I’m under no illusion that anyone other than myself is particularly interested in the details of my life. Like most of us, I suspect, I write largely for myself. Not so much to exorcise demons as to exercise them, negotiating the insecurities, anxieties and occasionally paranoiac neuroses through which we attempt to belong to the world. These are not simply responses to circumstances imposed upon us. They arise through our subjective participation in cultural structures that prefabricate conditions of existential discomfort. Recognition, legitimacy, citizenship, masculinity, femininity, professional standing and cultural identity become performances through which we compete for admission to a world that makes us fight for the privilege of getting a foot in the door, provided the rest of us remains outside.
Belonging itself is not an essential property of the world, but a relational distinction constructed and sustained through language, convention and cultural practice. It is another language game, one whose rules establish both the conditions of admission and the possibility of exclusion. Its transactional character is fundamental: recognition must be earned, legitimacy conferred, participation justified and value demonstrated according to conventions whose authority depends upon our continued participation. Arrive with ideas you simply wish to communicate, without seeking employment, funding, recognition or an invoice to send, and the absence of an identifiable transaction seems almost to terrify people. It is an affront to the symbolic order. The transaction is not merely the price of admission; it is what perpetually defers admission, converting belonging into something that must continually be earned, demonstrated and renegotiated. Belonging is an asymptote: a horizon that retreats as we approach it. The promise of arrival sustains the journey precisely because arrival would dissolve the distinctions through which the promise acquires value, meaning and significance.
There is something structurally peculiar about this arrangement. Constraint, prohibition and taboo participate in producing the desires they then ostensibly suppress, while the impossibility of closure sustains the pursuit of control, epistemological certainty and power. Transactional systems depend upon these promises, yet the authority they confer remains provisional, infinitesimally insignificant against the scale of the world and ultimately transient. Their failure to close upon themselves is precisely what makes them self-propagating. We reproduce the conditions of our dissatisfaction through the activities intended to overcome them, mistaking temporary command over a fragment of the world for mastery of the whole. Shelley understood something of this in Ozymandias: the monumental certainty of power eventually becomes a ruin surrounded by indifference. The machinery persists by promising what its own existence renders unattainable, until time disposes of the machinery as well.
This is not simply a psychological curiosity but a general feature of the cultural, economic and institutional systems through which contemporary life is administered. The pursuit of power makes sense within the language game that confers its significance, but the game itself becomes increasingly absurd when considered against the astronomical and cosmological scales within which our civilisation briefly appears. The authority of kings, billionaires, governments and institutions amounts to little more than a transient arrangement of matter congratulating itself on having acquired jurisdiction over other transient arrangements of matter. Recognising this threatens to render much of our ordered, bureaucratic and technocratically overreaching civilisation completely fucking meaningless. Not human experience itself, but the elaborate scaffolding through which institutions, corporations and cultural systems manufacture, define, design and distribute the promise of value. The distinction is considerable, although hardly convenient for those selling admission tickets.
My encounters with academia, separated by decades, were remarkably uneven. There were periods of genuine intellectual achievement, particularly during my master’s degree, but also experiences of profound alienation and isolation. The contrast is instructive, and unfortunate. That is unfortunate. Universities produce worthwhile research, occasionally extraordinary discoveries and people capable of remarkable intellectual work. But much of contemporary higher education has become an elaborate vocational apparatus, distributing qualifications demanded by institutions whose principal interest is that applicants possess them. Students learn the requisite language, demonstrate sufficient fluency in its conventions, collect their credentials and depart along their respective career trajectories. The institution calls this education. I remain unconvinced. The qualification promises legitimacy, but legitimacy merely introduces further distinctions through which one’s standing must continually be demonstrated. The destination becomes another departure point, and the apparatus acquires another reason to exist.
My first encounter occurred a few years into a prolonged period of chronic, long-term unemployment, socioeconomic exclusion and profound human isolation. An old school friend appeared at my door one day with an application for mature-age university entry. I sat the examination and received a AAA rating, which I was subsequently informed was rather good. Fortunately, I had recently read The Turning Point (Capra, 1982), which proved remarkably relevant to one of the essay questions and helped me construct an apparently cogent response. A fortunate accident of intellectual timing, perhaps, although I had been reading and thinking independently for years. University offered a possible route out of marginalisation, an opportunity to participate in a world from which I had long been excluded. Instead, I encountered another configuration of much the same exclusion, administered this time by people ostensibly devoted to cultivating human understanding.
I recall a sociology tutorial for which we were required to submit a written response to a reading on free will. My response drew upon the recursive geometry of a Menger sponge, exploring questions of incompleteness, uncertainty and absence without necessarily possessing that vocabulary at the time. Those were nevertheless the semantic attractors around which my thinking was developing. The written submission seemed to attract some attention from the academic staff, who briefly appeared to regard me with something approaching intellectual interest. The moment passed, and I was promptly submerged beneath the administrative and vocational machinery of undergraduate education. Not long afterwards, I abandoned the degree in some disarray and set off around the world on what I imagined would be a romantic adventure. It turned out to be neither particularly romantic nor much of an adventure. Mostly, it was another spectacular waste of time. But I enjoyed the travelling, and I’m glad I did it. As the saying often attributed to John Lennon goes, “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” Perhaps value has remarkably little to do with the purposes through which we attempt to justify our activities.
