One Must Imagine Academics Publishing, but not Perishing

The Failed Business of Philosophy or, Nobody Grew but the Academy™

(Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art - Gustav Metzger)

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—Philosophy…? In a voice that cowered.

Ask most people what they think philosophy is and they’ll be quick to fantasize about various people sitting around in a room stroking their chins. Lecture halls and meeting rooms filled to the brim with students listening to someone develop questions and answers concerning life’s biggest questions. Why are we here? What does it all mean? Who am I? How do I publish in another journal? Why do I only do admin now?

That haunting idea of ‘The Academy’ with its legions of ‘academics’. Two terms that are thrown around very quickly and very loosely. One of those cases where we all apparently silently agree on what we mean by these things and yet never stop to question them. What even is academia anymore? Why is it that not a single academic would agree ‘the academy’ is functioning productively and yet none can see how to get clear? Why is everyone so stressed? The answer is that philosophy is a business and has been for a long time.

The culture of ‘publish or perish’ (though nowadays arguably closer to publish and perish) is no hidden conspiracy in academic circles. It’s quite simple, you either keep up the pace or you’re on your ass. But why is this? My own theory relates to the noted difference between STEM and ‘The Humanities’. Inherent within STEM is an a priori empiricism that couldn’t care less for most of what we might consider to be humanist. Either your scientific data supports the thesis or it doesn’t, either the code works or it doesn’t, either the engineered bridge holds or it doesn’t. It’s quite simple. The markers of truth and legitimacy outside of the humanities are inherently tied to verifiable findings. This is, once again, inherently the opposite of the humanities and academia. It is very much the point of philosophical, psychological, and/or artistic debate to point out matters of subjective complexity, deconstruction, and metaphysical uncertainty. There’s been a fair few who’ve thought otherwise, but lo-and-behold, a new generation comes along and those thinkers who founded ‘complete systems’ are back into the dustbin of history. The point is that the humanities, in attempting to survive beyond the 1600s, needed to find some way of quantifying that which was qualitative.

Enter books, papers, lectures, appearances, afterwords, forewords, edits, scholarships, So-and-So’s Chair positions, admin roles, and anything you can muster to add to one’s academic record. For anything to appear and, more importantly, remain legitimate, it needs some burden of proof. Doctors heal, programmers code, carpenters build, and philosophers…write papers that only (at most) 10 people read. Why do they bother, then? I mean this as no offense to academics, whose work is usually so thoroughly cited, cross-checked, and complete that one can’t help but admire the effort, yet still, who is it they’re writing for? One might try to argue that academic (humanities) papers are written for whoever wishes to read them. This might be true if it wasn’t for the fact the majority of them are hidden behind gratuitously expensive paywalls and rarely (if ever) publicized. The same holds for academic books too. Countless academic presses take an author’s hard-earned and usually beautiful manuscript, package it into a generic hardback, out-price 99% of the market, and then never market it. None of this can be defended in any productive sense as anything other than some sort of vague pyramid scheme.

I wouldn’t feel so strongly about this except, it’s not highly technical papers that only 0.0001% of the population could even understand that are being tucked away and immediately forgotten here. It’s books on philosophers, artists, and writers usually written in an accessible way. So what the hell is going on? What is the point? As I see it, the point is that the publication of papers, books, editorials, etc. is the equivalent of a quantified addition for academics (they aren’t at fault here, it’s the way she goes). When there’s no inherent empirical metric available to use as a form of legitimization of your position one needs to be developed, enter publish or perish. But what has this developed into? Ask the average humanities academic what they did on any given day and they are likely to reply ‘Oh, you know, mostly admin.’ Give them a few years inside the walls of any ‘academic establishment’ and you’ll be surprised at just how quickly they forget why they even began working there or what they even enjoyed about it in the first place. This is mirrored in the language academics use when attending conferences or talks. They’re always on about defending ideas, or attacking ideas, as if the average philosophical conference is some sort of full-scale assault on the text. It has been a long time since philosophers have just…talked about the ideas that interest them. Of course, this is of no surprise, there would be no merit (or metric) in it with regard to the process I’ve been writing about.

Books aren’t being written to be read. Papers aren’t being written to be read. Editorials are priced out of the market. Academic press marketing teams are the equivalent of intellectual anchorites. Academics themselves are largely doing ‘admin’. All the while philosophy and philosophers are being forgotten at a staggering rate due to these exact problems. This isn’t to mention the grant funding feedback loop that very quickly obliterates every philosopher barring a select few into oblivion. The loop is as follows:

THE ACADEMIC GRANT FEEDBACK LOOP

A few people write papers/books on philosopher X.

Philosopher X gains some academic popularity (fashion).

Someone wishes to write about philosopher Y.

“Well, no one really reads Y, but a lot of people are writing about X?'“

“No one reads Y because there’s nothing written on Y.”

“…people are writing about X.”

