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Philosophical Analysis in a Creative Key: A Hands-on Case Study

Carlota Salvador Megias | Nov. 24th 2022

Originally presented at the University of Bergen, Norway, as part of the philosophy department’s internal seminar series.

—��Thanks for coming to my little experiment, everybody. Just out of curiosity, to get the interactive spirit of this thing going – who came here today because they’re interested in unconventional philosophical methodologies? Raise your hands, it’s okay…

What about an interest in the intersections between philosophy and new disciplines like the digital humanities? Literary forms? Practice-based research? Concerns with accessibility? Could it be that some of you actually came because you wanted to enjoy yourselves… ?!

For those of you who came just because you wanted to support me, I really appreciate it. Now that we’ve gotten our limbs moving, let me remind you that this talk might be a little different from the ones you’re used to. For one, there’s wine. For two, I’ve brought along some things for us to play with in the latter part of the evening. And for three, I’d like you all to interrupt me – politely – if you have a comment or question that you feel would be constructive to bring up to the whole group prior to the Q&A section. This goes for any students in the audience especially. I’d like this talk to resemble less a uni-directional lecture and more a standard classroom experience.

We good? Let’s go!

So I’m sure the first question on all of your minds is, what in the world is ‘critical-creative’ philosophy – that is, the topic of my so-called hands-on case study? Isn’t all philosophy, by virtue of doing analytical work in a particular written or spoken medium, ‘critical-creative?’ Sure. But I think few among you would look at the standard journal article or book chapter and think it’s doing ‘creative’ work in the colloquial sense of that word.

That’s not to say it’s not possible, of course…

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From Sinhababu’s “Possible Girls:”

… Just look at the abstract for Neil Sinhababu’s “Possible Girls” paper. If you check out the full paper, which I’ve linked in the slide for the curious, you’ll see Sinhababu’s created an extremely funny – and patently useful – science fiction scenario to flesh out some aspects of David Lewis’ modal realism.

I cannot tell you the joy this thing brought me in the first semester of my master’s. Still, the way I’d like to develop the term ‘critical-creative’ here is a little different from the example I’ve just given. Reading Sinhababu’s paper is an extremely passive experience, the compulsion to annotate aside. This text demands nothing of me, interpretatively, on the level of its language or its structural constitution. It’s just one page flip after another, with fun phrases and concepts straightforwardly illustrating a critical point that could’ve been made just as well by something much less engaging.

No, the ‘critical-creative’ philosophy I’m after is one where the reader’s activity with respect to the text isn’t superfluous – where my or your engagement with a particular piece stands to be substantively different, and where that substantive difference is in some measure part of the piece’s success as a contribution to philosophy. I’m sure this description calls the usual suspects to mind…

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… Though I’m sure there’ll also be plenty of objections to describing these works in such terms. Take the pedagogical value of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, for example: It might be a wonderful text to read in order to develop an understanding of the particular presuppositions you take to philosophical questions about our lives with language, but that activity can certainly be taken apart from whatever conclusions Wittgenstein would like us to draw about the same topic. In fact, you might argue Wittgenstein’s conclusions could have just as well been delivered in the form of claims. His commentators certainly deliver them that way. But writing pieces about what Wittgenstein’s text is really driving at substitutes for the work you might perform as one of its unique readers. It’s a bit like hearing your friend’s description of a movie instead of going to see it yourself: You’re getting the picture, sure, but you haven’t seen the picture, which is much of the point of film. And given that the picture – in this case, Wittgenstein’s text – is constituted in a highly pedagogical way, one wonders if its conclusions are worth all that much without the reader having done the work that the text demands of her in order to reach them.

Now ‘creative’ is a word that we typically apply to artistic endeavors. A good example of that in this slides’ collection of texts is Kierkegaard’s pseudonymously published Either/Or – a book we might generously take to be a species of bildungsroman, or coming-of-age narrative, told in an epistolary format, where the reader’s critical activity is focused upon how she interprets its characters’ conflicting senses of value and how that, in turn, reflects upon her own. I’ll defend this point at my disputas in some years’ time, but the beauty of this text – its profound success – lies in its resistance to authority and to authoritative interpretation at every turn, particularly when it comes to passing such judgments.

