Month: April 2020

Cavendish’s Triumvirate and the Writing Process

I’m working through Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) at the moment. It’s not the first time (in fact, I taught a course on it after Christmas), but her writing is dense and is neither as systematic as someone like Descartes nor as succinct as someone like Berkeley. But the pay-off is a philosophy rich full of insights that genuinely does seem to be, if not ahead of its time (I don’t want to be accused of anachronism), then idiosyncratic to its immediate historical context in some striking ways. For example, I’m reading Cavendish alongside Keith Allen’s A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour (OUP, 2016), and there are clear signs that she had thought deeply about phenomena such as colour constancy (whereby we take objects to have remained the same colour even though a different coloured light is shining on them) and metamerism (objects with different microphysical qualities that appear to be the same colour) that are central to contemporary perception debates (Colin Chamberlain has written a great article on Cavendish’s atypical philosophy of colour). As far as I am aware, these aren’t issues that her contemporaries (Hobbes, Descartes, Berkeley, et al) were much preoccupied with. And while reading and working through Cavendish’s philosophy is a bit like trying to untangle a charger cable that’s been kept in a box in a drawer too long – each time you think you’ve untangled all the knots another one appears – it tends to be rewarding, even if it is near impossible to pin down exactly what she thinks about any given issue ‘X’.

Perhaps because of the inevitable struggle that comes with defending an interpretation of Cavendish’s philosophy, I’m also thinking a lot about the trials and tribulations of the writing process (it may also be because I have literally nothing else to do). For a long time, I’ve thought that one of the best pieces of writing advice came from Daniel Dennett who, in various platforms (including a keynote he gave here in Dublin last September) has encouraged writers to ‘blurt something out, and then you have something to work with’. I’ve regurgitated this advice to students several times, and it chimes well with me because I find it much easier to shape and mould a pre-existing block of text, than to face the task of squeezing something out of the ether (or my brain – wherever it comes from) and onto the page. Like Leibniz, I prefer a block to chip away from than a Lockean blank page. With that in mind, I’ve started to wonder whether a particular aspect of Cavendish’s metaphysics might provide us with a nice model for the writing process.

Perhaps one of the most interesting, and remarkable, aspects of Cavendish’s system of nature is her claim that all parts of nature contain what she calls a “triumvirate” of matter (note: Cavendish is a materialist, even the mind is composed of material substance in her system). She claims that each and every part of nature is made up of three kinds of matter: (1) rational matter, (2) sensitive matter, and (3) inanimate matter. Even if you could pick out an atomistic unit (although she rejects atomism herself), she thinks, you would find varying degrees of all three kinds of matter. Inanimate matter is matter as we would ordinarily think of it, bulky stuff that weighs the other kinds of matter down and does the important job of filling up space (a job I’ve gotten very good at myself during lockdown). Cavendish compares inanimate matter to the bricks and mortar used to build a house. Continuing this analogy, she suggests that sensitive matter plays the role of the team of builders, moving inanimate matter around and getting it to take up particular shapes and forms. The variety of ways that inanimate matter is put together, she thinks, explains the variety of things in the natural world around us. What’s more, if there were no sensitive matter to move inanimate matter around, she claims, the world would be entirely homogenous. Finally, she compares rational matter to the architect responsible for it all. For the sensitive matter wouldn’t know what to do with all the inanimate matter if it wasn’t told what to do by someone with a plan. In the section of the Observations entitled ‘An Argumental Discourse’ (one of the strangest philosophical dialogues out there, between two ‘halves’ of her own mind who are ‘at war’) she sums up the triumvirate of matter like so:

as in the exstruction of a house there is first required an architect or surveyor, who orders and designs the building, and puts the labourers to work; next the labourers or workmen themselves; and lastly the materials of which the house is built: so the rational part… in the framing of natural effects, is, as it were, the surveyor or architect; the sensitive, the labouring or working part; and the inanimate, the materials: and all these degrees are necessarily required in every composed action of nature.

Observations upon Experimental (Cambridge Texts Edition, edited by Eileen O’Neill (2001)) pp. 24

This is, then, a top-down approach to understanding both orderliness and variety of things in nature. It’s all possible, Cavendish thinks, because there’s an ‘architect’ (the rational part of a thing in nature) that devises a plan and decides what to do the with bulky mass of inanimate matter. (Another note: Cavendish is a vitalist materialist or what we might retrospectively call a panpsychist: she thinks that every part of nature, from grains of sand to plants, animals, and people, has life and knowledge of things in the world around it.)

