Why Academic Writing Feels Dead, and the Orgasm theory

I often write about things that are either difficult to bear emotionally, or difficult to bear cognitively. Often times, I write about things that are both, at the same time, such as when I exhaust myself and my reader (or do I have 2 now?) by dealing with Bataille, Deridda, Castoriadis, or even Agamben before spitting forth an insight that came to me without ever being framed in any of those terms when I first conceived the thought. My writing, and I imagine, that of others, often suffers as a result of the paradox: the more respectable the writing is, the less clearly the inspiration for it is communicated, and the more it suffers under the weight of the literature it must reference. This paradox is at the heart of many sociologies, just as it is at the heart of academic writing. Sociology and history’s problem is often characterized as finding a way to account for the uniformity of change and continuity without privileging one over the other. The dominant contemporary model in the academy remains that of dialectical materialism. In the various ontologies of mind propounded by different philosophers, similarly, there is always a need to mediate between perception and truth, as between the one mind and the other mind.

The dominant model for this mediation has been, since the time of Plato, that of the imagination. I find the teleology of dialectical materialism both downright wrong and rigidly overdetermined (and therefore completely uncreative), but acknowledge the need to focus on real forces in play, and the possible and impossible consequences of the same. On the other hand, even though I often deny at some level the correctness of the assumption, ever since Plato, that Reason can be known (a denial which questions the function of the imagination itself), I am less inclined to dismiss the mediating function of the imagination. But let’s return, for the moment, to why academic writing so often feels ‘dead.’

It’s dead because it surrounds itself with the dead, as a matter of polite acknowledgment, practical necessity, and sheer fetishism.

Joining an academic family: the practices of kinship through descent

All of this has to do with the need to enmesh oneself with the club one is trying to join, and thereby subordinating one’s own insights to a pre-existing club, such as the club of paid academics. We identify them as our family (influences) acknowledging especially those who have genuinely influenced our views. Of course, we also do the reverse: like present day Mormons seeking for unbaptized relatives among the dead, we seek affinities among academics with whom we can then claim influence and relation. It’s a creepy form of pilgrimage to the dead ((I have unscanned photos of myself in my mid-twenties visiting the grave sites of both David Hume and The Haymarket Martyrs, for instance)).

The argument that is made in return to such critcisms is that we need to do such work, such as that of genealogies, in order to keep ourselves from losing institutional memory and wasting our time re-inventing the wheel instead of tackling new projects. This is a very good point, and should not be neglected. As others have shown, however, this process too, should remain exposed: we cannot, as Foucault points out in a Kantian moment, allow the processes of power to conceal themselves and thereby become autonomous. ((See, for instance, Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
———. “Nietzsche, genealogy, history.” In The Foucault reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 76-100. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.)) When the history of the discipline we enter becomes less inspirational than it is “the weight of dead generations,” it might be time to decipher why that is. ((Marx, Karl. The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonarparte. New York: International Publishers, 1998.))

One possibility is that it is primarily lesser minds who forget this lesson and ignore their history, thus wasting their time re-inventing the wheel. We, the elite and professionally (or in my case voluntarily) academic are above such vulgar problems. Work is thus directed into two possible general directions: to areas that the previous work of the discipline has identified as problematic and unknown, or to emplotting and strengthening the previous work of the discipline. What is rarely noted, but is pointed out by Foucault and others after him, was the extreme power that the discipline has to shape future direction: as long as the story a discipline tells about itself is left unchallenged, the presuppositions do as well. We are returned to a situation in which people, even the academics, seem to be caught in a closed loop. While the morons are constantly re-inventing the same wheel, the scientists are constantly re-inventing the same science, the same questions, the same problems.

