It's always about getting past that barrier: the psychosocial barrier of embarrassment, the fear of nakedly putting something "out there", of exposing oneself.
I write, I try and cobble some things together. At the
slightest hurdle I convince myself that this whole labour is pointless, that
actually completing this and trying to publicise it would just be a deeply
embarrassing thing to do, because no one actually cares, no one is going to
read it, and I haven't done anything interesting.
All this represents is a desperate attempt to cling on to
and control a piece of writing. This is why my mode of writing has
historically so often been perfectionist and obsessed: no, I can't do
this until I've read x y z and become an expert... no, I can't possibly write
this sentence without considering a few other things from this author I just
remembered... must populate sentences with parentheses in order to be as
specific as possible, not leave any room for misinterpretation, not appear like
some idiot who hasn't considered every dimension... Such a mode of
writing leaves a stench. It lingers in the air of every university. It reeks of
the academic obsession with "objectivity", the internalised boss-cop
in the head that is always demanding order, always demanding more data, always
demanding things are more clear, more visible, more controllable.
The ironic thing is that this neurotic mode of writing that
seeks to "perfect" it more often than not makes it less perfect,
transforming a more-often-than-not interesting conceptual core into a garbled
verbose mess that's boring and unjoyful to read. In accepting the gamble that
any argument can be "perfected" within language - all we need is to
cram in the right words, and lots of them - the neurotic-perfectionist drive
reduces writing to a dull, tepid representation; an inert painting
on a wall that eyes are constantly glossing over. The focus is almost
completely on words and sentences as simply representations/signifiers with an
internal semiotic "content", missing in the process how words and
sentences function as a-signifying forms, effecting little
movements, intensities, dopamine rushes, which mobilise the libido.
The neurotic-perfectionist drive underpins the Academic as a
particular aesthetic or style, defined in part by the denial of any style or
aesthetic altogether. The Academic, as an ideal aesthetic limit-point that
all “intellectual” or “theoretical” writing is inclined to tend towards, is a
style devoid of all style: no flourishes, no lyricism or stories, and only the
most constrained and forced turns of phrase and neologisms. Through such arse
clenching, the Academic thinks it gets to the Real, the “objectivity” it puts
so much blood, sweat, and anxiety attacks into uncovering, by stripping back all
style, all emotion, all traces of libidinal intensity: aesthetic austerity.
But it doesn’t. Rather than revealing the Real through this
act, the Academic instead deadens it: what we get is an Academic Realism,
rather than the Real – a weird, undead performance of the Real that
claims to be it. An unsatisfying reheated meal of academia’s greatest hits and
citations, microwaved so many times so as to become an unappetising, and above
all unconvincing, mush.
Realism is not the Real. Remember k-punk: ‘Realism has
nothing to do with the Real. On the contrary, the Real is what realism has
continually to suppress.’
(This is all of course a simplified argument. Clearly the
semiotic "content" of the words we write matter, for one, and clearly
this content is immediately bound up with its form. The takeaway argument, if
there is one, is the age old adage that radical content must be equalled by
radical form; that form, aesthetics, style, matters. Any
writing that pays no heed to its aesthetics, its written form, as academic
writing tends to do by treating writing simply as an inert carrier of semiotic
content, is not worth its salt. Or, put more forgivingly, is limiting itself
massively, keeping theory caged within the (classed, racialised and gendered)
academy it dreams to be free from.)
I write all this as an attempt to grapple with the actual
practice of writing no longer under the watchful eyes of the academy. I’ve
always been easily embarrassed about my own creative pursuits, owing to
persistent low self-esteem and my extreme childhood shyness. So when I started
university, it seemed like the place for timid, depressed, and socially anxious
me: place where any notion of “I” would retreat, where writing would simply be
about some subject matter that “I” could distance myself from. Knowledge was
what mattered, not “me”.
Unconsciously, the “structural” and the “personal” were held
in opposition, even if I professed to believe the opposite. I saw myself as
writing about implicitly “distant” “structural” things as a way to distract
attention from “me”. Writing was always placed at a firm distance from my everyday
life and modes of living. While this distance began to decrease when I started
getting involved in student activism, it continued to persist (and still does).
A constant disavowal and pushing away of the body, of the human meat puppet and
its unconscious: its drives, instincts and neuroses. A piece of sandpaper
always at hand, constantly and willfully eroding any trace of the human OS
behind the text, ignorant of the fact that this will/drive only further proved and
consummated the existence of the human OS. “Objectivity”, for all its claims to
dispassionate empiricism, is always driven by a libidinal, unconscious drive.
This is the neurotic-perfectionist drive that I found myself channelling, a slave
to.