Right, so how does all this relate to the writing process? I don’t quite know whether this is intended to be a helpful normative suggestion, or just a descriptive claim, but I suggest that Cavendish’s triumvirate might provide a model for thinking about how writing works. In this case, the role of bulky, cumbersome inanimate matter is played by the words on the page you’ve managed to ‘blurt out’, to use Dennett’s technical terminology. Or, perhaps it’s the thoughts/ ideas you’ve still got in your head. Either way, it’s a mass of sentences, propositions, textual references, and so on, that you’ve got to do something with (another tangled charger cable, if you will). What options have you got? Well, structure and presentation are important – and while these are facilitated by your word processor (for example), they constitute a kind of medium between your thought and the words on the page. So I’d suggest that presentation, structure, perhaps even the phrasing of individual sentences, is what plays the role of sensitive matter: Cavendish’s labourers or workmen.

Finally, there’s the role of rational matter: the architect or surveyor who’s plan the sensitive matter is just waiting to carry out. I actually think this may be the hardest comparison to draw. It would be easy to simply say ‘you’ are the architect of your writing, but once you’ve taken away the words/ ideas as well the as the way they are presented or structured, it’s hard to know exactly what’s doing the work or what’s left (just ask Hume). Last year, I saw Anna Burns, author of the brilliant Milkman, give a talk where she was asked about her writing process. Her answer, which in the mouth of another could have sounded pompous or pretentious, was honest and revealing: she had literally nothing to say. She couldn’t explain what the real source of her writing was and, even more remarkably, she wasn’t particularly interested. In any case, there’s something that’s grouping together, or paying selective attention to, some ideas or notions and advocating that they should become a piece of writing. Whatever that is, I suggest it plays the role of rational matter: Cavendish’s architect.

How might this be helpful to writers? I’m not sure it can in any practical way, but I find it helpful when I hit upon a nice description of something I’ve grappled with or when it seems that someone is describing my own experiences (it’s one of the reasons I like reading both philosophy and fiction). Perhaps Cavendish’s triumvirate model can be useful in this way. It may also, and I have begun to think in these terms myself, provide you with a measure of where you are in the writing process. Am I still sourcing the bricks and mortar? Are the labourers at work? Or are they waiting for instructions from the architect? Sometimes, it’s helpful to know where you are, because it lets you take stock of what there is still to do – and, in keeping with Cavendish’s analogy, who’s going to do it.

Precarity and Privilege. And why you should join a union, today

Reflecting on the personal impact of the corona crisis, a close friend remarked that things didn’t change all that much, rather they became obvious. I then began to hear variations of that idea repeatedly. If you live in a complicated relationship, that might very well show right now. If you have made difficult decisions, their consequences might be more palpable now. If you live in a precarious situation, you will feel that clearly now. On the other hand, there might be good stuff that you perhaps hardly noticed, but if it’s there, it will carry you now. On social media, I sense a lot of (positive) nostalgia. People remember things, show what mattered then and now. Things become obvious. The crisis works like a magnifying glass.

This effect also shows how well we are prepared. As an adolescent, I used to smile at my parents for storing lots of food cans in their basement. Of course, most of us also laugh at people rushing to hoard toilet paper, but how well prepared are we for what is coming? Perhaps you think that if we’re lacking things and certain habits now, this is owing to individual failures or laziness. But if we experience precariousness, hardly any of that is an individual fault. Habits need collective stabilisation and consolidation to persist. That said, I’m not going to focus on the state of your basement or hygiene measures. Rather, I’m worried about the question of how well we are politically prepared. Many people around me are facing really dire situations. And our political preparation (or lack thereof) leaves us with very few means to address them properly. So what can be done? I’ll begin with some general considerations and try to finish with some practical advice.

If we look around, we see that a lot can be done. Slowing down the economy like that without immediate chaos ensuing is a huge success. But very soon, people will start telling each other that certain things “cannot” be done, because they are “too difficult”, “too expensive” or “against the rules”. While a lot of good is happening, the bargaining and gaslighting has already begun. Being a highly competitive culture, academia has a notorious problem with collective action (role models in the UK who have been on strike for enormous amounts of time notwithstanding). But this crisis requires collective measures, both in terms of hygiene and in terms of politics.

