Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 244: Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism — with Ian Angus
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Ian Angus
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Kathy Feng 00:03
Hello listeners, I'm Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Ian Angus, professor emeritus from the Department of Global Humanities at SFU. Together they chat about Ian's academic career, his engagement with the work of Husserl and his most recent book, Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World. Enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 00:44
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again. This week, we have a special guest, Ian Angus, joining us. Welcome Ian.
Ian Angus 00:52
Hello, Am.
Am Johal 00:54
Ian, why don't we start with you introducing yourself a little bit?
Ian Angus 00:58
Well, I'm currently Professor Emeritus from Simon Fraser University where I taught in the Department of Humanities—now Global Humanities—for quite a long time. And before that I was a bit here and there, all over the place. So I don't know how far you want me to go back, but...
Am Johal 01:19
You started teaching at SFU in the early 80s?
Ian Angus 01:22
I taught here for two years in the early 80s. And then, you know, in the, in the 80s, there was the austerity program from the government, and I had short term contracts and I wasn't renewed. So I went back east and then to the United States for a while, and so on.
Am Johal 01:39
And then you came back to SFU around when?
Ian Angus 01:42
1992. Into, into the Sociology Department, and then shifted over to the Humanities Department.
Am Johal 01:51
So I just want to ask about how you started studying the humanities. You grew up in Ontario?
Ian Angus 01:59
I did in an industrial town called Sarnia, Ontario, which is right next to a place called Chemical Valley—which has, you know, Dow, Dupont. All of those oil companies and chemical companies had places there. So it was very much a working class town.
Am Johal 02:16
And what drew you to studying humanities?
Ian Angus 02:18
Um, it's a bit of a story. I went to university at the University of Waterloo because of the mathematics faculty there. And because it was close. And I wanted to get out of town, which really, a lot of people did. So it was my ticket out. And then I got there—and it was 1967 when I left—so then it was 1967, 1968. I got involved in student politics. University of Waterloo was known as the "Red University" in those days, and we had a solid core of about two to three hundred people who were strongly activist. So I got involved in that. And it changed my life. And I couldn't be interested in mathematics anymore. I switched into philosophy and took off from there.
Am Johal 03:11
Now, your most recent book, Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World came out in 2021. And wondering, we can begin with you sort of talking about where that project started for you.
Ian Angus 03:25
[It] started back in 2012, when I got a little bit of support from the university to take some time off teaching on the basis of a project that I submitted to. And I had been interested and affected by Edmund Husserl's late work, the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology throughout my whole life, really since I was about 20, 21 years of age. But I'd never really come to grips with it. It's an unfinished work. And I started off with various formulations of how I was going to take off from that work, and eventually took me nine years to finish.
Am Johal 03:25
So why don't we begin with sort of a discussion a little bit on—for our audience members who might not be grounded in Husserls work to sort of describe his background and his concerns in philosophy.
Ian Angus 04:25
Husserl was an assimilated Jew, originally from the Bohemian lands in what was, became Czechoslovakia after he was born, and then now the Czech Republic. He taught philosophy in Germany for his whole life, and was influenced by a lot of the major mathematicians of the time. He started a form of approach to philosophy called phenomenology. And it's become probably the single most important influence in 20th century, perhaps 21st century philosophy, though people have tended to take off in different directions. In France, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, De Beauvoir, people like that, took it off as existential phenomenology, and various different strains in different places.
Am Johal 05:18
And in terms of your own particular concerns with Husserl, how did you... How has he captivated you over, you know, a length of time?
Ian Angus 05:30
Well, I was introduced to Husserl and phenomenology by a fellow by the name of José Huertas-Jourda at the University of Waterloo, who taught philosophy there when I was there. And he was a very charismatic character. Husserl being important to him, I wanted to find out, you know, where that influence was, why the... Why the enthusiasm, you know? Husserl himself is a very dry writer, very kind of a stringent philosophical voice. But there is hidden almost inside it a real return to firsthand experience. And I think this is what has made it so influential over the time, when people who want to get out of all these metaphysical speculations. And it, as I say, did give rise to existential philosophy, and a much more engaged practice of philosophy. Though, I should say, there's still people who, who read Husserl and comment on Husserl in a very academic and astringent sort of fashion.
