YouSaid · the spoken record

Rebecca Kukla

lines on the record: 72
first: 2019-01-02
most recent: 2019-01-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's dead ringers if you wonder. So it wasn't like much seeing a movie with him. I was working in a movie theater and the movie theater hosted a lot of premieres, especially Canadian premieres. This was in Canada. And he was there. And, you know, I was young and excited that he was there, but there was no great take-home story about our interaction or anything. I have a total soft spot for the David Cronenberg movies that were just, you know, out and out over the top. exploding stuff and high drama. So I loved scanners and I loved video drome. I love all the ones where it's just like gross stuff coming out of other stuff and so on. I don't have a highly theoretical reason for that. I just, I like movies that are extreme. And I love that he was willing to be just incredibly low budget extreme in his imagery back in the day. That was what was most fun for me.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Felt just incredibly excited and privileged to be among all of these enthusiastic intellectual lefties who were all yelling at one another and getting super excited about the rebirth of socialism or whatever it may be. It was really fun.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a really long time ago and I was really young and it was really fun. So this was when he was a congressman in Vermont and he had this adorable series. He loved academics and so he would just have these dinners with academics where he just wanted people to come and have dinner and say interesting things near him. And my overwhelming impression of him was at that point, and this is 25 years ago, that he was just incredibly approachable and genuine. He was doing this because he just really liked the company of academics and didn't get it very often. So the dinners, I mean, they were political in the sense that we debated political issues, but I never felt like I was being, you know, used as a tool in the Bernie machine or anything like that. It really just felt like he wanted to talk to people. And I, as a very, very young, just starting out academic.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah, I mean, intuitively, that feels right to me. You mean with respect to relationships and sexual sexual ecologies. Yeah, I think three is hard. So this is my completely anecdotal unscientific response. I think three is hard to make work. Yeah. Because, yeah, like you always have an odd number and each person is a third of the whole dynamics, so there's nothing like major majorities that can be taken into account. It's tricky”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Broader culture is pretty messed up in a lot of ways. We could end up with a better one or we could end up with one that recreated a lot of those forms of being messed up and just turned out to be exploitative. It's very hard to guess in advance.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They just find themselves thrown. They just find themselves in the midst of the norms and carry on. So your question about scaling, it super depends on how it's scaled, right? If it became a thing that everybody did. And in the meantime, what had built up and become just the unreflective norm were a bunch of crappy misogynist exploitative practices, then it would be worse if it scaled up and it scaled up in such a way that the unreflective, widespread norms were better unthoughtful and more enlightened than it would be better. So I just don't have an in-principle question to whether scaling would make it better or worse. To me, it's all about how those norms would end up developing organically and through reflection and discussion and what kind of sexual ecology we would end up with. I mean, I think the sexual ecology we have right now.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, I think one of the reasons right now why polyamory works very well for a lot of the people who do it is, and this is directly addressing what I think you're getting at. Is because since it's a small nonstandard community, people really, in order to make it work, they have to do a lot of critical self-reflection studying to figure out what the norms should be. You can't just fall into polyamory right now. If you're going to do it, you have to explicitly sit there and think, what am I trying to get out of this? And then you have to explicitly negotiate with partners and future partners. What are our shared norms? What are our expectations? Nothing can just be taken for granted the way it can for traditional heterosexual monogamous or purportedly monogamous relationships. I think that for most straight monogamous people, there's very little thinking about what their fundamental relationship and sexual values and norms are and what their boundaries are. They just sort of go with the flow or to get back to your Heidegger would say that they're...”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To find good food, you have to get away from all the meetings and you have to get out into the smaller ethnic enclaves in the suburbs. And then, I mean, I'm not sure how much you want me to say about my process of finding food. But for me, it's this really complicated balance of reading user reviews, knowing which user reviews. I have a good sense for which ones should be written off as ignorable and which ones are worthwhile. I find that places that have too many user reviews are usually bland and places that have too few are not as good of a bet. So you want to maximize the right number of user reviews of the right kind and you want to make sure that the food is appropriate to the ecology of the neighborhood it's in that it's not you know an Ethiopian restaurant in a Thai neighborhood or whatever it may be those are less likely to be good so yeah there's it's a complicated calculus for me but I find eating in DC itself”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I live right in the middle of DC, not in the suburbs. And I actually find DC proper, a totally fine, but not especially inspiring place to find food. There's a lot of very medium food in D.C. DC is an interesting city because most of the