I was made aware of the brooklyn institute of social research through a post on the new apps blog today, and it seems to be a very (very) interesting venture. It was founded by a group of PhD students and young PhD’s from new york city, and is running a series of once a week courses in the humanities that seem to run for 6 weeks each, and from the pictures on the website, meet in hip cafes/bars.
As some may know, it has been a dream of mine to start something similar to this. A non-profit public school in the humanities that taught basic to advanced courses in philosophy, theology, literature, social theory and political thought and also ran seminars in the humanities for kids of al ages, ideally in conjunction with a public school system. After working with an urban non-profit back in college I have always liked the idea of linking something at the more ‘intellectual’ level with more on the ground work with kids in struggling communities. But that’s enough about what I would want to do…
One of the things I like most about the brooklyn institute model is that they are charging for classes. This may be against the tendencies of some who would desire something like a truly ‘free’ university, but I for one think this is great. In the world we live in, things cost money. And most of us who would want to be involved in a project like this are TA’s or adjuncts at best, and while ideally I am sure many of us would love to teach for free, it is simply not feasible. On the FAQ page of their website they give a great explanation for why their courses cost money, and they make the point of showing how much it would cost to take a course at a major university. I think in the long run this will hopefully make this project more sustainable, and encourage others to also considered going beyond the ‘free school’ model and not being afraid to ask for a reasonable financial commitment for the sake of supporting high quality teachers.
The only thing that strikes me as a negative about the whole thing is that it is in Brooklyn, which you know, is where everything ever happens these days. Maybe one of the characters on Girls will ride her fixed-gear to a class at the brooklyn institute while listening to a cassette EP from Grizzly Bear’s drummer with an $9 iced coffee in her hand. (Kidding. Obviously. Just because it is in brooklyn doesn’t make it bad).
Hopefully this can set a model that some of us can work on in the future to help create a new space in between ‘full time tenured academic’ labor and resentful ‘post academic’ work.
One of my favorite professors from college passed away this week. While he was without a doubt one of the most influential figures during my time at Vanguard University, it would not be a stretch to say that one of my least favorite professors also passed away a few nights ago. I showed the film ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ to one of my classes this week, and there is a scene towards the end of the film that describes quite precisely how I, and I presume many of my former colleagues, felt about Dr. Craig Rusch. In this scene Royal Tenenbaum is walking with Henry Sherman, the man about to marry his ex-wife. Royal is attempting to make amends with Henry and says something to the effect of “I’ve always been considered kind of an asshole, but it would really eat me up if I knew you wouldn’t forgive me” to which Henry responds, “I don’t think you’re an asshole Royal…you’re just kind of a son-of-a-bitch.” Upon hearing this Royal smiles warmly, as if this is one of the kindest things that could have been said to him.
I could easily imagine Craig Rusch with the same grin on his face while being told by one of the countless students he inspired, challenged and frustrated to no end that he was in fact ‘kind of a son-of-a-bitch’, maybe the most legendary son-of-a-bitch that Vanguard University will ever have on its campus.
Vanguard is a fairly small Christian college in shockingly conservative Orange County, California. It is not the sort of place one expects to find a hot bed of intellectual activity, engaged political thinking, and theologically irreverent debates. But for a period of time this is just the sort of environment created in the small program for Cultural Anthropology at Vanguard University. Besides the many who go on to study at a host of theological seminaries, Vanguard is also not the place where one finds many students planning to go on to graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences, but when I go through the list of the students I know who have graduated from the department of Cultural Anthropology department at Vanguard University, a majority have gone on to carry out graduate work in a number of fields.
Now, I am not saying that without Craig Rusch none of this would have been the case, but I have no doubt that many Anthropology alumni, myself included, may have easily let the thought of graduate school slip away if it was not for the blunt and sometimes aggressive encouragement we received from Craig.
I know that if it was not for an ‘Anthropological Theory’ course taught by Craig, I never would have been exposed to the figures in anthropological, cultural and critical theory which eventually led me to study contemporary European philosophy. While Vanguard did offer a few classes in philosophy, I am quite sure that none of the students who enrolled in them were ever forced to critically engage with the implications of the post-structuralist turn in the European humanities.
