Irene Klaver: Activism in Academia

An Interview with Irene Klaver by Lara Wallentine

Irene Klaver

The following is a five-part interview with Irene Klaver, a professor with the department of philosophy and religion studies at the University of North Texas. Klaver's first semester with the department was in the spring of 2000. She had been teaching at California State University-Stanislaus prior to her move to Texas. Klaver received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. She has won several academic awards including a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in 1997, and a Fulbright Fellowship for study in the United States between 1987 and 1993. Klaver, originally from the Netherlands, received her B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy, and her M.A. in Political Theory from the University of Amsterdam. Klaver has been on two editorial boards, taken part in several invited lectures and presentations, and her work has been published in numerous philosophical journals. For the future, Klaver hopes to establish a more interdisciplinary learning space for the environmental science and environmental philosophy programs at UNT.

When I was looking over your curriculum vitae and all the information I could find on you, specifically, your studies around the world and the extensive amount of work and research you've done, the first question that came to my mind is, "How did you end up in Denton?"

Mainly because of the program and the possibility to do serious work in philosophy and combine it with working with some of the scientists so that it combines the interdisciplinary aspect of philosophy and that's really the trajectory of my whole career. And the disciplines I've hooked up with have been shifted, but for me, philosophy is intrinsically an interdisciplinary enterprise.

It seems like it's changing a lot more, going toward becoming more interdisciplinary. A lot of your studies have been interdisciplinary.

From the beginning, my studies have been interdisciplinary. My background is in political theory with a minor in philosophy, actually. So, for example, my M.A. thesis was about the necessity of having unplanned places in cities. It was basically a dissertation about city planning. The theme on necessity of indeterminacy is still there as a basic component of my work, but has shifted from the city to a larger sense of the environment. I think philosophy is at its best when it's a philosophy of something. Or that philosophy is always thinking about something.

But why did you decide to come here, why not somewhere else?

Because in a so-called normal philosophy department, you are often the only one who is interested in environmental thought and often you have to defend that, giving a legitimation for why. Usually they talk about applied philosophy, [saying it] is legitimate philosophy. I would question the reduction of environmental philosophy to applied philosophy. For me, it's not just about applying philosophy to a practice but philosophy itself is intrinsically practical. That does not mean that it is necessarily directly useful for a practice, but it's always beginning with analyses or an account of a certain practice or a certain experience...thinking about the experiential. So, in traditional departments, you have to defend environmental philosophy, you are often the only one who's interested in it, and you are looked at with kind of skeptical eyes. Then you have to create relationships with the other departments. And the other departments are not necessarily inviting such as the biology department or an environmental studies department. That whole problem is dealt with here. It is already, structurally, architecturally, without building, dealt with. There's still a lot of work to be done to get a real good department but there's already a basic set-up for that interdisciplinary activity.

So you felt like you wouldn't have to fight here, you wouldn't have to start from ground zero?

It's not only the fight because there's a lot of fighting to do here, but the fight can be done on much more of an advanced level. You don't have to deal with the basics of showing that it is worthwhile, which takes away a lot of possible energy towards exploring interesting questions. As I said, there's lots to be done here, but there's a willingness to cooperate and work together and there's a lot of possibility of going to each other's lectures, and mixture with the students, the environmental scientists. So interdisciplinary work, it's in the air, we breathe it in and out, it's right here.

What courses would you like to teach, what do you look forward to doing?

I look forward to teaching an interdisciplinary course. The next thing is I'm working with is Tom LaPoint to set up a course about the issues of water.

Did you see Sandra Postel speak when she was here?