Am Johal 06:32
Now, in terms of phenomenological Marxism, can you talk a little bit more about that term?
Ian Angus 06:38
Yes. A lot more of this is becoming uncovered by recent scholarship. So the picture is much clearer to me now than it used to be, even when I started this book, really. But Husserl was in Freiburg in Germany in the 1920s, when his assistant Heidegger was there also. And some of the early members of the Frankfurt School were there at the same time, met him, and it was, in fact, Husserl who introduced Marcuse to Max Horkheimer. So there has been an interplay between phenomenology and Marxism right from the beginning. Partly because of this return to firsthand experience in phenomenology, the sense that philosophy needs renewal it needs to engage with the problems of its time. And of course, Marxism has always, always been about that. So there's a long history first, Marcuse and others in the 1920s. Later on two students of Husserl, Jan Patočka, who is also from the Czech lands, and Ludwig Landgrebe, in the 1930s worked on a synthesis of Marxism and phenomenology and came up with a very interesting critique of Marxism's reliance on Hegel. And then much later, in the 1960s, the Milan School, around the work of Enzo Paci, became very important. [It] influenced Paul Piccone, who was the editor of Telos magazine. And through that, it was distributed much wider in the English speaking world. So there is a long history, and that's one of the problems in writing the book, is you have to, in some sense, incorporate the history, but at the same time not write one of those interminable books recounting everybody else's ideas.
Am Johal 06:40
Marcuse was heavily influenced by Husserl, in terms of his book, One-Dimensional Man in particular, I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to how Marcuse uses Husserl.
Ian Angus 08:49
I can. Marcuse was influenced more by Heidegger in the 1920s, until he read Marx's early manuscripts which came out in the 1930s, early 1930s. And he then left aside Heidegger and he left aside phenomenology for a kind of much more vibrant—sensuous, almost—Marxism. Much later, Herbert Marcuse, wrote a piece, a short piece on Husserl's book Crisis of the European Sciences, which was presented in Boston and not widely circulated really until much later. And [he] engaged there with the connection between phenomenology and Marxism around the problem of reification, or alienation. Specifically, the connection is that Husserl's late book is about the domination of modern thought by scientific abstractions that go back to Galileo. Marx's work in Capital around commodity fetishism, and later Lukács's work around reification in History and Class Consciousness is about the domination of economic categories over lived experience in our ordinary life. So it's, this is the connection that has been most explored in the history. Two different kinds of critiques of the domination of concrete experience by abstractions. And that's what Marcuse picked up on in One-Dimensional Man. And One-Dimensional Man, though he does mention for the first time in many years, Heidegger—and to some extent, relies upon Heidegger—he also discusses this concept of one-dimensionality based on Husserl and so that's an interesting connection that comes up later in Marcuse's work. I'm not sure how much he's really influenced by Husserl. He incorporates Husserl very much into his own way of thinking.
Am Johal 10:52
You have a chapter in the book called “The Institution of Technique in Digital Culture,” wondering if you can speak a little bit to, kind of, part of the book, kind of, that's dealing with, I guess, would almost be media theory.
