As I began to respond to your request, Maryellen, to talk about how I orient myself in philosophy, I found myself reading about the notion of a culture of mass shooting as an aesthetic interest. This might be among the deadliest forms of slickness in the world now. Yet what are we to say about the slickness of so many politicians or of capitalists seeking to exploit opportunities while avoiding accountability for social justice?
The title that I give to this piece comes from a discussion that I was having with someone struggling with social alienation last year. He was feeling isolated from others, dogged by status anxiety, and unsure of himself. He grappled with constant self-pressure that oscillated between feeling that he had to hustle his business and indignantly wanting to escape into mysticism.
In our discussions, I criticized slickness—a word that the artist Misty Morrison has used in the context of the professional art world of MFAs. Apparently, the notion stuck with the person. Late last fall coming out of a long meditation retreat one weekend, this interlocutor found one expression rising to the surface of his mind: “against slickness.”
I am echoing that title because I hope that people like that person succeed in their struggle to stop reproducing slickness and manage to be more messy and real as people. While this will help them grow, it’s also important for philosophy. I strongly believe that the best moments in philosophy are not slick and that both professional and public philosophy today are suffering from various forms of slickness.
I am going to depart from conventional academic practice and not define “slickness” here. Rather, I’m going to use it in context throughout this short piece, leaving the matter to discussion at a future date as the case may be. I am also going to write a fairly short piece, unlike the deliberately long-read pieces that have been published on this blog as part of Into Philosophy. Of course, that co-authored series is in many ways a tacit polemic against slickness and for a different kind of polished craft, one attuned to human realities.
Looking back on thirty-five years in professional philosophy, counting the gradual professionalization of college and graduate school, it’s obvious to me that the moments worth remembering are resolutely not slick. They include (1) messy discussion groups, (2) classes where we got stumped or lost together, (3) times when writing itself was fascinating. To stay oriented in philosophy, I’ve found it crucial to remember and to value these kinds of things.
Messy discussion groups
I’ve written about these elsewhere in relation to climate despair and unjust policing. The groups that I have in mind are ones where, over time, people actually got past their egos enough to search together into what Martha C. Nussbaum calls, in The Fragility of Goodness, “important human matters.” These groups could not be slick, because people had to be vulnerable.
But vulnerability is not something one just dials up. It is fake to try to do so, as some New Agey environments do. For people to open up, they have to come to trust each other. In the context of fluid community groups, this takes a certain looseness and modesty to the environment. If people show up fronting their polished selves, people get defensive and close in. The groups instead have to be inviting and hospitable in a low-key way.
Such an ethos affects conversation for the better. Instead of super tight arguments, one gets people wondering together and slowly developing a reasoned position through piece-meal objections, differences of perspective, and—mainly—the spirit of the room gradually coalescing around people trying to understand each other.
Slickness goes out the window here, evaporated or thrown away. Instead, the room goes warm. For such a socially beneficial state of affairs to obtain, people need to work to make the room accountable to everyone who shows up sincerely trying to be there with others. And such accountability to everyone is just not slick. It can’t be. It has to be solid and leafy like a wide limbed tree.
Classes where we got stumped or lost together
Mark Fiocco has written beautifully about how hard and immediately unproductive questioning can be. When I think of unslick and beautiful classes, I’m thinking of classes where we got lost in questioning significant things. What I especially remember is letting the class spill over into time beyond it.
A class like that is quite different on the surface than the discussion group I previously mentioned. The class is quite focused, more regimented in its attention to epistemic norms. It often involves a basic hierarchy surrounding the teacher(s). Still, it’s not slick.
The main reason why comes out in the accountability that I mentioned a moment ago. A philosophy class that gets lost in figuring out what matters in it has to be accountable to the things themselves. As a matter of ordered reasoning, it has to create an environment of responsibility. Attending to the things themselves, people are responsible to work together to listen to each other, hold disagreement, and—paradoxically—get clearer as they get more stumped by the problem at hand.
Once again, we see vulnerability of a different sort, hard won through acts that lead to trust between people. In such classes, people have done the work, so to speak, of being both attentive to the common object of the class and thoughtful with each other. We also see thoroughness. This is something community discussion groups manifest in a different way. Classes that get lost together in figuring things out are thorough through a kind of systematicity generated from the things themselves and the commitment to learn in an ordered way with and through one another.
Such thoroughness is anti-slick. The slick classes would be ones that just won’t go there (some line of questioning or tradition of thinking) because it is in some way too messy or unlikely to produce immediate rewards. There are slick classes out there—perhaps any class that ends up too neatly packaged and too aimed at being cool or cutting edge. But they are a waste of time, although they tend to seduce people.
Times when writing itself was fascinating
Writing is such an art of perfection that the temptations of slickness are strong with it. The publishing industry is slick, too, whether one speaks of the most major academic presses, the so-called “popularizing” presses, or even the boutique elite presses of literary culture. Marketing is slick. Money-making is clever. There are both internal and external dynamics that tend to pressure writing toward slickness now.
But they should be resisted. The times I have in mind were ones where I could feel myself growing as a person through some part of the writing, either cognitively, in how I approached my dispositions, or with respect to my practical and social “sense of life”—another Nussbaum fragment from Love’s Knowledge. To write so as both to communicate and to grow becomes the simple and difficult task, a kind of good humbling that one returns to time and again using the tools of language and typing.
In the context of a society that looks for knowledge production, novelty, or sophistication, to write so as to communicate and to grow may seem breathtakingly naive, even indulgent. But it is worth asking why we should accept such social alienation. That we have learned something is a mark of having acquired some knowledge. That we can communicate is human decency. Why should the question then be, does it sell?
