Philosophy is gamified. We jump through hoops to try to get published in the "right" journals, and we do it willingly. We almost all do it, even those very lucky few of us who have earned tenure.
Perhaps we do it because this is genuinely the work we wish to write. Perhaps we just want to show we're still in the game. As Maeve McKeown writes in a paper on gamification and political theory which just as well could apply to philosophy:
Contemporary political theory is a game. Individuals compete to publish in ‘top’ journals, to amass greater numbers of publications than their peers; then journal-ranking is combined with number of publications generating scores. The aim is to get the most points. Whoever gets the most points wins: they get the best jobs and the most prestige. This Hunger Games–like contest has serious consequences for people’s lives, determining who can make a living from academia, who will be relegated to the academic precariat or forced out of the profession […] these conditions are stifling intellectual creativity, diversity, and dissent in political theory/philosophy.
Now, gamification isn't necessarily bad. We gamify things that we might otherwise not see through, such as language-learning. Yet, gamification narrows a broad range of experiences into a predictable path.
Take learning languages with an app. You do not get the non-linearity, the setbacks, the sparks of discovery, the joy of learning and erring together, when you use Duolingo versus a more holistic approach where you talk to native speakers, immerse yourself in literature and so on (note: I'm not saying anything bad about Duolingo per se, I'm a long-time user! But I do acknowledge the gamified method is a pale shadow of a more integrative approach). No, all of that richness of language is reduced to a series of pings for correct and wrong answers, and your weekly score on the leaderboard. I'm in the Diamond league. Yay!
When an entire discipline gets gamified, we are in for trouble. Because, as McKeown observes, top generalist journals aren't truly general. A lot of marginalized approaches do not find a place there. But it's not only that. We discourage ourselves from being truly playful and creative. Play and creativity is a crucial aspect of philosophy. We all recognize it when we praise Zhuangzi, Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. But we can't allow ourselves to write like that. We can't, because of the way academia is set up. Academia doesn't reward out of the box thinking.
McKeown situates the gamification of publication in the context of the neoliberal academy. She notes that political theorists aren't fond of this term. However, there is a good reason to use neoliberal here as "associated with privatization and deregulation; letting the market run public services in the name of efficiency".
It's important to note that this tendency to see efficiency and markets as the final arbiter to anything we do, even our hobbies and the private sphere, is not exclusively right-wing. In fact, Elizabeth Pop Berman makes the case that an “economic style of reasoning” came to predominate Washington policy among liberal technocrats, who hoped to improve efficiency. Using the market as the arbiter of anything, framing e.g., the loss of lives in terms of loss of productivity and lowering GDP, would reduce waste and make things overall better. A lot of philosophers, who are (broadly) liberal) buy into this efficiency rhetoric.
There's of course the matter of survival. With so many philosophy programs threatened with reduction or closure, it is small wonder we're trying to survive. With so few jobs and adjunctification, we can blame philosophers for hoop-jumping? Prestige becomes the marker and currency for excellence, and in practice, prestige (judging by journals considered "top" generalist journals) means overwhelmingly "Anglo-American normative analytic philosophy". So we all jockey for a limited number of spots in heavily skewed journals. Perhaps we even writing things we don't really care all that much about, we are content, we settle for making small moves in topical but arcane debates, for readers in the single digits and even fewer citations and uptake.
A few of us, through luck and other factors, can play this game really well and end up getting lots of citations and uptake. For the rest of us, it's a scramble. Unlike with the Duolingo leagues which (apparently) adapt to your time commitment, there's only one (geographically distributed) leaderboard in the game of philosophy and few people can find a place on it. It's saddening to see so many people leave the profession. I do not think going alt-ac is a tragedy, for many people it's great, and I encourage people to at least explore alt-ac as there are so many ways we can do philosophy meaningfully, in and outside of the academy. But it's still saddening to see all those diverse, powerful voices not get a place in the narrow gamified space that academic philosophy affords, and it's our loss.
I was recently asked in a podcast why I put so much energy lately in drawing philosophy, and in writing fiction, and things like that, rather than publish in top journals. One easy explanation is that I have the privilege to do so, since I have tenure and don't need promotion. But there is also that I genuinely think I am better at those ways of doing philosophy than writing journal articles. I still write journal articles, but only limited quantity and only when I think the article is something interesting that I can explore best in that format. For many of us, writing philosophy and doing philosophy in a more diverse way would make us better thinkers.
We know the arguments for the cognitive division of labor, outlined by authors such as Helen Longino, Philip Kitcher and others. But we struggle to implement this in our own lives, because of the overall market logic.
Maybe we can do little bits individually to make things better. Maybe those of us with tenure can try to work at the philosophy that they truly care about. It could be a paper in Mind, of course, but it could be many other things besides. Maybe we can work to look for diverse expressions of philosophy in job applicants, and not penalize (at the very least!) an assistant prof who goes up for tenure for having a collection of poetry published.
Overall, the forces that make us see self-preservation as this narrow thing to aspire to are very strong, and it is foolish to think we as philosophers could escape them through deep thinking. As Kant already mentioned in the First Critique (about different kinds of illusions, I know, but the point applies), deep thinking isn't going to get us out of this. Those forces make us see having a tenure track job, a home, a retirement account ("Check here to see if you have saved up the right amount for retirement for your age bracket"–I wonder who writes these things, and what purpose they serve) as key to self-preservation.
But in philosophy, there's a much richer notion of self-preservation than the narrow neoliberal view allows. Stoics thoughts that self-preservation means preserving your virtue, even if it means giving up your life. Caleb Ward, in this beautiful piece on Audre Lorde, contrasts mere security with a rich sense of self-preservation, which is preservation of the whole person. Interestingly, this rich sense of self-preservation and survival is not antithetical to the demands of life.
Very often, we're told we need to buy into the market logic because things like housing, food, retirement (if we get there) are the essential things of life. Philosophy is a frill, an excess, something that doesn't fit this faux-Darwinian picture. And yet, we managed to shoehorn philosophy in it by gamifying it, and thus denying ourselves the fuller expression and self-preservation it might potentially afford.
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