Another possibility is that as a population we have not yet fully assimilated the former lessons; re-inventing the wheel is therefore a useful way of indicating which problems or old scholarship remains problematic or foundational at some point for a given discipline or sphere of knowledge. This is an appealing thesis: while it allows for the possibility that some may be smarter than others (thereby soothing the ruffled feathers among academics for whom such an assumption is the basis of both their physical leisure and their mental (salaried) labor), it also denies that the scientists are working at the proper level of knowledge. This implies the political prioritizing of those questions which society has still not incorporated into its everyday pre-existing storehouse of knowledge. This can be inspirational and lead to monumental tasks of re-shaping our disciplines. Such processes are described as a ‘paradigm shift’ by Thomas Kuhn, or by Althusser‘s ‘epistemological rupture.’ ((Both of these were in turn inspired in this by Gaston Bachelard‘s ‘epistemological break.’)) The problem comes in seeing this as the basis of an institution’s real history instead of its self-representation, which is what, largely, these people do.

But they don’t theorize what causes the break, or how the pressure can build without breaking, and why it should suddenly break then.
I sympathize with the issues on various sides of the above: we should acknowledge our inspirations, and we need an institutional history on which we can continue to build. However, there’s still a problem. Academic writing sucks. It’s so burdened with the need to enmesh our insights in the processes and disciplines which made the insights possible, that the insight is buried. This frustrated energy, which is the insight prevented from achieving the purity with which it first emerged to consciousness, constantly places the ancestors of the concept above the children, the dead over the living. It can be redirected into a casual quality of prose which despairs of ever communicating anything clearly, and considers publishing a required task to get on with the business of teaching and earning a salary. Or it may be directed intensively inwards, manifesting as a florid or ironic prose style that mocks the disciplinary ancestor-worship which has colonized our minds and forces us to write as we do.

Orgasm
Of course, there are others who have better, simpler, answers for the sorts of problems, both theoretical and practical, which the above discussion cannot resolve. In his brilliant introductory work on the history of anarchism, Yves Fremion talks about the ‘orgasms of history,’ those moments when the tensions of societies burst free in a moment of creative release. ((Fremion, Yves. Orgasms of history: 3000 years of sponteous revolt. Oakland: AK Press, 2002.)) This orgasmic theory of history allows for all sorts of rather nuanced theoretical reframings of sociology. Among other things,

• it allows for the theorization of multiple powers and tensions without assuming antagonism, a predetermined outcome, or theorizing the powers as in tension with each other. There is merely ‘tension’ in a field related to the erotic activity of society (whether it be bodies, or societies, in motion).
• It also doesn’t require the counterpoint of event-structure-event that is so problematic for western thought, and the debates over which can arguably be said to have kicked off deconstruction. ((See, for instance, Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.))
• it doesn’t require that the orgasm be productive at all (just enjoyable), but allows that the orgasm may grow into a new, and different form of life.
• it specifies a relationship between the tension and the orgasm without determining the transformation of one into the other by reference to terms internal to either. This is an essential difference with the otherwise similar doctrine, common to Marxism, of dialectical materialism. That is to say, while it carries the aspects of tension in dialectical materialism, which speaks about such tensions largely in terms of solely agonistic terms, it does not claim to be able to predict the outcome of tension’s transformation into being (becoming into being, potentiality or virtuality into reality, etc.). Thus history is what we make of it.
• it introduces the notion of desire and eros into a discussion that has the constant tendency to reify itself in a move that is best described as thanatological.

I remember reading the introduction to, I think it was, Yi-Fu Tuan‘s ‘seminal’ work on space and place, where he introduces the term ‘geo-piety.’ He begins his acknowledgements and then notes that he very likely relies in many places on those he has simply forgotten to thank or acknowledge. The reason, he said, was that he had “eaten them!”

And like any other living being, he transformed them into productive energy. In his case, the orgasm that become his book. ((We can remember at the same time that not all orgasms need be productive in order to be enjoyable. This insight, which is insisted upon by the radical ex-catholic Bataille, is the basis of his theory of sovereignty – the expenditure of energy and wealth (they are the same thing, for him, as for me) in nonproductive, or improductive excess. The enjoyment of the moment without concern for reproduction is the sovereign moment which finds its reflections also in forms of transgression and death.))