Good—at least, accountable—relationships
The thing that I would most convey to folks making their way through professional philosophy is that forming good relationships along the way makes the process the most sustainable and flourishing. It’s also just the right thing to do. Of course, the question is what a “good” relationship is. Is it one where you score through it, or one that is fluidly transactional?
No. It is one where the people are at the least accountable to each other as people with lives of their own and reliably value such basic social things as truth and truthfulness (in Bernard Williams’s conceptions of these words), being a real person first, and having some thoughtful and considerate generosity. Shouldn’t these things be easy to find?
But societies and professions can be really twisted. Robert Jackall, in Moral Mazes, foresaw slickness without ever using the word, as he studied the role of what Karl Manheim called “self-streamlining” in corporate managerial cultures in the USA of the 1980s. In worlds of what Jackall later called “organized irresponsibility,” it may seem safer for the individual left on their own to avoid any friction and to disappear through the system as one climbs to success.
Forming good relationships, however, is a kind of constant friction. They take time and loyalty, especially when things get rough. One must work through conflicts to have good relationships. They cannot be merely optional or transactional based on convenience. At the center of relationships has to be genuine and pervasive respect for each one in the relationship. That may even mean opposing the system for the sake of the ones you respect.
I dream of a profession where we speak of people who are deep and relational as the true bad-asses, not the people who are intellectual wizards. True, we are here in academic philosophy using our minds. But Plato and Aristotle settled this matter thousands of years ago: a mind without character is a mistake. We are here in large part because we know how to use our minds. But what about our characters? And where do they show themselves? In relationships.
Resolutely avoiding success
The last thing on my mind is the paradoxical notion that the right thing to do in professional philosophy is to avoid success. This not only sounds stupid; it sounds privileged and unjust. Lots of people never even come into the profession because it trains people in off-putting, sexist, biased, and frankly colonial ways. Yes, things are changing. But it is not easy to form good relationships when the people around you are oppressive! And to succeed in the context of a profession that has historically marginalized all sorts of people is an achievement, even an act of power for people, right?
Yes. Moreover, the profession of philosophy is not totally corrupt. It has many virtues, and it has built up a number of intergenerational, global practices that are largely sound or socially useful in non-cynical ways for doing good things. To succeed by the virtues and in the practices must be a good thing.
What I mean by avoiding success is not seeking it because one is focused on other, better things. The avoidance here is a matter of where one puts one’s attention. Where I grew up, people used to talk about “keeping one’s eyes on the ball” (i.e., in a game). This might have meant winning for some coaches. But they were wrong. What made the game was the play, and to play well for the sake of the game meant sometimes not focusing on the ball but on the field, and, moreover, not obsessing about winning but rather about doing the best one could in the game. (Do you hear the echoes of growing and communicating in this?) The rules set up winning and losing, but the excellence appears in the play within them, not at their terminus.
What are some of the other, better things in the language game of professional philosophy? They include the non-slick good things I have gestured to in this short piece, and they include good relationships. They even include ways in which, as professionals, we are poised to see beyond the profession to what is better than philosophy. What is winning in philosophy, even?
I wish success for everyone who deserves it, meaning that they have succeeded by virtues and good practices to be right for roles with responsibilities and even to be worthwhile for public consideration thanks to their good work and, sometimes, their righting of historical injustice in the profession. But I do not think that I should focus on success. I think that I should resolutely pay attention to the non-slick good things of human life as I labor in our profession. I should think of my own growth as a person as I study things that strike me as being worth sorting out in the world. I should think of others and how they are faring.
Oration for my slick brothers
Now, Braveheart Gillani and I are currently co-organizing a study group through the Baker Nord Center for the Humanities here in Cleveland called Queering Masculinities. Thanks to it, we are beginning quarterly discussions at the LGBTQ Center of Greater Cleveland on gender traveling, as we call it, with a focus on queer masculinities. I want to end this brief post—with thanks, Maryellen—in the spirit of that group with an address to slick brothers that I’ve known. Slick sisters are welcome to travel over and identify too with what I say. Maybe that’s another conversation.
O my slick brothers, why do you do it? Are you not cool enough already? Will you prove to yourself that you are worthy if only you shine more brightly in mirrors? Or maybe it is unbearable—to be so vulnerable to shame and humiliation in this relentlessly competitive society? Once I was snorkeling off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and saw a brown shark, a small one, only six feet or so in length. It was off in the distance, and I was so surprised that I shouted underwater through my snorkel. Then, in that instant, the shark was gone—faster and more powerful than any living thing that I have personally seen in the water up close. I understand why it is consoling to liken oneself to the sharks. Their minds are so narrow on a few, discrete things, it seems, and when they act, they plow through the shallows like it was nothing. To be successful like them in the waters of the profession is to be half-god. But we are creatures subtle in a different way. We succeed by growing internally, which is to outgrow success. Then other things are our speed, bearing, and strength: the slowness with which we wait on things that matter, our ability to give room around a thought, and our capacity to persevere through hardships by being real with each other and ourselves. O my slick brothers, you too deserve a life.
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The goal of the “Navigating (Living) Philosophy” series is to collect experience-based explorations of philosophy’s personal, institutional, and disciplinary evolution that can help young academics and students navigate philosophy today. If you would be interested in participating in the series or would like to nominate someone who think would be a good fit, please get in touch with us via our submissions form.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., land of many older nations