Ian Angus 11:07
Okay, yeah, I'm glad you asked me that, because that's one of the pieces of the book that has not been discussed. And I would really like to hear what other people have to say about it. Husserl's work, as I said, was about the dominance of scientific abstractions over contemporary experience based on Galilean science—that is to say, mathematical physics. And if you look through the history of modern philosophy, you'll see that when people talk about experience, they think of experiences as atomistic things that occur, for example, very much under this influence of this scientific paradigm. Now, I have to go through that in the book. And I have to talk about that and what it means and so forth. But I was very much aware that this is not the major problem nowadays, though, I still think there is a problem of reification. And there is a problem of the role of technique and technology in our lives. Most people, I think, have somewhat contradictory reactions to technology, because they don't have a chance to think through all of its aspects, or many of its aspects. On the one hand, we're afraid of new technologies—and we're afraid of technologies such as surveillance technologies, and so on—getting out of hand, and on the other hand, we rely on them very much and hope that they will solve some of our problems in the future. So that's... That needs to be thought through more. So I thought that I could take the question of digital technologies, in a kind of general fashion, and I wanted to connect it to the problem of the crisis of the European sciences and the domination of concrete experience, through reference to Husserl, but also to pull on various other threads of work, which I had worked on in the past—media ecology and technology in that very specific sense. So I don't talk at great length about media ecology, I more or less sketch it in a few pages, and try to rely upon what is generally known. But I begin my analysis of the digital phenomenon by talking about the relationship between knowledge and the transmission of knowledge, which were essentially two different issues for the vast majority of human history. You could know something, but could you communicate it, who would know it, and so on, very different questions. Nowadays, I believe, what it's inherent to what I call digital culture, is the collapse into what I call information being a form of knowledge and a form of its transmission. So with the computer that sitting on the desk here, you both can put some content in there. But simultaneously, it can appear in other places, it's transferred to other people. That's a phenomenon which I call "transversality." So that you have, in the first place, a collapse of knowledge and transmission. And that's one of the things that is most significant about digital technology. It produces a problem of meaning, which I believe is exactly parallel, in our own time, to the kind of problem of meaning that Husserl was analyzing.
Am Johal 14:22
Later in the book, you're talking about the living body and ontology of labour. I imagine parts of this part of the book have been taken up by others, but wondering if you can speak a little bit to that part.
Ian Angus 14:35
Yeah, well, this connects very much to your previous question. I suggested before that most phenomenological Marxism has put the two traditions together through the problem of reification. I do discuss that but I put more emphasis on the living body. The living body is the source of perceptual verification of scientific abstraction in Husserl. And, and it is in Marx, the activity of labour, which grounds all human society and culture. So this analysis of the living body in the central part of the book I call the ontology of labour. Labour as a form of basic being of the, of humans. And this connects to the problem of digital technology, which occurs twice in the book. It comes up as I was just discussing as a problem of meaning and the crisis of meaning through reification. But it comes up again, in the second part of the book as digital technology in terms of its use in labour processes. And what are the potentialities of this kind of development? There's a huge amount of discussion on this, these days, a lot of writing, some of which is very specific and descriptive. But there is a line of thought which has suggested that there is a communist potential in digital labour. I started out quite skeptical towards this. But when I've worked out my analysis of transversality, and the relation between the function of information as both knowledge and transmission, it seemed to me that there was indeed a genuine possibility that workers who produce knowledge and digital content simultaneously can transfer it to other co-workers. And people can work together—as you know, when manuscripts and so on we all do this these days—without a hierarchical organization of that process of labour. So that the process of digital labour in itself, there are other factors, but in itself, I believe does have a communist potential. And I came to agree with Vercellone and other, other thinkers who have suggested this. To my own surprise, actually.
Am Johal 16:54
In the book, you have that sort of discussion around excess. And I'm wondering if you can speak about in Husserl how he uses that word, or that term.
Ian Angus 17:07
Husserl doesn't use it. So that's a very easy one to answer. The term excess comes out of the ontology of labour. And it's a central feature of Marxism, that human labor produces more than it needs to sustain itself. So that you can have in class societies, there's a class that takes away that surplus and enjoys it. But more importantly, there's a basic phenomenon that human society can accumulate things from the past—develop culture, develop knowledge, develop technology—precisely because people were not absolutely exhausted every day simply surviving. Now, we know very well—and this Marxist component is very important—that some people were kept in that condition while other people took the surplus. I don't ever want to forget that. However, that excess, that surplus productivity would be the term in Marxist terminology. That surplus productivity is the basis for human history, and human culture, and human development. Now, generally speaking, in Marxism, that has been attributed to the forms of the organization of labourers, specifically capitalism, which becomes more productive than previous systems, and so forth. And goes, could go on about that analysis. But I, in my analysis of Marx, and indeed of the phenomenon itself of the ontology of labor, I suggest that human surplus productivity rests on the surplus productivity of nature itself. So I call that in the first place natural fecundity. Human labour can produce more because nature always produces more. But it produces more in what we might call a wild way. That is to say, an undomesticated way. Domestication is the formation or control of growth for human purpose. Nature produces in a wild way. So these two phenomenon together, human surplus productivity and the fecundity of nature, I call excess. I regard that as a fundamental category of the ontology of labour.
