On Urgency and our Emergency: Academia's Hatred of its Social Underground

I begin this because the timelines of academic writing disrupt the possibility of community formation, unless you are already positioned within elite institutions. Who has the time for six months or more of revision and another year to publication unless there is not an urgency to your communication because you already are safe, held within a prestige economy, ferried around the country and globe by travel funds and per diems, asked to work on endless editorial boards? Whatever urgency tenure clocks impose on some is an artificial, managerial urgency. It is about taking up lines on a C.V. for the sake of financial reward, the urgency of bureaucrats to justify existence vertiginously upward through quantification--the only valuation available in late capital (and of course, there is nothing actually there at the top to finally approve one's existence, just endless vertical negotiations around the altar of the trustee boards who aren't listening and will cut your department anyway). But here on the ground we are facing the impossibility of life under neoliberal scarcity, emergent neo-fascism, and environmental catastrophe, and we need horizontal movements towards communities that are only just becoming, that cannot be justified to anyone but those who need them to live. We cannot wait until reader number two is satisfied and the docket of special issues is cleared, and then years longer for the respectful footnotes that will be the only form of response and engagement, because no one is building anything but their own career, no one is justifying anything but their fragile institutional position.

The pseudo-urgency of the collapse of tenure has produced calls for reactionary alternatives: so-called slow scholarship and renewal of the figure of the public intellectual (I won't even mention the abdication of responsibility that was/is post-critique). This seems to me exactly wrongheaded. While within an institutional context it is a noble resistance to the entrepreneurial speed-up that has emptied a certain type of scholarship of critical depth, beyond those skeletons of humanism, what is needed is not a romantic return to mid-century norms of depth and languor (Gadamer not publishing until 50) but a speeding up of our creation of what Mark Fischer called "counterconsensual collectivities." Calls for more public scholarship, and thus forms of public presence for intellectuals, is again reminiscent of the mid-century. But this is also romantic. The Cold War context in which ideological struggle between capital and the state conscripted intellectuals into the battleground is long past. Occasionally figures emerged from this juncture that were rallying points of emergent difference, James Baldwin or Toni Morrison come to mind--symbolic and ideological resources for current struggles and collectivities. But now to access a public, one has to acquiesce to the insipidness of NPR or New York Times coverage that refuses to label racists as racists or fascism as fascism, or move towards the shock-jock sophomoric leftism of the podcast scene--occasionally capable of insight, but ultimately selling a branded place-holder for a leftism to come. We cannot be as cool as Chapo, as insidery, which is after all a form of cool insider prestige granted by success in a capitalist marketplace

When I speak of urgency, I refer to the mental as much as material conditions under which intellectual work is carried out. Exhaustion is perhaps the best term but doesn't fully capture the bass notes of desperation nor the high register panic that persists in that tiredness. There is also, among intellectuals, a return to a bipolar pleasure as a principle of engagement, as some compensatory for the rest of our drained out existences. Most striking about critical intellectual work today is how rudimentary a counter-positionality can be. We scream climate change is real at an unlistening set of authorities in government and on campuses. And we affirm some base-level counter-community in our social media circles. But it does nothing, it is hopeless. And so we just as frequently live expected lives, within career paths that might be hopeless, committed to some vision of humanist consciousness raising that goes nowhere, exhausted by overwork and precarity, panicked about the world to come, desperate to make a difference, compensated by media pleasures and pseudo-collectivities. We can't live this way. And many are refusing to, sublimating their burdened and failed selves into fascist ecstasies of reaction and violence.

The urgency then is the ongoing creation of intensive critical countercommunities, (as Moten and Harney call them, "undercommons"). Intellectual work is, before all, a communal enterprise, in that making a piece of communication is about building a community to communicate with. Creative intellectual activity is a sublimation of capital's deprivations into a utopian object that imagines into being the counter-community that it speaks to intensely, and that will speak back to it. That communal recognition in creative acts is all that is left, and we must be thankful that it can and does still subsist in creative acts with negative capability. In refusing the standards of looking, thinking, hearing, promulgated by power and capital, sexism and racism, homophobia and cisnormativity, we create not just new ways of sensing, but communities that begin to sense and feel in those ways. This is urgent because it is a path to survival, mentally and materially--for with such communities come fleeting recognition, support, alternative living and thinking with each other.

The pace of academic scholarship not only doesn't allow this, it denies this is the function of intellectual work. Professional communities are about performances of thoughtfulness, not intensity. That thoughtfulness is always for an authority looking on, whoever is sitting on those job and tenure committees, it is about satisfying what those without urgency because they won already might think is smart sounding. It is rarely about those other scholars, dotted around the world, who might be glimpsing the line of flight you are beginning to see in some critical text that disrupts the present. Of course, we all have experiences of finding this community in academia! It's why I stuck with it, because my life touches on such sociality in this work in ways it never did outside of it. But, these are glimpses, confined to a, however precarious, elite few. What is needed is rapid horizontal expansion, overlapping and networking of the communities of intellectual and creative work regardless of institutional positionality.

So this is a writing experiment, to will into being the community I need, and I hope some of you need, through a more persistently urgent intellectual writing. Urgency means being wrong, missing an important source or citation, and all sorts of other professional faux-pas. But being urgent means communal input can displace the responsibility for perfect knowledge production onto the debate fostered in emergent communities, not the individual writer. It also means living in a voice that moves fast, that could explain things more, but trusts readers to question and interrogate, and doesn't obsessively guard against being called pretentious or wrong. The blog seems like the last thing needed right now, and yet there was a utopianism to the early blog scene that remains attractive to those of us who missed it. So this is for anyone who needs it, no more or no less, even if that is only myself.