Disciplinary Decadence

Living Thought in Trying Times

Lewis R. Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317261209
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, philosopher and social critic Lewis Gordon explores the ossification of disciplines, which he calls disciplinary decadence. In response, he offers a theory of what he calls a teleological suspension of disciplinarity, in which he encourages scholars and lay intellectuals to pay attention to the openness of ideas and purposes on which their disciplines were born. Gordon builds his case through discussions of philosophy of education, problems of secularization in religious thought, obligations across generations, notions of invention in the study of ideas, decadence in development, colonial epistemologies, and the quest for a genuine postcolonial language. These topics are examined with the underlying diagnosis of the present political and academic environment as one in which it is indecent to think.

Chapter 1
Decadent Knowing and Learning

Many philosophers and social theorists whose specializations include philosophy of education have taught in elementary and secondary schools. I am no exception. I was a high school social studies teacher in the Bronx, New York, for the latter half of the 1980s. That experience has left an indelible mark on me, as I am sure it has on many who took a similar path. I had entered the New York public school system with lots of the misguided presumptions of many young people at the time. That was during the Reagan administration, and one of the tactics of that administration was to take advantage of the media edge afforded the president on pressing social issues. The president and his tacticians knew that they could simply present any controversial claim before the American public—true or false, though often false—and then leave it up to their opposition to prove otherwise. The problem was that their opposition didn’t have a competitive level of resources, and besides, something sociologically new had emerged on the scene, to which I will later turn. What the president and his cohorts knew was that once something was presented in a public forum, especially a national or international one, it took on the veneer of “truth.” Thus, as long as he and his associates never recanted their position, it stood, continuing its life as though true. The Black Welfare Queen was one of those falsehoods, false because it was advanced as exemplification of a norm instead of an exception and accepted in American society because of the bad-faith presumption of black life as abnormal. But more germane here is the infamous manifesto of that administration’s position on public education—A Nation at Risk. That work was pushed with the fervor of few misrepresentations of American reality in years past. The reverberations of its pronouncements are still felt by many of us: American workers are noncompetitive because they are badly educated through left-wing pedagogical innovations of the 1970s. Instead of pedagogy aimed at developing a politically informed citizenry, the nation should focus on skills-based education and a small set of texts and concepts geared at the most centrist understanding of American civic life—that is, the hijacking of the American Revolution by its right wing—namely, a good number of the founding fathers, and the body of literature that forged an Anglo-Saxon American identity.¹ The result, as is also well known, is that much federal, state, and private funding shifted during the 1980s from schools and classrooms to teacher education programs.² The effect was catastrophic on the morale of teachers: In effect, the American teacher became the proverbial scapegoat, and the task became to “fix” this derelict creature.

One could imagine the attitude young college students had toward public school teachers at that time. Hearing mostly of their faults, the presumption was that we—the young, newly graduated, and restless—could do better. With such low morale among the teachers as well, especially with regard to their abysmal salaries, there was a sudden shortage of teachers in the nation, especially in large urban areas. So New York City implemented a per diem program that would enable recent college graduates to teach. I entered the public school system through that program.

What I found in the New York public school system astonished me. I was at first a day-to-day substitute teacher, so I got to see some of the “best” and “worst” schools. I won’t here rehearse the racial, ethnic, and class packing of the former and the pathologies of the latter. Those are familiar to nearly everyone who has examined American public schools. Eventually, I began to develop techniques to make it through the worst situations, and I discovered something rather unusual: Adolescents loved engagements with philosophical and artistic material. (I took advantage of my undergraduate training in philosophy, political theory, and ancient classics and a childhood talent for drawing portraits.) Success with this kind of interaction led to my being called several days in a row to one particular high school, which occasioned the investigation of its principal, who, after observing one of my classes, decided to hire me for the rest of the academic year.

I ended up spending three years at that high school. What I saw as a regular New York City high school teacher destroyed many of my presumptions about public school teachers. Instead of lazy, ideology-pounding didacticians, I found committed individuals who came to work much too early and left much too late. I saw professionals who took every opportunity to improve themselves and their profession. And I saw people who genuinely loved their students. This is not to say that there weren’t those who fell short of such excellence. What was clear was that the pathological cases were just that—pathological cases. They were the exceptions instead of the rule. What I also saw, however, was that resources were constantly being taken away from public school systems, and a mad dash for what remained left the more vulnerable systems at the mercy of the privileged ones. Again, all that should be familiar to most readers familiar with the distribution of resources in American school districts: Predominantly white and upper-class school systems—in the Bronx’s case, the Riverdale districts—received first dibs on everything, and those with darker and poorer majority populations struggled for the leftovers. I say “poorer” because the district I ended up teaching in was at a meeting line of poor white and poor black and Puerto Rican populations. In an unexpected twist, the students who were most in academic peril, mostly due to truancy, in that school were white.