Am Johal 19:23
I saw you recently at Andrew Feenberg's talk, and I know that you've been in discussion with him about your own book, and I'm wondering around some of those discussions that you've had with Andrew.
Ian Angus 19:34
Well, yes, since Andrew came to SFU, whatever it was, 10 or 15 years ago, we've become good friends. And we've had a lot to talk about—his basis in the Frankfurt School and also his interest in phenomenology. He's got a foot much more strongly inside one side of that and me and the other, but we have had a lot to talk about. And he wrote an extended review of the book, which was published in Thesis Eleven, which was really a very good review, talked about, really the problem of reification in the first part of my book, and connected it to his work on the critique of technosystems and the relation between technosystems and social movements. Now, that's something which I've actually worked on myself—social movements, not so much techno systems, in his meaning of the word. But I hadn't kept that in my mind when I was writing the book, I had to drop a number of threads just to finish the damn thing. But Andrew picks this up very, very strongly in his review, and Thesis Eleven kindly asked me to respond. And I responded basically by agreeing with everything he said, that my critique of formal abstraction in the first part of the book is essentially, in social terms, a critique of technosystems. And in that sense, quite compatible with his analysis of how social movements reform technosystems, and they're not just simply static phenomena. I did—just to say one more thing, though, I did say in the response that I thought that the ontology of labour that I propose in the second part of the book is a necessary grounding for that critique, which I don't know whether Andrew agrees with that or not.
Am Johal 21:28
Yeah, essentially, that's what I was gonna ask you, is around the ontology of labour and why that's important. But you've already answered that briefly. But if you wanted to add a bit more to that, I think it's an important aspect of the book.
Ian Angus 21:41
Okay. The general answer to that is, it's all very well to critique abstractions, and reification, and so on. But it's always done with the intention of returning to something which is more concrete, which isn't such an abstraction, which is more engaging, shall we say? That has to be talked about at the same time. And I would suggest that that's what I'm talking about it in the analysis of the living body in the ontology of labor. So that it's all very fine, really, to work on one aspect of this problem. But philosophically speaking, it's important to notice that the abstraction is always built upon a concrete activity. This is a general thing about 20th century philosophy, it puts practical activity before thoughts and abstractions, not in an ethical or moral sense, but in in a practical sense, that thought comes from activity. So to have a complete philosophical view, one has to talk about that as well.
Am Johal 22:42
Wondering, in terms of your relationship to phenomenology now, how you view your own work is different than Husserl. And also, if you could speak a little bit to kind of the, the Eurocentrism? You've, you've spoken a bit about it before related to Husserl, on how you kind of evaluate that aspect of philosophy, how to recover its good parts or its interesting parts.
