so far concerning Weapons of Mass Instruction and Disciplined Minds “on faith”? I am clearly not, in the space provided here, capable of unpacking for you all the ways and reasons these authors challenge typical assumptions about the value or goals of the schooling system, either at its lower or higher ends, regardless of how public or elite its funding.
I bring up wanting to critique what I have said so far, or going along with it “on faith,” as a way of tying this thought to the last post on taking the theory pill. What connects these?
Theory as ideology critique vs. theory as dogmatic worldview
You will never rise above the scripted world of opinion-having if hunkering down in the position of a common sense that takes its self-certainty for granted while weighing all other perspectives on the basis of points taken one at a time. This is the version of “critical thinking” seen at the end of any textbook chapter. It’s the easy way out from having to struggle and tarry with “the negative” as Hegel said.
Hegel raised the stakes of critique to a level beyond anything anyone has ever raised it. Marx met that standard, but Lenin and Co. proceeded to lower it to Fox News lows. What do I mean?
Hegel worked within a tradition that did not take seriously a critique that poses itself as “outside” of the discourse being criticized. The expectation he had for himself, which he then set for the rest of the advanced world of his time, is that of “immanent critique,” i.e. from inside, as opposed to outside.
An immanent critique does not say “oh that’s wrong because of X, Y, or Z reasons, either because I believe otherwise, the evidence refutes it, or because the position itself is generally wrong.” Rather, it presents the position in a way more rigorous than its own adherents, establishing familiarity with what is under analysis, before then taking the terms of the position in question to their logical conclusion to show the untenability of the position in question.
The other aspect of critique, in this rigorous sense, is to aim at understanding the conditions of possibility of the discourse even occurring. Such was the move made by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, where he is not critiquing pure reason so much as establishing the conditions of its possibility, so as to derive an understanding of its limits, or proper functions and place. Without doing so reason will not know when or how to stay in its own lane, so to speak. By taking his critique to this other level, Kant was able to rise above the deadlock of his time torn between empiricism and rationalism and, by doing so, forever changed philosophy.
This gigachad kind of critique can be summarized so far as being primarily characterized by three values that guide the attitudes and set the expectations in the aftermath of Hegel: Critique understood as 1. immanent, as 2. contradictions taken to their logical conclusion, and as 3. an attempt to understand the conditions of possibility for what is taken as the actual subject matter or its associated positions in the discursive field.
What kind of fool would hold BBQ dads, much less college students, to such a standard? No one holds anyone to this standard anymore. The last leftist to hold himself to this standard was Marx himself, who had to satisfy incredible expectations that were set by the German Idealist milieu of his time. Marx’s approach took on everything relevant to his subject matter at the time, every ideological tendency or philosophical school that had a substantive influence on the popular consciousness of academics, activists, and workers alike.
So successful was he at immanent critique that Marx is, to this day, often confused as having advocated for a position that he was critiquing, as with Ricardo or various socialist positions popular then and now. In the case of being misunderstood as a Ricardoian, he is accused of having written a political economy in that classical sense, when in fact he was doing an immanent critique of the Ricardian-Smithian-Millsian tradition of political economy. He took it, by its own terms, to their logical conclusion, while establishing the historical conditions of those terms, bringing in what he had learned through French socialism (of which he was very critical) via methods adopted from the tradition of German Idealism.
To say that Marx’s critique is incomplete or at times remains trapped within certain assumptions of the traditions he critiqued is to admit that he is, in fact, a human. There are some, though, who raise him to the level of God-man. First came Kautsky, the inheritor of the Marx-Engels estate and High Priest of Worldview Marxism as crystallized during the time of the Second International, for whom Marx was probably not quite a God, but who nevertheless enshrined him as such.
7 Then came Lenin, for whom worldview Marxism and its master signifiers “Marx,” “revolution,” and “dictatorship of the proletariat” were his Absolute. Consider this classic piece of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism as articulated by Lenin himself:
The teaching of Marx is all-powerful because it is true. It is complete and harmonious, providing men with a consistent view of the universe, which cannot be reconciled with any superstition, any reaction, any defense of bourgeois oppression. (Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism)
To say that Hegel set the standard for critique at a level almost impossible to reach, which Marx languished for the majority of his life to satisfy, which Lenin then lowered to something worse than your average BBQ dad, is a powerful condemnation of the Old Left. Because I said no one since Marx has gone so far to satisfy that standard set by Hegel, this is also a condemnation of the New Left.
