These days when I think about careers in academics and indeed the academic project in general, I also tend to think of onerous burdens; the way in which the achievement of a productive life in the academic mainstream is a clear symbol also for a decayed and limited personal life, forsaken income, compromises in integrity and creativity, and a kind of repressed despair that results in some way from betrayed idealism.

Sometimes it strikes me that this runs in strong parallel to what we presume when we see someone that is successful, in an honorable way, in politics, particularly at the local level.

And of course in both cases, there is also the secondary truth that when we see someone in either field that is tremendously well-known and successful, we also tend to know that they have “sold out,” that they have traded integrity for financial success, have darkened their legacy with unseemly and untoward dealings of various kinds, and so on.

And in both cases, we increasingly bemoan the fact that the best and brightest young people, and particularly the best and brightest young people with high levels of honor and personal integrity, increasingly eschew participation in both spheres, often after making a start and then experiencing disillusionment along the way.

These similarities make me think that there is a deeper cultural undercurrent here that informs both situations, one that deserves some thinking and analysis.

If only I was still in the business of doing this sort of thing. Who knows, in the future I may be again. But for the moment, I count myself amongst the number that I have just described, fully aware of the irony of the situation, and of this post.

The first inkling I had that many, many academics in the arts and letters weren’t all they were cracked up to be was when I heard some Very Serious People at a Very Serious Institution that I attended getting readings of some big theorists very, very wrong. During my second stint at grad school, this happened again.

The most obvious incorrect reading is that of Jean Baudrillard and the concept of simulation. This is almost universally fucked up by… people. Everywhere. Again I read tonight on a very prominent website, on which someone is trying to explain something to a popular audience using Baudrillard, that simulation is an “amazingly realistic copy” and that hyperreality is a “world in which the copies are more real than the original.”

Over and over again I hear this stuff, since my first stint at grad school in 2003.

NO.

Simulation is the direct production of a non-original without any original. Rather than being “made” as an original thing is, a thing is instead “simulated” into existence.

Hyperreality is a world in which there are no originals or copies, only simulations. That is the entire point of the theoretical framework. There are no copies. It is not about copies. This is not about the fidelity of copies, the fantasticness of copies, the multiplicity of copies, the modernism of copies, the acceptance of copies, or anything else involving copies.

That is the point. To oversimplify too much (but it seems necessary), there are no copies in hyperreality, nor are there originals. There are only simulations.

It is not a framework about fake realities, imperfect realities, secondary realities, derivative realities, regrettable realities, or anything else of the sort. It is not a critique of social media implying that we’d all be better off talking face-to-face. It is not a critique of mass-produced consumer goods implying that we’d all be better of with hand-crafted goods instead.

Jean Baudrillard was not agreeing, prior to the fact, with your Luddism. It is an account of a particular mode of production that is perfectly informational and cheaply and infinitely informational, and in which notions of originality and reproduction thus no longer apply because the parsimoniously identifying characteristics of the “original” and of the “copy” in previous modes of production no longer apply.

For some reason, after all these years, there is nothing that makes me more ill than the naive, simply incorrect, account of Baudrillard that is used everywhere to (darkly and incorrectly) illuminate just about everything.

Academic culture is sick, particularly in the arts and letters.

That’s not to say that the pursuit is misguided in itself, but rather that the ideological, behavioral, organizational, and interactive conventions that have come to surround and embody it are now maladaptive. It is, in effect, a culture designed to chase away anyone with brains and self-respect, despite themselves.

And, as if on cue, the Chronicle of Higher Education has begun to police their comments section heavily to quiet the disaffected voices of young academics that have lost hope or that are leaving the academy behind. Rather than embrace their relevance as a space of discourse on the present and future of academic production in the United States, they have become metonymous of the problem itself by simply disallowing comments on any story likely to rouse the rabble and heavily moderating comments elsewhere to ensure that only “the right kind” of comments are allowed.

The result is very tweedy, very demonstrative of serious restraint and discretion, and very fake. It’s bullshit, like much of what passes for inquiry and academics these days—and I don’t mean the “productivity” (articles, books, etc.) but rather the epistemic and cultural regime that surrounds them.

There’s a reason that STEM is where it is relative to the arts and letters, and it’s not entirely to do with the rational-instrumentalist ethos of a technology-capitalist society, or with the historical specificity of the trajectory of the patriarchy, etc. Some of it is because the STEM folks are more interested in their present work and in doing/seeing more of the same from others than in preserving their social privilege, status, and identity. (And, N.B. converse to the point, the present work that they are interested in is emphatically not that self-same social privilege, status, and identity, which they find to be boring.) They’re just too damned geeky to give a shit about what’s going on around them; they can’t stop thinking about their robot/laser/proof/etc.

That this enthusiasm is lacking in the arts and letters to such an extent that the enterprise becomes an often transparently self-serving exercise in posturing and public performance tells me that either some much-maligned names have been correct and history is over or that the Right People that the arts and letters are trying to protect are, in fact, the Wrong People in a national and incestuous club of middle-school cliques and intrigues, with the Actual Right People mostly operating and doing interesting work elsewhere, where there is no “game to play.”

This begs a rhetorical question: Where have all the arts and letters geeks gone?

No, not the professoriate. The geeks. And why are they no longer one and the same?

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Whenever you find yourself saying “I don’t have time to…” it should be taken as a strong clue that you very much need to tell yourself to “make time to…”