Accepting Søren Bro Pold's proclamation that "the social knowledge base of the University has already disappeared", Davin Heckman locates a few, forward looking prospects for a reconstruction of the Humanities in Jean-François Lyotard's "famously sloppy" Postmodern Condition (1971), Hannah Arendt's Human Condition(1958), and Imanuel Kant's prescient hope that the University could serve as a "mediating nexus among a growing array of conflicting professional tendencies."
I appreciate the thoughtful reply from Søren Bro Pold, as it really forces me to drill down to the crux of the matter. There is nothing mistaken in his reply, but I do believe that he focuses the key dynamic to the core reality that we need to push on: 1) “It already happened.” And, 2) “how do we understand the many ways this tertiary retention grammatizes us?”
For me, to be reminded of the ways in which the social knowledge base of the University has already disappeared is painful. As a teacher, editor, and researcher, I know that the University is not the intellectual meritocracy I had once believed it was or could be. At one point, I actually believed that thousands of scholars labored dutifully to track down every relevant piece of research to comment on and critique, pushing knowledge forward with a commitment to refining and improving upon the best ideas for the benefit of all. Sure, inspired communities exist and clusters exist, but their egalitarianism often means they simultaneously struggle for legitimacy. I console myself thusly: You gotta choose between punk rock and pop stardom (I’m not a loser, I’m an underground sensation. A very deep underground sensation. LOL.).
In reality, increasingly overworked and underpaid contingent teachers scan for footnotes and catchphrases that will confer legitimacy on documents that will be used for their annual performance reviews (but that few will actually read). Meanwhile, an ever-shrinking handful of marketable “big names” will publish the versions of the same book over and over again, reskinned to respond to emerging trends, essentially homogenizing the trajectory of intellectual thought around pop-culture themes, offering the hope of relevance to humanities disciplines that are withering.1One such thinker is Bernard Stiegler, whose voluminous output has resulted in 21 books translated into English. Stiegler is a paradox here because the depth of his output and the urgent questions he attends to demand merit this kind of platform. On the other hand, his work is often referenced like Foucault and Derrida before him, superficially, without critical engagement, to lend authority to a point that the author wishes to make. Though I have tried to work through Stiegler’s thought over the past two decades, I fault myself to the degree that I fall into the trap of being a “fanboi,” finding, perhaps, too much fascination in his work. But it’s worth asking, how many good ideas can a person have? A lot, I’m sure. But are any scholars or thinkers so brilliant that they should publish a book length manuscript more than a couple times in their lives? I am of the view that quickly developed arguments that react to emerging trends should be published in formats that are best adapted to the metabolism of that kind of work–journals, blogs, and innovative formats that can be accessed and engaged with for little or no cost–with the opening for counterargument. It is hard to fault individual writers or editors and publishers for trying to make money by participating in a broken intellectual scene, but the “digital revolution” seems to have accelerated the collapse of the social knowledge base when it could just as well have reclaimed it from neoliberal economics. To be fair to Stiegler, many of his books (or key portions) can be found online in free, open access formats. Academic publishers should focus on fewer books by a greater diversity of writers, with the more quickly developed, ephemeral arguments (that often resemble conference papers) reserved for experimental publication formats that take advantage of the richness of digital media, with the emphasis on open, transparent, but deep metabolism. But, in spite of the familiar materialist arguments, there is no way to simply “engineer” the process of culture, even the graciously developed public spaces require will, trust, and commitment to be cultivated and sustained. And the legion of aspiring intellectuals will dutifully cite them in hopes that they might be lifted like Cinderella from a patchwork schedule into a tenured gig. (Someday, Prince Charming might read the paper I wrote on Pokemon and whisk me away to an Ivory Tower!) But even the best of these efforts will be a day late and a dollar short, as academics strive to be low rent influencers, big fish in an evaporating puddle. (What if all those years in the library would have been better spent making mukbang videos?)
