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agenda · presentation
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Program Facts |
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Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture (PIC) Interdisciplinary Graduate Program Binghamton University State University of New York Binghamton, NY 13902-6000 USA  WebsiteContact Person: Stephen David Ross (Director) phone: +1 (607) 777-2666  sross@ binghamton.edu
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1 | The interdisciplinary program in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture (PIC), at the State University of New York at Binghamton, is a graduate program of studies that offers Masters and Doctorate degrees (MA and PhD). The program also holds a major international conference annually (in April) that attracts graduate students and faculty from various disciplinary and interdisciplinary orientations. Also associated with the program is the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture (CPIC). | ||
Program Description |
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| 2 | Binghamton University's interdisciplinary studies in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture, address the ways in which cultural forms of knowledge and expression shape and are shaped by human practices and experience. Of particular importance are recent developments in history, theory, and practice that promise to stretch the boundaries of philosophy and transform the discipline and the university: post-critical continental philosophy; coloniality critique, postcolonial theory, and philosophy of colonialism; feminist philosophy; gay, lesbian, and queer studies; multicultural studies and critical race theory; critical social theory; and cultural critique, including aesthetic, representational, and ecological practices. | |||
| 3 | A major concern of the program is with history and tradition, with how they are to be thought and how they contribute to thought. The history of philosophy along with other histories in Western and non-Western traditions—of art and literature, political and social theory, philosophy of history and science, and theories of gender, ethnicity, culture, and class—are at work in these critical discussions. | |||
| 4 | The program explores relations between philosophy and other disciplines and critically examines disciplinary boundaries, historical and institutional. It seeks to foster discussions not confined by disciplinary boundaries concerning intelligibility, legitimacy, and disciplinariness. |
Program Highlights |
| »The program is characteristically unlike any other philosophy program since it is quite comfortable on the margins of the philosophy discipline. It aims instead at what can be described as inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinary approaches to modes of relating to the world.« | 5 | I prefer to describe the program from my own somewhat limited experience during my years of residency, from fall of 1994 to spring of 2001. Any kind of »objectivity« will be inevitably tainted but I would still like to convey, as best as I can, a reflection of how many past and current students of PIC relate to the program. | ||
| 6 | The program is characteristically unlike any other philosophy program since it is quite comfortable on the margins of the philosophy discipline. It aims instead at what can be described as inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinary approaches to modes of relating to the world. PIC is also unique in the sense that it is basically a student-centered program and is malleable to student projects and interests. The program is built on a pedagogy that relies as much on the strength of the students as on the excellence of the faculty. Students are rigorously called upon to learn in a space that is made up of various interconnected pockets as well as of a few autonomous zones. Difference, if one could talk of such a thing, is a permanent fixture of this program and is not reduced to a mere rhetorical device. | |||
| »That is what philosophical practices may be all about: creating the possibilities of change, of lines of flight, of transformation, at the same time as they allow for ›moments‹ of identities, concepts, or stability. But it is in between that philosophy occurs, and PIC is unique in providing the possibility of this in-between.« | 7 | The program started to take off about 10 years ago when batches of interesting students started to flock to a program that was neither analytical nor continental but a mix of history of philosophy, literature, phenomenology, cultural theory, and political philosophy. It was the students who really shaped the program over the years to come. The program administration was quite sensitive to the needs of the students and wanted to allow for their voices, differing and different, to be actualized. Some argued that the absence of definite structures would disintegrate any program, and there were actually various splinters at the faculty level, but the diversity of the voices of the students have benefited from the somewhat anarchic environment. PIC became more and more conducive to forms of thinking that are in no way similar to the forms of thinking produced under strict disciplinarity and where a center or a focal theme defines what a program is. What defines PIC is its lack of precise definition and its insistence on this (un)comfortable point since it allows for approaches to ethics and to social and political thought from perspectives that have been marginalized. | ||
| 8 | A collectivist approach within students and some faculty coexists and cooperates with other pockets of different forms of engagement with philosophy: Marxism and Marxist thought flourish along with African, Asian, and Latin American philosophies; Phenomenology in its various manifestations mingle with Gay and Lesbian philosophy, Queer Studies, and Psychoanalysis; Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel rub shoulders with Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Kristeva, Alliez, and Balibar; Kant and Lyotard learn a lesson or two from Nagarjuna, Dogen, and Nishida; and the Situationists mix with Césaire, Fanon, and Sorel while Anzaldua and Audre Lorde enliven McKinnon and Butler. PIC students and faculty engage in various life practices, from practices of resistance to practices of alchemy, from the rigorous reading of Ancient and Modern texts from across the globe to the contemporary reassessment of ways of sensing, feeling, and interpreting, from feminist, post-colonial, and post-structuralist perspectives. PIC recreates a space where the later Hegel would have gone mad, where Nietzsche would have fulfilled his mission, and where Otto Weinenger would not have had to let go of life at the age of twenty three. | |||
| 9 | The shifting terrain of the PIC program makes it such a unique opportunity for the development of different forms of questioning, different forms of engagement with the world, and especially with academia. Faculty and students in the program take to task the place of the university in the overall development of society and the increasing role of education in breaking down creativity and producing or co-opting critical norms. What the program offers is neither a rejection nor an acceptance of academia as a space of contestation; it engages education as a space of resistance, a space for creativity as well as for aesthetic disappearance and social and political escapism. Whether the program intends it or not, philosophy itself as way of living and relating to the world is at issue: applicants to PIC want to pursue what is called »living,« to fulfill themselves and/as others, and to create spaces (not one, not only many) where philosophy itself is multiplied. PIC is not about rejecting what is called the canon or about embracing a different, somewhat under-privileged field of knowledge—although it may and does allow for both—for PIC, so far, has been about working in between these imagined categories without acknowledging absolute distinctions. PIC is about allowing for new practices of philosophy associated with critical and creative forms of engagement with the enveloping world, a world that is not only academia, that is not only the United States, that is not only the technological domain of the »human.« | |||
| 10 | PIC may be unsettlingly flowing between various discursive practices and different historical projections but, hopefully, it will not find a resting place. That is what philosophical practices may be all about: creating the possibilities of change, of lines of flight, of transformation, at the same time as they allow for »moments« of identities, concepts, or stability. But it is in between that philosophy occurs, and PIC is unique in providing the possibility of this in-between where new terrains appear, different in their engagement with the world but more or less reflections and contestations of the asymmetries of power driving various manifestations of sociality. | |||
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11 | Something like PIC is refreshing in the universe of American academia, a universe that produces subjectivities corresponding to the new world order of »dumb and dumber.« PIC is a deviation (some may even say aberration) in a society that no longer produces »citizens«—that can take active parts in political and social projects—but that prides itself on training soulless specialists that can perform certain tasks—some of which are called political or social. What is called »critical thinking« has been shrunk to either logical games or to a disappearance behind certain texts since methods have been fixed, schools have been set, ways of interpreting have been established. With PIC, interpretation is what is at issue; culture can never be circumscribed; philosophy is what can never be caught—nor taught. The Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture program is one of the few spaces that can allow for irreducible differences, as it is itself indeterminate and constantly in flux. It has been producing fresh new practitioners of philosophy that, not unlike the environment that they have created and in which they flourished, cannot be pinpointed or categorized. |
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