I was in an unusual situation there. I had not taken any education classes before, but I had earned my way through college by tutoring in my alma mater and giving private lessons in music. I didn’t know anything about age-appropriate material and many of the developments in pedagogy. So I taught my courses at a very high level and even lectured (which was a big no in that system), and the result was lively, enthusiastic classes. A year later, impressed by my students’ attendance rate, the principal invited me to develop a special program for in-school truants. After some thought, I decided to take it on. By then I had taken graduate courses in education (to secure my teaching license) and had developed some ideas that I wanted to try out.

The program that some gifted colleagues and I eventually put together was the Second Chance Program at Lehman High School. Although we had many adventures, I’ll only mention one. I had insisted that the seventy-five students meet in a bare room. There were no chairs, no tables—nothing but the walls and the floor. When we met, I wrote on the board a single question: “What is a school?”

We spent three days discussing that question, during which the students discovered such things as the etymology of the word school, which comes from the ancient Greek word skole, which means, to their surprise, leisure time. We talked about how special it was to be able to have the time to devote to things uniquely human and that the schools the students have come to know didn’t have to be structured as they were. The students then began to point out that our empty room could use some furniture, and they each began to contribute to its decoration by furnishing comfortable chairs, a mural, plants; eventually we went on to the content of instruction, what they felt they should be learning. It was an odd experience, watching students advance their wants with their needs. There was, in other words, an isomorphic relationship between what the students wanted to learn and what they ought to learn. (One pro with this approach was that my students tended to do extraordinarily well on essay sections of standardized exams, but not as well on the multiple-choice sections. We focused on thinking, and multiple-choice questions aren’t really designed for thinkers. Thinkers could see many possibilities in many questions, whereas conventional, unimaginative types, those who tend to share a predictable view of the world, would, say, pencil in c because it would be the only answer they could imagine.) The range of what the students decided they wanted to study looked, ironically, much like the liberal arts curriculum of a French lycée.

After some years of teaching, I began to think about the effects of philosophical engagements with my students, but there wasn’t a context in which to explore such questions at a level that satisfied me. I decided to go to graduate school.

My academic philosophical training up to that point was entirely in ancient Greek and modern European philosophy, with the American pragmatists peppered in. I entered graduate school with the hope of looking into Aristotle’s conceptions of potential and developing a theory of student achievement.

I mention all this to bring to the fore the importance of the work of members of societies such as the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society and the Philosophy of Education Society of North America. It was philosophy of education that brought me to the study of professional philosophy. I thought about philosophy well before becoming a high school teacher and a graduate student, but one needn’t get a doctorate in philosophy to do philosophy (although it helps if one wants to teach it in a university). I was, for example, introduced, by way of my Rastafarian uncles, to the writings of black liberation thinkers, most of whom did not have formal degrees in philosophy but whose books were philosophically rich. So I had no structural pressure to go on for the degree. Moreover, I hadn’t expected to have a career as a college teacher and researcher. Thus, once in graduate school, there seemed to be few incentives to carry me through. The irony of my situation was, however, that the likelihood of not having a professional future in the academy freed me to pursue my course of study in a way that was different from my graduate school colleagues—that is, without pressure and anxiety of receiving its material rewards. Beyond the job market and other material dynamics were the simple realities I faced as a young black man engaged in thought in a world that often denied that black people could think. Yet, satisfying as that activity may have been, it wasn’t the entire story. What had happened was that I had fallen in love with the world of ideas and teaching and was brought in touch with the humanistic and transcendental commitments that brought me to philosophy to begin with. That love was nurtured by my mentor Maurice Alexander Natanson. During my first semester of graduate school, the director of graduate services suggested that I take a course with Natanson on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness—to familiarize myself with “that sort of thing.” I did. And the rest, as the expression goes, is history.

The Topics at Hand

The topics I would like to touch upon in the rest of this chapter pertain much to my short autobiographical narrative. The first will be a discussion of the importance of working through contemporary problems of philosophy of education through taking seriously questions of the human condition and their relevance to our understanding of recent political reality. Second, we will see that the first leads to problems of evidence. This problem of evidence is linked to problems of truth and the psychoanalytical reality of its indecency in the present age. The indecency of truth reflects a form of bad faith at the level of knowledge production that I have been calling “disciplinary decadence.” I will discuss that and then conclude with my ongoing defense of thinking in an age antipathetic to its possibility.