interesting food is way out in the suburbs. I don't drive, and so for me to get out to the suburbs is a whole project, but really if I want good food, that's what I need to do. I think that in the city of DC itself There's so much pressure to cater to the common denominator because mostly you have people having meetings constantly having meetings right and they're meetings where nobody wants to offend anybody else because they're trying to make a political deal or they're trying to settle a case where it's whatever it is. And so they want the food to sort of be adequate and respectable but intrude minimally into their experience. And if you want”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Created this kind of distinctive Tampa culture that actually really has its own food and its own music, which is just a mixture of all of these things. And when you're in the middle of Tampa, you almost feel like you're in a different country. I mean, it's so lush and it's so weird and it's so not organized. There's almost no city planning there whatsoever. So you're in this city and you're in the middle of a business district, but there will be chickens walking by and there'll be like water birds wandering across your path and they'll be geckos climbing up things. And it's all very tropical and exotic and evocative. And at the same time, it has this really vibrant culture on the ground that almost nobody knows about because when they think of Tampa, they just think of this sort of bland city that you get around the edges. So I think not only is it underrated, but it's really kind of hidden and underexplored. It's one of the few spots in the states that I feel has not really been mined.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's certainly underrated. Tampa is another really complicated city. So I lived there for several years. I think a lot of people go to Tampa and they either go there for business and end up in the suburbs at these sort of corporate business parks that are terrible or they have retired relatives around there who are living in gated communities that are terrible or they go to the beach, which is whatever it is. It's the same as the beach everywhere in this country. But if you actually go into the center of Tampa, into inner city Tampa, it's an incredibly distinctive city. It has a long history as a center of labor activism. It's incredibly racially diverse. It was a place where it was a cigar city originally and it's filled with Cubans and Central Americans and Caribbeans and also Romanians and Jews and Italians and Spanish folks. And they all came together and they all”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The street art in Columbia was fantastic. I guess they have a new mayor who has gone out of his way to encourage street art to sort of loosen up the graffiti laws and also to bring in street artists so the city is turning into this huge palate. And I guess the main way that it surprised me was that I didn't realize that I had stereotypes about South American cities, but I suppose I did, and I suppose I expected to be kind of a little bit dysfunctional and hard to manage and rough going. And it was just such a model of a well-run city at this point. It was really inspiring.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I was actually in Bogota. Oh, Bogota, okay. Bogotau was amazing. I didn't know so much what to expect when I went to Bogota, but it is so clearly it's just a physically absolutely beautiful city. It may be the most beautiful city I've ever seen in terms of combining nature and artifice. It's got these spectacular soaring skyrises and this gorgeous colonialist architecture all kind of up against the backdrop of the Andes and it's just, it's lush and it's super dramatic and beautiful. But I guess what I was not expecting was just how functional that city seems to be. I mean, it's just an incredibly easy city to walk around, to be in, to explore, to eat in. It was an extremely welcoming city. It had the largest and most vibrant gay neighborhood that I might have seen in almost any city.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Purpose it in the direction of inclusivity and harmony and so on. Sometimes they repurpose it in ways that are just going to introduce new kinds of divisions. That said, that sounds really negative and I have to say I found Johannesburg this incredibly creative vibrant gorgeous exciting city and I really loved being there but at the same time there's just no denying that it's an incredibly fractured troubled space and it's fascinating to see the way people are of their own accord fracturing it rather than healing it in a lot of cases.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percentage of the people who live there are South African. It's flooded with all kinds of people from all over Africa who are not who the city was built to house. And so it's got to repurpose itself in this very rapid, dramatic way. I guess if I had to take a philosophical punchline out of that experience, it's that apartheid was a system of top-down segregation and division and surveillance. And now the city doesn't have that, but it has substituted it with all kinds of bottom-up strategies for self-enclaving and division and drawing lines and territories between groups and between people so that in a lot of ways the city is as divided and segregated as it ever was but in new ways. So I think that one lesson to take out of it is that when people repurpose space, they don't necessarily repurpose”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, no, no. I understand. South Africa. So the reason I was studying South Africa in particular is because through my geographic work, I've been studying what I call repurposed cities, which are cities that were very definitively built materially to support a particular social and economic and political regime that keeps people separated in various ways and flowing in various ways and so on. And then my question is, well, when that regime ends kind of abruptly and the city gets filled up with new people living in new ways that aren't suited to that material form, how does that thing I was just talking about happen, right? How do they rejig and remake their space to make it suit them? And conversely, how does this old found space shape what they can do with it? So I was interested in Johannesburg as a post-apartheid city and trying to figure out, I mean, almost nobody, Johannesburg is mostly an immigrant city now. It's a very small city.