I can be sympathetic to the immediate struggles of World War, revolution, and civil rights. Black and white thinking, or “Manicheanism,” is the norm in politics that is made into a necessity in times of crisis and war. It’s amazing Marx was able to do what he did, and I am not saying I will ever live up to such standards either.
Anyone who has been following my thought this year knows about Benedict Cryptofash, as introduced in my piece on him and Chris Cutrone’s debate, as well as continued in my three-part ongoing conversation with Cutrone that grew out of a conversation in lieu of a live debate between Chris and Cyrpofash. The reason the live debate didn’t take place was because Cryptofash told me he wants to maintain his anonymity.
Insofar as Cryptofash has made a name for himself, or herself or itself or whatever (because this character is anonymous, we don’t know if they are even an individual or a group), “his” name has been made so far on the basis of advancing a position. The position he advances argues that Marx was first and foremost anti-Left; that the attempt to see Marx as the father of Leftism, instead of as its greatest critic, is a way of dodging the challenge posed by Marx, while appropriating his project towards a continuation of everything he was against.
I basically agree with Cryptofash on this much, as do many others. However, by claiming anonymity, and for failing to show any evidence of having done (much less begun) a thoroughgoing critique of everything in existence, he fails to be like Marx.
Benedict Cryptofash thinks that he is being like Marx when he critiques the Left as being nothing more than a reification of the two-party system, and accompanying/supportive assumptions, that functions to naturalize capitalism under the guise of a progressive democracy, which is great. But this is far from all, much less what is most important, when it comes to what Marx was doing. Cryptofash fails to do as Marx did when he
- Merely critiques opposition from the supposed outside (as opposed to immanent critique, i.e. inside-out).
- Fails to advocate for a clear agenda, or at least failing to lay the groundwork for a solution by advocating for a set of working principles and goals. For Marx it was the communist movement and its strategy for building off of the existing worker’s movements inside and outside of the parliamentary system and the labor unions for a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat (that was ill defined and little more than an operating assumption at that point).
- Hides behind anonymity, something Marx vehemently opposed when he saw it advocated for by the likes of Bakunin and the anarchists who were for militant subterfuge and secret societies.9
The transition from Hegel and Marx to Lenin and the actually existing world of theory and critique is that of theory to ideology, a distinction I have been developing. How I make this distinction clear is by emphasizing the way in which theorists are thinkers who try to develop an approach to making sense of the world on the basis of a certain set of explicit and implicit operating assumptions, whereas ideology collapses, closes, and calcifies those operating assumptions into black boxes, social signifiers, and sacred dogmas.
Such a distinction is never completely clear cut. Every theorist has sacred dogmas, whether explicit or implicitly taken for granted. And every ideologist has operating assumptions that are not necessarily, or at least not always, set beyond question in stone. However, genuine thinkers who strive to understand and critique in a way that gives the subject matter and associated audiences who are invested in the discourse their due is nonetheless put in stark contrast against the militant ideologue who is on a mission to make his ideology win out over all the rest, asserting that his is the complete and coherent worldview of objective reality while all the rest are mere ideology.
Lenin knew a thing or two about organizing and influencing people, and he also had a sense for how to seize power and hold it for at least a moment in his historical time. Whether one is sympathetic or not to his agenda then, much less now, is beside the point and not the hill for this piece to die on. My position is simply this: Lenin set a standard for critique at an impossibly low place, one based in ideology that assumes itself to have the complete worldview already figured out. Since then, the Left, which is “over represented” in academia, has not done much to lift the standard back to where it was in Marx’s day.
When you already have all the answers, the only question left is how to win enough people to your side. If you have the philosopher’s stone that grants absolute knowing in every essential way, helping you tell the difference between the good and the bad, the smart and the stupid, then you have little left to learn outside of rhetoric and the practical contingencies of the historical moment.
