I haven't read the interview yet (I plan to), but I want to highlight Graham Harman's post on Andrian Johnston's interview, here.
I've been telling people for the past few months that I feel the anti-anthro crowd, in all various and contradictory forms, is gaining ground within the academy. And because the cutting edge is always to be opposed to whatever the cutting edge is, I assume to see a pro-anthro backlash. I'm not blaming Johnston of any of this. I've never meet him, and everyone I know who knows him says he is a great guy and a sincere intellectual. However, I really do assume that the pro-humanism or pro-anthropocentrism conference is on the horizon. The special issue for anthropocentrism will be coming out in journals soon, In Defense of Humans or whatever will be a title forthcoming book. You know it's coming.
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This is a weird kind of pre-ad hominem. It seems to suggest that your opponents will only hold their views because they are part of a movement, while your allies hold their views completely independently.
Wouldn't it be better to say that when a view becomes popular within the academy, but it's still only popular with a subset of true believers, it needs a few critical articles and some scholarly resistance in order to spread beyond the true believers into the previously indifferent? Before that, it's been an affinity group, scholars with shared pedigree, for instance: after the backlash, many will have seen that the weakness of the criticism is reason to change their minds.
Or, alternatively, the criticism won't be weak, and there'll be time to reformulate and respond. But in either case, I think we should be glad of our critics. Sometimes, they're the only people who are really reading our work carefully.
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