You don’t have to look far to see this in action, beyond my
personal experience. Why do you think there’s a mental health epidemic in
universities today? Why do you think so many academics are depressed and
anxious? It’s at least in part because the academy is animated by objectivity,
and objectivity is predicated on a particular drive: the neurotic-perfectionist
drive that self-flagellates, that tries with futility to rid academic work of
any trace of the human meat puppet, the ostensibly “subjective” element
constantly muddying our access to “the Real”, despite being fully in the Real itself.
Objectivity is always trying to tame, contain, and control the human OS,
the unconscious; and what is anxiety if not the attempt to regain control?
The result of this neurotic-perfectionist drive is a mode of
subjectivity much akin to Nietzsche’s character of the “objective man” that he
skewers in Beyond Good and Evil:
He is only a tool; let’s say that he is a mirror, not an ‘end unto himself’. The objective man is indeed a mirror: above all, we must admit, he is accustomed to subjugating himself, with no desire other than what knowledge, what ‘reflecting’ can offer him. He waits until something comes along and then spreads himself out gently so that even the light footsteps of spirit-like beings gliding by will not be lost upon his surface and skin. (p.97)
The academic as a smooth, spread-out surface, achieved only through
routinised self-subjugation, self-flagellation, self-deprecation.
*
By the end of my undergraduate I was pretty bored of this
approach (which is rampant in the social sciences and humanities even on
ostensibly radical topics), but didn’t know where else to look. Then I did my
Masters, properly read Mark Fisher and Deleuze and Guattari, and realised that
what I thought was “theory” was in fact an incredibly narrow slice of it, a
mere faction, held hostage by an academia that resists the osmosis of theory
into the Outside. (Mediums such as sound and video are almost always out of
bounds.) The academy’s obsession with secondary literature and journal
articles, coupled with its dull literalism and “objectivity”, had completely
muted the thrill, the feeling of moving through a portal into a different
world, that accompanies reading a good philosophy/theory book first-hand.
Fisher and Deleuze-Guattari actively shunned academic
convention: Fisher basically never wrote for academic journals (although he did
take part in numerous academic conferences and organised a major one on
accelerationism in 2010 - he was no stranger to the academy, for sure) and
instead put his heart into the noughties underground blogosphere, his short
Zer0 books works, and his writing on television, film and music in more
mainstream outlets such as The Wire or New Humanist. From my
viewpoint it seems Fisher always tried to live by his concept of “popular
modernism”, constantly trying to bridge the gap between the mainstream and
the marginal or avant-garde, plunging into liminal, in-between spaces to later
emerge with new, critical, and accessible insights: TV reviews that cited Lacan
and Nietzsche (e.g.),
and his music writing that (most famously) reanimated Derrida’s concept of
“hauntology” being two examples of this. By necessity, this demanded a certain
critical distance from and engagement with the academy, which certainly would
not usually judge the above work of sufficient academic rigour.
Deleuze-Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus meanwhile is written with
an exuberant, militant flair that actively channels the post-68 spirit in
France, which had not yet deflated by the time they published the book in 1972.
Examples of this are numerous, with the book peppered with phrases like “fucked
by the socius”, “Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass, A solar anus”, and
“all writing is so much pig shit” (and that’s far from exhaustive). While such
joyful and profane desecration is less present in A Thousand Plateaus or
Deleuze’s solo work (to my knowledge), these works break with academic
conventions in other ways: ATP famously is a non-linear book, where any chapter
can and should be read in any order, and joyfully brings together a whole host
of intellectual fields. Whereas AO’s theoretical foundations, which it departs
from and sublimates over the course of the book, are largely psychoanalysis and
Marxism (although the literary works of Artaud and Samuel Beckett are also
formative, so this is reductive), ATP frequently falls back on the natural
sciences, pulling concepts from fields like genetics, thermodynamics,
cybernetics, and differential geometry and mashing them together to produce a
joyfully weird – and difficult – text of philosophy.
What Fisher and Deleuze-Guattari give us hints of is what is
intellectual practice can be like when unshackled from the Academic, and
provoke us to further ask: How can intellectual practice look and feel
different? I don’t have a total answer to that, but as
this post argued, approaching an answer will involve (1) embracing and
taking seriously style and aesthetics and (2) going through
embarrassment (and fear, and denigration), making deviations and experiments
that by their very nature will provoke and shock the collective unconscious
into defence mode.
Theory freed from the Academic – freed from “in this paper I
will argue that”, a mode of writing which mainly only appeals to other
academics, and paper presentations that consist of a mild-mannered white man
reading from a laptop in a stuffy lecture theatre – may not be theory in any
form we currently recognise it. It may elicit shock, derision or laughter. So
be it.
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