You may have been introduced to this book as one that delineates our proper moral psychological development from a clearly bad hedonism to a clearly good deontologism, as its author supposedly intended. Unfortunately, this pithy summary delivers a philosophical upshot that is not only mistaken, but comes at the expense of the text’s singularly best quality – that is, the very many different ways the text crystallizes depending on the reader’s strategies of approach and quality of attention. It goes without saying that some readings will be better than others – but not necessarily because they are ‘correct’ in the sense of mirroring authorial intention. If a reading is to be ‘correct’ in that way, it must get there on the text’s terms alone, thereby precluding any appeal to Kierkegaard’s writings about it. Many of his commentators and interpreters do not respect this stipulation.

Alright. I’m sure you’ve noticed all the texts on this slide are books. The minimal actions they require of their readers are the processing of sentences and the flipping of pages. I wanted – and still want – to take this whole ‘critical-creative’ thing one step further, by looking to pieces that demand much, much more of both their readers and their creators.

Unfortunately, there are precious few of them in philosophy.

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Kolb’s Socrates in the Labyrinth

University of Iowa’s Tractatus map

my let’s play shadowgraphs

I talked about one, David Kolb’s “Socrates in the Labyrinth,” at another talk I gave called “The Literary Philosophical” last year. To recapitulate some of what I said back then: This philosophical hypertext – one of the few of its kind – both acknowledges and deconstructs the importance of what Kolb calls “the line” to philosophical argumentation (and, more broadly, to textual understanding). We follow what we believe a text means. The “line” is that which we might agree with, resist, depart from, or creatively engage to suit our own ends. That there is a line is irrevocable, regardless of medium or particular act of communication: It is given by author(ity), and it is found (be it through confusion, discomfort, disagreement, delight, or approval) by reader. For Kolb, in the “line” lies both the “inherent fertility of texts” — bound as this is to Kolb’s belief that the mind can’t help but to make some kind of sense of what it encounters — and what Kolb calls “the sociopolitical problem analogous to the philosophical problem:” That is, what we can — and want to — take the “lines” to be; the latitude we have to draw these.

By writing “Socrates in the Labyrinth” using a software that allows readers to manipulate the text in its essentials, Kolb is able to impart this argument not simply on a propositional level (that is, in the content of what he writes), but on a phenomenological level, too (that is, in the form of readers’ engagement with this content). The same invitations we might take linear texts to make to their readers are clearer, more dramatized, and have higher stakes in these kinds of hypertextual structures.

Other examples include David Stern and the University of Iowa’s Tractatus map, which helpfully visualizes the TLP as a subway system in an all-new translation. I even tried making a ‘critical-creative’ piece myself that I brought along with me today. It’s a collection of card games based on the central conceit of Either/Or’s “Shadowgraphs” fragment, accompanied by in-character and pseudonymous writings that offer a model of interpretation for both the games and the original source. You can check out all these pieces by clicking around this slide later, but in the interest of time, I’ll press on for now.

Suffice to say, I craved more content. So I tried to put together a package of incentives for both academics and members of the general public to create pieces of the kinds I wanted to write about. I made a competition soliciting critical engagements with canonical classics done through creative mediums, where the reader’s interaction with the work becomes its essential feature. I also wondered – how would people understand a call for pieces like this, anyway? To what extent could the bevy of examples I’d collected in the call actually communicate a coherent vision?

For those of you who explored the competition’s website prior to this evening, I can imagine the sheer amount of links I provided for potential participants and other interested parties may have felt a little overwhelming. I highly recommend you spend some time with every example of critical-creative work I gave in the competition’s FAQ, but I wanted to highlight one in particular before we continue, as a contrast to the submissions the competition actually ended up receiving. It, among the other examples I give in the FAQ, is also a testament to the fact that the situation for such work is a little different in other fields, and particularly in poetry. What I want you all to take special note of going forward is the relationship between the author’s practice; the analytical dividends afforded to them by their artistic creations; and how these creations invite their readers to reach the same places that their practice drew them to without guaranteeing their success in doing so. Take this poem from M. NourbeSe Philip’s collection Zong!, for example.