What’s the problem? Precarious employment (not only) in academia has been a growing factor for a long time. As I see it, this jeopardizes not only political but also academic goals, because it leads to an unwelcome dissociation of teaching and research. But at the present moment, this precarity might turn into something much worse. We already see furloughs and dismissals especially of people on fixed term contracts and the flimsy justifications rolling in on a fairly large scale. At the same time, we witness what we have already seen in the medical sector. We lack transnational policies and thus people are being treated very differently, depending on where they happen to work and what sort of contract they have. Add to this that many ad hoc measures, such as online teaching, are now used as a pretext to introduce lasting changes that may be detrimental to both employment conditions and educational standards. So the precarity and educational standards might worsen to a tipping point where education might become largely disposable. Indeed, mass education is of course disposable already, unless you have democratic tendencies.

What can be done? The first thing I find striking is that, while people continuously talk about online teaching and other means of continuing work, hardly anyone addresses the question of precarious employment. Given the current firings and freezing of hirings, we know that the job market is going to be brutal. If you are, say, an international postdoc or teaching fellow whose contract runs out after the summer, it will be very difficult to find or even seek employment. While I see people readily exchanging advice on zooming, I’ve seen hardly anything so far on how to address this problem. The exceptions to this rule are labour unions and some employee organisations some of which are currently collecting data and push for measures. (You know of more exceptions? Please spread the news widely!)* Now let me ask you: Are you a member of a union? No? You’re no exception. In the various places I worked during and after my PhD, I have never been encouraged to join a union. It’s almost as if there were no awareness that there is such a thing as the representation of employees’ interests. In fact, I guess it’s worse, and it’s something I’ve not only noticed in academia but also in much of the growing freelance and start-up culture. Going from my own experience, I’d say that people always have been and still are (more or less subtly) discouraged from joining such organisations. So when employees encounter difficulties in their employment, they typically will be portrayed as not being tough enough for the job. You are overworked? Well, if you don’t blame yourself already, you’ll likely be shamed into avoiding publicity. Being overworked is still portrayed as a personal lack of stamina, to be addressed not by collective industrial action but by courses on time management or mindfulness. This way, failing to secure (permanent) employment can still be blamed on the individual rather than on the way higher education is run.

The individualisation of such problems does not only affect people’s (mental) health, it also keeps people away from engaging in collective action. In turn, this means that unions etc. will remain weak because they can easily be portrayed as not representing anyone. If people keep blaming themselves, the unions don’t have a case for building an argument in favour of better employment conditions. I see this as one of the main reasons why we are politically not well prepared for addressing economic problems in this crisis. So what should we do now?

Trying to collect ideas, I have written to a number of friends and colleagues who kindly provided me with suggestions. Let me briefly summarise some crucial points:

  • Generally, permanent / tenured people should take it upon them to make a move. We should be aware that people on fixed term contracts are vulnerable and should not be expected to lobby for their interests alone.
  • Try to see who is in or is likely to get into trouble and talk about the situation. Bring it up with your colleagues and managers whenever the opportunity arises. If you have department meetings or exchanges with funding agencies such as the ERC, ask what can be or is done to ameliorate the situation.
  • Join a union and encourage others to do so, too. In the Netherlands, the unions are taking it upon them to make a case for employees in precarious positions.
  • As I see it, it would be good for universities to invest in staff rather than reduce numbers. Wherever possible contracts should be extended, as is in fact done by various funding bodies.
  • If there are no financial resources for staff, measures should be taken to reallocate budgets, especially travel and overhead funding for the extension of contracts or hires.
  • Universities in Austria and Switzerland have created hardship funds for employees facing precarious situations. This should be done proactively, as people in vulnerable positions might feel discouraged to come forward.

These are just some ideas. I’d be grateful to hear more. But to my mind, the most important point is that we need to pursue such steps in a collective effort. Right now, these steps should be taken because we are in an emergency. Ensuring stability is what is required for providing a safe working environment.

Ultimately, taking measures of solidarity is also about helping academia to survive beyond this crisis. Whenever recession hits, education is often considered disposable. If we were to allow for the reduction of staff without resistance, it would just signal that academia could do with even fewer people and resources. Dictatorships would certainly welcome this. The way we treat our colleagues and students will contribute to determining the political system that we’ll find ourselves in after the crisis.

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* Of course, there have been initiatives addressing the adjunct crisis. But I havent’t noticed that precarity has been an issue of great public concern in this crisis, even less so among tenured academics, as a recent piece by Emma Pettit notes:

“While tenured professors have typically stood by silently as their nontenured colleagues advocated for themselves on the national stage, they have watched their own kind dwindle. Positions are remaining unfilled. Tenure lines are getting pruned. There’s still the same service work to do, but fewer people to do it, and those who remain shoulder the burden.