This position is a lot more similar to the two primary ways that “critical thinking” and “critical theory” operate today, both of which have serious problems.
• Critical thinking has become evaluating individual claims and propositions on the bases of logical validity and evidence in a linear way where each sequential claim or proposition in a chain is analyzed against the common sense of the critical thinker, where the burden of proof is always on the Other
10 insofar as that position, argument, or perspective comes into conflict with the thinker’s own assumptions.
• Critical theory has become either 1. fidelity to the way of seeing opened by some great thinker, as in, “As X [insert great thinker], I see Y” or “would argue Z.” or 2. theory gets used in a more eclectic and undisciplined way, i.e. cherry-picking this, that, and the other thinkers in the general tradition of continental philosophy for handy quotes to bolster one’s position, perspective, or ideology. This is done by neo-reactionaries, progressive Christians, and leftists who want to “theory wash” their presumed worldview, i.e. a way of dressing it up in impressive sounding jargon with a little nuance sprinkled in.
Neither of the mainstream tendencies of critical thinking or critical theory are free of lapsing into self-congratulatory and convenient techniques for letting oneself off the hook from actually having to do the work, tarry with the negative, or struggle through contradictions from a variety of rigorously thought out perspectives; all of these, as convenient to one already enmeshed in institutions or seeking to court an audience supposedly critical of such institutions, are infinitely useful for the careerist, sophist, or idealogue, while frustrating anyone seriously seeking to understand the most important problems, concepts, and perspectives afforded by the history of ideas, power, and ideology. If that’s you, then you fail the overwhelming task at hand.
Rather than enumerate fifty principles, methods, and assumptions worth working with when tackling the subject matter of human subjectivity, power, ideology, and social change, much less truth, justice, and reality, I will go the other route, which is to simplify. For, if you feel the overwhelming weight of the task at hand, you need a little encouragement and some practical tips to get you back on your way.
As posited in my “theory pill” piece, the point, as I see it, is to extricate oneself from common sense meaning, language, and interpretation. Though there is no objective standpoint free from or outside of meaning, language, and interpretation, anyone who seeks freedom from the taken for granted should nevertheless give it their best shot. Not because common sense is always wrong, but because it is necessarily incomplete and, more damning, taken for granted in ways otherwise unbeknownst to us.
To adopt “a radical perspective” is not something one does like the protagonist in They Live who puts on critique of ideology glasses to see the real messages or agendas behind what has been taken for granted. Perception is never as clear as it seems and, if there is a definite objective reality that can be seen operating behind the veil of ideology, we do not have access except by way of concepts and other perspectives that are able to see what our own taken for granted positions fail to understand.
All ideologies, as ideologies, contain a collection of partial truths and useful functions that have become closed and calcified black boxes or rigid designators in the service of a movement, organization, or institution. These partial truths carry the weight of facts that are undeniable to anyone who has contemplated their correctness. Before we can get into the practical applications we must unpack the terminology I’m using here:
The “useful functions” are those psychological and social functions that do something for the believers on the one side, as well as for the maintenance and growth of power for the representatives of that ideology on the other side. To say that these partial truths and useful functions are “closed and calcified black boxes and rigid designators” is to say that what were operating assumptions for theorists are now dogmas for ideologues; as “black boxes” when these dogmas are exchanged without understanding their contents, i.e. serving social signification of belonging to the in-group; or as “rigid designators” when the terms have been painstakingly defined to signify something specific.
Every ideology has its master signifiers that quilt the other signifiers as rigid designators defined in very specific ways necessary for leading to the conclusion dictated by the master signifier, i.e. communism as the master signifier quilts “freedom” in a rigid way that necessarily leads to the conclusion that communist revolution is necessary; libertarianism as a master signifier quilts “freedom” as liberty in a rigid way that necessarily leads to the conclusion that government interference in human life and market exchange needs to be minimized in every way possible.