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From Philip’s “Notanda” to Zong!:

“My intent is to use the text of the legal decision as a word store; to lock myself into this particular and peculiar discursive landscape in the belief that the story of these African men, women, and children thrown overboard in an attempt to collect insurance monies, the story that can only be told by not telling, is locked in this text. In the many silences in the Silence of the text. I would lock myself in this text in the same way men, women, and children were locked in the holds of the slave ship Zong.” (p.191, emphasis mine)

In Philip’s words: “My intent is to use the text of the legal decision as a word store; to lock myself into this particular and peculiar discursive landscape in the belief that the story of these African men, women, and children thrown overboard in an attempt to collect insurance monies, the story that can only be told by not telling, is locked in this text. In the many silences in the Silence of the text. I would lock myself in this text in the same way men, women, and children were locked in the holds of the slave ship Zong.”

I remember my poetry professor in undergrad, Cecil Giscombe, asking us to think deeply about what Philip meant by ‘the story that can only be told by not telling,’ and I found it immensely difficult to grasp that concept at the time – possibly because I was myopically focused on the products of Philip’s practice as opposed to the practice itself. It was a practice driven by the questions (quoting Philip again), “How did they – the Africans on board the Zong – make meaning of what was happening to them? What meaning did they make and how did they make it mean?”

Philip preserves the abject senselessness of these persons’ circumstances (that is, she is true to it) by her active resistance to making meaning in her writing process – particularly as we might typically assume a poet does, and especially when it comes to experiences of cruelty, absurdity, and loss. Her emphasis is on the passive construction be told as opposed to the active construction telling, and this particular framing puts Philip into a relationship with the original text – and the persons with which it is putatively concerned exclusively through elision – that gives unto a dynamic, difficult, and invaluably subjective reflection about this taken-for-granted tension between our linguistic resources and our capacities to mean. Just for fun, compare this to Wittgenstein’s method and its putative upshots in the Philosophical Investigations.

Now, with that preamble out of the way, here’s the overview of the competition:

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Critical-Creative Philosophy Jam-Competition

• participants were asked to create a critical-creative piece based on a canonical work of philosophy, meaning that their (and their audience’s) critical engagement with their chosen work of philosophy should take a creative form

• artistic pieces inspired by the lives and works of famous philosophers are ubiquitous, but few of these make substantive, lasting contributions to the ways their philosophies are understood by academics or by the general public

• academic scholarship is difficult for the general public to access, too, and does not do as much as it could to enrich their approaches to the canons, traditions, and problems they’d like to learn more about or explore for themselves

• aimed to bridge this gap between academic philosophy and philosophy as an activity that anyone might enjoy

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Specifications

We offered the following prizes:

• Panel winner (x 1): $500 in compensation and publication in the digital review. This prize was awarded by our panel of judges.

• Runners-up (x 2 or 3): Publication in the digital review. This prize was also awarded by our panel of judges.

• Popular winner: Publication in the digital review. This prize was chosen through itch.io’s jam voting system by jam participants. It went to the highest ranked piece that had not been selected as the panel winner or as a runner-up.

• We aimed to select anywhere from 4 to 5 pieces for publication in the Fall 2023 issue of the digital review, ‘counter-works.’

Our judges were:

• I an Hatcher – performance artist, freelance programmer, poet, and musician

• Elyse Lemoine – writer and games developer specializing in narrative design at Riot Games

• Carlota Salvador Megias – PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Bergen and jam host

• David Stern – professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa and creator of the University of Iowa Tractatus map

• El Toon – writer and TTRPG creator

Now, as it happens, we’re unlikely to publish quite that many entries to the competition in the journal, for reasons I’ll explain in due course. You’ll notice that the team of judges is interdisciplinary, comprised of members from within and outside of the academy, and that one of the stated foci of the competition is that the pieces be accessible to the broader public in the sense of being both free and ideally something a non-academic can learn from and enjoy. Both of these aspects – an interdisciplinary team and a public focus – are of immense importance to me, as they are woefully underemphasized in our discipline and in fact actively discouraged given the kinds of milestones one supposedly needs to reach to advance their career. This is especially tragic when you are a researcher at a publicly funded university. I had no exemplars to follow in creating this competition except for similar competitions put on by members of the general public who do this for fun or as a side gig, and that was another reason for my hosting it: I wanted to set a precedent for putting out a call that tries to bridge the academy and the public in just this way. While it was very enjoyable, it was not nearly as fruitful on the submission side of things as I had hoped it would be. I’ll talk about that now.

