We recently connected with Tucker Farris and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tucker, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

Nearly a year ago I lost my best friend suddenly and out of the blue. In the waking months following his passing, I found myself struggling to cope with the suddenness of his death and the void left in the world of our fields because of his voice stopping before he’d been able to fully commit to the work and intellectualism that he was so wildly good at. He was a theorist too, someone who exists in the stark eccentricities that allow us to explore the world in new and creative ways. Our work was often contrasting but mirrored in a way where we formed the perfect symbiotic relationship for the creation of new social ideas.

Several months after his death I was cleaning out the old inbox for a university email account that I was no longer using and I came across an email he sent me with a singular attachment. It was an experimental ode to New York City he wrote out of his experiences in childhood and his development as a person based on the city that had made him. He called it “To NYC”.

I stopped when I saw that email and re-read the piece four or five times with tears in my eyes. It was brilliant. Full of images, dark reflections, and a sense of true humanity within. It was philosophy as much as it was art. I cried in re-reading it.

I realized then an incredible fact as well. No one else had ever read it. It was unfinished. Where the sidewalk had ended unexpectedly.

This is my most meaningful project as an independent publisher of radical and creative academic explorations into the cradle of human experience.

“To NYC” by William G. Cockrell is a forthcoming publication from my company Plum Publishing Co. Ltd. I cannot imagine a more meaningful homage to my best friend in death than to immortalize his most intimate reflections and artistic explorations in print.

This work is meaningful not just for the privilege I have to experience the art as editor and publisher, but for the fact that it is inherently a revolutionary and radical step towards an independent publication that steps past the follies of self-publishing and circumvents the dangers and institutional problems with academic publishing in the traditional sense.

To break free from the humdrum of the more corporate side of publication on either side of the aisle (popular vs. academic) we can transcend the binary of that which is published for the consumption of the population at large and that which is reserved for the ivory tower. This divide is important to deconstruct as the isolation of intellectualism from the public sector, specifically the world of theoretical and philosophical meditations on the human condition has (very much by design) constructed a world where the public is intentionally misled and kept away from knowledge, while on the obverse, the ivory constructs an inflated sense of elitism around access to the knowledge held in our circles.

The gatekeeping of knowledge, or rather it’s binding, is what I strive in my work to deconstruct, to allow for knowledge to be unbound and accessible.

“To NYC” is a stepping stone in that project, allowing something so raw and intimate, yet relatable and introspective to pass into the world of public and professional consumption allows for yet another chip to be taken out of that wall between ivory tower elitism and public experience of social existence.

Tucker, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Officially, I am a professor of sociology. I am not a sociologist by trade, however. Rather than existing in the attempt to scientifically describe society, I try to rewrite the missive of sociology to instead ascribe a degree of meaning for the everyday individual in their own social reality. My work centers around the idea that the individual, the person, their inner and outer experiences of the world, and the ways they meaningfully interact with the world around them lends to a sense most strongly rooted in the very nature of their being. This is a shift away from the sensibilities of modern sociology and it instead lands similarly in the world of the 1960s new age movements where authors like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson where the conventions of literary and scholastic examination blend away from the norm and into the objective subjective to construct a sense of ‘truth’ in the abscesses of the unknowable.

But my work is not simply that of a social theorist. I am not solely locked into the world of ivory tower explorations that no one but a selection of colleagues will ever read or care about.

In 2022, I founded Plum Publishing Co. Ltd. an independent academic publishing house that is specifically bound by our philosophy of “Knowledge, Unbound”. Where we have taken a stand against both the sensationalism of social texts for the public in more popular publishing streams, and also against the rigorous degrees of gatekeeping in the academic publishing circles specifically rooted in the theory and philosophy range. In traditional academic publishing, we run into the issue of the new era of peer review. The notion of peer review is important as it acts as a check on academic work to ensure that rigor exists and that the work is ethical in its production. This is not inherently problematic in theory as it protects subjects, researchers and the integrity of the work itself. However, within the realm of the radical, the forest of the eccentric, the madness of theory and philosophy that holds the potential to transform thought, the nature of contemporary peer review acts as an obstacle rather than a benefit. It limits the degree to which creators of ideas are able to stray from the normative conventions of our field. It is, to borrow a term from Hunter S. Thompson, the ideal antithesis of “Gonzo”.