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people who live in those spaces constitute one another. So I was thinking about using things like some ecological niche theory from philosophy, biology, and some other material like that, some work from phenomenology, to talk about how we are inherently shaped by the places that we are in, but that likewise what people do is modify their spaces and their places and give them new meanings and change them in the ways they need to make them suit their needs. So there's a kind of a symbiotic relationship, a niche-building relationship between places and people. And it seemed to me most interesting to think about how that worked in urban spaces where you've got a whole lot of people and really complex space bumping up against one another.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And philosophers' examples were always things like opening a doorknob or something like that, like these very abstract minimal interactions with the world. Whereas to me, a key feature of being embodied is that you're embodied somewhere and the somewhere that you are is just this endlessly complex concrete space. And I think that has a huge impact on all of these questions to do with subjectivity, agency, free will, perception, how we perceive danger, how we perceive safety, and so on. So I've always been interested in that. Separately, I've just kind of non-academically always been.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that actually there's been a really skillful narrative behind this interview so far. I mean, you keep on engaging me on topics where I end up talking about the importance of place and motion. Long before it ever occurred to me to do a degree in geography, I was always just fascinated by the role of place. It seemed to me that there was this turn going on in philosophy that sort of has been going on since I was a graduate student kind of started in the 90s where philosophers got really interested in embodiment. They suddenly remembered that we have bodies and so they started doing all this work thinking about the role that being embodied plays in what it is to be a person, to be a thinker, how we think, what we perceive, and so on. But those bodies were always still like oddly displaced bodies. They were like bodies that weren't anywhere in particular.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Philosophers and comedians have almost the same job, which is to come up with sharp, penetrating, quirky insights about the world. And so you need to be out there in the world. And so I've always had a lot of things that I've done other than philosophy that have mattered to me intrinsically for their own sake, but also instrumentally I think they've made my philosophy better. So boxing falls under that general category. The other thing is, though, I don't regulate my emotions very well unless I can exhaust myself, honestly. I just write better and work better and think better and I'm a calmer and more level-headed and smarter person if I have managed to get out my rather large amount of energy and aggression. And so it's extremely helpful for me to sort of exhaust myself in the ring many times a week in order to do the rest of what I'm supposed to do.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Closely related to everything I've already end up saying today and closely related to what I just said about Rousseau. I think I have a new colleague this year at Georgetown, Femi Taiwo. He just finished his PhD at UCLA. Fantastic young philosopher. And he gave an interview recently. And one thing he said really stuck out for me, which was that so many philosophers think that philosophy is about responding to other texts and other people and they forget that it's first and foremost about responding to the world. And I think that if you just do philosophy, you kind of literally don't have material. You can read other people's philosophy books and respond to them, but you don't have any actual rich juicy material. And so for me, having a lot of other things in my life other than philosophy has always been where I've got. I mean, imagine if you were a standup comic and all you did is sit there and try to write comedy all day long, right? You wouldn't have any material. I don't actually think it's very different.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a philosophical point of view, why is boxing good for me? I don't know if this is technically from a philosophical point of view, but here's two things. One is I think philosophers who only do philosophy and nothing else tend to be kind of bad boring philosophers.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really both great question. I do all kinds of very different things with my graduate students depending on what we need to do. So sometimes we go out and meet in a busy coffee shop because I feel like that will be helpful. Sometimes we sit in my quiet office. Honestly, I've had graduate students who I've boxed with pretty seriously and we've talked about dissertation work in between rounds in the boxing gym as we're punching each other, which is pretty embodied. So yeah, I think that's a great question. And I never really thought of it that way until you asked me the question. But I do go out of my way to sort of change up the environment and the motion depending on what kind of conversation I think it's useful for us to have. And in particular, I find that what I have to talk about philosophically with my graduate students or other people is dependent on what city I'm in too, just dependent on the entire physical environment around me and what kind of stimuli I am experiencing.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving through the world and noticing things like my feet hurt when I go up this hill, and that guy over there won't talk to me because he thinks I'm weird. What's that about? And this kind of responsiveness to the world around him and to the other people around him and to his motion as he travels is integral to the philosophy he can do. And it's a much deeper inversion of the sort of Cartesian solitary model of thinking than people notice.