Why Undergraduate Philosophy?

An Introduction Ada S. Jaarsma

In the first meeting of our seminar on Jacques Derrida, in winter 2013, the students in the course and I broached the question of what it might mean to study philosophy in the context of a university classroom that presupposes certain exclusions. We talked, for example, about the many individuals who werent able to join us as enrolled students because of devastating provincial cuts to the higher education budget. Several students described the structural exclusions that result from the universitys increasingly close relations to the marketplace. Along these lines, we discussed how the corporatization of universities leads to exclusionary dynamics, ranging from the disciplinary effects of the assessment of students (quantifying their work into the aggregate of a GPA) to the ideological effects of the assessment of professors (as sites like rate my professor inculcate a culture of entertainment rather than a culture of critique).

The activities of reading and conversing about texts are caught up with market-driven imperatives, we mused, regardless of whether we willingly confront such dynamics or not. Derridas assessment of consumption explains why we cannot take for granted how we engage with texts: The mass productions that today inundate the press and publishing houses do not form their readers; they presuppose in a phantasmatic and rudimentary fashion a reader who has already been programmed. They thus end up preformatting this very mediocre addressee whom they had postulated in advance.1 Consumer-based reading practices exclude creative and critical thinking, according to Derrida, which means that the terms of such overly programmed reading align dangerously close with the existing order of values and meanings. On this account, philosophical study itself risks a certain unquestioning acquiescence to the exclusionary logics of the market. While we might want to affirm activities like reading as resources for securing emancipation and freedom, Derridas analysis disallows such naivet. Of course, Derridas own method of philosophy prompts a much more hopeful line of thought: how might philosophy overcome these constitutive exclusions and equip us with capacities for critique, as readers and interlocutors? And what kinds of practices should we be enacting, both within our classroom and beyond, in order to contest exclusionary forms of repression and create conditions in which critique and freedom flourish? While this conversation marked the beginning of
1 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Trans. Pascal-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011)

our semester-long seminar, its concerns ultimately overflowed the boundaries of our classroom. At the conclusion of our course, the students moved the seminar into the city, meeting in parks and cafs, shifting the focus of seminar-discussion from Derrida to Spinoza and Deleuze. Students from universities across town joined this summer seminar, which was entirely student-led, and out of this philosophical community came the decision to launch the journal, AFFECTUS. In tracing the history of the journal as caught up in some way with wide-ranging reflections on exclusion, I would like, on the one hand, to make the case for its critical aspirations and, on the other, to reflect on its significance as a collaborative and student-led project. In contrast to the preformatted reader, constrained by mass marketing into reading solely along predetermined ways, Derrida suggests that there is hope that critique might emerge out of close readingfor texts that form the reader pedagogically. I see this journal, AFFECTUS, as an enterprise that reflects such pedagogical hope. Above all, it was the labour of undergraduate students, exclusively, that brought this journal into being: students put out the call for papers, students from across the continent submitted an array of excellent work, and students gathered together for the difficult work of adjudicating submissions and ascertaining the contents of this first issue. Rather than the constraints that tend to govern the assessment of student work, constraints that can impede rather than inspire creativity, this peer-reviewed assessment reflects the criteria that the editorial board of students developed together. It seems worth emphasizing that these values and ideals emerged out of student-led discussion. In his analysis of the obstacles that often block critical resistance in universities, Jeff Schmidt points out that professors were often themselves the best students, those who

excelled by playing by the rules. Conforming to institutional norms, he explains, reflects the long-rewarded behavior that got them [professors] into graduate school in the first place.2 In other words, there are certain preformed habits and dispositions in professors that can reinforce, rather than call out, the exclusionary tendencies of the classroom. Schmidts gentle rejoinder to professors suggests that resistance is more likely to be found within student communities. And, as we peruse the contents of this first issue of AFFECTUS, we come across examples of the creative, boundary-questioning work that demonstrate the possibility of critical resistance. In their inventive recasting of Jean-Paul Sartres No Exit, Exit Time, Britanny Burr and Syd Peacock move the drama of Sartres play from the hellish afterlife into a modern-day university hallway. Even when I am alone, I am existing with others, one speaker admits, an insight that Sartres characters are unable to glimpse, let alone express, because of the trouble that this admission would cause for the stubborn individuality of bad faith. It is no neutral declaration, this acknowledgement that I, regardless of circumstance or choice, exist fundamentally with others. As Lisa Guenther explains in the interview with Michael Giesbrecht, the study of philosophy ought to create time and space for exploring existence, experience, and praxis, putting us more on the hook for the world that we create together. This kind of pedagogy intensifies our responsibility for the shared nature of existence, especially in relation to structural forms of oppression that affect all of us but in grossly disproportionate ways. Since it is the hope for solidaritya hope that is existential but also pragmat2 Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000).

