Welcome to Beautiful Losers episode 7! This episode was recorded a few weeks ago, before the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and protests that followed.

We take up a handful of texts that exemplify or interrogate the limit of critique, namely the practice of inquiry that has developed within the context of the university and the humanities since the enlightenment. This episode is both a capstone of a unit of thinking as well as an introduction to a new set of themes that we will continue to explore. As always we are perpetually concluding and beginning anew.

Three texts are under discussion today: Francois Furstenberg’s op-ed “University Leaders Are Failing,” Bruno Latour’s “Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” and Adolph Reed, Jr.’s “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism.”

Francois, Bruno, and Adolph make for an odd threesome, different as they are when it comes nationality, academic discipline, theoretical foundation, and methodology. These articles don’t talk to one another as much as they speak to overlapping themes and questions: What is the purpose of the university? Who does it serve? What form of discourse can appropriately adjudicate matters of difference and disagreement?

Beyond a particular focus on the university, these questions lead us to a more foundational relationship between the systems and structures of knowledge, on the one hand, and the often surprising and unexpected fruits of those systems, on the other. We make the case that another discursive formation is needed to help adjudicate and manage this relationship. We acutely feel the loss of a common cultural ground in the face of increasingly isolated and systemically specialized social systems. Your Beautiful Losers know too well that calls for a “common cultural framework” can also lead to reactionary outcomes; we do not think that pandora’s box can re-furl itself.

Our modernist question: How to best manage a variegated socio-political landscape? While we don’t have an answer at the present moment, we are receptive to misleading answers and frameworks that distract from the fundamental, systemic dynamics at work in our society. 

The University Without Finances

Furstenberg’s Op-Ed makes a case for the mishandling of university financial resources, evinced by his institution’s capital management strategy during the pandemic. This piece is emblematic of the “bad thinking” often displayed by beautiful losers. To us, Furstenberg’s complaint sounds like a dressed-up version of grad students complaining about their stipends.

While we’re sympathetic to his plight, Furstenberg makes his case by appealing to a higher morality, one that values the material conditions of professors in the way that Furstenberg does. A technical analysis of financial risk mitigation and management, an appraisal of balance-sheet strength, an analysis of university asset allocation, or even a basic understanding of how the financial operations of a modern research university management company operate are all absent. Furstenberg wants a seat at the table, but doesn’t provide any reason for management to take him seriously. Nor is he making a case for his colleagues to make a radical break from the university until their issues are meant. The result is, as they say, “a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Criticizing Critique: Are we all conspiracy theorists now?

Latour’s landmark 2003 essay examines how the intellectual tools of critique can fuel and shape the very politics that critique itself, as an enlightenment project that celebrated the powers of reason and science over superstition and prejudice, sought to eradicate via the methodology of evidenced illumination. Think here of how the contemporary Right employs anti-racist arguments against the Left, who they accuse (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) of prejudice in its many varieties. Celebrated though it might have been by Enlightenment thinkers, the objectivity of science does little to help political argument and analysis when the legitimacy of science itself crumbles under the weight of pessimism in a postmodern age that lacks legitimating grand narratives. Think, for example, about longstanding debates about the legitimacy of climate change. These debates have already been won, but we continue hurtling toward the precipice of a disaster. 

En route to sketching out this state of affairs, Latour makes a prescient observation about the relationship between critique and conspiracy. Latour spent his career as a theorist of scientific knowledge who questioned and challenged the epistemology of modern science. He did so in order to help improve science from within—to help us become better, sharper, and more sensitive critical thinkers. In this article, then, he grapples with the fact that the same intellectual moves he made to better critique and scientific knowledge can also be used to undermine the entire Enlightenment project of science. 

Critique is an inherently negative project. Critics break and pull things down in order to put them back together in a way that produces better or more accurate understanding. Nothing within the methodology of critique demands that what follows the act of critique must adhere to a specific moral or political outcome. It’s a process and a methodology, not an ethics or a moral system. There is no guarantee to critique.

Latour turns to Martin Heidegger’s use of “the thing” and the way that Heidegger’s phenomenology burdens an object with a host of phenomenological, historical, social, material, and economic conditions. The attempt is to tie an analysis so deeply within a specific framework that it can’t be decontextualized. This effect is something like super-contextualization. Can we provide enough context, and make context so important and essential that no one believes their understanding is complete without context? The idea is compelling because it seems to offer a positive alternative to the negative project of critique, which you can see today in the negativism that pervades all political discourse on and off social media. Latour seeks to build rather than tear down, and to him this means channeling Heidegger’s call to re-contextualize the world in a way that escapes how humanity tends to oversimplify, desacralize, and disenchant objects, ourselves, and the relations between those two phenomena. Still, we remain skeptical: bad faith actors, or good faith actors that disagree with your context will always be able to deploy critical thinking tools toward other ends. 

Despite our skepticism, we admire Latour’s effort to turn criticism from a negative practice into a positive one:

“The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. I am aware that to get at the heart of this argument one would have to renew also what it means to be a constructivist, but I have said enough to indicate the direction of critique, not away but toward the gathering, the Thing. Not westward, but, so to speak, eastward.”

The call to engage in a more positive program strikes us as correct, but it remains to be seen what that positive program will look like. Pragmatically, it seems to us that it must move outside of the domain of the university proper and into the broader social world. Week after week it seems that your beautiful losers lament the disparity between the kind of thinking available in university vs. the kind of thinking taken up in publicly available media. There needs to be a more active engagement with the world. But how to do this without turning the university into a big consulting firm remains to be seen. 

Essentially Anti-Racist

Finally, Reed Jr.’s article disentangles and demystifies the ways that race and class become intermingled and essentialized through modern civil rights programs and business structures. 

This conversation was recorded before the protests, before the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and many others. It continues a theme we had been discussing for a number of weeks: what is the relationship between race and class and how do these two discourses interact with each other in ways that are both productive and unproductive?

Reed makes a strong case against the ubiquity of race and racism as an “essential” framework. In this case, “essential” refers to the ways that any idea (race, gender, identity) is positioned as a constant, universal feature of human existence. Reed points to the ways that thinking about race essentially was a specific 19th century strategy meant to include a poorer white class into the power dynamics of the southern aristocracy. Elsewhere Reed has taken this argument to speak out against organizations like the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter. Reed’s point is not that these power dynamics don’t exist or aren’t pernicious, but rather that they must be understood as specific strategies that are deployed in order to protect material interests. Similar to Walter Benn Michaels, Reed argues that the progressive versions of anti-racism, insofar as they are focused on addressing the essential characteristic of race and not the material conditions of racist policies, will always fail to address the class-based problem that is racism. 

If Latour outlines some of the shortcomings of critique from within the vantage of the university, then Reed does the same, but more forcefully argues and grounds his analysis in contemporary cultural dynamics. 

This is not to say that we feel that the answer to the problems of critique are found in the work of Adolph Reed Jr., but his writing offers a powerful testament to the power of critique and critical thinking—namely, the ability to demystify the operations of culture in order to point to the underlying dynamics that are motivating action, duplicity, and the like. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com