(This article is written under the effects of an unnamed recreational drug. The author, whoever it may be, is not responsible for the content of it.)
At a time when worthless knowledge proliferates at exponential rates in the forms of meaningless dissertations and journal/book publications, it is apt to institute the movement of a radical disestablishment of the gigantic hypocrisy that the academe is.
To dig one’s own grave for one’s own worthless existence is an act of heroism not susceptible to being understood by the contemporary mediocre mass, including the academics themselves, who will simply call the above-mentioned act one of foolishness.
Academe, by right, should hold, or at least attempt to grasp, the truths of the world and conscience of societies; but at present, it is firmly in the grip of the capitalist social logic that pervades every nook and corner of human existence.
Not only has higher education become an ‘industry’ in the capitalistic sense of the term—this has happened long ago, and is only expected to deepen; institutionalized intellectual activity, i.e. the academe, has itself succumbed totally to the logic of capitalist production and consumption.
As Baudrillard has demonstrated, capitalistic production and consumption are characterized by the intrinsic worthlessness of both what is being produced and subsequently consumed. Produced object are consumed, in the capitalist economy, not because they have intrinsic worth, as if people really ‘need’ them; they are produced, and people are compelled to consume them, because the world of commodities are a closed system of sign/signification.
In such a system of signs, the logic is vigorous, tight, and thus compelling; so compelling indeed that individual producers-consumers do not even think of the true worth, or its absence, of the things they produce and consume. The central motivator in such a system of exponentially expanding sphere of production-consumption is that of social differentiation, which results in morbidly competitive production-consumption.
This regime of intrinsically worthless competition of productive-consumptive activities is undergirded by a fundamental human desire for recognition. The cleverest trick of capitalism consists in its having seized upon this desire, given it the substance of individualized production-consumption. Once this is accomplished, the system can run on itself, as the circle reinforces itself.
It is exactly the same that has happened in the field of academe. In pre-capitalist eras, only those who actually had anything worth saying said any. They devoted often ill-provided lives to the pursuit of true knowledge and beauty, and they wrote in idiosyncratic styles which they found best suited to expressing their ideas and visions. Their consumption of knowledge was largely sincere, i.e. for the benefit and pleasure of consuming the knowledge itself, and so was their production of knowledge—we hear time and again stories about writers/scholars/philosophers who believed in their thoughts and wrote despite the lack of recognition in their life times, and despite the hardships involved.
Contemporary academe is a capitalist industry in more or less the full sense of the term. It is a system of standardized mass production-consumption. Academics go through inhuman, standardized ‘post-graduate trainings’ by completing accredited methodology courses; they read the classics in their disciplines and lukewarm and tedious methodology manuals and articles, not because they enjoy or really want to read them, but because these academic consumption goods are like the Louis Vuitton bags that although you don’t quite know whether you like them, but you definitely know you have to have them; they write in impersonal, mechanistic and boring styles, and painstakingly make references just like the contemporary mass culture itself is a huge game of endless cross-referencing. Furthermore, just as the capitalist economy has to tap into ever deeper territories of human psyche and/or social relations in order to generate ever more ‘needs’/desires, so the academe has to ‘problematize’ ever more spheres of social life to keep the continuous and, in fact, accelerating production-consumption of academic discourses. One classic example would be the so-called ‘disaster anthropology’, an anthropology that profits from the disasters that have fallen on people. Of course, the justification is that such studies help the distressed people; but it must not be denied that the problematization of such an issue generates productive-consumptive activities that mainly take place within the esoteric field of the academe. It generates funding, employment for otherwise unemployable anthropologists, and eventually GDP…and publications in researchers’ CVs, and publicity for the anthropology departments and research centers.
It is not difficult to comprehend that the proliferation of previously inconceivable kinds of research (for reasons of they being absurd), which seem to account for the greater part of all the social research that goes on these days, is a direct effect of the dynamism of the capitalist economic activities, and is thus parasitic on the latter.
The parasitic and derivative field of the capitalist system that the academe is, in turn, exhibits all and every of those absurdities and madness in the larger system. For example, academics everywhere now are under huge pressures to produce as many research publications (and only those in certain high-impact factor journals count) as they possibly can, for otherwise they will be fired; this is no different from companies which cannot generate profits have to be shut down. Despite their limited energy, both physical and intellectual, academics are forced into a cycle of intensified production-consumption, which in the bottom of their hearts they know is futile and worthless. They are forced to read the ever proliferating books, journal articles, and attend academic conferences, in order that they get inspirations for their own ‘research’. Once they’ve done their own ‘research’, they take turn to produce large quantities of books, journal articles, and conference presentations which other fellow academics are now obliged to consume, because in this industry, one has to show that one has ‘engaged with the debate’, has surveyed the relevant literature, and is ‘in dialogue’ with their fellow academics.
There is often very little logicality in all these profuse academic production and consumption. As human knowledge accumulates over the past two millennia, it is increasingly impossible, if not already, for genuine intellectual questions to be posed in the humanities and social sciences. Academics often dwell on questions that have either been answered before or pseudo-questions that only stand behind thin veils of disciplinary protectionism. Such repeated questions or pseudo-questions have no purpose to them apart from creating activities for the academics themselves, hence perpetuating the academic institution itself. It is said that Goethe was that last man that could claim to have read everything that existed. Given the information explosion in the two centuries after Goethe, what academics are now doing has become reactionary, superfluous, even deductive; and it carries on only because of their own irredeemable ignorance.
But there is very little time for our contemporary academics to think about these problems. They are too deeply caught up in a tyrannical production-consumption system which has the long-term effect of deafening their critical sensitivities. Even if they are conscious of the absurdity of their activities, which I think the smarter ones of them in fact do, they are not foolish enough, or far too timorous, to dig their own graves. Academics are people after all, and in this age of the ‘affirmation of ordinary life’ (C. Talyer 1989), they choose to live a lie than die a truth.
Thus, when fashion waves sweep across academia, as they do across the sphere of normal production-consumption, the only thing the actors can do is to ride the tide and try to benefit from it. When certain signs become fashionable, these signs are produced and consumed in frenzy. Similarly, when an academic topic comes into fashion, the academics organize workshops/conferences about it, read and write papers about it, publish articles, books, edited volumes on it—a mad bout of productive-consumptive activities that generate employment and satisfactions for the academics, but hardly anybody else. Like in the capitalist economy, the research institutes/individuals that are able to produce the most innovative products at the lowest cost and within shortest time will win in this competition—hence the monstrous pressure that inflicts universities and their miserable academics—and those who don’t will gradually lose out.
Margaret Thatcher used to accuse sociology of being ‘academic socialism’. This brings up the memory of a time when the academe was somehow still opposed to the establishment, and functions as a source of criticism and enlightenment. This time seems to be gone for good now. Academia is now a capitalist industry every bit exhibiting the absurdities and inhumanity of capitalism. Worse still, in their domesticated behavior, the academe and academics surreptitiously glorify the capitalist logic of worthless production-consumption.
How much hypocrisy can a person manage to live with? How much hypocrisy can a system live with? When the absurdities of the academic industry become too apparent, it shall collapse under its own weight. Even if we are not able to bring forward that eventuality by our own meager strength, let us rejoice when (it’s not a matter of ‘if’) that judgment day finally comes. Let us also hope that day comes rather sooner than later.
