Taylor and Derrida

I’ve recently started Shoshana Zuboff’s The Support Economy (having read her watershed work In the Age of the Smart Machine in Charlie Moran’s seminar on Writing and Emerging Technologies), and in the first twenty-seven page chapter, I’ve already got ten different Post-It notes. This is good, because it’s really helping me think through my economic ideas; this is bad, because it means more notes and analysis to work through for the dissertation.

However. Before I get to go there, I have to sort out my thoughts on Mark C. Taylor. For me, most of Taylor’s book was pretty familiar stuff — I’d read John Casti’s Complexification for pleasure as a new graduate student, and caught on quickly to its intersections with Derrida’s Writing and Difference (although such ideas weren’t terribly helpful in my Chaucer seminar that year). In the last hundred pages of The Moment of Complexity, however, Taylor starts to do some stuff that I found really helpful and relevant to my dissertation work. I’ll quote at length here: “‘Thought,’ Derrida insists, is ‘a dimension that is not reducible to technique, nor to science, nor to philosophy.’ Insofar as it has a goal, the pursuit of thinking is intended to ‘remove the university from ‘useful programs and from professional ends,” and thereby subvert the ‘powers of caste, class, or corporation.’ Thinking, like art, resists technological and economic interests by following an inverse economic logic: to think is to engage in an activity that is useless or even wasteful” (Taylor 253; sorry for the nested quotations). So yes, of course I was grinning and nodding while reading this; Derrida effectively critiques many of the instrumental ways of thinking frequently offered as neoclassical economic rationales for higher education, and in so doing links — for me — the ideas of Feenberg with the ideas of Gibson-Graham and Aronowitz.

Taylor then quotes the way that “Bill Readings effectively summarizes Derrida’s conclusion:

Thinking, if it is to remain open to the possibility of Thought, to take itself as a question, must not seek to be economic. It belongs rather to an economy of waste than to a restricted economy of calculation. Thought is non-productive labor, and hence does not show up on balance sheets except as waste. The question posed to the university is thus not how to turn the institution into a haven for Thought but how to think in an institution whose development tends to make Thought more and more difficult, less and less necessary” (Taylor 253-254).

Taylor’s follow-up to this is what I found difficult, because of the questions it raises for me about the intersection between instrumentality and localization. He continues, “the more useful thinking is, the less its value, and the less useful it is, the more its value. For thinking to preserve its critical edge, it must remain autonomous, that is, independent of political influence and market forces” (254). Here, my poststructuralist side wants to cry out that such a thing is impossible, since no one can ever be independent in that way: our thinking is never free of the influence of politics and economics. In our quotidian and material lives, we are always localized and embedded in context, and transcendence belongs only to faith. Still, this idea seems immensely helpful to me as — again — an antidote to the all-too-frequent economic rationalization of higher education (and, in fact, of nearly every aspect of everyday life). How far might I push such reasoning? Might I ask my students to consider that what so many of their teachers — myself included — want to teach them is ultimately, by nature, wasteful, and that such wastefulness is a good thing?

Taylor reminds me why I enjoy Derrida so much, and find him so frustrating. He takes me places where I’d never go.