Auto-ontology (every philosophy must be able to conceive of itself in its own terms)

Terence writes:

Philosophy seems to pose a problem for Latour, and is not officially included in his list of modes of existence, but is declared to be definitory of the Moderns: “the Moderns are the people of Ideas; their dialect is philosophy” (22).

Every philosophy must be able to account for itself within its own terms, otherwise it is a performative contradiction.  A philosophy of discourses must conceive of itself as a discourse; a philosophy of objects must conceive of itself as an object, etc.  Does a modal philosophy have to conceive of itself as a mode?  It might be able to but I'm not sure that it's necessary to conceive of it as a single mode.

Clearly the practice of philosophy (like all concrete practices) must be polymodal.  First, aime is a work of fiction [fic] inasmuch as it uses all kinds of characters, various sorts of shifting and so on.  Whether we are reading Latour in his 'own' voice or speaking through his litany of characters we are encountering a shifting (and rather shifty) actant.  That much is straightforward.  Aime is also political [pol] inasmuch as it declares 'we,' 'us,' and 'them' on various occasions.  The 'talk' of the book is most definitely 'crooked' rather than straight.  It does seem to have the structure of a curve that tries to draw the reader along.  It is actively and explicitly seeking to compose a public.  Latour claims that in his religious writings he aims to 'speak religiously,' although they didn't have that effect on me!  The book also involves elements of reproduction [rep] via technology [tec] in both its printed and electronic forms.  That's true if somewhat banal.  More interestingly, the book is written in a transformative way [met].  It seeks to provoke emotions in us and leave us different to how we started.  It is not written in a fashion that avails itself to evaluative reading.  Indeed, it is hugely frustrating if you want to read it evaluatively along the lines of a scholarly paper or a student essay wherein theses must be first set out then justified.  Latour delights in revealing what he's really talking about only after x hundred pages of dissembling, metamorphising, preparation and preamble.  We could even say that it is a legal [law] text inasmuch as it is seeking to reattach the Moderns to their actions.  Moreover, it is clearly a passionate attachment for its author and doubtless it will be for many of its readers.

I could go on but I think the point is clear.  The book (in all its forms) can be understood in many different modes.  The question is: is that enough?  Is something missed out?  Is there terra incognita lurking at the edges of this field of vision (apologies for the mixed metaphors)?  Is the above confluence of modes sufficient to account for the book itself not just as a book but as a work of philosophy?

I wrote in another post that, as James argues, the distinctive quality of a philosophical truth is that it arrives through reasoning.  Latour's process may not always seem entirely reasonable but it certainly involves a thread of reasoning inasmuch as it presupposes a subject-reader that it must lead on a journey in order to transform that reader, in order to lead its reader to conclusions that can only make sense at the end of the journey, with no shortcuts being taken.  That 'journey' is the key thing.  If philosophy can be thought of as a mode then it's in that transformative journey that the contrast is to be found, I think.

Yet more on ontological conservatism and the confluence of modes

Terence comments on Levi's comments on my comments on Latour's modes.  (How's that for a referential chain?)

On the 'prohibition of category mistakes arising from illegitimate crossings,' it is not all crossings that are said to be 'bad.'  Far from it - modes are co-dependent.  What use is REF without REP?  Were there nothing of the latter there'd be nothing to 'bring back.'  Likewise, TEC cannot function without beings of REP to hybridise.  In the habit chapter he gives the example that if a microphone goes out during a pastor's sermon then it takes an engineer to fix it and that's a REL/TEC crossing.  Every mode such as REL, LAW, POL, etc. is related to a specific form of HAB and various METs and NETs - these uber-modes.  The prohibition is on crossings that do violence to the modes and seek to erase one or the other of them.  So, there's clearly a conservatism or conservationism inherent in that but it's not crossings that are illegitimate per se, only certain forms of crossing that try to state one mode in terms of another, thereby erasing the former (at least that's my understanding).

That said, he's altering his argument subtly as the book progresses.  In the habit chapter he's now able to say that DC isn't all bad.  It's now the result of well ordered processes; it's an appearance and appearance has its own mode of existence, HAB (a mode itself pluralised by the fact that every other mode instantiates it differently).  Even the appearance of being 'critical' early on in the book vis-a-vis the 'evil genius' of DC was, in fact, just another mode to be asserted positively.  An addition to the pluriverse, not a subtraction from it.

