the inmate's journal : the academy

I don’t know about you, but I think something happened to the world of knowledge sometime near the end of the reign of Queen Victoria.  Not that it was her fault necessarily, but surely she could have done something about it from her London perch.  The fact that she didn’t must be a sign not just of the decline of knowledge, but the decline of the monarchy.  And if the two are related, I’m not going to be the one to suggest it.  

 

I do, however, have a theory about how things have gotten the way they have.  My theory’s philosophical, psychological, historical, sociological, and spiritual, but doesn’t particularly fit into Philosophy, Psychology, History, Sociology, or Religious Studies, so you won’t find it in any textbook or curriculum.  I call it The Gap Theory.

 

It begins, as any decent theory does, in the beginning, when humanity and nature were one, consciousness was a glimmer in God’s eye, and we frolicked our short brutal lives away without regret or promise.  Then something happened.  Creation, a Big Bang, Alien Visitation, I don’t care; the point is—dreams began.  Being animals wasn’t enough.  We started actively, desperately, chaotically, working toward the dreams—building cities, prolonging lives, manufacturing laws and morality—the whole shebang we happily call civilization.  Art inevitably was born, although all art has ever said and ever will say is that nature rules eternally and all this chaos we call progress is going to disappear and silence and night will gobble everything up.  But since some of the art is done beautifully, it makes us weep because we temporarily feel the void below all things and the futility of our silly bombast.  But then we run back to the silly bombast because that’s what we know how to do best.  And as we kept creating more things and things piled on things and more things and more things, it began to be that we couldn’t even see nature any more.  And this happened sometime around 1889 or 1945 or 1969, give or take a hundred years.  Call it alienation, anomie, ennui, or the academy—it doesn’t matter—the elastic’s stretched so far from our origins that we’re at a breaking point.  Individually, culturally, collectively.  We’re trying to make the elastic stronger through whatever means (some of us use yoga, some of us gadgets, some of us ecotourism), but we’re a bit doubtful it’s enough—it may snap in 200 years, 30 years … or this afternoon.

 

The elastic’s stretched everywhere.  Between fiction and fact, good and evil, nature and artifice, science and religion, the individual and the community, life and death, meaning and futility, beauty and truth.  The elastic the academy specializes in is the one stretched between theory and practice.  Strident proclamations defending the underprivileged contrast tragicomically with the privileged and protected lives of the proclaimers.  Dissertations and lectures about justice, equality, and diversity bear little resemblance to the homogeneity of thinking and tyranny of practice required to become a certified academic.  Research agendas of scientists, claiming the betterment of humanity and the diminishment of suffering, ignore the ecological and psychological alienation that’s typically bundled into those agendas.  The beauty of the academy—its flaunt and perfection—is how cleanly and consummately it demonstrates Cartesianism … how entirely you can separate mind and body without actually killing yourself.

 

Since Queen Vikky died, it’s become commonplace—and frequently expected—for academics and intellectuals to talk about their theories like this—

 

The Blabber	The Blabbed
Jacques Lacan	This passion of the signifier thus becomes a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but in man and through man that it speaks; in that his nature becomes woven by effects in which the structure of the language of which he becomes the material can be refound; and in that the relation of speech thus resonates in him, beyond anything that could have been conceived of by the psychology of ideas.
Martin Heidegger	Enframing is the gathering together that belongs to that setting-upon which sets upon man and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.  As the one who is challenged forth in this way, man stands within the essential realm of Enframing.  He can never take up a relationship to it only subsequently.  Thus the question as to how we are to arrive at a relationship to the essence of technology, asked in this way, always comes too late.  But never too late comes the question as to whether we actually experience ourselves as the ones whose activities everywhere, public and private, are challenged forth by Enframing.  Above all, never too late comes the question as to whether and how we actually admit ourselves into that wherein Enframing itself comes to presence.  The essence of modern technology starts man upon the way of that revealing through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak	The rememoration of the ‘present’ as space is the possibility of the utopian imperative of no-(particular)-place, the metropolitan project that can supplement the post-colonial attempt at the impossible cathexis of place-bound history as the lost time of the spectator.

 

This is intelligent?  This is the age of communication and knowledge?  Bring back Socrates, who doubted and gabbed about important things like love and justice in ways that everyone could understand but no one wanted to.  But Socrates begat Plato, who institutionalized him in The Athenian Academy.  Then this whole thing was repeated in a religious sort of way with Jesus and Paul.  Then, because humanity’s kind of slow, the first university was created in 859 in Fes, then there was Cairo, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, then all hell broke loose and the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries exploded and now every hamlet has an institute of higher learning and nobody knows anything.

 

But I hadn’t developed theories like this as I read The University of Knickerloo’s ad for a tenure-track professor of communications in The Post-Rhetoric Journal of Inclusive Talk, calling for interdisciplinarians and corporate communicators everywhere to send in their resumes.  Then, my bank accounts all in the negative, my sanity the same, fearing Hal was right that I was headed for a park bench and a singing bottle, I thought the university might be the perfect place for me … bulging with rainbows, paved with enlightenment and the sugary seeds of marvel and talk.

 

Ah … dreams, my sedimental sweeties … they make the weeping world go round.