Thinking Academically

At Goldsmiths yesterday for a discussion on Paratactical Life with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, overshadowed by industrial disputes at Goldsmiths and elsewhere, giving critical urgency to considering the primary task of the university in society, and the double task of the academic. For which Erin Manning advocates what she calls strategic duplicity.

This involves recognizing what works in the systems we work against. Which means: We don't just oppose them head on. We work with them, strategically, while nurturing an alien logic that moves in very different directions. One of the things we know that the university does well is that it attracts really interesting people. The university can facilitate meetings that can change lives. But systemically, it fails. And the systemic failure is getting more and more acute. Todoroff

One of the domains in which this duplicity is apparent is thinking itself. And this word thinking appears to have special resonance and meaning for academics - what academia calls thinking is not quite the same as what business calls thinking (which was the focus of my book on Organizational Intelligence) and certainly not the same as what tech calls thinking (the focus of Adrian Daub's book).

One of the observations that led to my work on Organizational Intelligence was the disconnect between the intelligence of the members of an organization and the intelligence of the organization itself. Universities are great examples of this, packed with clever people and yet the organization itself manifests multiple forms of stupidity. As do many other kinds of organization. I still believe that it is a worthwhile if often frustrating exercise to try to improve how a given organization collectively makes sense of and anticipates the demands placed on it by its customers and other stakeholders - in other words, how it thinks.

But at the same time, I don't imagine that an organization will ever think in quite the way a person thinks. There are some deficiencies in organizational thinking, just as there are deficiencies in algorithmic thinking. For example, there are some interesting issues in relation to temporality, raised in some of the contributions to Subjectivity's Special Issue on Algorithms which I guest-edited last year.

For Brian Massumi, the key question is what is thinking for. In an academic context, we might imagine the answer to be something to do with knowledge - universities being where knowledge is created and curated, and where students acquire socioeconomic advantage based on their demonstrated mastery of selected portions of this knowledge. But what really gives a student any benefit in the job market as a result of their studies is a sense of their potential. The problem with students using chatbots to write their assignments is not that they are cheating - after all, the ability to cheat without being found out is highly valued in many organizations, or even essential. The real problem is if they are learning a deficient form of thinking.

 

 

Philip Boxer, The Three Asymmetries necessary to describing agency in living biological systems (Asymmetric Leadership, November 2023)

Philip Boxer, The Doubling of the Double Task (Asymmetric Leadership, February 2024)

Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020)

Benoît Dillet, What Is Called Thinking?: When Deleuze Walks along Heideggerian Paths (Deleuze Studies 7/2 2013)

Brent Dean Robbins, Joyful Thinking-Thanking: A Reading of Heidegger’s “What is Called Thinking?” (Janus Head 13/2, October 2014) 

Uriah Marc Todoroff, A Cryptoeconomy of Affect (New Inquiry, May 2018)

Richard Veryard, Building Organizational Intelligence (Leanpub, 2012)

Richard Veryard, As we may think now (Subjectivity December 2023)

Related posts: Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010), Reasoning with the majority - chatGPT (January 2023), Creativity and Recursivity (September 2023)