What is this kind of ontological optimism lacking?  It doesn't prevent us from questioning or interrogating modes - indeed, the whole endeavour seeks to lay them bare, to de-habituate them and open them to appreciation (i.e. appreciation meaning an assessment of value).  It isn't 'uncritical' in that sense; it is de-habituating.  It doesn't stop us proposing new modes that transform the other modes by their entry into the ecosystem (indeed, this is highly encouraged).  It doesn't stop us from combining modes in new ways, provided that we do not attempt to define one mode in terms of another.  It doesn't necessarily mean that e.g. an ethnographer working with a church group must be essentially preoccupied with REL.  That group is a confluence of all kinds of modes and cannot even begin to be understood mono-modally.  Fieldwork is essentially polymodal, that much is clear.  Nor does it stop us from extending e.g. the REL mode to situations that are not conventionally 'religious.'  Indeed, as I mentioned before that mode is defined so abstractly that it could apply to almost anything.

However, this ontological optimism does tend to encourage us to 'keep our distance,' to let others just get on with their modal adventures unperturbed; to live and let live, so to speak.  And this brings me back to what I said about chapter 1 with Latour exoticising the other in order to construct it as that which must be absolutely respected - 'respected' to the point where it seems unclear as to how we could even engage with it (a common problem, in fairness).  An anthropology of almost any church group (to rejoin that example) would surely demonstrate that most Believers tend at least as much towards a kind of confluence of REF and DC overlaid with a hazy mysticism of HAB, speckled with flecks of MET, as they are to the translations described by REL.  That Jesus really was the son of God, that there are indisputable moral certainties and that the Bible 'proves' this in a very real and referential sense (pointing to the book to make a point, quoting chapter and verse to prove a point, etc., everything points towards reference!) is fundamental to these forms of life.

The assertion that these are really just crossings (however legitimate) and that REL is the true essence of religion is not a merely descriptive, empirical assertion - it is a proposition, a declaration of value, an appreciation of value.  It is an assertion that the proper form of religion is concentrated around the REL mode with crossings across that mode only serving its practical, institutional needs.  It is a value judgement.  And this is where Latour must depart (and if he does not do so then be deported!) from his self-styled evidentialist empiricism and reveals his true moral-political-philosophical colours.

These are not just neutral descriptions of modes as they really are but the distillation and rearticulation of the values of the Moderns - a kind of saving of the Moderns, an identification of what is valuable in their metaphysics, a flushing out of the poison and a reconstitution of the valuable materials as a carefully designed, rigorously controlled 'menu of values.'  Like a kind of tapas menu (if you permit me the analogy) where some items are necessary (the bread and butter modes) and you're encouraged to try everything but some items are optional.  All items, however, have been carefully crafted from many materials - an appropriately heterogeneous network.  It is a gourmet restaurant, the cuisine is often stunning in its subtly and ingenuity but it can hardly pass its wares off as raw - nor would it want to.  Everything is highly refined and, indeed, this is what makes the whole endeavour valuable; that is the chef's skill.  No mediations, no value.  Essential Latourism.

Long story short, the value menu is propositional, not simply descriptive.  It may be based upon experience both as a concept and in terms of some fieldwork but that doesn't change the fact that its menu items are highly philosophically refined.  Latour's rhetoric (for we really must distinguish it from the substance of his argument, there's no other way to read him) often implies an earthy, concrete empiricism-qua-evidentialism that is promised but never really delivered.  The empiricism-qua-trajectories-of-experience is perfectly valid - he channels some experiences and not others.  No problem there.  But he should be more direct in his representation of his endeavours.  His skill is great but he sometimes tries to pass it off as magic.  This must not be permitted.  A habit, an appearance of the worst sort.

REL isn't 'how religion works' (though I can accept that it may be part of how religion works), it's the part of religion that is asserted to be most valuable, the most appreciated.  A kind of mereological judgement (and therefore critique since judgement connotes critique) - looking into the assemblage, picking out the most valuable part according to your own predispositions and making this the essence of the thing, whether it is functionally essential or not (that is an open question - a lab without REF is surely unthinkable - it'd be a total failure - but the same may not be true of religious groups and REL).