Human Conditions

It has always struck me that research based on what is “in” versus what is “out” is a denigration of the value of knowledge. Beyond the faddish nature of such approaches should be questions that generate what we would like to know, and if those questions lead to paths that are “out,” then so be it. The last half of the twentieth century exemplified much hostility to the human being, especially in academic philosophical circles. The two main sites of this hostility are well known. There is the postmodern wing, wherein the human being represents pathologies of centrism and arrogance better left to the past. And then there is the neopositivist wing, where the human being represents the pollution of subjectivity. The quest for pure objectivity on a par with the exact sciences supposedly requires a social science devoid of humanistic features. It struck me that both of these aspirations involved human beings denying their own humanity, and I ended up writing on such dynamics as manifestations of self-denying phenomena, as forms of bad faith, in such works as Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995a/1999) and Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995b). Through a theory of coextensivity—where a phenomenon can have many exemplifications—I showed that bad faith manifests itself as more than a lie to the self in an attempt to evade freedom. It is also a form of denial of social reality. The performative contradiction in denying social reality is that “denial” is communicative, is outward directed, even where the reference is to the self, which makes it social. It is, in other words, a social rejection of the social. Other forms of denial are the conditions through which evasion can be advanced in the first place. One of these is the notion of a human nature. The advancement of a nature leads to the notion of lawlike structures on human action before such actions are made. The problem is that it places our relation to structures as the cart before the horse. Structures set the conditions for us, but they do not determine what we will do and the meaning of our various projects in life. This is so by virtue of many of us doing different things and creating new forms of meaning in structurally similar, if not the same, circumstances. The human world is, in other words, lived, and it is creatively so. Appeals to individual natures won’t help in such cases since the observer would need prior cases to establish this instance as part of a series that constitutes a nature. It is a contradiction of terms. An individual nature by definition pertains only to this individual, which means its status as a law of action or identity cannot be advanced beyond itself, and even to itself it becomes limited since it would have to create such a separation of self from self.

It is for reasons such as those just advanced that existentialists, for example, prefer the term human conditions instead of human nature. I should like to add here, however, that this does not mean that an existential position stands as a form of individual libertarianism. The peculiarity of the social world’s relation to individuals is this: An individual makes no sense outside of a community, and the same for the notion of a community without individuals. They are in a symbiotic relation to each other, and I have argued in the fourth chapter of Existentia Africana (Gordon 2000) that this relationship is a transcendental one—that is, both necessary and universal. It is such an understanding that led to my advancing the importance of another, unfashionable approach to philosophical problems: transcendental phenomenology. There are many definitions of phenomenology, but the upshot of such an approach is that it takes seriously the role of consciousness in the constitution of knowledge. Following Immanuel Kant, phenomenology takes seriously the active role of consciousness in the constitution of meaning. Beyond Kant, however, there is the dynamism of consciousness of meanings and essences that are not fixed in the sense of being ontologically closed categories of understanding. For in phenomenology, one begins by suspending the natural attitude or the question of one’s ontological commitments, which means that phenomenological essences do not function as, say, Aristotelian essences (i.e., substances).

The turn to conditions brings us now into more concrete terrain. Consider Hannah Arendt’s schemata on this question in her classic The Human Condition (1998). She argues that human life is a function of at least three fundamental activities: labor, work, and action. Labor is activity without which we will not be physically alive. It pertains to our survival, and it is what we share with all other, in a word, animals. It is cyclical activity. And the “we” here means both the self and ultimately the species. Work is creative activity. It is world constituting. The paradigm example of this is art. Action, however, is peculiarly social. It is not that there aren’t social dimensions to the first two. A social world is required, for instance, to make them meaningful to us. But action depends on the social. It is activity whose continuation is fragile. A sign of its fragility is its dependence on speech, which makes it in its structure peculiarly public.

Each of these activities is vital for human beings. The prevalence of one over the other, however, sets the stage for the type of societies in which people live, and that relationship constitutes a, if not the, condition of being human in its time. A society dominated by work, for instance, tends to put a low premium on labor and action. Think of what the world would be like if we structured it according to the credo of art for art’s sake. My guess is that it would be like France, where many of its ideals are embodied in a single city: Paris. That city, unlike London and New York, is dedicated to art and the senses more than to commerce. In spite of its cathedrals, it is not a city of God but a city of aesthetic wonder. As they used to say in the French-speaking world, at least according to Frantz Fanon in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks (1952), “Know Paris and then die.” (This expression is by the way a variation of a proverb found all over Africa: “This would be the ideal moment for me to die.”)

The exemplification of a society devoted to action, at least in Arendt’s imagination, is ancient Athens. There, labor and work were subordinated for the sake of a public sphere in which citizens acted. That sphere was protected by the walls and institutions of the city-state or polis, which led to its correlative activity—politics. The fact of slavery and the subordination of most women were rationalized as part of a greater purpose through which both excellence and honor were achieved.

And then there is the society dominated by labor. If such a society requires lots of time for the cultivation of survival, then the small bits of leisure time available to work and action are precious. But if labor is the dominating value and there is much leisure time not devoted to work and action, the result is energy aimed back at labor-centered activity or activity heavily linked to the fruits of labor—namely, consumption.

Now, none of these are perfect societies. The purpose of Arendt’s schema is simply to examine what condition their various relationships manifest. Our world, for instance, stands by patently egalitarian values, although we often fall short of realizing them. Because of this, the ancient Athenian model of society for the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Disciplinary Decadence
• 1 Decadent Knowing and Learning
• 2 God Beneath
• 3 Obligations across Generations
• 4 Inventing Africa
• 5 Decadent Development
• 6 Prospero's Words, Caliban's Reason
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author