Oh yeah, [Sandra Postel] was a phenomenal speaker. That kind of brought Tom and me together. We really should develop a course and hopefully it will become a core course. That's one of the things I want to fight for. Because now those kinds of courses are always up to the individual teacher as part of a special problems course or a philosophy of ecology course and the teacher, him or herself, can fill that in the way they want. But I really hope, given the expertise of our environmental science department that we will get a core course about water. One of the interesting things that Sandra Postel emphasized was the cultural attitude towards water is something that should be dealt with, not only policy issues which are utterly underdeveloped in the realm of water. And it will only become more important. I just heard on the radio that for the first time in history the government has issued a spring report about drought and drought in the coming year will be even larger than the '98 - '99 drought. The whole area east of the Mississippi is subject to a serious drought this year. You have to start to thinking differently about the availability of water, your attitude towards water, all of which has dramatic consequences of course for agriculture. One of the issues, the political aspects, are tremendous and philosophy could come in there, thinking about political philosophy but also in the realm of cultural acceptance of water.

There's a beautiful little book by Ivan Illich, H2O: Out of Waters of Forgetfulness, which shows a change in history of our respect for water: from our capacity for washing away water or our capacity of forgetfully washing away whatever is attached to you, to his sheer mechanical image of water, H2O, which just comes out of the pipes--kind of the domestication of water. I'm very interested in the problems of domestication. And domestication of water is a wonderful, wonderful area to explore that also entails a rethinking of the place of the American Corp of Engineers.

So where Sandra Postal wanted to give a positive place to philosophy, she was also very insecure about how to do that and then also how easily people slip into what she literally calls "touchy-feely" subjects. She acknowledged later that philosophy is way more than the touchy-feely area of our lives.

When you say "the problem of domestication," what do you mean by that exactly?

Domestication means literally to conform [land] to the human "domos," the human house. So part of my writing is about the de-domestication of whatever...not just thinking about animals and what the term is usually used for--the domestication of horses, cows and so forth. But also in more abstract terms such as water or the domestication of ourselves, and especially domestication in the sense of closing the doors. With that I mean symbolically, the shutting out of possibilities, of thinking in terms of openness, but instead of that you have the stratification of life. So with the domestication of water, you're not only thinking of tap water, and the pipes, but also the stratification of rivers, the damming of rivers, and the whole levy system or the concrete sluicing of water or for that matter the larger domestication around the river, the eradication of wetlands or the clear-cutting of the mountains which is a more subtle straight-jacketing of the river. There's a lot to think about in this field. It's really a course I'm looking forward to developing in the program in a serious way. It would be a nice example of the fruitful, possible relationship between the strength of the environmental science program here which has a lot of focus on water, and the contribution of a philosopher to that. I'm convinced it would enhance the minds of the environmental scientists.

It sounds like you really came here because you were intrigued by the interdisciplinary groundwork that has been established and also, you came here with the hopes that you could encourage that.

Yes, definitely, for our own [philosophy] students as well for the environmental science students. And there was another reason for coming: I liked the idea that graduate students, philosophy and environmental science graduate students, would be here with the same intentionality or at least a clear, focused interest in environmental issues.

Let's start at the very beginning. Where are you originally from?

A town north of Amsterdam, Alkmaar [in the Netherlands]. For everyone in that area, Amsterdam was the place to go to. In high school, I had already gone a lot to Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a really interesting city to live in, to be a student in. There are a lot of cultural, political events, all kinds of theaters, but also social/political cafes...in short, a perfect place to be a student in or to live in. I still love Amsterdam. There's a lot of possibilities to be a student and to be active in all kinds of projects.

What did you do when you were there?

There were all kinds of different phases I went through. I lived there for quite a long time. [From 1977] and part of the '80s. Amsterdam is a wonderful place to explore many identities. I think it's good when people have that opportunity and so I explored quite a few of them varying from going out to discos to being a hardcore activist in the squatter movement and those are very different identities.

What is the squatter movement?