Let me be clear, however, that it was not Craig’s intellectual intensity alone that qualifies him for the title of biggest son-of-a-bitch in Vanguard University history. Along with being a harbinger of academic rigor at the University, Craig also embodied the sort of ‘fuck you’ attitude that flew in the face of the somewhat conservative and stifling tendencies of the school. At a place which treats alcohol consumption amongst legal adults with an intensity usually reserved for meth production in middle school science labs, Craig kept a bottle of scotch in his office, and turned his home into a personal micro-brewery. Upon finding out that some friends and I had discovered a fantastic Irish bar that he frequented, he quickly informed me that we were to ‘keep the place to ourselves’ and ‘not tell anyone else’, in fear that we would all be found out by the watchful eyes of Jesus’ prohibition enforcing army.
Craig taught us that we could still exist within the tradition that our University was founded upon while not being afraid to critically re-consider some of the pillars of that tradition. He was not irreverent for the sake of being irreverent, but rather he lived with a freedom and energy that paid tribute to the power that comes with serious thought. While many of us surely did not agree with much of what Craig said, and he made few disciples, he opened us up to a way of thinking that I could not begin to thank him for.
Sadly, that chance to say thank you has come and gone. As I approach the conclusion of my doctoral dissertation, I occasionally think of the professors and mentors from my past that I will be excited to share the news with. I had already imagined the response I may get after an email to Craig informing him that I finished something that I never would have started without his encouragement. The email likely would have arrived days late, bearing a time stamp that would indicate it had been hurriedly written somewhere in between last call and his morning alarm clock, and would contain no more than a couple of lines. I imagine it would read something like this:
“Dr. Burns, you beautiful bastard. Congratulations. Now go get yourself a fucking beer. -Craig.”
I can’t think of a better way to start introducing the occasional discussion of music and culture onto this blog than by encouraging you to check out a new mix-tape by philosopher (and fellow transcendental materialist) Ryan Krahn. It makes me happy to be living in a world in which I get to know individuals with whom I could gladly discuss the merits of a contemporary Hegelian materialism and the brilliance of Frank Ocean in the same conversation. Listen to this now.
Next semester I am going to be teaching two sections of ‘introduction to ethics’ at a small liberal arts college, and as i’ve never taught this course before, am interested if anyone who has is willing to share any thoughts/advice. I’ve been told that most courses in the department are taught in a seminar style and usually tend to be based around the discussion of primary texts rather than using a textbook. In light of that, I am hoping to use 4-5 primary texts which exemplify different ethical positions in the western philosophical tradition. Here is what I’m thinking of using thus far:
Nicomachean Ethics- Aristotle
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals- Kant
Fear and Trembling- Kierkegaard
On the Genealogy of Morals- Nietzsche
I want to add a fifth text, either something that would come before Aristotle (Plato maybe?) or something which would fit in between Aristotle and Kant. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
While this blog has basically fallen off the map in the past year or so, I have decided to at least attempt to breathe some life back into its stagnant online existence. I’ve found it nearly impossible to get myself into any sort of writing routine recently and I figure there is no better way to get myself to write a bit every few days than to re-commit to using this space. To make this happen, however, I am planning to shift the focus of this blog a bit. While I will still post on explicitly academic/philosophical matters, I am also going to begin posting on more ‘popular’ topics such as: sports, film, music, literature, politics and culture. I flirted with the idea of starting a new blog which would be more focused on such popular pursuits, but while reading a back issue of n+1 yesterday realized that there is no reason that one cannot discus topics as diverse as Kierkegaard’s appropriation of German idealism and the curious career of Tim Tebow in the same space.
That said, I hope many of you won’t mind seeing me pop up in your readers a bit more frequently. Along with this, I will likely place any thing I write that deals explicitly with political philosophy (or more precisely, political ontology) on the new’ish group blog Stubborn People, a site initiated by the lovely Dave Mesing.