By doing this across a range of domains one ends up with a system of essential values that can be debated with others and their interpretations of what's essential and what's not.  That's the way around the impasse of the rhetoric of description/empiricism vs. the reality of proposition/judgement.  Take them for what they are and then they can be properly debated; indeed, this is the condition of possibility for diplomacy.

The essences are not idealisations.  REL is not the idealisation of religious practice, it is one part of it - a part raised up and honoured by its identification.  The mereological judgement extracts and abstracts this one component and raises it to the level of essence.  Not because that's necessarily how things work but because that's how things work best - or so it is claimed.

If we take this approach to the modes then things open up and are pluralised again.  If we ignore the continual, nagging suggestion that these modes have been rigorously derived from experience of the way things are and simply accept that they are derived from particular, narrow portions of experience that have been abstracted, translated and submitted for debate and scrutiny then, personally, I find little more to object to on this issue as long as we're also able to say that e.g. REL isn't confined to religious practice but is simply typified by it; that religion is the archetypical instantiation of it but does not 'own' it.

If we can assume all of that (a double dislocation) then I don't see what is to stop someone (a) detaching REL from religious practice in observing it in other kinds of situations and (b) insisting that REF is the appropriate mode for exploring fundamental questions of cause and reason, that the piousness of REL is sometimes an appropriate form of translation but it's nothing to base a life around and that religious practice is for the most part a crossing of FIC/HAB with some thoroughly misunderstood MET thrown in for good measure all wrapped up with an often dangerous ribbon of POL and LAW.  That doesn't define any mode in terms of any other; its a perfectly legitimate diplomatic argument.  It doesn't deny the reality of REL, it simply recognises that religious practice is neither determined by that mode nor is that mode exhausted by religious practice.

Apologies to anyone who managed to read all of that.  I'm still working this out as I'm writing it!  There must be a shorter way of making the point but that's all I've got for now.

More on ontological conservatism

Terence replies to my previous comments on Latour's ontological conservatism.  He uses the phrase “duty of non-infringement” to describe the way Latour defends his modes – that’s a good way of putting it. I think a lot of it comes down to how we interpret that. On the one hand Latour is very clear that he wants to grant ‘dignity’ to each mode, that each mode is valid and good in its own way, etc. However, this is stated and insinuated rather than actually argued. His intention is clear but he doesn’t go so far as to say why the modes must be conserved at all cost – why no creative destruction? If they are historical then surely that is inevitable, given a long enough timeframe. Why hold back the tide as a matter of necessity?

Or is it necessary?  It seems like that from the way his argument proceeds but I do wonder.  In its precise technical definition I don’t see what the REL mode even does to save religion, really. It’s narrated in such a way that it’s clearly meant to defend religion from its detractors but it’s a funny sort of defence. REL is defined so abstractly that it could apply to completely non-religious situations – ‘I adhered religiously to my instructions - I agonised over them out of respect to their originator.' And if it can be detached from religious situations then religion is merely an archetype of the mode, nothing intrinsic to the mode itself (perhaps this is true of all the modes; they are named by their archetypes rather than their essences).

Modes, Pure Philosophy and Latour's Will-to-conserve

Terence Blake has a couple of posts criticising Latour's modes and his philosophical strategies.  The second post begins:

Latour bifurcates our traditions into the heterogeneous networks of domains (concrete traditions) and the homogeneous felicity conditions of modes (abstract traditions) and their values. Having spent a lot of time explaining to us how science, contrary to its image as an abstract tradition, is in fact a concrete impure assemblage of actors and trajectories, Latour is now explaining how nevertheless one can abstract out a pure value of objectivity that is served by this composite rhizomic domain.

The further I'm getting through the book the more I'm liking it, however I am also more convinced of one of my initial impressions: that this is a work of pure philosophy.  It is 'empiricist' only in the most abstract, philosophical sense (despite what Latour insinuates).  Yes, Latour has done case studies on science, law, technology and so on, and to some extent aime is a synthesis of all is work to date.  But he's written no case studies on politics, for example (Politics of Nature is another work of pure philosophy).  The majority of the modes has no anthropological connections whatsoever - at least not yet.

Not that there's anything wrong with that as such but it is as though admitting doing pure philosophy isn't good enough for him and so it has to have these empiricist motifs tagged on here and there, clogging up the flow of concepts in order to make it all seem more real and grounded.