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His meditations famously by saying, Well, I want to do good philosophy. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to lock myself in the room and I'm going to close the windows and I'm not going to move. I'm going to make sure I can't see anybody else who's going to distract me and that I can't hear anything because I just want a completely blank solitary environment so I can think clearly. That's a very specific kind of location, right? There's all kinds of fascinating assumptions built into the idea that you do your best thinking when you're sitting still in a blank room not talking to anybody else. And I think for hundreds of years, most philosophers never even thought to question the basic shape of Descartes' idea there, right? That basically philosophy was a thing you did when you weren't distracted by the world or other people and everything was staying the same so that you could just have your abstract thoughts. Rousseau comes along and very intentionally and explicitly inverts Descartes and says, I can only do philosophy when I”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reveries of a solitary walker, you know, there's more to say about it than I'm going to be able to say here. But the most noticeable thing about it is that it's a special kind of autobiographical book that I don't think anybody had written before where he's autobiographizing, as it were, as he moves through space, as he walks. And so he's reflecting on how his own relationship to what's around him and his own movement through space shapes who he understands himself as being, what he can see, what he can't see. And I think that this idea that place and location and movement have a constituent impact on what we can think, what we can see, how we can philosophize is an incredibly deep and moving insight. And just to see why this is important, compare it to somebody like Descartes.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like almost nobody but me understands how important it is. Rousseau is probably my favorite writer from the entire history of philosophy. And one of the things I most love about Rousseau and that has been really influential on me is that for him the style of writing and the mode of writing is not separable from the content of what he wants to convey. So he wrote dialogues, he wrote traditional philosophy works, he wrote books and composed entirely of letters, you know, epistolary novels. He wrote operas. He wrote in pretty much every autobiographies. He wrote in pretty much every genre. And each of those genres is designed to make certain kinds of philosophical points possible. They're not separate from the content of what he has to say.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I have nothing but positive things to say about Ruth's referee's solitary walker. So the question is, why is it important?”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To think of other people as physical objects or as tools, it's most useful to think of other people as entities who are engaged in certain kinds of projects and self-reflections and so on. And that's a whole separate ontology where it's not really an interesting question to think about how that does or doesn't reduce to a physicalist ontology or some other kind of ontology. Was that at all comprehensible?”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If what you're trying to do is, to use a very high Hagarian example, build a chair, then you're not going to break the world into the objects of physics. You're going to break the world into the tools that would be useful for you to build a chair. So you're going to think of the world in terms of things like hammers and saws and nails, and you're not going to care that much what the physical structure of the hammer is, what you're going to care about is that the hammer is a good thing to use for making a chair at this moment, for banging in a nail. So thinking of things in terms of their tool-like functions versus thinking of them as physical objects are just two kinds. It's not like one is more right or one is more wrong. It's also not some sort of spooky subjectivism. It's just recognizing that our useful ontological categories are indexed to what we're in the midst of trying to do. And furthermore, thinking of other people is yet another category, right? So it's not most useful.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. Okay. So this is, you know, any of my Heidegger friends who hear this are going to think this is a ridiculously oversimplified caricature. But I'm going to do it anyway. I think that the core idea of being in time is that to understand what something is ontologically is not a question that can be answered unless we understand the context in which we're asking the question. If what you're trying to do is physics, then you're going to break the world into the kind of objects that are useful for doing physics, independent objects that have Properties that physics needs them to have.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that now that we have entered an era in which there are real live Nazis crawling out of the woodwork and having a serious voice in public discourse, my intellectual labor is finite, and I've just decided I'm not willing to spend any more of it on a Nazi. That said, back in the day, I took Heidegger really seriously and I found him a really important thinker. I'm trying to think of what a cute little nugget of take-home summary of being in time might be.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's in there? Okay, I have an incredibly emotional and vexed relationship to Heidegger. I no longer, I used to publish on Heidegger and I don't anymore. That was a conscious choice that I made. This is not yet a direct answer to your question, but I will answer your question. We always knew Heidegger was a Nazi. Philosophers for many years had this line, which was that, oh, yeah, you know, politically he was a Nazi because everybody was, but it has nothing to do with his philosophy. I think that was just willful obtuseness on the part of people who wanted to read him and take him seriously. I think that more and more has come out showing just how deeply held his Nazi convictions were and that it was not just him going along with the crowd. It was stuff that he deeply believed. And in a lot of books that don't get read as much, he explains in detail the ways in which Nazism shaped his ideas.