I just read Scu’s blog post which provides his riff on Harman’s thoughts on the Adrian Johnston interview carried out by Brian Smith and myself. While I completely get where he is coming from, I think it may be a bit much to call the position outlined by Johnston an ‘anthropocentric backlash’ for at least two reasons. First, it’s hardly a new position to privilege the human to some extent, and there is a certain French reliance on Descartes and Rousseau that seems to have never really left (the best contemporary example would be Badiou). Second, it seems like the position of someone like Johnston is far to subtle to be taking for a sort of reactionary humanism, as for him, following someone like Zizek, the point is that through a sort of evolutionary glitch (or fuck-up) humans have been left with a certain capacity for freedom and reflection which is unique to our species. Thus rather than being a ‘traditional’ humanism, it’s a sort of humanism grounded in a thoroughly materialist account of how life and subsequently thought are events which take place after the primacy of matter. After reading some of the excerpts of Meillassoux’s Divine Inexistence in the Harman book, I think his own position (in which humans are ‘the ultimate’) is probably a better target for anyone out to fight the ‘new humanism’.
So I’ve let this blog wither away into nothingness….but would like to try to insert a spark of being into it again by posting the table of contents for an upcoming issue of Cosmos and History edited by Brian Smith and myself. It features papers that are based on presentations given at the ‘Real Objects or Material Subjects?’ conference which took place at the University of Dundee in March, 2010. As C&H is open access, the issue will be available for everyone. I’ll post again once it’s online. Until then, here is what you can expect:
Real Objects or Material Subjects?
The Future of Continental Metaphysics
Table of Contents
Editors Introduction
Michael O’Neill Burns & Brian Anthony Smith
The Problem with Metzinger
Graham Harman
The Transcendental Core of Correlationism
Paul Ennis
Critical Idealism and Transcendental Materialism: A Speculative Analysis of the Second Paralogism
Michael Olson
Objects in manifold times: Deleuze and the speculative philosophy of objects as processes
James Williams
Becoming L’Homme Imaginaire: The Role of the Imagination in Overcoming Circularity in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason
Austin Smidt
Beyond Objects, Beyond Subjects: Giorgio Agamben on Animality, Particularity and the End of Onto-theology
Colby Dickinson
Fanon and Political Will
Peter Hallward
The Necessity of Contingency or Contingent Necessity: Meillassoux, Hegel, and the Subject
John Van Houdt
Aufhebung and Negativity
Ryan Krahn
Lacanian Materialism and the Question of the Real
Tom Eyers
Materialism, Subjectivity and the Outcome of French Philosophy
In early April i’ll be leaving full-time residence in the UK and moving back to Orlando, FL to have free rent, finish writing my PhD, and hopefully get some teaching work. Luckily, I’ve been invited to give a colloqium paper in the department of philosophy at the University of Central Florida on April 14th. If any readers are in the central Florida area, I encourage you to come. Here are the details of the paper I’ll be giving:
Title: Anxious Ontology: Reading Søren Kierkegaard between Idealism and Materialism
Abstract: In much of the recent secondary literature, Søren Kierkegaard has been read as pre-figuring much of what took place in 20th century European philosophy. Often this reading places Kierkegaard in a philosophical lineage that came to be embodied in the ethical, hermeneutic, and deconstructive methods which are often considered to be parts of the larger post-modern sensibility of 20th century philosophy. In this paper I will break from this tradition of considering Kierkegaard’s relation to 20th century philosophical trends by considering him in both the 19th century context of German Idealism and the recent 21st century turn to speculative, or transcendental, materialism. In particular, I will focus on Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, reading this text both as a response to theories of immediacy emerging in German Idealism and as pre-figuring recent materialist re-considerations of Idealism. Along with providing my own attempt at a 21st century reading of Kierkegaard, I will place my argument into dialogue with two recent interpretations of Kierkegaard offered by David Kangas and Slavoj Žižek. At the heart of my argument will be the claim that Kierkegaard’s potential relevance to 21st century debates is dependent on a rigorous re-consideration of his indebtedness to the philosophical climate of the early 19th century.
Registration for 21st Century Idealism is now open on the conference website. It is absolutely 100% free, all you need to do is fill out a simple form. Easy.
Details on affordable accomodation in Dundee should be on the website soon as well.