There is, of course, a very real sense in which his work is empiricist - that is, 'radical empiricist'.  The whole endeavour is built on the foundation of James' flows of experience but this is a purely philosophical empiricism; ironically, it doesn't seem to flow all that directly from or into fieldwork.

However, as for this 'bifurcation between networks and modes' it's quite a weak bifurcation inasmuch as, I believe he states early on, every concrete situation is an event of both NET and one PRE or other.  The limitless heterogeneity of NET is always combined with the particular essence of a mode.  REF is not equal to science; science both exceeds it and REF exceeds science.  So, there's still plenty of room for the heterogeneity and messiness of real practices.

I agree that his way of setting out the modes is conservative.  However, every mode inserted into the schema will transform the whole assemblage.  Perhaps it isn't the will to conserve and protect that is the problem but the absence of other modes that would, if recognised, transform the whole?  That's my working hypothesis, I'm still working out what those modes might be.

Latour, fieldwork and philosophy; A defence of (radical) empiricism

Forgive me, kind reader.  I've been reading Kurt Vonnegut this evening and therefore feel compelled to write a little bit like I'm a 'writer.'  Much of what follows is correspondingly pretentious.

What stoked my interest was another post by Terence of Agent Swarm blog fame; this paragraph in particular:

Despite his insinuations to the contrary, Bruno Latour with his compositionism is the direct application of this thought, that he is very familiar with. His talk about his “empirical” research is very misleading and contains overtones of scientistic bravado, as his system is parasitic on these predecessors. He is however a good populariser of good ideas, and his work should be encouraged as long as we do not accept his own contextualisation of his ideas. Latour is vey much an inheritor of Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida and Serres and the intellectual contemporary of Laruelle and Stiegler. It is this that gives his work its superiority over Badiou’s, not any primacy of the empirical over the philosophical.

I don't think that Latour ever claims a 'primacy' for the empirical over the philosophical.  His field studies aren't just about adding a scientific gloss to concepts he's borrowed (or stolen) from others.  I think that misrepresents what he does with his field studies.  I agree unreservedly that he's misleadingly coy about his philosophical influences.  Indeed, he's self-consciously strategic with who he acknowledges and who he doesn't.  He frequently and unabashedly cites Serres and other peers and contemporaries like Haraway, Callon, Greimas, etc. as well as lesser-known old, dead dudes like Whitehead and Souriau.  Indeed, he is happy to heap praise on anyone he considers an ally or fellow traveller.  For some reason other obviously significant precursors like Deleuze, Foucault and Nietzsche are deemed less than allies and are consequently relegated to scattered, almost accidental footnotes and occasional, almost embarrassed comments in interviews.

On this point I'm reminded of Foucault saying that he hardly ever cited Marx because, at the time that he was writing, everyone was citing Marx at every possible opportunity on any subject -- so Foucault elected not to cite him at all despite his obvious influence!  Latour's evasions may be similarly contrarian.  More cynically, they may be designed to allow Latour to present himself as more original than he really is.  Then again, maybe he just thinks that citing names and dates is boring and a waste of time; an academic pleasantry that, due to his fame and notoriety, he is in a position to skip.  I think there's probably an element of truth in all of those explanations.

Regardless, while Latour is clearly "parasitic" on his predecessors (who isn't?) I don't think the title "populariser" quite does him justice -- nor, I repeat, is his 'empiricism' merely about adding a scientific gloss to his inherited ideas.  The most valuable thing about Latour, from my point of view, is the way he joins the empirical and the philosophical -- far from these terms being in competition they, under his penmanship, become profoundly harmonious.  In fact, one of the main criticisms I have of his more recent work is that it is not empirical enough.  He was fastidiously anthropological when it came to science, engineering, law, etc. but largely abandoned the practice when it came to thinking about politics -- little more than offhand anecdotes creep into his political writings.  Consequently, I found his 'Politics of Nature' to be the weakest of all his books -- abstract, verbose and fanciful in a manner disappointingly unlike what came before it.  ('We Have Never Been Modern' was similarly abstract and general but since it wasn't modal in its focus and because it was considerably more concise it worked much better, I think.)

Probably my favourite essay of his, and certainly the best example of the empirical/philosophical complex that I'm talking about, is what I think (from memory) is the second chapter of Pandora's Hope, the essay on 'Circulating Reference'.  Is the story that Latour tells -- that of following some soil scientists and botanists in their journey from the heat, humidity and creepy-crawlies of the Brazilian rainforest through all their scientific translations back to the laboratories, running water and journal articles of cosy old France -- a mere gloss on the philosophical content?  Is it simply an elaborate, science-tinted vehicle for making his point?  I don't think that it is.