For more on the master signifier, Baud-Lacanian (a small channel on YouTube) clipped together a bunch of sections where Mikey of The Dangerous Maybe blog is talking about master signifiers, which can be watched here:
The task of philosophy is, arguably, to suspend master signifiers. As Zizek puts it
to maintain a distance toward every reigning Master-Signifier… This maintaining of a distance with regard to the Master-Signifier characterizes the basic attitude of philosophy… philosophy begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as given (“It’s like that!”, “Law is law!”, etc.), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible. What characterizes philosophy is this “step back” from actuality into possibility.
Adopting the critical theoretical mindset is not to simply downplay and dismiss a system of closed and calcified black boxes or rigid designators that forms some total worldview in service of power as necessarily wrong or as pure ideology. We must also ask what works and how it works, towards what ends, in whose interests and, more importantly, ask what the partial truths are that have been monopolized? What do those partial truths obscure when taken as the complete truth?
To counteract the tendencies of everyone to use critical thinking or critical theory to merely bolster a position seen as commonsensical or as a normative contender to what is seen as the common sense of the status quo, anyone who wants to rise to the task of rigorous thought and genuine understanding must practice both theory and critique, using these terms the way Levinas does in Totality and Infinity.
13 Here “theory” is the inversion of “critique.” Theory is used to understand and grasp the world so as to better manipulate it, whereas critique turns back on the one doing critique to challenge this tendency to grasp and attempt to control.
Philosophy and theory, then, as techniques for better understanding oneself and the world, should be used in a way that goes 1. beyond the piecemeal cherry-picking of insights to bolster or “theory-wash” one’s position, 2. beyond fidelity to one great master thinker, and 3. beyond merely weighing any and all propositions insofar as they run counter to one’s assumed position or perspective. Instead, these are fields that must be used to open what has been closed, to liquefy what has become calcified, and to deconstruct not for the sake of downplaying and dismissing, but rather for the sake of salvaging those time honored insights that have been monoplized and interned by the appropriation of ideology.
Don’t be that fucking guy
It is very rare for a person to spend much time thinking through their own presuppositions in a way that suspends assumptions and takes on radically different viewpoints to the best of their ability for years on end before turning to self-critique of those new viewpoints. Rather, every sophomore in philosophy thinks they have it all figured out and is here to write off entire schools of thought, thinkers, and traditions as wrong on the basis of some argument they overheard or cooked up on the weekend. After over a decade in philosophical societies, conferences, and class rooms, I have no problem stating that such people are a flash in the pan, that they don’t have what it takes, and that they either burn out and bounce to the next thing soon after while thinking they still have it all figured out, or they develop a little epistemic humility and get serious about tarrying with thinkers and texts on their own terms.
So I say:
• Instead of the piecemeal approach, dive in the deep end and try your best to give great thinkers, schools of thought, and fields of discourse their due; to not do this in a hurried and hackneyed attempt to disrobe or write off the subject matter or perspective, but to understand for the sake of being able to see the world through a radically different perception.
• Instead of feeling like you must offer up a challenge to every little thing that runs counter to your assumed position or common sense, do your utmost to understand the thinker, school, or field in its essential totality; instead of saying, “what an idiot, X thought Y…” think, “considering the fact that X is not an idiot, why did X think Y?”
• Set yourself to the challenge of not criticizing a position until you have defended that position from the onslaught of common or knee jerk objections it has certainly already had leveled against it.
• “Steelmanning” is to turn the position you are against into something stronger than what your opponents have even advanced. I am essentially saying that if you want to rise to the task in a way few ever do, then don’t just steelman instead of strawman, but moreover, do your best to see the world through the eyes of the Other.
• To walk a mile in the shoes of the Other means something very different than mere empathy or whatever is normally meant. When we are talking about philosophy and theory, this should not be done of your own devices; because we are all now functional illiterates, the counteractive measure demands that we not take as authoritative to a worldview or theory secondhand reports on YouTube or Wikipedia, but that we tarry with the primary works and essential secondary works of any and all theories or ideologies that we seek to understand inside out. Not only will this show you have done the work, but it will help you get acquainted with the essential and more deeply vexing contradictions that are too quickly passed over by the run of the mill “critic” (BBQ dads included).
