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August 16, 2003
Invisible Adjunct has an interesting post. She asks: what happens to PhDs who don't find academic employment? She says:
"That's a question I've asked more than once at this weblog (most recently, in the entry entitled PhD and Nonacademic Careers: Information Underload with some followup at Why do People Teach as Adjuncts?....One message I take from my reading of the nonacademic job search literature: working one's connections and building one's network is at least as important as figuring out how to transfer one's "skill set." Which raises the question, "what about those PhDs with no real connections?"
Some, such as Chris Cumo, find blue collar work that involves a trudge through a swamp of menial jobs including landscaping. It's a slide into junk jobs. I did them whilst putting myself through uni---working in a small goods factory and as a office cleaner in the early morning before obtaining a scholarship for a PhD and supplementing my income by teaching.
Chris Cumo does landscaping. He felt he was excluded from obtaining a full time job in academia on the grounds of class. He is working class not middle class and never would be middle class. He says the academic system shaped him and disdained him as one of the huddled masses. He tried for seven years to land a job in the academic marketplace before facing the reality that his chances for an academic job have dwindled to zero and accepted that it was no longer worthwhile to search for work in academe.
Though excluded from academia and now a landscaper gardner (a menial worker not designer) Chris also writes part-time. That writing is what is important. It indicates that there is an intellectual life in larger culture and not just in self-imposed, isolated academic world of a cadre of intellectual elites. PhD's without full time academic jobs can engage in other kinds of writing. That is what Chris is doing.
What Chris indicates for both unemployed philosophers and the philosophically trained outside academia is that there are other ways of doing philosophy that are different from, and an alternative to, academic philosophy.
One can be academically trained as a philosopher and yet not be simply philosophical through and through. Thus one can be a self-declared philosopher yet exempt oneself from from a commitment to the norms of conventional philosophical discourse.
Of course, that statement would bemuse the professional academic philosophers, especially those in the analytic tradition who seek clarity of understanding and possess a commitment to truth. They would see such a person as being outside philosophy, as a pretence philosopher---a pseudo philosopher.
You need a big pinch of salt with that reply about what constitutes proper philosophical discourse that proceeds within acceptable limits and within non- negotiable horizons or limits. Why a pinch of salt? Well, John Stuart Mill (more here) was not an academic philosopher yet he is treated as a political philosopher of note in articulating the categories of political liberalism. And Derrida, who is an academic philosopher, is dismissed as not doing philosophy. Thus philsophers in Sydney who had never read Derrida's work were moved to join protests against Derrida being awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge in the 1990s.
The justification? Derrida's style of doing philosophy is seen as something else beyond philosophy. What is that something else? His style is usually seen to be a form of literary discourse. And a literary discourse is outside the philosophical tradition by definition. That exludes philosophy connected to art and not science. It supresses difference in the name of identity.
What is wrong with the analytic response is that is ties philosophy to an academic discipline or a convention. It does not allow for opening philosophy to diverse modes of thinking. Why not a philosophy that invents, creates, and experiments? A philosophy that takes up the challenge to transform life. Philosophy should remain open to life. Why not start from examing life just as it is?
Let me make three quick suggestions for different kinds of philosophy.
Why not start from the borders thrown up by the national security state to keep refugees out? On our border phobias and lack of hospitality towards refugess from Afganistan and Iraq.
Another possible difference. What is wrong with a philosophy that is connected to cinema?: cinema represents a new way of seeing and it allows for the possibility of transforming philosophy into something other than it just being an academic discipline.
Why not a philosophy connected to becoming--to the way that our language has changed because of computers, the Internet and weblogging?
So why should we accept conventional ways of writing philosophy? Why not begin again; why not renew; why not question; why not refuse to be the same? Why not create new kinds of writing, new images of philosophy and new ways of what it is to be and think? These are the questions Gilles Deleuze throws at us.
They are good questions as they connect philosophy with questions that should challenge the way we live our lives. They indicate a way of thinking about philosophy in terms of its possibility of what it might be able to do. Rather than think of it as a collection of texts that form a canon (analytic or continental) we can think of philosophy as a challenge to think differently by creating problems and asking questions in order to rupture a conventionally lived life.
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