And today, as a global pandemic has devastated budgets and led college leaders to freeze hiring and furlough even tenured professors, the cause seems especially urgent.

The structural changes that preceded the pandemic helped set the stage for those austerity measures, and manufactured a growing — if uneven, slow, some would say glacial — recognition among the tenured that relying on contingent labor hurts everyone, activists and higher-education researchers say. …
How much tenured professors have cared, historically, about their contingent colleagues, is difficult to measure. Everyone knows the caricature: the older, typically white, typically male full professor whose non-tenure-track colleagues escape his vision, who still believes merit rises to the top and those who fail to land tenure-track jobs lack work ethic, intelligence, or both. …
Even if tenured professors might not pay attention to the adjuncts who walked their hallways, they couldn’t help but notice the fates of their graduate students, who were being sent into a bottlenecked academic-jobs market to compete for slimmer pickings. They started to connect the dots.”

Will the future be like the past? Making sense of experiences in and of the corona crisis

The world is a different place now. But what does that mean? In keeping with my previous posts, I want to think about the way we experience this situation. Binge-scrolling through expert advice, curves and numbers is important for assessing the situation and deliberating about forms of collective action. But at the same time, it is essential to understand one another and ourselves within this situation, to return from the third-person talk to the second and first person perspective. Thus, a crucial part of our thinking should be devoted to the various meanings of our experience. I speak of “meanings” in the plural for two reasons. On the one hand, I think our experiences of the situation vary quite a lot, such that the events we undergo mean different things for different people. So your social and economical situation, for instance, matters greatly in how you will feel and how your expectations take shape. Would I feel as balanced as I do, if I worked, say, in a bar? Or as a postdoc who is facing that my contract is running out soonish? Even if we’re likely facing an enormous global recession, the current stability still affects my being. On the other hand, and this is perhaps surprising, I have noticed that my very own experiences have different meanings even to me. Let me explain: I have now been staying mostly inside (with family) for a bit more than three weeks. Given that I often suffer from anxieties, I would have expected that the growing corona crisis would make me feel bad. But while I have clearly lost a sense of normality, this doesn’t exactly trouble me. I feel ok, perhaps even slightly more balanced than in the months before. For a while, I thought that’s quite surprising. But then I realised that this is true of a number of people. In fact, this morning I read an article according to which some psychologists report that a significant number of patients with depression or anxiety disorders find that their situation improved, paradoxically so. How can we make sense of such experiences? Is there a way of explaining the eerily positive attitude some of us have in this crisis? I’m no psychologist. But as a historian of philosophy I know something about the ways in which we relate to our histories and biographies. My hunch is that this kind of experience is partly determined by our beliefs about how much the future will resemble the past. While trying to explain this hunch a bit more, I’ll say how this might help in assessing conflicts between people with different ways of experiencing the crisis. Will the future resemble the past then? As we will see, this is not a question of (future) facts but of values.

Speaking to various people about the corona crisis, it seems that most conversation partners fall into one of two categories: (1) those who believe that we’ll be “going back to normal” at some point and (2) those who believe that the future will be fairly different from the past. Let’s call them continuists and discontinuists respectively. Continuists think that the future resembles the past, even after this crisis. Accordingly, they will try and prepare for the time after the crisis in much the same way they have pursued their goals before. By contrast, discontinuists assume that the future is not only uncertain but likely different from the status quo of the past. Accordingly, they cannot prepare by pursuing the same goals by the same means. They will expect having to adjust their means or even their goals.
The question whether historical events are continuous with past events or mean a disruptive change is hotly debated, because whether or not you see continuity or change depends what criteria you focus on. But for now I’m less interested in the theoretical issue. Rather, I’m wondering how our pertinent beliefs affect our experience. A wise friend of mine once said that our beliefs about the future shape the present, for instance, in that such beliefs guide our current actions. If that’s correct, then continuists and discontinuists will be preparing for different future scenarios. Of course, the question which future scenario is more likely is a rather pressing one. What (else) will this virus do to us? Will the economy break down completely? Will we have civil unrests, wars over resources? Like you, I’m interested in these things, but lacking relevant knowledge I have nothing to say about them. What I want to address here is how being a continuist or discontinuist relates to your experience of the current situation.