First, a general comment: One of the biggest surprises was that the interdisciplinary panel I’d put together functioned remarkably well for what could have ended up being some pretty daunting differences in terms of our artistic sensibilities, intellectual interests, and bases of knowledge. We recently spoke about the submissions for several hours and it seemed to be a genuinely illuminating experience for everyone involved. To our mutual amusement, we agreed almost unanimously on which pieces deserved to be considered for publication, despite coming at them from distinct sets of concerns dependent upon our respective areas of expertise. Perhaps this is because – when it comes to art – the wheat is easily sorted not from the chaff, but from seeds that have yet to break ground.

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To take one example I couldn’t bring with me tonight, consider Make Philosophy Studio’s “The Famous Violinist,” based on Thomson’s thought experiment of the same name. Its purpose was to dramatize the moment of cutting yourself off from the violinist who needs to be hooked up to you with an interactive 3D-printable sculpture. While we all agreed that the concept of turning a thought experiment into something malleable – or at the very least manipulable – could be fruitful in one’s philosophical practice or for illustrating challenging abstractions to students, this particular example was both inaccessible and somewhat redundant, even if the sculpture itself looks cool. Very few instructors have 3D printer access, not to mention that the basic conceit of the sculpture – to facilitate discussion – could be accomplished just as easily by asking two students to hold a string between them that the class has to decide whether or not to cut. Most importantly, for my purposes, it didn’t seem like any critical work regarding the thought experiment went into the creation of this artistic piece. It’s a reproduction, not an analysis or interpretation.

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We received several submissions that were closer to reproductions than analyses or interpretations. Greenhouse Studios’ FlusserVision, for example, took the speculative futures described in Flusser’s What If? and turned them into a video game. But the structure of the video game itself didn’t critically engage with any of those futures or Flusser’s speculative methodology. Instead, it visualized what its source material could only describe. Here’s their trailer if you’re interested.

Compare this with a similarly speculative endeavor from the FAQ, FICT.site. The critical-creative bent of that project involved participants inventing artefacts from an imagined timeline where colonialism never happened. This meant that participants would have to think critically about the the material, social, and political conditions that might generate such artefacts; consider how these artefacts constrain the theories that are available and intuitive to persons from this alternate world; and, in the process of working through these speculative beings’ theories and practices as they might relate to such artefacts, draw constant comparisons between our intellectual resources and their own.

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Il Principe

On Distance

Other submissions took existing texts and either modified their presentation or juxtaposed them with other, existing texts so as to contextualize them or suggest a particular interpretation.

Consider “Il Principe” by Liminris: It juxtaposed Machiavelli’s The Prince with the historio-geographic conditions that were contemporaneous with its writing. But the final project did not go beyond this juxtaposition to any particular analysis or interpretation, by – for example – encouraging its readers to make discrete connections between materials, or to ask new questions in light of what the creator had discovered through his research.

Contrast this with “On Distance” by Silvia Stoyanova: Here, we have a presentation of texts by Adorno and Leopardi that are visually modified to prompt the reader to draw connections between disparate words and concepts. However, the overarching point of such connections – and the way these might relate to the hypertext’s stated theme of dialectics-as-methodology – doesn’t emerge organically from the reader’s explorations, nor by the author’s explicitly showing or telling us her particular way of drawing these texts together. These would have made for a critically stronger work.

Cast your minds back to Zong!: Philip’s practice and its significance to the poems she’s created is something that the reader can be clued into through a close reading of her text, and is later confirmed by Philip’s own reflections about her creative process in the Notanda. The Notanda is no substitute for close reading – rather, it stands to change the way in which her poetry collection is received; it calibrates the reader’s attention and gives her what are potentially new strategies of approach to the text she’s just finished traversing.

