I’ve been experiencing some odd artefacts when trying to visit Larval Subjects recently (amusingly, the main URL seems always to send me to the same post and, since that post relates to exhaustion and writing, I had been assuming perhaps that the site was temporarily not being updated…). I have therefore only just discovered Sinthome’s unnerving, but resonant, recent reflections on the… temporality of academic work. Sinthome’s post touches on a few issues that have been discussed, albeit somewhat indirectly, on this blog from time to time. I thought I would highlight a few passages here, although these excerpts won’t do full justice to the original.

Sinthome begins with a reflection on academics as dead men walking – frozen in time – reproducing in ossified form the intellectual debates in which they were originally trained:

Long ago when I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine used to joke that she could always tell who the graduate students were because their clothing was ten years out of style. That is, there’s a way in which the graduate student occupies a different time– perhaps due to poverty, perhaps due to living amidst musty books and endless writing that render one oblivious to much of the world –or walks about in time as if they were living in the past. Occasionally you will encounter a professor like this as well. Perhaps she is an older professor who is still obsessed with existentialism, and talks endlessly of the schism between Sartre and Camus, and complains that Unamuno doesn’t get enough attention. Or perhaps he is still embroiled in debates about logical positivism. Or maybe you encounter a Hegelian who still reads Hegel through the lense of Josiah Royce, McTaggert, and Bradley, seemingly oblivious to the decades of scholarship that have occured since. In such moments a feeling of the uncanny comes over me, accompanied by a chill of fear. Right there before me is a person, another human being, yet this person is like one of the ghosts from M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense: He is dead, but he doesn’t know that he is dead. He walks about seeing the entire world through the eyes of this long departed way of reading Sartre or Hegel, without realizing that things have changed. Such scholars are like echos in a cavern, marking the persistence of a voice after that voice itself has departed. And if I feel a shiver of fear, then this is because I wonder whether I am not looking at my future or destiny, that someday I am doomed to be outmoded, out of step, ridiculous, insofar as things have moved on since Deleuze, Badiou, Lacan, Zizek, and so on. Will I be the ranting old man that causes graduate students to chuckle for being so deaf to contemporary discussions? “Keep reading,” I whisper to myself. “Stay young,” I plead. “Do not fall out of time and become walking history.” It is perhaps not by accident that I find myself forgetting how old I am at the young age of 32.

Sinthome then turns a critical lens, however, on the specifically academic pressures for the production of intellectual novelty – the structural pressure to discover “new” things, to reject older forms of knowledge, in order to complete a thesis, publish, participate in academic debate… Sinthome concludes that this drive for novelty for its own sake is destructive of the search for truth as a substantive goal:

The aim is thus not the true, but the new; and the result is that the ground is perpetually shifting under my feet as I scramble to keep up with all the changes taking place so as to secure my credibility and my position. Of course, the belief here is that this is “progress”, that we are not simply producing the new for the sake of the new, but that the new arrives as a more accurate, more true, vision of the world, reading of Hegel, understanding of Lacan, etc. And there is merit to this. Yet nonetheless, the rules of the academic game are such that one must produce the new and not tarry too long with any one thing without varying it and producing new information for the machine. As a result, it is proper to entertain skepticism as to just how true this new is.

It is not enough to be a Marxist. After all, that’s outdated, crude, and out of fashion. No, I must be a “neo-Marxist”, keeping abreast of the latest developments from Deleuze and Guattari, Negri and Hardt, Badiou, Ranciere, Laclau, Zizek and all of their debates. I might suspect that I can get by with Althusser’s high falutin structuralist Marxism, but Althusser is so “1965″, as can be clearly discerned with his incessent and oh so gauch use of the term “science”. But alas, it’s not enough for me to be a neo-Marxist as I am a young academic that wants my piece of the pie, so I might tweek all these thinkers and perhaps contest them altogether, earning my own nitch in the university system and the world of publishing. And having accomplished this, some young, upstart grad student or beginning academic will someday challenge what I have sought to establish, pushing me off my place on the hill, and generating yet a new theoretical paradigm that makes everything else look interesting from the perspective of historical value, but which is now outmoded. If I read Althusser today, then this is not because I’m an Althusserian (though, as the Joker said of Batman, “what marvellous toys he has!”), but because I need to understand Althusser to understand Zizek, Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, and Laclau. And so it goes.

Sinthome characterises these structural dimensions of academic work as obsessional – as incessant repetitive activity that serves to deflect from the achievement of any substantive goal. From this standpoint, Sinthome revisits the question of whether academics should seek to keep up with the intellectual times:

I’m led to think that perhaps the only viable solution is to will oneself to become old, to resolutely refuse the march of the information-producing machine that is incessantly and forever calling for the production of the new, giving the illusion that one can catch up with it, that one is doing something in responding to its superegoic demand, and stodgily allowing oneself to become non-informative, while also becoming a bit more true.

Sinthome’s argument reminded me (but then, what doesn’t, these days…) of Benjamin’s attempt to devise a form of historical materialism that would not invest its faith in the restless forward drive of progress:

Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.

And:

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

I had promised Kerim Friedman that I would try to get back to his question about whether knowledge can be seen as cumulative – I’m not quite ready to make good on this promise, but I can at least flag that part of my answer, I think, would come from reflecting on these sorts of issues: I think knowledge potentially can build on knowledge, at least within a shared historical framework that enables us to agree on key aspects of what we are trying to “know”. I also think, though, that there are good reasons to be suspicious of many specific claims that a novel approach actually represents a meaningful contribution to social learning – that it represents either a true “discovery” or builds in some way on what came before. Sinthome has, I think, highlighted some of the structural factors that contribute to this result (others have been the subject of a number of posts on this blog). To begin to assess whether we are learning, we need critical distance – which, among other things, means working out ways of stepping sideways within our own time, gaining an appreciation for why a form of novel thought might appeal to fashion, and then differentiating the resonance of fashion from the resonance of truth…

Problematic concepts, all. But we have an intuition that some alternative must be possible: that our choices aren’t restricted to dogmatic ossification in a museum piece of frozen historical time, on the one hand, or a compulsively restless form of progress, on the other. I think it’s worth testing whether there might be some way to ground this intuition, to clarify the available historical choices we might otherwise overlook.