The Wire

I haven’t written here in a while, mostly due to the fact that I’ve had nothing to say. At the end of last semester, I had some thoughts about what direction philosophy could go in, some things culled from what I was teaching in a critical thinking course at a local college here in Philly, but I sat down to write, didn’t, and never returned to the subject.

I suppose the fact is, I don’t give a shit what direction philosophy goes in, if it even goes in any direction at all. I assume the whole discipline is going to go the way of American Jews at some point - eventually the non-devout will be assimilated into other disciplines, as has been going on since the McCarthyite purge of academia in the 50s (see John McCumber’s brilliant Time in a Ditch, which I never pass up the chance to recommend - mostly because that book helped signal the beginning of the end of my life in professional philosophy), leaving a core orthodoxy that will eventually dwindle or become a pure historical discipline or something of that nature. How does one justify their budget to the increasingly business-like modern university? Oh, right, we teach logic to students because it’s a workable model of how rational arguments progress…er, well, that is…it might be a way to judge truth and falsity, that is, if we ignore people like Gödel and Tarski and pretend that natural languages are closed systems or that grammar isn’t historically variable (so fuck you, Foucault [which I’m sure many of the people I’m unfairly maligning would say to him if he wasn’t dead and they had actually read something he wrote]), and yes, I’m being quite unfair to those I methodologically disagree with, but it’s tough to hold my contempt in sometimes, and now that I don’t have to play the academic political game, what harm comes with telling these people that they are intellectually bankrupt? And who in academia would give a fuck what criticisms I’d have of them anyway?

Oh, what a scathing indictment! A man in a blog said some untoward things about something he doesn’t like! Well that’s going to set the world on fire.

The fact of the matter though is that I’m simply just disappointed by philosophy’s (as a discipline) inability to actually be in a position to affect anyone. For various historical reasons that have amplified over time and been fed back into the system, philosophy is the realm of the privileged scholar, and it’s a realm that has become so dissociated from the world it attempts to explain that it never even comes close. Much like for neo-classical economic theory to make any sense, it has to idealize ad absurdum, analytic - and to an extent the continental orthodoxy as well - philosophy idealizes to the point where humans are no longer recognizably human, if they even appear in the discussion at all. I contend that this is why philosophy since modern times has been awash in sci-fi examples and situations.

Alright, so why bother with another polemic - it’s not like this blog is lacking for them, is it? (I had to end the sentence with “is it” so I could include the question mark that needs to be there to have the first part of the sentence make sense. I suppose if I didn’t use hyphens to signal asides, which I think is grammatically incorrect anyway, I wouldn’t have to resort to the rhetorical question.).

Tonight, I was reading this great article on The Wire, and I started to think about why this show is so amazing: how it shows how complex interactions within certain social structures can lead to chaotic or unpredictable regimes, how it shows how power structures and epistemological structures are linked, how it shows how certain practices can feedback into the system and amplify over time, and most importantly, what happens to the human beings that have to live in and with these systems, how difficult - if not impossible - they are to overthrow, and most importantly, how you can cope in the face of such monumental and ungraspable entanglements.

A few quotes from Simon:

“Thematically, it’s about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It’s the triumph of capitalism.” (from his Slate interview).

And from a New Yorker article:

““The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less”.”

My point being what?  Well, the thing is, The Wire so eloquently and tragically says all the things that philosophy should be saying. That is, philosophy does say all these things - or rather, there are philosophers or people writing philosophy that say these things, a few of them with the force and wit of the show, but none of these people are in a position where anyone outside of academia will read them. Some of these people are bothered by that and some of these people actively distance themselves from the philosophical orthodoxy and some of these people work to connect the things they write to the outside world where it can make a difference. And furthermore, I know that very little theoretical writing has the viscereality that fiction can give. Think of this less as a criticism of philosophy and more as a lament for the direction it has gone, where the good philosophers (and no this is not a Threnody for the Victims of Academia, but rather one bemoaning the fate of those within the system) are the McNultys and Bunks of the academic world, trying to actually say something vital and worthwhile when the economic constraints and the constraints of academic tradition make it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.

Filed by andyb at January 14th, 2008 under gripes, philosophy