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that I have an opinion on that one. That one's one that I know is out there, but that hasn't penetrated actual professional philosophy much, I gotta say.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the level of concrete fleshy bodies and material spaces, right? So power isn't sets of abstract rules. Power is the way that we are trained up when we are little kids to hold our legs in a certain way or to hold our face in a certain way or to wear certain kinds of clothing. Power is the way that schools are built with desks in rows that enforces a certain direction of the gaze and so on. I mean, I could go on and on, but the way that the materiality of our bodies and our habits and our environments is where power gets a hold and where our social patterns and norms are grounded rather than in some kinds of high level principles or laws is also, I think, very fertile. And that's independent of the details of his genealogical stories because, yeah, he does seem to have played fairly fast and loose with actual historical details.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the details of his empirical genealogical stories, you mean? Yes. But I think the basic Foucaultian picture, which is Let's reduce Foucault to just two little bits here, right? One basic piece of the Foucaultian picture is that power is not a unified unilateral top-down thing. Power expresses itself in all of the little micro interactions that go on between people and between people in their environments all the time, right? So power isn't about a big set of rules that's imposed on people. Power is about all of the little things that we do with one another as we move through the world and all of those add up to structures of power rather than being imposed top down. I think that has been, at least for me and for many other people, an incredibly fertile productive way of starting to think about social phenomena. The other bit of the Foucaultian picture that I think is incredibly important is the idea that a lot of this happens at”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that what happens over time is that those tensions bubble up to the surface and in the course of trying to resolve themselves, they create something newer and better and smarter that incorporates both of the original sides. That was a much more Hegelian way of putting it than I wanted it to come out. But basically the idea that going out and looking for consistency in the world is hopeless. Instead, what we should do is figure out how the contradictions in the world are themselves productive and push history forward and push ideas forward is what I take to be the key interesting Hegelian idea.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's interesting in Hegel? Okay You ask hard questions. This is why you're good at your job, right? I think Hegel's fascinating and I think the main idea in Hegel that is fascinating is that any cultural moment or a set of ideas or set of practices is always internally contradicted.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working relationships with the professors. It's easy if you're a professor to feel like that relationship is a socially equal one because you're just hanging out with another adult who's interested in your field. Whereas the graduate student is hyper aware of the fact that you can make or break their lives and that it's not an equal relationship. And so a lot of those power differentials get hidden from the person wielding the power. And I just think it's an extremely easy position to exploit. And we've got thousands of years of this idea of the wise old professor being this kind of erotic figure that gets pulled into all of these dynamics. But it's been a really toxic, difficult time over the last, I don't know, 10 years in philosophy. And I hope it's getting better from all of this.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grotesquely harassing her students and using her status as the kind of guru star of the department to do it. So I don't even think that it's just men who exploit that position, but I do think that in philosophy, it's mostly men who are in a position to do that to start with. Ultimately, I don't have a really deep explanation for why we have so many scandals, but it is depressing. I mean, I've just found out again and again that even departments that I thought were functional when you really start talking to people and especially when you really start talking to graduate students who are not men, you find out more and more depressing stories about just how willing people are to exploit their positions in the department. I mean, I think that in departments that have graduate students, I mean, it's just such a weird relationship already, right? It's an adult supervising another adult. The second adult tends to be younger, but they're an adult. The graduate students who are around for years, they're in this intense.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very deep need to please them and do what they say and so on. And so the power relations, the whole power setup is just ripe for exploitation. There was just a case that I'm sure you heard about that was not in philosophy, despite the fact that it keeps being reported as if it was in philosophy, where it was a woman who had that star status, Vita Ronel, and she was the one who was...”