In his 2015 States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century, Stiegler anticipates the stupidity of artificial intelligence as a structural problem in higher education long before chat-GPT overturned the applecart of techno-utopian progress. From Lyotard’s famously sloppy 1971 Postmodern Condition, Stiegler distills an important point for us:
Reason (if we must and we still can refer here to reason) passes through these islands [Kant’s faculties], opening passages in which languages form, over and above which there is no universal language, as the classical thought of the seventeenth century believed, nor any ‘synthesis’, nor any ‘meta-discourse of knowledge’, nor a universal subject, as idealist speculative thought believed, and as did, later, the materialism of the nineteenth century. (2015, 84)
In other words, Kant’s hope that the University could serve as a mediating nexus for a growing array of conflicting professional tendencies never materialized. Instead, Lyotard sees intellectuals serving a performative, linguistic role as apologists for technocratic tendencies they do not control. Over 50 years ago, Lyotard’s concern was that the computer age would mean the end of the University as a cultural institution. And even as the University is in crisis, we still can’t seem to see why. If it takes more than a half a century to arrive at a partial understanding of Lyotard, how can we even begin to hope to process the impact of the machine-driven acceleration we are undergoing right now?
If I suspend the customary techno-bravado of being a digital media scholar, I am not even remotely confident that I will be able to tell which papers are real or fake next semester. I can kind of sniff things out right now, but I still get help from AI to do it. Will I be able to tell the difference tomorrow? How about a month from now? Does it even matter anymore? Maybe Lyotard was right, what if my job is just to manage the collapse?
The 50-year metabolism needed to digest Lyotard’s argument (and that’s with an h-index of 106!) should remind us of Pold’s first point: “It already happened.” As far as his second point, “how do we understand the many ways this tertiary retention grammatizes us?” The answer seems to be, “We do not understand it very well.” As much as I depend on hope and art to sustain me, I lament my cynical conclusion: Maybe we can’t evolve our way out of this predicament. Rather than reaching for the fruit, we might need something more radical, to strike at the root. This does not mean to disavow techniques and technologies for writing. But it does mean abandoning the seductions of surveillance, reigning in ascendant industries, forming a robust critique of the anti-democratic ideologies that inform design (behavioral economics, choice architecture, and nudge theory), abandoning the tired technocapitalist tropes (“Resistance is moral panic,” “There’s nothing new about the newest thing [but we promise it will improve your life],” “Early adopters are smart [Luddites are backwards],” “Youth know best [Surely, you’re not old and stupid]” “One million people can’t be wrong,” etc.), cognitively mapping the formations of power that drive innovation, infrastructure, access, and content, and holding a skeptical attitude towards technologies and techniques that diminish popular agency.2I understand that these arguments can seem conservative, even “reactionary.” But reactionary as a political term is typically understood as a reaction of social or economic “liberalism.” But I think it is quite something else to seek to delay, remedy, or rewind changes that are technical in nature. Few people would argue that wind power, cycling, or organic farming are “reactionary” practices. I believe it is a very temporary thing that we cannot easily see the difference between historical cultural dynamics and the so-called “textpocalypse” actually makes the case for caution here. We struggle, even, to see the difference between folklore and industrial mass media, though there are significant differences in their material foundations and downstream implications (indeed, the muddled reality of the current semiotic landscape is often used as an argument for authority and control).
At the risk of opening a new can of worms, perhaps the most radical suggestion might be found in Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition (1958), particularly in her discussion of “freedom,” which requires precisely that which is foreclosed by machine intelligence and its probabilistic models: To allow humans to do new things, to allow us to speak freely and idiosyncratically, to disclose unknown and unpredicted things, and to make the world together in the pluralistic expressions of our singularity. But given its been 75 years past its initial date of publication (and in spite of Arendt’s impressive h-index of 176),it is not so much that I am looking backwards at a paradise lost, but that we could be looking forward for an idea whose time has finally come.
Works Cited:
Arendt, Hannah. Human Condition. U of Chicago, 1996.
Lyotard, Jean Fracois. Postmodern Condition. Trans. Bennington and Massumi. Manchester UP, 1984.
Stiegler, Bernard. States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century. Trans. Daniel Ross. Polity, 2015.