Ian Angus 23:10
Okay, that's a really good question. And, and let me take it in two parts, holding the Eurocentrism later. Husserl was interested in a critique of the domination of a certain scientific paradigm over our thinking in general. But he was very much in favour of science, as I am as well. But he thought that phenomenology and philosophy should be a kind of a... I call it in the book "encyclopedic" following Enzo Paci. It could be an encyclopedic conception of the sciences, and that the concrete would come out of this unity. Now, a couple of things about that. One, I don't think anybody or even any coordinated group of people can totalize the sciences like that nowadays. But two, the question that Paci already asked, if that were possible, does that mean this these people should be something like the vanguard? Would they be something like the Leninist Party or something like that? To really mix two different traditions. But that's not viable. So my book suggests that really the problem of the relation between phenomenology and the sciences, is that any different scientific paradigm or knowledge paradigm in general—because there is some that we might not consider scientific, certainly not in the Euro tradition, European tradition—needs to be criticized through its relationship back to the lived world from which it emerges and which it continually alters and changes. Individually rather than totalizing them all taking them one by one. So this is part of what I'm trying to do, for example, with digital culture and so on, the claims to knowledge in the digital culture. So that's different and it's importantly different. It amounts to what I call in the book Socratic phenomenology. Socrates not being the proponent of any kind of form of organized scientific or parascientific knowledge. But being involved in criticism of claims to knowledge in relationship to their lived basis. So that conception of Socratic phenomenology is definitely not in Husserl. And not... It will be hard for me to say how widespread it might be or how widely accepted it might be. [I] haven't got any any news on that yet. Second question, about Eurocentrism. Now, this is something that Husserl has been accused of, by Jacques Derrida and also by others. And I think it's basically true, but it's one of those—Eurocentrism is one of those terms now that can be thrown around with impunity, pretty much, because nobody's going to stand up and say the opposite sort of thing. So it really is a question of what is Eurocentrism? Well, I first started out by trying to analyze it within phenomenology and Husserl. But if I jump over that quickly, I tried to state a position in the book, which suggests that access to transcendentality, which we haven't talked about yet, but which is my reformulation of the transcendental ego in Husserl. Access to transcendentality is possible from any one of a number of what I call—the term I use in the book is culture civilizations. Now, it it was recognized in phenomenology by Husserl and others, that the things that we see and the actions that we recognize in the world are, in a certain sense, not determined, but encased within a life world, in his terminology, or a world. The world of Indian civilization is different than the world of European civilization. And more pertinent to our situation here, the world of Indigenous people, is indifferent to the world of European settler people. So I tried to develop a multi-centered conception of access to transcendentality, while suggesting that transcendentality is itself a unity. That is to say, what is transcendentality? That's awfully hard to say. But what it is, is the basis for human knowledge, or the analysis of human knowledge, which I think is open to everyone. And I think this part, the universality aspect of this is really important, because nowadays, there are many tendencies that try to push us back into "you belong here, you belong here, you belong there." And I think that's ultimately very destructive. But the other aspect of that, that this culture has its virtues, and its access to knowledge. And this one has another one. This is the important part of that. So I think that I tried to formulate a way of talking about that.
Am Johal 28:17
Wondering, around Husserl's influence today. We had this conversation earlier about, you know, there's philosophers like Alain Badiou, who, you know, picks up Husserl's work through studying with Sartre. And, of course, his own father was a mathematician. And so there's a there's a big part of his sort of political project built around systematization. And, he doesn't use word maybe "transcendental" as often as he does "universal," but I think those things are tied together in some kind of way. If you were to kind of place Husserl's work and why it matters today, or its ongoing influence in philosophies, [as it] continues to be mentioned and taken up by others.
Ian Angus 28:59
You know more about Badiou than I do, so I can't speak specifically to any influence by Husserl. But there, the giving of a significant role to mathematics is common to them both. Badiou draws the conclusion that one doesn't begin with any ontology, or at least an ontology with any kind of a content. He calls it just an X, right, begin with an X. And of course, once you're into there, you're talking about abstract relations with which mathematics, the importance of mathematics is that it's the most rigorous formulation of abstract relations. So you're straight into that, Husserl comes at it from a different angle, though he does analyze exactly that. This is what is meant by formalizing abstraction. Abstraction to an X, or what Husserl calls an "anything whatever." And in this, I mean, there's a great book to be written on exactly this, I'm not the person to do it, but this is... Understanding this, if you tried to jump over it as Heidegger did, or others have tried to do, you can't grasp what is very specific about the modern age. And, and that is this unprecedented abstraction, which develops the possibility of sciences and knowledges that go way beyond our immediate experience. And yet come to affect our immediate experience. So that then there's this reification problem. So that is where I would see the connection between these two and I, I do know some people who are more influenced by Badiou than I am. And I would love to talk more about this.
Am Johal 30:39
And in terms of Husserl's ongoing sort of influence in philosophy today, others who are taking up his work, I'm wondering if you could speak to that?