• Finally, I said early into this piece that “There will be those who have read this far who want to argue with what I have said to this point because they feel defensive about schooling, because they get enjoyment from picking things apart, or because they feel responsible to be critical of whatever it is they read. The question is, is this criticism deep, rigorous, or profound, or is it about as scripted as the BBQ dad’s knee-jerk reactions or second-hand opinions?” I think it would be foolish to say we should all turn off our critical faculties and just read theorists “on their own terms” to “give them their due” in a completely self-brainwashing way. The point is to simply bookmark those thoughts and objections until later, go the distance, and then let it sit for a while before, if it is even worthy of critique, a re-reading. In the ideal scenario, one suspends belief and disbelief, counter-balancing against one’s tendencies, while bookmarking initial questions on the first pass of a text, primarily surveying the text for its basic terrain. The second reading is the one that returns to make sure it understood on the first pass. This return runs it to everything else one knows, comparing and contrasting with other thinkers within or against the position of theory of the author in question. The third reading, if indeed there is a third reading, is only really done if the first two readings proved fruitful enough for a third reading conducted under new goals that were revealed as priority by conclusions or realizations afforded by the previous reading. That’s a confounded ass way to say it though, so to put it another way: You only do a third reading if the first and second got you to the point where you now, having understood and argued within and against the subject matter, now have new or refined questions and goals that were made possible from having done the first two readings.
If you’re at this point wondering how in the world doing this kind of thing is something we have time for, when the world needs changed as soon as possible, then I don’t even know why you are reading. If you already know what must be done, then go do it! Let me know how that works out for you. From what I can tell, this attitude of not having time has been a convenient excuse for supposed “representatives” of various ideologies to advance their careers without understanding much more than how to manipulate those who are supposed to follow their leadership.
I am not a leader or an influencer, neither a professor nor a student, just a working class pleeb who wants to understand and, to the best of his ability, free himself from the taken for granted as it has been given by those who would have me follow and do while they, supposedly, think, understand, and lead.
The task, as I see it, is for those of us who want to gain some freedom from the clutches of ideology in an attempt to better understand and then hopefully influence the influencers, i.e. hold their feet to the fire, to take on the most painstaking and overwhelmingly difficult overhaul on ourselves, on our own beliefs and assumptions, via radical perspectives and difficult concepts necessary for raising the stakes to a level never before reached by the rank and file worker, much less academics.
If Heidegger is correct when he says that “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking”
14 then I am saying it is on us to begin, if we ever want to become more than your run of the mill sophomore, or the BBQ dad they are well on their way to becoming.
For “labor power” see Marx’s Das Kapital. For “standing reserve” see Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, from Basic Writings. For “timenergy” as the precondition to both labor power and the human as standing reserve, see my book Waypoint.
Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank
Weapons of Mass Instruction A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008) by John Taylor Gatto – This is not only where I get the quote, but it is also one of my favorite works in the heterdox field of critical pedagogy. Though I disagree with a couple of the threads in his thought, there are no other authors in this field who have as decisively factored in the ways that schooling was developed as a response to labor organizing.
See above, or as Chicago style puts it: “Ibid.”
The Idea of the University by Karl Jaspers
Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt
For the role Kautsky played in turning the thought of Marx into a total worldview, I recommend Michael Heinrich’s Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital, as well as Paul Mattick’s Anti-Bolshevik Communism.
Ibid., I take this quote from Michael Heinrich’s Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital
See The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict by Ann Robertson https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/bio/robertson-ann.htm
Not to be confused with big Other. When I say “the Other” and capitalize it, I always mean the concrete other person in any interpersonal situation, which is how it gets capitalized and used by the translator of Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, Alphonso Lingis.
“Rigid designator” is a term developed by Saul Kripke in his famous Naming and Necessity. Suffice it to say that he thinks all words, insofar as they function at all, function as rigid designators. This simply shows how deep in ideology and clueless of power or social relations he really was, may he rest in peace.
Tarrying With the Negative by Slavoj Žižek – I have to give full credit to Michael Downs for this quote being known to me, much less understandable. THANKS MIKEY
Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas
What Is Called Thinking? by Martin Heidegger
