Don’t know as I start this whether this post is going to go onto the blog or into the archives. Why do some things go into the archives? Most common reason is because they’re too boring and abstract to go onto the blog (and you thought the blog was boring and abstract).
What I do know is that I feel compelled to type, and to potentially type a lot. For most of the afternoon, every single though that’s passed through my head became a chain of thoughts and then a full-on sequence of musings, and each time I thought that it ought to be on the blog.
Now that I’m actually sitting down to write because I just can’t take it any longer and need to start typing rather than merely thinking about typing, what invariably happens will happen all over again:
- I will suddenly have no idea what to type
- I will suddenly get very sleepy and that will be that
I have no doubt that some of this comes down to psychology. My psyche is giving me the bum steer for some reason when it comes to thinking these days. Maybe for a lot of reasons. But the only solution to the problem of “I am not allowing myself to think for some reason” is to continue to think and peel the god damned onion.
— § —
My committee chair and I haven’t spoken in a while. I’ve love to speak to him. He’s a good man and a friend. We’ve talked off and on about setting up a time to catch up this spring, and over the last 48 hours or so he has reached out to me to see if we can chat. I haven’t responded.
The reason for this is that I frankly don’t know what to say. That sounds like a bad reason not to speak with a friend, and it is, but it’s very me. I hate speaking with people when I don’t know what to say, when I don’t know what my feelings or thoughts are.
The contemporary virtue-signalling position is that “I listen to everyone, and I’ll listen to you, so share with me what’s on your mind and I won’t judge, because I’m here to hear you, because you matter and it’s all okay” and so on and so forth. And I’m sure he’ll be just like that.
But I’m going to be the contrarian and honestly say what people won’t allow themselves to think: someone who literally does not know which three words to string together is not a good conversation partner, and high-minded non-judgmentalism does not change this fact.
— § —
Academics right now is all of the following to me:
- Cipher
- Hazy memory
- Distasteful morass
- Insurmountable mountain
Probably a few other things besides.
Yes, I did get to talking the other day with one of my best friends, who is staying with me for a little while, about Dialectic of Enlightenment, One-Dimensional Man, and the Frankfurt School and ISR crowd as a whole in the context of intellectual history and the juncture between politics, social science, philosophy, and cultural criticism.
And it was exhilarating to be talking about such things again, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
But academics is not about such things. Academics is about publications and the job market. And I have been out of that game for years now. And for good reasons:
- The job prospects are terrible
- It is not a good job even if by some miracle you get it
- Getting it requires far more than a miracle; it also requires heroic self-crucifixion
I’m just not interested. That’s the part that’s difficult to talk about with other academics, because of course they conflate the two. The job is the books, the books are the job, the journals are merely a medium, and so on.
Well, no.
In the time I’ve had to reflect since getting my Ph.D. I’ve come more and more to the opinion that academics and academe by and large have little do to with inquiry or research. It is a kind of coincidence of marketplace activity that the two are related, sort of like when General Electric ends up putting out a line of flying discs or dog toys at one subsidiary or another.
The fact that this happens does not indicate, contra appearances, that General Electric and petkeeping really and necessarily have anything to do with one another.
Academics is rent-seeking on an industrial scale as people pass through the part of life’s river known as “youth.” The particular contents are irrelevant. Yes, there are many people in it that love the books, but that’s merely good business—good marketing strategy. It’s not at all unlike eBay’s business model in connecting buyers and sellers together.
On one side of the room we have some people who absolutely love books and journals—so much that they will work under horrible conditions and almost for free at a thousand other things if only they get the chance to read and write a lot of books and journals. They come incredibly cheaply, will work extended hours, and accept all manner of indignity so long as they can continue to read and write a lot of books and journals.
On the other hand we have the youth, who—by a combination of patronage, lobbying, blackmail, and other strategic behaviors often bordering corruption—are now essentially forced (or at least believe they are being forced, which often comes to the same thing in the end) to travel up this stretch of river in order to reach adulthood and receive an income of any kind.
The professoriat stands on the banks of the river and lifts the rope, but the money collected goes to the rent-seekers, who happily pocket it and reinvest it into the aforementioned youth campaign(s) to ensure that a steady supply of rivergoers continues to pass by—that no-one disembarks and ends up walking along the bank instead.
And the professoriat are promised that they can read and write as many books and journals as they wish between rope-liftings and toll-collectings, so long as they do not slow the flow of traffic or fail to collect in any one case. They simply have to work it all in. (They are also promised that the reading and writing that they do in between toll-collectings and rope-liftings is tremendously valuable and laudable and will be read by everyone, which serves as an incentive to certain high-minded sorts of people, as well as to certain insecure sorts of people.)
But in fact what is going on is that the reading and writing is done on a riverbank and comes to nothing in the broader world. The rivergoers are poorer for having passed up the river, and don’t feel as though the rope-lifting was a particularly beneficial exercise worth the price that they’ve paid for it. The estate owners happily reassure both, pocket the tolls, and enjoy their life in the manor.
And it all happens out on the river, far away from much of anything else, and comes to nothing in particular.