Ian Angus 30:49
Well, there is a lot of... Phenomenology has come back, it disappeared, not entirely, but it just went down in terms of its general influence for quite a while and has come back. There is still a lot of that work, which is scholarly commentary, basically, another book on, you know, Husserl's concept of this or so-and-so's way of thinking about that. I don't want to disparage that too much. Because it's, it's important work. And quite often, for somebody thinking for themselves, it's a first step or a second step towards getting to what they want to say themselves. So that's okay. But I do think the vast majority of phenomenological work these days doesn't step beyond what has essentially been achieved or commentary on what has been achieved. Now, that's quite a lot. But the point is to step beyond a bit, and I'm not the most plugged in guy these days, so I don't, I can't really sort of name for you, the people I think are doing the best kind of work. I find a lot of PhD students and postdocs that I meet at conferences and places like this look like in the next few years, they're going to do some really good work.
Am Johal 31:59
Wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you take up existentialism in the book.
Ian Angus 32:06
Yes, well, existentialism and phenomenology have always been very tightly connected together, especially through the influence of phenomenology in France where Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, De Beauvoir took up what they understood immediately as the, the intuitive and direct aspect of phenomenology. And they developed it into existentialism, and that influenced me a lot as a young fellow, but less as the years went on. I became more interested in perhaps more rigorous philosophy than that. But in the course of doing this book, something came back to me which is—not quite the same, but very similar—which is, we talked briefly about transcendentality. In phenomenology, the basis of philosophy is doing something. That is called transcendental phenomenological reduction. It involves setting aside of assumptions, not denying assumptions, but setting them aside, putting them on the shelf while you investigate the meaning of things. It opens up—people think it sets things away and cuts you down, it actually opens up the world of meaning, without having to worry about what is the status of these things, and so forth. Now, because of this, right in the middle of the most systematic kind of phenomenology in Husserl, there is an act, which he says you must perform. And he describes it and talks about doing it himself. It was discovered, I believe, in 1905, there was a specific summer, and he was on holiday when he came across this, right? So it's a human experience that can be described and passed on to others. And it must be done in the first person, it must be done oneself. Now, if all of that is so, when you write a long book like mine, you have to at some point account for your own coming to see this and coming to perform it and coming to do it. So there is, what I call in the book, the necessity for an existential narrative. That is you have to look at your own life and describe it in such a way, not in all of its, you know, ups and downs, and heres and there, and whatever. But what leads you to some kind of philosophical standpoint, and some philosophical, hopefully, insight. So, there is a chapter in the book, which is an odd chapter and I don't know what people are going to make of it, which is that I give a short version of basically a lot of my previous work as an immigrant to Canada, as somebody who is very strongly influenced by by my mother's embrace of Canada by my mother's insistence that we would become Canadians. And that later led me into Canadian studies, into some studies of multiculturalism, some critiques of the role of the state in Canada, and in the end to a critique of Empire, which is kind of the final point in some ways of that work for me. So I give a narrative of this—oh, and then up to my small, especially compared to other people, my small involvement in the TMX struggle, and therefore an opening, which I think many of us feel here now who are not of Indigenous background, the necessity to change our views and change our actions to, to live better with the original people here. So I give this story. And this story is, indeed, I think, what has led me to this conception of intercultural philosophy. So it's some kind, it's not exactly an existentialism, but it's the importance of this first person perspective. I wanted to affirm that because almost everybody that I've ever met, who starts to study or read philosophy or think about it seriously does so because of intense personal questions, things they want to answer. But the people who are drawn into it as some kind of profession, usually forget about that. Many of the people who have that still burning within them drop out of it, because it's, it becomes more professionalized [and] doesn't seem to answer those questions. Now, you can't, these are not questions you can answer for another person, right? It has to be a personal journey, a personal struggle. But I do think that it's important, especially for someone like me, who is now coming to the end of his, certainly the end of his career, and I'm at the tail end of my life, though, hopefully not at the very end. But, you know, it's important to say this, because it is part of trying to recover the genuine center of an intellectual tradition, away from all this institutional baggage and nonsense. And for the people who need it. You know, as Socrates knew, very early on, it's the young people who have the burning need to investigate, you know, and it's important that the that this be recognized as a genuine part of the issue,
Am Johal 37:37
We must corrupt the young, Ian.