Now how does having one or the other attitude affect your experience? As a continuist who retains your goals you will likely want to stick to your strategies and go back to normal if possible. The current restrictions (contact restrictions or lockdowns) will probably feel rather disruptive. By contrast, a discontinuist might welcome the disruption as way of preparing for an uncertain future. So my guess is that there is a correlation between being a discontinuist and having a more positive attitude towards the disruptive measures. Let’s illustrate this idea with an example. A controversial issue that arises for many people around me is productivity. While some people readily give tips on how to successfully remain productive at the home office and quickly switch to things like online teaching, others see these outbursts of productivity as a problematic distraction from more pressing issues. They worry, for instance, that the switch to online teaching will worsen the standing of academic teaching or the exploitation on the job market.
My idea is that we can pair up the conflicting approaches towards productivity with attitudes about (dis)continuity. While a continuist will remain productive, a discontinuist will be suspicious of such productivity as it seems likely to be jeopardised by the changes ahead. This doesn’t mean that the discontinuist will stop being productive tout court. It just means that the discontinuist will likely want to prepare for adjusting the means or even the goals, rather than keep going as before.

As this example shows, there is not only a difference but also a conflict between continuists and discontinuists. If you currently google the keywords “coronavirus” and “productivity” and look at the headlines, you’re clearly listening in on a fierce dispute. Should you work on improving your productivity? Or should you redirect your focus on different priorities? Continuists often seem to experience the restrictions as if their lives have been put on hold. The crisis might be very disruptive, but by and large the goals remain intact. This might also be mirrored in different attitudes of students: If you are an ambitious student and a continuist, your priority might still be to pass your exams well and quickly. If your university cancels the regular classes and exams (rather than running them online), you will likely be annoyed or worried. By contrast, discontinuists seem to experience the restrictions as the onset or emergence of a new situation; they will likely try to adjust their goals in line with hopes or guesses about the outcome. If you are an ambitious student and a discontinuist, your priority might be to understand and prepare for the new situation. Your focus or interests might change and you might appreciate a pertinent adjustment of teaching rather than the pursuit of former goals.

As I see it, this kind of conflict is often misrepresented. It often seems to be presented as a quest for the right way of responding to the crisis. Thus, depending on the predominant attitude around you, you might see your own response as a failure. Surrounded by continuists, the discontinuist will feel like being not sufficiently productive. Surrounded by discontinuists, the continuist will feel like insufficiently adapting to the new situation that will arise. However, as I see it the conflict between these two stances is not about the facts of the crisis or the predictable future but about values. Let me explain.

As I see it, the question whether there is a continuity after the crisis is not one that could be established by looking at current or estimated future facts. It would be fallacious to think that there is a definite cut off point that distinguishes continuity from discontinuity. In other words, whether a crisis like this allows for going “back to normal” or is a pervasive disruption is not an empirical question. If the crisis has very dire consequences, you can still claim that we’re going back to a “very impoverished normal”. If the crisis is not too disruptive, you can still claim the world is altered, if mainly by the prospect of the crisis returning. So it is the other way round: First you claim that there is a continuity or discontinuity, and then you quote empirical facts for support.

If this is correct, what is it then that makes the difference between continuists and discontinuists? As I said it’s a question of values. If you largely accept the norms of the status quo before the crisis you will evaluate the predicted situation as a deviation from these norms and find points of impoverished continuity. However, the discontinuist will see the norms of the former status quo as undermined. In fact, this is what allows for seeing discontinuity. So the future scenarios discontinuists see are ones in which new norms are established. They will be what we often call a “new normal”, for better or worse. Such a new normal might include, for instance, the restrictions that we anticipated in view of anthropogenic climate change and the Paris Agreement. Seen in this light the current measures taken against the corona crisis might appear as being in line with new norms to be consolidated.

What does this mean for the eerily positive attitude that some of us experience? Once you recognise that the belief in discontinuity is a matter of value, it’s plausible to assume that what empowers (some) people is the necessitated change of norms during lockdown. So while it might be right that the positive attitude correlates with former states of anxiety or depression, it would be dangerous to confine this to a psychological question of individuals. We shouldn’t overlook the societal values going hand in hand with such empowerment. Seen in line with societal values, the disruption of the status quo is not merely destructive. It holds the possibility to establish norms more in line with what many of us might desire in light of the challenges we face, for instance, with regard to climate change. It doesn’t mean that this possibility will become true. But as long as we’re not hit by total disaster, there is hope.