Acquainted with the Night
A new piece in The Republic of Letters
Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and the human.
I have a new essay today in The Republic of Letters. It’s different from anything I’ve published before, which is part of the reason it’s appearing over there, but it bears, if only implicitly, on all that I do here.
There’s been a good deal of talk recently, on Substack and elsewhere, about the dire present and potentially more propitious future of humanistic inquiry as modern universities, facing challenges too numerous and widely-reported to recount here, have begun to appear less and less the principled stewards of its ideals and methods which perhaps they once did. This accumulation of intersecting crises has prompted responses of all sorts, ranging from proposals for reform to outright exodus. Some of you may have seen Justin Smith-Ruiu’s essay, “A Third Way for the Humanities” back in March, which broadly diagnoses the state of play and gestures at a path forward, or Jared Henderson’s more recent reflections about a possible monastic future for the university. I’ve followed all this with intense interest, yet most of the discussion has concerned itself mainly with the condition of the university’s pedagogical function, that portion of its mission which is about teaching and learning, shaping minds in the habits of literacy and colloquy, and transmitting a body of knowledge deemed most worthy of remembrance. While I think of today’s essay as a contribution of sorts to this larger conversation, it’s concerned not with these institutions’ collective pedagogical activity but with their role in supporting the more solitary production of tangible scholarship.
In short, it’s about the fate of this work in the aftermath of its de-professionalization, as the spirit of humanistic vitality drains out of the institutions which once sustained it and onto digital platforms, and comes to be supported—to the extent that it’s supported at all—by revenue from ads and small patrons. While there’s much here to be optimistic about, this development is not without its downsides. The Italian writer and artist Silvio Lorusso has offered the exceptionally useful term “entreprecariat”—a portmanteau of “entrepreneur” and “precariat”—to name the beleaguered condition of many of today’s artists, who, in the absence of a stable home to shield their work from direct exposure to market incentives, are subjected continually to its whims and face pressure to acquiesce to its demands.
I’m suggesting that something analogous is now happening, for better and for worse, to the tangible outputs of what I’m calling—vaguely, but for lack of a better term—“intellectual work”, as it comes into direct contact with the economic and algorithmic forces which institutions have historically protected it from, and which can only undermine the authentic search for truth which is in perennial danger of degenerating into sensationalism, propaganda, advertising, or slop. It’s something of a sociological conjecture born, as you’ll see, of personal experience, a kind of apologia pro vita sua with larger implications for the state of culture today, and which, because it’s the primary home of all my writing, directly implicates my aspirations for Ever Not Quite.
One more thing before I sign off and send you over to read the piece. Its purpose is to raise more issues than it can pretend to answer, making it more of a provocation than a declaration, and perhaps it’ll prove to be a kind of “opening statement” in the event that I decide to keep writing about these issues. I’m genuinely uncertain about that, and it all depends on whether this seems to strike a chord and catch the interest of its audience. So, please share widely, and let me know what you think.
Many thanks to Sam Kahn for suggesting that I write the piece.
-PJA