Ian Angus 37:41
Were it so easy [laughs].
Am Johal 37:46
Ian, I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to, now that you've completed this project, it's out in the world, are there future books that you want to take on now that you have the professor emeritus status? Your time, I'm sure it gets taken up in different ways. But are there some unfinished philosophical projects you still have on the backburner?
Ian Angus 38:08
Well, there's certainly a lot that's unfinished, that is for sure. And one of the things that's happened since this book has come out is that I've been invited to give, [to] write essays on various aspects of the things. So I've tried to take the arguments a little further, to sharpen up the connection between phenomenology and the Frankfurt School, for example. So I'm doing that at this time, and I'm staying away from books, because they take a long time. And the great thing about essays, you know, 10-15,000 words, something like that, is that you can pick them up, get very involved with them for a while and then finish it. Nine years was a long time to spend on this, and I don't anticipate doing anything of that size anymore. And my energy is flagging a bit as well. So I, I would be insane to take on that, something that big.
Am Johal 39:06
Now that you've had some distance teaching, from SFU, I'm wondering if you have any reflections of your time as a professor at SFU, because you would have gone through a lot of changes inside the institution. Things that get taken up politically, institutionally different culture wars that happened in that long sweep.
Ian Angus 39:29
It's very true, very true. And towards the end of my time teaching, and being an active member of the university, I did—my attention was drawn very much towards the changes in the institution, the corporatization of the institution, the financialization of it. The way in which the institution of the university—not just SFU but basically all universities anywhere as far as I can see, I'm happy to note about exceptions—have become a part of the functioning capitalist system. And they were always least when I encountered it, that late 60s, it was part of the capitalist system, but it was at an arm's length, you know? There was a kind of space where thought could happen, where more experimentation could happen. And that's definitely what attracted me to the university. So I did get involved in a number of political battles along the way, trying to maintain this. And I know many people who are not perhaps, so much on the left, but nevertheless do value the University, have been involved in these things, too. But on a whole, we've lost I think, and it was a moment for me when I realized, talking to a student, that I couldn't recommend a vocation in the university anymore, the way I had for many years. And when I came to that point, I wrote a short book about the university and what I thought was going on. And so I don't feel very optimistic about that. And I have been, I think, supportive of various kinds of attempts to create para-university structures outside the university. Yeah, there would seem to be hope for some cafe culture, and things of that nature in town here for a while. I think we have to look for other spaces. And to some extent, social movements have opened spaces for such discussions. But they have their downside as well, which is that they're usually focused on something very immediate. It's both the downside and upside, because to make something happen, you have to be focused on something immediate. But the sense of more unrestrained thinking, which is what I think the university is supposed to provoke, it's hard to find anywhere.
Am Johal 41:56
I was going to bring up as well, somebody who you knew well, Jerry Zaslove, who's been a guest on our show, of course, and someone who I've always enjoyed spending time with, [who was] really supportive of the work of our office. But he set up many institutions and structures to allow that space to happen. Of course, we, we miss Jerry dearly. In fact, he came to my graduate Liberal Studies class a few months before he passed away to talk about Walter Benjamin's critique of violence. But wondering if you could share some of Jerry's influence in the university, particularly at SFU, given that he started in the original faculty of 1965.
Ian Angus 42:41
Well, Jerry was very important to me, and I miss him dearly. He, he is the one who roped me into the Institute for the Humanities in about 1993 or '94, something like that, then into the undergraduate program of the Humanities, and after that, the Department of Humanities, so I owe him a great deal. Which, luckily, I got a chance to tell him before he died. But he had a wide influence. He was both native to the university and outside it as well, almost with equal intensity, which is a rare thing. And he, in pulling me towards the Institute of the Humanities, he basically gave me a home in the university, which I still maintain to this day, a department or other kinds of program couldn't have given me, so I have so many memories of him, it's hard to hard to pick one at this point.
Am Johal 43:43
Well, thank you for joining us on Below the Radar.
Ian Angus 43:47
Thank you very much, Am.
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Kathy Feng 43:52
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Ian Angus. You can learn more about his work and writing in the show notes. If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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