The squatter movement was occupying houses that were meant for speculation and to get them out of speculation so we could turn them into serious housing units again. Our biggest success was squatting a big building in the center of the city which had been a building for a newspaper but the tendency in the early development of Amsterdam was that a lot of the large businesses went to the outskirts of town so you get a kind of emptying of the town. This was a huge building which covered a whole square. And the city was planning to make a parking garage there which was outrageous since it was a beautiful part of Amsterdam, and it was just behind the royal palace, just in the heart of Amsterdam. We occupied the building with 100 people. They were afraid because the coronation of the new queen, Beatrix, was coming up, which involved tons of diplomats and foreign ambassadors, and kings and queens and presidents and a lot of journalists. The city council was just afraid that we would make a big upheaval. And you know, we threatened to do that, we threatened to use smoke bombs. The squatter movement turned violent later but in that period in the early '80s, it was benevolent violence, not real violence. But you can ruin things pretty good without killing people. So they obeyed our demands which was pretty amazing. They bought the buildings and they made housing for young people. And that's what it still is now.

A lot of [the buildings] were beautiful 17th and 16th century little houses, some of the oldest houses [in Amsterdam] were there. It was just magnificent. I lived there with five women. We had a women's house but we were connected to the big house also. It was really a commune of 100 people and downstairs were places for artists, music, but also painting and sculpture. And there were little shops like bike shops. It was a total sub-culture of all kinds of enterprising little things. And a lot of those people actually became pretty successful, in a more commercial way, later on. There were a lot of forefront people who with the kind of energy they had in the early 80s turned different. They changed their identity but they still had a similar core of intensity and often they became very successful in whatever they did.

In that period, I studied mainly political science but not so much at the university. We had a lot of our own reading clubs and reading societies. We just gathered. One of the people who joined our intellectual clubs was a famous professor in political science. He was very helpful in getting me through a lot of the official requirements, though I was way beyond them, but I needed them to get my degree. It was in this period that I didn't care for a degree, I didn't want to have a degree, but a major influence on getting a degree was one of my best friends from high school who went to study in Cambridge, England. He came back from Cambridge and he got a fellowship to study at the New School for Social Research in New York. He said, "Irene, you should do it too, you should get this fellowship." To be eligible, I had to have a degree.

Would you say that obtaining the Vera List Fellowship was a turning point in your life?

No, not really in the sense that one of the problems I had with a big part of the squatter movement and with a lot of the activist movements is that there was a big anti-intellectualism virulence which makes it hard for people like me who are really interested in philosophical analyses of certain developments in our society or life in general. So at the same time that I was involved in the squatter movement, I had all these reading groups with people. We read social, political and philosophical works. One group was partly related to the university, there were a couple of professors in there. And there was another group that was related to the Journal for Philosophy in the Netherlands that one of my friends had started. He was in the philosophy department in Amsterdam. There was a group that did a lot of cultural criticism and cultural analysis. We introduced Foucault in the Netherlands. It was all around the journal called KRISIS, Right now, it's one of the more interesting journals in the Netherlands. So I was always involved in those groups and there were people that were very dedicated to political and social analyses, and political philosophy or cultural philosophy. Some of them were active in other social movements but within the squatter movement itself, there was often a hesitation towards intellectuals. They were thought to be not active enough or not committed enough, which is hard. And often from my side, some people from the movement were not reflective enough about the consequences about what they were doing. You could just predict that it would have a totally counterproductive effect upon the whole movement. And that was what happened. The population at large of Amsterdam that was very supportive of the squatter movement in the beginning but later turned totally against it and the whole movement split up.

[Obtaining the fellowship] was not a turning point in the sense that I switched from activism to an intellectual career because for me, that happened at the same time. But it was a turning point in the sense that I decided to dedicate myself more explicitly to furthering my intellectual career because I had, in order to get to the United States, to finish my degree in the Netherlands. I was not planning to do that, I was not particularly interested in getting a Ph.D., or a degree for that matter. It meant more of a focus on my studies.