I subsequently spent another decade attempting to enter the socioeconomic machinery through which people are expected to earn a living, establish their legitimacy and generate something called value, although what precisely that value is for remains an interesting question. Employment, income, social participation and personal worth are so thoroughly entangled in contemporary culture that exclusion from one readily becomes exclusion from the others. Economic marginalisation constrains social participation, diminished participation restricts opportunity, and restricted opportunity reproduces marginalisation. Eventually, I found my way into the technologically mediated corporate and institutional world, spending years becoming thoroughly entrained into its peculiar dynamics. I learned to navigate systems ostensibly designed to deliver services, solve problems and create value, but whose continued necessity depended upon never quite accomplishing those objectives. Their inability to fulfil their stated purposes was, in effect, their raison d’être: solve the problem and you eliminate the justification for the machinery. My second encounter with academia came after all this, when I might reasonably have expected to recognise the pattern. I did, although recognition hardly made the experience more agreeable.
I completed a Master of Applied Cybernetics with a GPA of 7.0, the highest available on the university’s grading scale. It was an excellent experience, intellectually rewarding, demanding and exceptionally successful. I subsequently entered doctoral study intending to extend that work into a more ambitious investigation. What followed was considerably less rewarding. The difficulty arose not from the intellectual demands of research, but from a collision between independent inquiry and institutional orthodoxy that progressively undermined the entire endeavour. The institutional matrix was so convoluted that its continued existence seemed to depend upon the constant labour of people administering and justifying it. Procedures generated further procedures; complexity demanded additional expertise, oversight and intervention. Each attempted resolution became another condition requiring management. A system beyond the capacity of its participants to understand, control, define, design or substantially improve nevertheless required their continued participation in its preservation. One might reasonably ask whether the doctorate was intended to produce knowledge or demonstrate sufficient endurance to become another component of the machinery.
There is a recurring structure here, extending well beyond my personal encounters. Academic discourse is substantially a self-propagating system in which the ideas most likely to persist are those that reproduce the conditions requiring further discourse. Uncertainty becomes an inexhaustible resource, authority its institutional expression, and intellectual confidence a performance sustained by the permanent deferral of resolution. The process is selective: contributions that reinforce established distinctions, methods and disciplinary boundaries acquire legitimacy, while those that question the conditions producing those distinctions encounter the resistance of the structures they seek to examine. Intellectual inquiry becomes entangled with the reproduction of its own authority. Academia’s extraordinary achievement is to remain endlessly uncertain about almost everything while maintaining an almost supernatural confidence in its authority to adjudicate that uncertainty. An impressive arrangement, provided one doesn’t mistake the persistence of discourse for the advancement of understanding.
I was once deeply offended by all this. These days, I find it increasingly difficult to care, not because the consequences are unimportant, but because academia is hardly exceptional. The same dynamics recur throughout politics, government, corporate life and the wider culture. Much of what passes for reform reproduces the conditions responsible for the problems it claims to address. I have watched this at close quarters: culture warriors, often responding to entirely legitimate grievances, struggling to occupy the seats of institutional power whose configuration perpetuates the inequalities they oppose. The objective becomes possession of the machinery rather than examination of what it actually does. Changing who exercises authority leaves the relations through which authority is generated substantially intact. The antagonists remain mutually dependent, their opposition sustaining the institutional field within which their struggle acquires meaning. Few wish to question the arrangement because doing so threatens the ambitions of everyone patiently queuing for their turn at the controls. The gravy train must keep running, even if its passengers spend the journey denouncing the railway.
The same grotesque logic appears in our cultural fascination with billionaires. We criticise obscene concentrations of wealth while preserving the assumption that becoming obscenely wealthy is something everyone ought to desire. Well, no. I don’t want to be a billionaire, and I don’t think anyone should aspire to become one. It represents a profound distortion of value, whatever value ultimately means. The accumulation of wealth becomes its own justification, just as academic authority becomes evidence of intellectual legitimacy and political power becomes confused with meaningful change. Across these domains, the recurrent mistake is to treat positions within a system as though they were independent of the relations that produce them. Yet those positions exist through the configurations of constraint, dependency and exclusion that their occupants seek to exploit or reform. The result is a civilisation perpetually congratulating itself on challenging the status quo while enthusiastically reproducing it. Even rebellion acquires value through the structures it opposes, and those structures acquire renewed legitimacy through their capacity to accommodate – ergo commercially metabolise – rebellion.
The pattern returns at different scales, from individual insecurity and the pursuit of belonging to institutional authority, economic aspiration and cultural identity. Systems do not merely preserve themselves by resisting change. They preserve themselves through the particular changes they make possible, rewarding those who learn to reproduce the pattern. Their apparent objectives remain perpetually deferred because fulfilment would dissolve the relations through which those objectives acquire significance. This is the peculiar circularity of a civilisation that manufactures scarcity, exclusion and dissatisfaction while presenting their resolution as its principal achievement. Perhaps that is why I continue to write, even when nobody particularly cares to read it. There remains something worth investigating in the distance between what we believe we are doing and what our participation actually sustains. This is a topologically distributed property of communication, recurring across cultures, institutions and national boundaries wherever the production of legitimacy becomes inseparable from the reproduction of the authority that defines it. Academia is simply one particularly articulate participant in the exercise, whistling in the wind and calling it progress.
Reference
Capra, F. (1982) The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster.