Certainly, the fact that these ideas were based on firsthand research and not simply on sitting down and thinking hard about stuff he'd read doesn't necessarily make them 'better' -- but to dismiss the empirical process through which the ideas were derived as indicating nothing more than a loosely shrouded scientism is shortsighted; in fact it misses the point.  Every philosophical idea derives from some kind of practical process -- whether it's trekking through the forests of Bavaria, slouching over a writing desk in a musty Cambridge office, or clumsily wandering about in a laboratory.  Every philosophical utterance is an embodied utterance, an utterance with a backstory, a genesis -- the result of a radically empirical flow of experience (James is another influence that Latour has no shame in citing, which is good since Latour's empiricism is really just an actor-network-ised version of James').

Most philosophers believe that reading, walking and talking to like-minded others constitutes a sufficient process for the productive stewing of ideas.  Latour, contrariwise, has found fieldwork among the different people his philosophies comment on (the practitioners of his various modes of truth) to be considerably more fecund than guessing at the particularities of their lives from a distance.  I don't find it hard to see why.

It isn't a case of 'empirical, therefore scientific, therefore better' -- it's much more interesting than that.  I mean, would the poor guy have spent all those months and years painstakingly note taking, conversation starting and archive trawling just to score a few Brownie points for being 'scientific'?  The interesting point is that, in what I think are his best works, the distinction between the empirical and the philosophical if it doesn't quite disappear then at least becomes considerably blurred.  I think it's much more likely that it is his anthropological process in combination with his philosophical and theological education that has resulted in the ideas he claims as his own (however unpaid his dues may be).  And this, I think, is an object lesson not just for how we interpret his work but also in how we think about thinking in general.

To my mind the really pertinent questions are not 'Why do fieldwork?' but rather 'Why don't more philosophers do fieldwork?'  Why don't more philosophers realise that secondary sources aren't good enough?  Why aren't the social sciences and empirically-inclined humanities given the time of day in philosophical discourse (unlike their Natural brethren)?  Why is intellectual hermeticism still thought to be a valid thought process?  The notion of the cloistered, hermetic genius is an evocative image, though it is one unburdened by any kind of actual existence.  Newton, for one, consciously promoted himself as such an isolated, neutral, disinterested-but-brilliant figure; historians like Simon Schaffer have shown that he, like all great men of letters, was a formidable network-builder.

Frankly, I think the burden of justification is on those who don't look very closely into the lives and issues on which they pass judgement.  It isn't the empiricist who needs to justify himself.

I don't think the epistemic authority deriving from doing empirical research is at all necessary to explain why Latour does such research.  However, I do think that, in many cases, actually going out and talking to people, reading primary sources and producing an original study of a situation does accord an analyst a degree of authority over and above those who simply read books and take others at their word with regard to how things work.  Take the old-school, pre-Bloor and pre-Latour historians and philosophers of science -- all those Whiggish dinosaurs who thought that they could infer all they needed to know about the practice of science from its results, on the one hand, and the casual testimony of its off-duty practitioners, on the other.  Latour and others showed this supposition to be laughably inadequate.  When intensively observed scientists' practices appeared to function quite differently from how they were supposed to according to tradition, dogma and folklore.  When anthropologists actually took the time to watch these tribespeople in action they found that the prevailing explanations proffered by their more naive and doting commentators were wholly inadequate since they were largely oblivious to what stands out as the most remarkable characteristic of scientific research, when observed by an anthropologically trained outsider: that facts are constructed, often astonishingly well.

I'm perfectly happy to say that these empiricists have greater epistemic authority by dint of their efforts, compared the idleness of their rationalist predecessors who merely inferred the details of their subjects from the ideological predispositions to which subjects and observers were all privy and upon which all agreed -- specifically, that Science was all about disinterestedly uncovering Truth and discarding Fiction.