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Principia Mathematica:

Choose Your Own Adventure

A majority of the submissions had a pedagogical bent and, perhaps because of that, made no overarching interpretive points about their source material. For some pieces, this was a strength: Alexander Andersson’s tabletop game “Sweet Justice,” for example, resisted setting clear win conditions regarding the equitable distribution of resources under the veil of ignorance, in part because that – the veil of ignorance as a site that both stages and clarifies politically-motivated interpersonal negotiation – is much of the interest in Rawl’s Theory of Justice, at least for this game’s purposes. Here, what’s ‘critical-creative’ is primarily the work that students are asked to do: Rather than reading about how the veil of ignorance works, they are asked to enact it under conditions where they are more likely to recognize its potential and limitations.

A somewhat different piece that is both pedagogical and clear regarding what analytical dividends it pays for its author is Landon D.C. Elkind’s “Principia Mathematica: Choose-Your-Own Adventure,” which asks readers to lose themselves in visualizations of the Principia’s logical structure. It’s best traversed with a copy of the Principia by one’s side. Here, the critical-creative work that was done by the author dawns upon the reader precisely through her exploration of the piece.

I’ve now breezed through six of the ten submissions the competition received. So, what did they – and the staging of the competition – teach me about the differences between this kind of work and more ‘conventional’ philosophy?

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Takeaways

exemplars and pitches are insufficient to convey what ‘critical-creative scholarship’ might be; a requirement is that research must non-trivially synthesize the researcher’s engagement with the text/problem at issue, on the one hand, with the fruits of this engagement, on the other

Well, first and foremost, it’s that one can’t afford to be vague or to believe that exemplars and pitches like the one linked on this slide can convey what will constitute a ‘successful’ critical-creative work. Through reflecting on these submissions’ benefits and demerits, particularly in light of my inspirations in other fields, I’ve realized that I must be explicit in insisting that research of this kind must non-trivially synthesize the researcher’s particular engagement with the text or problem at issue, on the one hand, with the fruits of this engagement, on the other – that is, my process of creation must feature as an essential component of your consumption of my work. Put yet another way, the researcher’s attentive latitude and strategies of approach must be an irrevocable feature of the piece’s style. This might strike you as mysterious when it’s stated this way, but recall some of the texts pictured on the third slide: Their form and content can be understood as collapsing in a way that is mutually reinforcing, and they all rely upon a tension between the subjectivities constituting the text and the subjectivity of the reader to make their contributions – yes, even the Tractatus.

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Takeaways

2 & 3

2. the piece must be accessible such that it teaches readers how to engage with it and both the creator and the reader get something out of it

3. this is a fruitful methodology for texts, problems, and questions where subjectivity is a particularly salient feature

Building upon this first point, critical-creative work must be accessible. This is especially crucial because the standards for what constitutes ‘good’ philosophical work here are nowhere near as clear as the standards for what constitutes a decent philosophical argument presented in a conventional form. ‘Accessibility’ here means that others besides the creator can actually get something out of the piece. For example, they can use it as a tool in their own research or scholarly reflections, or they can enjoy it as they would a normal game without academic ambitions. Most importantly, the piece must be capable of teaching its audience how to engage with it. For some works, this might be a rulebook; for others, it might be easing them into a particular realm of interpretative activity or tuning their attention. This success criteria can vary depending on the piece’s intended audience, but in the end, it is a lot more binary than the first: Either the piece works, or it doesn’t.

Finally: Just like you can’t write an academic article about everything, you also can’t turn everything into a piece of critical-creative scholarship. There are texts, problems, and questions for which it will be illuminating, and there are others for which it will amount to nothing but window dressing. I’d like to posit that this is a fruitful methodology for texts, problems, and questions where subjectivity is a salient feature.

Let’s take one of my philosophical old flames, friendship: I suspect that projects of this kind, where researcher and reader alike are drawn into speculative activity regarding the complex relationships between the value of a practice, its particular value for its practitioners, and the material conditions of the practice at issue, will go much farther than papers that merely explicate how these relationships function from the top-down. This is something I feel quite passionately about: We don’t all need to be better epistemologists, but we could all stand to be better friends on grounds that intersect with epistemological concerns, such as the extent to which honesty in a friendship does and should matter to its value. I’m sure many of you would insist rather automatically that this is essential to a good friendship – but does that describe the friendships you actually do value? We can’t and frankly shouldn’t run experiments exploring these kinds of questions in our actual lives, but we can create experiences where academics and members of the broader public alike can challenge their base values and conceptions.

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