When I was a philosophy undergraduate student, I had a life-changing experience in a class on the philosophy of language. It was a good class, as undergraduate classes tend to be: I learned the basics of a subject had known little about previously.
The course was taught by a newly minted PhD whose specialty was that subject. She was young and smart and energetic. Don't underestimate this detail: philosophy is generally a field of old men, and as I had aspirations to make a living at this practice, it was important to catch a glimpse of a youthful, vivacious version of it.
The life-changing part came when I asked a question in class about the relationship between Donald Davidson's idea of truth-conditional semantics and Jacques Derrida's notion of the trace. I was intrigued by the fact that Davidson and Derrida were contemporaries, and the young version of me saw (or thought I saw) some kind of confused similarity between these ideas.
I was startled by the reaction I received. My professor launched into a vocal attack against the very idea that there would be any such relation, or that such a thing should be brought up in our course. I never attended Catholic school, but I got the sense that this is what must have happened whenever questions counter to faith might be raised.
It is obvious that I was struggling with the chasm between analytic and continental philosophy, a gulf I would eventually try to violate by taking a double major in philosophy and comparative literature. But there was something more to this struggle than just the content of the ideas; it was more about an approach to the idea of forming ideas itself.
I persisted by attending her office hours, partly out of earnest confusion. I can't remember the content of our ensuing discussion, but I will never forget the way she punctuated it. I'm sure I recall it verbatim, almost a decade and a half later:
Why would you want to think that? Why would that be at all appealing?
I left that day with a sense of unwelcome clarity. My professor was not raising an objection inherent to my thinking, or even to my comparison of two thinkers' ideas. She was objecting to the very act of raising the question. I was not being asked to defend the position, but the posture, the curiosity itself, which was so wasteful as to drift into obscenity. There are some things we simply do not touch.
As for me, I found the pedantry and intolerance of philosophy to be distasteful, and surely it was one of the reasons I pursued graduate studies in comparative literature instead. And once there I certainly overindulged in the lustful pursuit of obtusity, mistaking it for wit. I wouldn't say that the best philosophy is done at some sort of Aristotelian mean between barren formal logic and turgid etymologism, but certainly I do believe that neither approach is enjoyable, let alone moving ideas forward.
All of this serves as preface to a strange experiece I've been having over the past few days on philosopher Jon Cogburn's blog. Jon kindly linked to my recent DiGRA keynote, which he seemed to appreciate. Cogburn and his colleagues have a history of running detailed and immensely useful reading groups on recent philosophy and videogame theory, so I was happy to see the channel open.
But things quickly fell apart, and the conversation has descended into a set of aggressive complaints about the form of my argument and the inspirations I draw from, rather than its purpose or sense. My purpose is not to snark and grouse about individuals here, so I'm not going to name names nor quote sources (you can follow the link to Cogburn's site if you are interested, and I do want to underscore the fact that Jon himself is clearly legitimately interested in what I had to say). Instead, I merely mean to reflect on the whole state of affairs, one that brings me full-circle to meet some of my earliest exposures to philosophy, experiences I'd somewhat forgotten about since having spent so much time in cultural studies, media studies, and continental philosophy.
How does one proceed in the face of an encounter of this sort? It is hardly a conversation, nor is it an inquisition. It sits at a purely metadiscursive level, and any invitations to dip down into discourse itself seem only like lures to enter a dark pool filled with piranha. It's a fool's gambit; one is challenged not for the ideas themselves, but for the fact of their existence in a particular form.
The indefatigable K-Punk has discussed these encounters in terms of a bestiary of trolls and grey vampires, extending those terms beyond their history on USENET and web forums:
In many ways, the academic qua academic is the Troll par excellence. Postgraduate study has a propensity to breeds trolls; in the worst cases, the mode of nitpicking critique (and autocritique) required by academic training turns people into permanent trolls, trolls who troll themselves, who transform their inability to commit to any position into a virtue, a sign of their maturity. But there is nothing more adolescent—in the worst way—than this posture of alleged detachment, this sneer from nowhere. For what it disavows is its own investments; an investment in always being at the edge of projects it can neither commit to nor entirely sever itself from—the worst kind of libidinal configuration, an appalling trap, an existential toxicity which ensures debilitation for all who come into contact with it (if only that in terms of time and energy wasted—the Troll above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people's toys away from them).
I am a thick-skinned person, capable of tolerating disagreement and sloughing off brickbats. Certainly I've encountered enough of it in my time as a game developer and critic, let alone as a philosopher. Heck, I even fended off Stephen Colbert! I even enjoyed ripostes to my attack on the Beatles!
Yet, this particular experience fills me with sorrow rather than anger or thrill. Despite K-Punk's screed and the subsequent discussions of it among my philosopher friends, I guess I'd still retained the naive belief that they were wrong, and that the unwashed masses of ignorant, slavering videogame fans were more intemperate than the tweed cadre of of genteel philosophers. Maybe I was wrong.
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