But, and this is the key point for me, this superiority comes not from being grounded in practical experience as opposed to abstract ratiocination -- this classical opposition of empiricism and rationalism is false because it opposes two variants of a common problematic: subjectivism.  On the contrary, I think it can be claimed that the evidentialist ethic enacted by the practice of fieldwork leads to a general qualitative improvement in philosophical discourse because it extends the radically empirical flows of experience, the practical processes that generate the philosophical discourse.  The processes that philosophers generally enact so as to generate their ideas -- sitting, staring, reading, writing, walking, talking to other philosophers -- are not invalidated by this general empirical commitment but they are shown to be relatively disconnected from the world on which they comment in a way that is not necessarily disastrous but is demonstrably unnecessary.

In other words, fieldwork deepens a philosopher's attachment to that on which they commentate morally, socially and epistemically.  It broadens the attachments, the connections, the radical flows, which they both ride and channel.  Doing fieldwork (of whatever kind) allows a thinker to be surprised and perturbed in their trajectory by a greater array of facts, theories and knowledges than they would bump into otherwise.  It pluralises their journey and thus their philosophy -- but, importantly, it does so in a fashion with specific pertinence to what they're thinking about.  It's not about 'broadening horizons' by learning a new language or 'expanding your mind' by dropping acid or some-such.  It's about delving more deeply into the world so as to synthesise and criticise philosophical abstractions from within it rather than above it -- the latter being a fool's errand.

In a sense, every philosopher does 'fieldwork' because every act of ratiocination is an empirical -- i.e. experiential -- phenomenon.  The question is, then, not so much whether to do 'fieldwork' but rather what fieldwork is germane to the topic at hand.  Far too many philosophers think themselves above the humdrum, humid, detail-cluttered world of the merely empirical.  They are all fools.  (It's worth mentioning parenthetically that, from what I know of him, Feyerabend, for one, was no such fool.  Of course if I was being fair I might have to say the same of Kant, who was prolific in all the sciences of his day, and many others besides; but I'm not being fair I'm being polemical, so ... whatever!)

Rationalists -- those who believe that ratiocination is anything but a much variegated element in the flow of experience; that it transcends the "great blooming, buzzing confusion" out of which we all clutchingly piece together a world -- simply abstract from the flows they embody and translate in order to make it seem that their utterances are sui generis -- that their thoughts are more original than they would otherwise seem.  Then again, that is somewhat reminiscent of what Latour does by not stating his influences in full.  Oh well, none are innocent!  Or, as Kurt might say, so it goes.

[Addendum:

In response to the above Terence replies:

Philip of Circling Squares ... seems to be criticising me, despite the fact that I agree with nearly everything he says and have said similar things in various blog posts. I think he is right about what he calls “fieldwork” and I share his desire for philosophers to indulge in more “empirical research” conceived broadly. My quibble is that sometimes Latour slides between this more general sense, where a philosopher like Deleuze can be considered to do (conceptual, affective, perceptual, political, and yes why not? religious) fieldwork and a more limited sense in which Latour has done fieldwork but not Deleuze, Badiou, Lyotard and Serres. My quarrel is with the diplomatic caricature of himself that Latour secretes, consciously or not, and that interferes with the part of his message that I like and wish to help publicise.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood or misrepresented what you were saying. Hopefully the tone was not too objectionable. When I wrote “I’m not being fair I’m being polemical” I meant it! I was dimly aware that your Feyerabendian predilections might actually chime with some of what I was saying, the post I referred to just seemed to be saying something different. My mistake.

I completely agree with the portrayal of Latour as a wily, Machiavellian diplomat rather than the mild, polite, self-consciously constructive diplomat he pretends to be. As I wrote in a follow-up post, he always has to be read as a scheming polemicist rather than a scholarly essayist; everything’s performative with him. A key element of his performance is his citation — or non-citation — of influences. This rhetorical style can be a little annoying at times but it does seem to be intrinsic to his thought — practicing what he preaches, essentially. Bah, philosophers!]

'Para-academics' or 'para-intellectuals'? A reflection on intellectual discourse and the academy

Terence on his Agent Swarm blog:

I do not like the term “para-academics” as it suggests a mere neighbouring but parallel position in relation to academia, as if the ghetto were isomorphic with the official hierarchy and seeking merger.

'Para-academic,' to me, implies 'wannabe-academic'.  There's a hint of condescension to it.  It implies that we're outside the main building where the real stuff is happening, cold noses pressed against the window panes, breathily gawping at what's going on inside.  More prosaically: in the phrase 'para-academic' the in-group ('academic') defines the out-group ('para-academic') but not vice versa -- and this denotes a hierarchy (since the 'academics' require no distinguishing prefix; they simply are what they are).

