I WOULD SERIOUSLY APPRECIATE MY PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY INVOLVED FOLLOWERS TO SHARE THIS
[I am adding these comments again just to give more of a picture of this issue, because it hits pretty close to home]
Just for the record, Dave Jonathan/Lisa Hemmingway of Cascadia Network and Victory Farm shut down all its seminars and practices because they weren’t able to let go of power and recognize their failure to be either professional or humble in how they navigated interpersonal relations in the group. Since their personal relations with board members got more critical, they single handly and without any consul shut down the cooperative and its functions.
Not only did I clash with them two years ago and last year over them brushing over marginalized minorities, but also over their defacto leader position and centralization of power that came with - evidently, as I partook on the Cascadia Network’s Phenomenology of Spirit reading group this year, the same issues appeared again and seemed to play a behind-the-scenes role on how people interacted in the group. For instance, when me and my colleague were the only people of colour in the group, the assumptions that dominated the conversation were very transappearently the universality of the white maleness of participants - it is not surprising there has been a history of such dismissiveness ultimate affecting who is willing to participate in the group. Ultimately Dave wasn’t able to manage it and now they have deleted some record of it.
Definitely one of my personal quarrel has been that it is crucial for any radical practice and pedagogy of philosophy to include marginalized communities who would benefit most and maybe add much to what we are learning - I feel that this was something always under erasure or dismissal for the sake of academic mastery or expertise (which we have learned much about the master/slave dialectic, so it is not a surprise that discontent came with this determining factor of the group). These determining factors are also constraining the freedom or notion of Philosophy we have developed in these circumstances - the academization and professionalization of philosophy over the last three hundred years has put a devastating pressure and regulations over whatever bares the name of Philosophy, and it is ultimately in instances like this that such an issue becomes evident in everyday life.
One of my friends who was involved in these seminars noted the following (note these comments were done prior to Dave using they/them pronouns): “My posts have been deleted from a FB page mocking Jordan Peterson (from MONTHS ago, like how fucking sour can someone be?)
Uninvited from a Hegel reading group. The sophisticated reasoning here is that “finishing Hegel” means having understood him, that Philosophy is about means-to-ends, success, and powering through a text, that if the moderators do not recognize their fervor in you that you are therefore less than a person (ableist) such that your participation does not create surplus value for the mods to consume (capitalist model of production of knowledge, sophist model). Not to mention that everyone who wasn’t as white as their sneakers felt displaced, non-academic intellectuals felt displaced.
If you create spaces under the rubric of inclusivity and then self-righteously exclude people then you are literally dangerous and anti-community.
I wrote this whiteboy a letter about this sort of shortsight. All the letter did was make me a target for exclusion.
My experience with Dave Johnathan has been one of encountering someone who, in order to hold a communal space, must hold more power than others. If power is threatened, fight or flight comes on - not dialogue. When there WAS dialogue, it was disingenuous: one received the gloss that a CEO or a rhetorician would give. Dialogue implies accountability, and accountability implies that you change your (un)witting possibly toxic behaviors.
During the time in which I DID participate, when I was stupidly FAR LESS willing to commit labour to a philosophy producer (sophist), I was told off in argument by Dave: “analytic philosophers have problematized the abstract/concrete distinction so using those terms critically isn’t really acceptable (note, this sophistry re-asserts the very fucking distinction in its assertion (rendering me as abstract and him as concrete). To digress from pedantics, the point is that this is NOT true, because the motherfucker is NOW reading the Phenomenology of Spirit and utilizing the distinction nearly every step of the way. The point is that he is willing and able to simply use rhetoric when he is threatened to dissuade people from challenging him. This is not thinking behavior, and that’s why it produces violence.
This fellow, to be fair alongside plenty of drama and smoke in the air, willy-nilly left on a vacation without warning the hard and fast reading group that he started, under the impetus that we would immediately resume, and then, upon returning, willy-nilly cancels it for everyone, citing personal shit… Only to be found operating the same group, exclusively, without several of the former members (women, trans, poc). Note: We have been reading this text for like 5-7 weeks and each reading is ATLEAST 3-6+ hours depending on how megabrain you are… That is ALOT of labor from ALOT of people simply taken for fucking granted.
The group utilized this method to purge itself down to: white men. Whose first voyage into “going their own way” included blaring music whose main hook was the N word, and creating a peculiar American atmosphere where “going hard in the paint” (whatever the fuck this is supposed to mean) is representative of what it means to sympathetically engage a philosophical text. This is the EXPLICIT creation of an atmosphere whose MEANING _IS_ TO BE EXCLUSIVE.
Lastly, the person on blast here specifically, vindictively, had a vendetta against specific members of the group, because they were brought into the fold by another individual. All were tacit targets in this behavior.
A group acting in secret as to avoid accountability is what the right-wing does. An identity that cannot be maintained without exclusion and oppression is, quite formally, “back in the dark ages”. It’s in a Master’s position and having never, truly, “felt the fear of the Lord”, traipses across the land as if it is ALL purely FOR. IT.
Y'all realize that this is middle-class white supremacist shit right? Coming from white male intellectuals? Y'all should know to be WAY the fuck more careful with the power that you give yourself the right to - especially in this day and age. I’m literally embarrassed to the point of cringing at how blatant this shit has been to “outsiders”.
This is rude. This is sophisticated. This is ruthless. This is vindictive. This is racist. This is cisnormative. This is status-quo academic farce. This is manipulative. This is lying.
Creating safe spaces and heeding ACTUAL otherness, and not just the capital O otherness that you read in your sophisticated books, is a life-long task and a goal bound with honour.
For a Philosophy group, of all things, to take the turns that it did at the hands of the bad captains of the discourse, speaks VOLUMES to the ongoing death of actually Thinking - actually knowing how to encounter someone OTHER THAN YOU.“”
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