It was really interesting to come here, especially when I moved on from the New School for Social Research to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Philosophically, the New School was not that strong. One of my most influential professors, advised me to go to another school. He made a list of schools that he thought were interesting for me and one of them was SUNY, Stony Brook. When I went there, some of my fellow students, at least two of them, were activists. One of them was a very dedicated environmentalist, and the other was a dedicated lesbian feminist. I learned very soon that activism in the United States is very different from activism in the Netherlands. I would say it is more sectarian and also very exclusive and totally inwardly oriented, even though the issues are almost grotesque in wanting to reform the society at large. So there's this grotesque intentionality which I'm inclined to say leads to a totally inward vision. So you get all of these internal fights. It was interesting. I could see how social movements in the United States are so much more isolated which probably accounts for their, on one side, grotesqueness, and on the other side, their inwardness. In the Netherlands, the presence of the social movements were more of movements within society. There were many more connections to society at large. I'd say we accomplished more because it was close by which has to do, of course, with the society which is more liberal. Our enemy is not as big.

So I never felt totally at home with the activists movements here. I felt like they were kind of alienating, although my best friends were activists and I did a couple of things with them which I enjoyed. I'm always interested in what people do, but I cannot completely affiliate myself with American activist movements. I do find commonality in their concerns and their causes but I do miss the intellectual component very often, even though I started out in activism where that was lacking.

How, along the way, did you decide to become a professor?

In the way that the program is set up at Stonybrook, you very early on get into teaching. It's part of your Ph.D. program. I realized that I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed working with students and hearing what they had to say. And I also realized that I really liked to stay in philosophy. I had tried some other disciplines like psychology, but I had always found myself drawn towards a more reflective perspective. So I knew that I wanted to stay in philosophy and being a professor is virtually the only way you can make a living in philosophy unless you write that one famous book. (She laughs.)

I basically like to think together with people, to work collaboratively. I have always said that I never wanted to write something alone, so I have published a lot of works together, like they do in the sciences. I really like that. I really like that cooperation with people, that bouncing off of ideas. Though we pretend to be great thinkers ourselves, we always go beyond individualism and we should go beyond our own individualism to make an effort to show that we live in a society in which we have to do things together. We are never just one, we are always many. We have many different affiliations, and many different connections. By writing together, you affiliate with at least one other unit.

If I look at the articles that I wrote together, they are all very different, depending on the people I am writing with. So different sides and different strengths of myself are pulled out. When I am writing alone, I tend to be more literary, which I like. But a part of me is also very analytic, and especially when I write together with others, I'm always the one gives some systematism to the whole project. So a whole other side of yourself is being drawn out. I think that's the virtue and the strength of working together with people, that different aspects of yourself are being drawn out and being more grounded. And I assume that different aspects of other people are being drawn out of them.

[Working together] makes everyone and everything more complex. And if anything, my philosophy is the philosophy of complexity, to show that things have many different faces, many different answers, aspects. It's not necessarily to say that I'm against Thoreauvian simplicity. Thoreauvian simplicity is itself is not only an awareness of the complexity of things, but a celebration of it. So in that sense, my intellectualism is, for me, an activism because it is a statement against an individualistic society, it is a work that wants to show that things are multi-layered and that even our most individualistic practices, namely, being a philosopher, could and should be more cooperative. So being a professor is, for me, working together with students.

So, becoming a professor happened very organically. It was a way to make a living, but it was also because of the cooperative aspect and the working-together aspect. You have a little community going on instead of just being an intellectual at home with no affiliation to a larger group. I could never do that. The university is the most present structure in which you can gather a group around you, legitimately. You could try doing that yourself by forming a community but then you have the danger that you so easily get into a kind of sectarianism. If anything, that's something I try to fight on all levels, this notion of a closed community. Working at a university allows you to have a least a permanent flux of people coming in and out. So, your community, by definition, is a very open community. Together, with my emphasis on complexity, that's a major issue in my philosophy, to think about borders being open and porus. That ties directly into my environmental philosophy in that also there, we should think in terms of open borders. That's profoundly anti-specieism. Our moral concerns should not stop with the human species, and should even not stop with other species, but should incorporate even the inanimate realm. That should be thought of in ontological terms, not only ethical terms. I'm not much of an ethicist, ethics is not my focus. I try to think what our interaction is with the material world around us, the material realm, how much we are working within that realm how we are a part of it. On that level, the borders are open and porus.

CEP - PHIL - UNT - April 25, 2000