There are personal reasons why this is wrong but there could also be social and political ones.

On the personal side, I've been debating for the last few years whether to go back into education and pursue the PhD.  I currently work in a university on the research side of things but the study I work on has little to do with my academic interests (save for the fact that it's scientific and I'm interested in science studies).  Dropping this more-or-less stable employment and going down the academic route often seems like a great idea -- but just as often it seems like a terrible one.  Getting funding is incredibly difficult in the first place, the 3 or 4 years of PhD study (in the UK) are extremely stressful for most people and, at the end of it, academic jobs are scarcer than hens' teeth.

Of course there are many reasons for doing a PhD and diving into academia other than professional or financial advancement (which is just as well).  But does a PhD really give you so much more than a title and a certificate?  I'd say 'yes it probably does'; but, then, just how much?

I have quite a few friends who are completing or have recently completed their theses and their experience, so it seems, has been one of daily disillusionment.  Not that they had any illusions that it was going to be easy or that there'd be plenty of jobs waiting for them when they graduated.  The dire state of that side of things is a given.  What they're disillusioned about is the support they've received (or rather not received) from their supervisors, the alternately disinterested or malignant way they've been treated by university administrators and the general sense of living and working in a glorified sausage-factory -- less the "dynamic intellectual environment" promised by the prospectus, more REF-friendly unit shifting, churning out drab, cookie-cutter publications by the dozen.

In other words, far from 'intellectual' and 'academic' being synonymous it seems that, more and more, they're being pulled apart.  This is what is putting me off, far more than the hopeless job prospects, etc.

Of course, grad students and academics are wont to complain and I enjoyed my time studying in that school in the past.  I enjoy going to conferences, seminars and reading groups; I love thinking and writing.  The thought of teaching fills me with dread but I suspect that, over time, I'd come to love that too.  So, I'm also rather skeptical of those who make it seem as though academics and grad students are the most put-upon, oppressed workers in all of capitalism.  Plainly nothing could be further from the truth -- academia is, compared to most of the alternatives, a great place to work.

However, given all these problems, given that the intellectual and the academic are increasingly antonymous, is it such a bad time to be a 'para-academic'?  If, on the contrary, it's actually a very good time to be thinking and writing outside the academy then the dismissive connotations of that phrase are surely misplaced.

And, in actual fact, my soul destroying, low responsibility, relatively low paying 9-to-5 job gives me considerable free time to pursue my own interests -- much more than my Teaching Assistant, PhD-chasing friends seem to have.  People talk about academic publishing being archaic, a remnant of the days before information technology (never mind the Internet) -- and they're right -- but couldn't something similar be said of academia as the hallowed seat of the intellectual?

It's an open question but I'd argue that if academia does still dominate intellectual discourse then it needn't do so.  Self-consciously philosophical, political, critical, theoretical kinds of work can just as easily carry on elsewhere -- maybe they could even flourish outside the strictures of academic bureaucracy.

I was reading the other day about the composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass who, when they weren't able to make a living from their music back in the '70s, started a furniture removals company together to pay the bills.  Both had offers from academic institutions to teach and research but they chose manual labour and working on their music in their spare time.  Can you imagine many would-be philosophical radicals doing something similar?  And yet isn't this precisely the kind of conclusion that their ideas should reach?

For the better part of two thousand years, in the Western tradition, intellectual debate was dominated by aristocrats and clerics.  For the past century or so it's been dominated by university employees.  This model continues to be relevant, but is it always and everywhere appropriate?  Given near universal literacy, hyper-abundant texts and almost zero participation costs isn't the sociology of intellectual discourse bound to evolve sooner or later?  And wouldn't this be a good thing?  Wouldn't the rather stifling ecosystem of the academy be much more productive if it opened out, seamlessly, onto a civil society that was fully capable of carrying on similar debates under its own steam?

Maybe if academics were made to observe themselves not as card carrying intellectuals -- granted such status by dint of their profession -- but rather as 'para-intellectuals' -- actually hamstrung by the contradictions of their professional status -- then the whole discourse would come to have less to do with the bitter, jealous feuding of professional fiefdoms and and more to do with having some new bloody ideas for once.

Ah, one can dream.