icthat emerges from this line of critique, we confront an insistent challenge: namely, to find ways to cultivate solidarity with others, through our actions, choices, and relations. What is the significance, then, of choosing some philosophical frameworks over others as we make decisions about such actions and choices? In Democracy Promotion as a Political Project, Jeta Mulajs careful parsing of the implications of democracy-projects foregrounds the political stakes of how philosophical arguments about democracy are elaborated and then carried out as programmatic visions. Identifying prevailing paradigms as political projects of the powerful, Mulajs analysis invites us to grapple with the dissonance that arises from reading Plato and Aristotle alongside a contemporary thinker like Jacques Rancire. It also prompts uncomfortable and deeply pressing questions about what our normative ideals should be for how philosophy and politics come together and how they might inform the nature of our shared world. In Rhythm as Logos in Native-World-Ordering, Sierra Mills Druley shows us that our reflections on philosophy and politics are limited if we are not also equipped with resources for confronting our cosmological assumptions. Drawing out a nuanced account of indigenous philosophy, Druley proffers an important intervention in how we think about relationality, especially in terms of the spatial and temporal dynamics of rhythm. Rhythm, Druley suggests, can be seen as revelatory, prompting a kind of learning that is not literate or visual but visceral and real. Druleys conclusion points to a vision of humanity in communion with the whole of the pulsing world, a vision that is inspiring and that provokes reflection on the methods by which we might participate in such communion.

Jason Walsh, in his The Nature of Oz: The Cultural Logic of Nature Documentaries and Prison Films, draws our attention to the ways in which ideological constructions mediate our cultural conceptions of life, nature and freedom. While shows like Oz represent the panopticon in ways that align with Foucaults descriptions, Walsh exposes how such simulations of reality work to undercut critical resistance on the part of consumers. And while nature documentaries dramatize the plight of global warming, they pacify us with the domesticating logic of capitalism (enterpreneurs will save us) and of naturalized survivalism (there has always been conflict). Walsh concludes his essay by citing a rhetorical question from Foucault: Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? This indictment by Foucault of the allegiance of modern institutions with capitalism reminds all of us who work and study in universities of the importance of resistance. We will be celebrating the launch of this inaugural issue of AFFECTUS with an event at Mount Royal University that has been organized around the question, Why Undergraduate Philosophy? While this query is ultimately an open one, with no delimited set of answers, I do think that we can read this first journal issue as supplying some initial responses. Why undergraduate philosophy? One answer has to do with the insights, challenges and commitments demonstrated by every writer in this issue. Rather than closing down debates by appealing to authorized interpretations, each essay advances innovative lines of thought. We can see the thematic coherence of the issue in the very investment by each contributor in the tasks of close reading, analysis, and dialogue. Another answer has to do with the community of students who initiated this project in the summer of 2013. Not content with an approach to philosophy that keeps it constrained

to the classroom, these students bring philosophy outside of the universityto the parks and cafs where conversation thrive, and also to this new undergraduate journal. The hope, then, is that these essays will incite further debate and will foster ongoing community, community in which solidarity is an ever-present ideal and in which the boundaries of the classroom remain contested.

Bibliography
Derrida, Jacques. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Translated by Pascal-Anne Brault & Michael Naas. Melville House, 2011. Schmidt, Jeff. Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000.

Dr. Ada S. Jaarsma is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Humanities at Mount Royal University, where she teaches continental philosophy and feminist philosophy. Her current research examines the intersections of existentialism with evolutionary theory.