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For instance, is not that different than it's ever been. There are more female graduate students now, but how that translates into changing the discipline is unclear. So, I mean, I think part of it is just the very boring fact that it's a male-dominated field, right? And male-dominated fields are likely to have more sexual harassment, it seems to me, because there's more of that male culture that's unchecked. I do think also that, and I want to say publicly that not all departments are like this and my department at Georgetown is very much not like this, so I don't want this to be heard as about my department. But I do think in many departments in philosophy, there's a kind of a guru culture that goes on where there are people at the top of the field, the big stars of the department, who are usually male just statistically for the reasons I said, who have more power than they even understand that they have and everybody feels”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually a great point. Yeah, I mean, there hasn't, yes, the incentive structure has been very messed up about all of this. And so, yeah, I just don't know if it's that we have more of it or if it's that the culture around reporting it and gossiping about it is more. But in a way, it doesn't matter, right? Because we have a lot of it, which is really your point. So the comparative doesn't matter. I mean, why do we have a lot of it? Philosophy is a dramatically less gender-balanced field than any of the other social sciences or humanities. And then most of the STEM fields, the numbers in philosophy are pretty dire, but what's most interesting about them is that as feminist philosophy has been on the rise and as consciousness about gender issues in the academy has been on the rise, our numbers haven't changed all that much. If you go back and look like 30 years or 50 years even, the percentage of women who say make full professionals”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, anecdotally, we've certainly had more than our share of stories and scandals, right? And it's very hard to know if that's because we have more sexual harassment or if that's because we're more interested right now in reporting it, like if our little Me Too movement started earlier than in other field, or it's...”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I honestly, I would be really careful before saying whether I agree or not because I'm only in philosophy and I don't know how people are making those comparisons.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In different ways, have really different kinds of effects. And those effects can be anything, any kind of speech act can be misused or used well. So yes, profanity can be used to harm and to pointlessly offend or to lessen a conversation, but it can also be used strategically to carry out all kinds of social functions and shifts in social space that we just can't substitute with other words, even if those words have the same meaning, because even if they have the same meaning, they're pragmatic force isn't the same. So to me, cursing is a rich toolbox. I try with dubious success not to overuse it, but it's a toolbox that I'm not willing to give up. And I think that more and more philosophers would probably agree with that. There's more and more work on profanity, taking it as a serious philosophical topic, which I'm excited to see.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking about what philosophers call the pragmatics of language, namely what do particular acts of speaking actually do? How are they interventions on the world? So simple examples of speech hack theory is that assertions and imperatives do different things. If I assert something to you, I've now tried to transmit a piece of information. But if I issue an imperative, I've now tried to transmit to you an obligation. I'm trying to make you do something, which is just a different act, right? Or if I warn you, that's a different kind of act again. If I name you, that's a completely different kind of act. So I think that cursing and profanity is a whole domain of speech acts that has all kinds of interesting and subtle social effects that just can't be substituted for by non-curse words. You can take the curse words out, but then you have lessened the performative and pragmatic power of our language. And different curse words use”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“not even a curse word yeah right exactly and the room cracked up and i i didn't understand why they were laughing and finally somebody said oh well you've already dropped it like 12 times you just didn't notice so um i'm a bad person to ask about profanity because i use profanity so constantly and fluently and automatically that i also i often don't notice when i'm using it however To take your question more seriously, yes, I think that Let me try to give you more serious philosophy answer. One of my main interests and one of my longest standing research programs as you hinted is in speech act theory, in thinking about language, not in terms of what particular words mean.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a bad person to ask because, well, so I was once giving a seminar at Penn State, and it was a two-hour seminar, and I was like an hour and a half into giving it. And because I thought that I wanted to be this very responsible person, I turned to the people in the room and I said, you know, I don't know what the norms are here. Would it be okay if I said the F word, except I didn't say the F word? I actually said the F word.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who do that kind of philosophy congratulate themselves regularly about how clear they are. And in fact, I think to anybody except one another, they're not clear at all. They've created this internal jargonistic, abstract language, which is utterly impenetrable to anybody other than the few people who are using it, with tortured sentence structures. And I think that they're self-congratulatory clarity is a kind of an ideological myth. On the other hand, I think this is changing enormously. I think there are all kinds of parts of philosophy that are becoming more and more vibrant and attracting more and more people where the whole point is to start with the world and what it is that we can say about the world and how we can intervene on that world and to let ourselves get our hands dirty and to take the responsibility of reading science and reading social science and making sure that what we're seeing is responsive to empirical reality. So to me, philosophy is getting a lot less.”
2019-01-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source