(Rinse and repeat)

Much academic production is being produced for the sake of academic production, and it would be very easy to insert a rather banal (though not entirely untrue) comment here about capitalism with regard to the academy. Something along the lines of academic work being reterritorialized as something it isn’t; the ever-fluxing, all-consuming, unidentifiable beast that is ‘Capitalism’ hoovers up another structure and wears its skin as a trophy. But what use? Further, why do I feel so passionately about such a problem? Is it not true that near enough everything has been taken in by capitalism in some form? Isn’t this Žižek’s point concerning ideology? Dare I say, however, that I feel philosophy is different from other commodification. Try as hard as one might, those commodities of sense will be appreciated or not, no effective barrier can halt my enjoyment or critique of a cup of coffee, a song, or a painting. And yet philosophy, with its rather cumbersome and dated aesthetics has managed to back itself into a corner, speaking largely to itself over and over again until retirement. Now, this wouldn’t be such a tragedy if it wasn’t for the fact that what is being tucked away (pragmatically speaking, being locked behind a very high paywall) is the discussion of what it is to be human, what it is to be. What is being financially (and therein socially) locked away is that which all men and women have a right to. Namely, what it is to be themselves, exist in society, and experience.

One way to analyze this, sticking with Žižek, would be via the oft-repeated joke about Red Ink: “A man moves from East Germany to Siberia, where he knows his letters will be censored. He establishes a code with his friends: anything written in blue ink is honest and true; anything written in red ink is false and only there to get the truth past the censors. A month goes by and the man’s friends receive a letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.”

We can easily reappropriate this joke about contemporary philosophy and academic forms of publishing: A blogger and freelance theorist moves from gig work and blogging into a tenured role as a professional academic, where he has heard his writing and papers might be stifled. He establishes a code with his friend: anything written with Chicago referencing hasn’t been tampered with or made to fit the academese style; and anything written with Harvard referencing has been altered to askew it in line with the ongoing fashions. A month goes by and the man’s friend receives an email: Purchase a PDF - Purchase this article for $34.00 USD.

This unfortunate reality abides by an often overlooked aspect of capitalist logic which is pure, ‘GDP-brained’ pragmatism. Well, this system works enough for this stuff to exist, so why change it? The very question of ‘What’s the alternative?’ begets a pathetic impotence of agency on behalf of the questioner. Even though the numbers of value and importance (readership, engagement, and communication) are almost entirely stagnant if not null-and-void, the numbers concerning the continuation of production keep on rolling. This attitude inherently finds itself in agreement with the tacit notion that ‘Well, no one really cares about this stuff anyway, so why try to change it?’ A logic that quashes any possibility of direction by entitling it as ‘Utopian’ and therein feeling it has already surpassed, only to return to the same hyper-pragmatic, GDP-baked quagmire from before.

These aren’t patents or prototypes that are being hidden from view, but writings on and of the unique and wondrous, the cynical and vital. Further, the very process of paywalling vast amounts of written content is a twofold condemnation. Firstly, the act of gating such material condemns it to a practical non-existence (no one knows about it). Secondly, the notion of it being gated projects a certain pseudo-mystique concerning who should be accessing it, giving the impression that philosophy is meant for only a select few. And, additionally, this pseudo-esoteric, bankruptcy equally appears to declare, in its apathetic stance toward the content itself, that no one is interested in this anyway so why not just keep things as they are? But this is all transparently recursive. Interlocking functions beget a forced conclusion that is exhausting, demotivating, and abjectly Sisyphean. One must imagine academics publishing, but not perishing. We have collectively accepted the stance of some tired egregore that all’s fine if we just keep on churning out publications, not only when they’re not being read, but with the explicit understanding that they’re not being read.

When the hell did everyone become so afraid of ideas? I don’t even mean political ideas, which, by and large, are dragged into the selfsame faux-understanding of democratic-liberalism as a priori. You might wax lyrical and tease Fukuyama for his proclamation of the end of history, but you all sure do act as if history has ended! I mean ideas that actually affect one’s life, that change the way we live. Maybe the problem is, to paraphrase Husserl, ‘Any idea that allows for its own deconstruction negates itself’, likewise, ‘Any methodology of teaching that treats ideas as socio-cultural, dead relics negates the ideas themselves.’ - Careful now, we don’t want our students…actually learning from the wisdom of the past and respectively changing their lives. There are no longer any morals, only the study of morals. There is no longer any wisdom, only the study of wisdom. Hell, if Nietzsche were alive today I imagine HR would escalate the Will to Power until it became a Will to Admin!

This is all quite insane. However, I do have some vague solutions. Of course, they cannot be based within the structures that be, for that would render them redundant immediately. They are more holistic, without any demands. More academics should write about the things they are working on outside of academia on blogs and personal sites, why? Because you’re interested in them. More academics and philosophers should feel comfortable just talking (not defending, attacking, or analyzing…talking) about such ideas in situations external to the academy. More people should just create para-academic resources with rigor, interest, and enthusiasm (With an emphasis on rigor).

What’s the point of this piece? I don’t know. It certainly isn’t to critique academics, who largely find themselves within an occupation the name of which no longer relates to the content. This is to say, there is a history of ‘academia’ that no longer relates to contemporary ‘academia’, the signifier remains, but the signified is caught up doing admin and checking emails. Maybe I sought to critique ‘The Academy’ itself, but that appears to elude us at every turn, I couldn’t really tell you what it is, but I’d truly like to meet someone who has a solid definition. Even so-called ‘para-academia’ has been dragged into this mess because the very legitimacy of academia upholds the legitimacy of para-academia. Anyway, the point is this, let’s not pretend the academy is anything but a very crafty business. And, if I have anything to say here, it’s not necessarily any solution to a rather elusive problem, but merely to explicitly state that the current state of academia is doing a vast amount of damage to…academia.

Thankfully, I’m in a position where I can say this, I have very little on the line and am quite happy living off beans and rice for the foreseeable future.