Essentially, in contemporary peer review, there is a barrier of either entrenched practitioners in tenured postings who see work as needing to fit into the conventions of what they themselves know. This creates an aging feedback loop in philosophy and theory whereby the old guard ensures that all the new material is inadvertently in line with the old. It stops the progress of new discoveries of thought and being. On the other hand, we have reviewers who are new to the academy who need to assert their place in the field and do so by abiding by conventions to be accepted and promoted in the eyes of the old guard.

Neither of these parties is to blame for this problem in terms of malice or intentionality, but instead are caught up in the machine of academic publishing which has, for the past half-century evolved to be a wildly exploitative field.

Plum offers a new escape and a return to the conventions of publication of philosophical literature from the enlightenment. That is, there is no rigorous peer review of contemporary academia, and instead, the discourse of new ideas develops once they are in the space of consumption. The goal here is to reduce the rigidity of what qualifies as ‘good enough’ to publish academically. This does not mean there are no checks in place, our editorial board reviews every manuscript that is submitted to ensure academic rigor and ethical treatment, but we do not judge content beyond ensuring it is not inherently harmful ideologically speaking. Beyond that, our mission is to produce a space of academic philosophical discourse that is radical and eccentric in nature but without the need to adhere to ivory tower standards that strangle new ideas because of their departure from the old and tired ways of thinking and writing.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

My colleagues in sociology may share with us a long and winding list of what constitutes the formative elements of society.

In reality, the nature of creative exploration is the human experience. It is the driving underlying modality from which we determine both our identities and the ways by which we intersperse ourselves with other social beings in our immediate social world.

Art, creativity, and the curiosity to explore either is fundamental not only to remaining true to our nature as human beings but also to constructing and maintaining a thriving social world for our interactions to travel and develop through. Art itself is an expression of emotion, of experience, of oppression, of pain. It cannot be ignored in its social importance and intimate connection to the human space of being.

As such, it is wildly disconcerting to see how society in general treats the performance, production, and investigation of art.

I see two major issues with our approaches toward art in modern American society today. First: the world of fine art and art dealing has very explicitly hijacked the world of creativity and exploration and folded it into a world of assets, markets, and millions of dollars in exchange for work used as tax deductions and valuable assets. Letting the wealthy elite into any sacred space of humanity is bound to ruin it for the rest of us. So my first piece of advice for the public to better support artists is to stop letting the elites dictate the nature of what art is. Abolish the auction house, the art dealer, and the elites that patronize them. Support the artists in person and often. Be a patron of the arts by patronizing the art in your area.

Secondarily, the declaration of war on art at the onset of the 1990s in schools as far as funding for teachers and programs is both a horror I have experienced and one I feel stands directly as a major threat to the fundamental preservation of empathy and understanding for the human condition. Kids need to learn how to express themselves creatively, and the people specifically poised to help them develop that skill (art teachers) are losing jobs left and right and it is a major social emergency for our culture and society that we have somehow let that happen.

To solve both, I offer the simple task: if you are wealthy enough to buy a $6000.00 painting, sculpture, or installation, take that six grand and give it to your local high school’s art department rather than furnishing your home with one piece of art. Aim for the creation of hundreds more. If you cannot afford such a price tag, try your ever-best to create something yourself. Even if no one can see it. Try even in your most simplistic form to flex the ancient muscle of human creativity.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

The stereotype of the tortured artist is real. Pain is art, and art is pain. Creating is a process akin to self-administered surgery wherein you must find the malignant pieces of art within you and excise them with no anesthesia to display them for the world to see.

That is art. That is creating.

But creating art that has the potential to make things better? Creating with the goal of highlighting issues, advocating for causes, and speaking for unheard populations? That is akin to the deepest and most intensive torture of the soul itself. You are inscribing the pain of yourself as the creator, and the added social and collective pain of hundreds of faceless marginalized individuals into something consumable and that is all before you even know if it will emerge as something perceivable by anyone other than you.

That is what I share with my students and what I will share here: Art is pain, and it is suffering. All of it. Good art is where you can feel the pain empathetically through the medium, but all art itself stems from the sleep-deprived and depraved lost soul hedging their entire existence on the hope that their communication of the natural aesthetic of their being is ‘enough’ for the population to see them clearly.

Art is pain, patronizing the arts is empathy.