Queering Philosophy II
This is part of a series of posts starting with Queering Philosophy I.
Hall (2022) identifies the philosophical obsession with disciplinary purity as a “straight habit.” Of mainstream academic philosophy, she writes:
To be a philosopher is to be straightened, brought into alignment with philosophy’s norms. This straightening excludes many areas of philosophy, declaring that they don’t count as properly philosophical. When we’re in the realm of the improper or unruly or unintelligible, we are in the realm of queerness. (p. 36)
To be clear, she has a special sense of straight in mind:
The term straight as I use it here refers to practices, and ways of knowing and being, that, taken together, inform dominant assumptions about what constitutes real philosophy. (p. 34)
That said, there is a clear connection between the two senses of straight. The straight habits of mainstream philosophy do not align with the kind of methodology employed in much of queer theory.
Let me be more explicit. I am thinking about analytic philosophy, the kind of philosophy that is dominant in most English-speaking philosophy departments. Analytic philosophers have methods that can differ drastically from our humanistic colleagues. We also have a canon that is not recognizable as a philosophical canon to many of our humanist friends.
Many philosophers in the analytic canon have been ahistorical and obsessed with, well, straightening things out. Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell both complained about the problems with natural language, its messiness, its capacity for deceit. In its stead, they praised the clarity provided by formal languages, like the emerging mathematical logic at the time. This attitude still persists to this day, though with a wider scope: probability theory, game theory, decision theory, type theory, and even category theory are welcomed into the tool-kit of analytic philosophy. Literary analysis? Not so much.
I wonder how much the insistence on purity and straightening is simply the collective refusal to acknowledge the vast majority of humanistic inquiry — conducted by our friends in literary studies, history, ethnography, and so on — as legitimate. In that case, the problem of queering philosophy would be a special case of the problem of philosophy’s methodological narrowness.