I’ve been mulling over some of the practical paradoxes involved in doing para-academic research (and collective action more generally) in the current climate. Thought I’d chip them in here, as there’s some relevance to questions you are raising at the end here.
Gathering the kind of momentum required for a political or social thought that could drive widespread action seems impossibly difficult at the moment. It’s like there’s a wedge in both directions: academia has been hamstrung by distorted incentive structures, so this weird bargain sets in where you’re allowed to say something really dangerous and disruptive only if you say it in some super-obscure way that no-one outside the twelve people in your field will ever care about. But outside academia, the research process faces harsh economic (and social) pressures, often ending up succumbing to market capture and getting reduced to something like disposable consumer content. Or alternatively, we never get past the calling-for-a-new-discourse stage, and end up just calling for it forever, as if trying to announce it into existence. Every path leads to a blunted edge.
In practical terms, what creating a parallel academy might require is:
1. actual institutions (equivalents of the good bits that got distorted: decentralised peer review etc - this is not so difficult in theory, it’s about building discussion platforms with the right reputation mechanics and then convincing people to use them properly until a culture with good epistemic norms sets in).
2. people having the will and energy to front the initial labour to get 1 up and running, and then use it (since the whole point is to build a research space that exists outside market relations, no-one’s going to be able to expect any trade-able reward for fronting this labour. this would need a fair amount of conviction.)
3. people knowing that other people wanted to do this with them were also prepared to front all the labour.
I think the third might actually be the hardest. If the meta-crisis is something like a generalised collective action problem, or a contemporary bug in the social technologies we have historically used to solve collection action problems, then it’s clear why this is so ludicrously difficult - creating the kind of discourse required to address the state of inertia is itself a collective action problem, and so we end up stuck in a loop.
Perhaps a good way to start untangling this is to start thinking about the problem in terms of labour (rather than attitudes, say). Creating a parallel academy requires individuals fronting labour that will not provide any immediate returns, and may never do. First that labour needs to become available. A lot of the difficulty comes from the fact that everyone’s labour is always-already tied up somewhere else — a call reclaim it is, ultimately, a call to de-professionalize. Clearly people have to eat, but you can e.g. reclaim your intellectual and creative labour by, say, switching to blue collar work. And so on. In many cases this will probably feel like doing something amounting to giving in to apathy or isolation, or abandoning one’s social destiny. Something like FOMO. Maybe the details of this are not quite right, but labour does seem to provide a useful frame—If the kernel of the difficulty is that no-one has any energy left for collective action, then the first step is surely to find ways for individuals to start reclaiming it. Perhaps habits of production are a better focus than habits of consumption.
Sam
