They write in Aeon-
Right now, many forms of knowledge production seem to be facing their end.
No. Some may simply not find a place in Academia or receive any type of subsidy.
The crisis of the humanities
in Academia. People are welcome to do humanities research in their spare time
has reached a tipping point of financial and popular disinvestment,
only in the Academy. People will buy books about literary figures they admire even if they are not written by academics.
while technological advances such as new artificial intelligence programmes may outstrip human ingenuity.
How can they? They are a product of it.
As news outlets disappear,
others take their place
extreme political movements question the concept of objectivity and the scientific process.
as they have been doing for hundreds of years. People who advocated universal suffrage were considered 'extremists' at one time.
Many of our systems for producing and certifying knowledge have ended or are ending.
None have. Some 'certification' processes have become discredited. But that has always happened. I'm a certified alchemist but nobody will give me even a kilogram of gold so I can turn it into lead.
We want to offer a new perspective by arguing that it is salutary – or even desirable – for knowledge projects to confront their ends.
This is not a new perspective. Plenty of research programs- e.g. the search for a permanent motion device- have been shut down over the decades and the centuries. This also true of fields were diminishing returns gave way to negative returns. If I see that an Associate Professor of English has published a new study of Yeats I expect it to be an illiterate polemic raging against not just the whiteness of his penis but the fact that he was not using it according to current protocols mandated by Queer Theory.
With humanities scholars, social scientists and natural scientists all forced to defend their work,
Scholars have always been expected to defend their work
from accusations of the ‘hoax’ of climate change to assumptions of the ‘uselessness’ of a humanities degree,
which is disproved if they enable its possessors to command a premium. The problem here is that what is being rewarded may be class rather paideia.
knowledge producers within and without academia are challenged to articulate why they do what they do and, we suggest, when they might be done.
all workers may be challenged by employers in this way. However even non-workers produce knowledge. I am constantly discovering new things about my ability to fart.
The prospect of an artificially or externally imposed end can help clarify both the purpose and endpoint of our scholarship.
These guys are Associate Professors of English. They can't clarify shit.
We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question of ‘ends’.
Useless fields- sure. We don't want scholars working on a cure to cancer to re-orient their work.
This need not mean acquiescence to the logics of either economic utilitarianism or partisan fealty that have already proved so damaging to 21st-century institutions.
Nonsense! Chinese research institutions have thrived as never before because of 'economic utilitarianism' though no doubt 'partisan fealty' too has increased.
But avoiding the question will not solve the problem.
These guys are too stupid and ignorant to solve shit.
If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production,
we don't. Universities have too many administrators and a horrible cancel culture.
then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work
Eng Lit isn't a discipline. It is a coprophagous type of diarrhoea.
– in part to advance the Enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’ and in part to defend themselves from public and political mischaracterisation.
The Dark Ages had no problem with 'useful knowledge'- like how to make an axe which could chop off heads more efficiently.
Our volume The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences (2023) asks how we should understand the ends of knowledge today.
We shouldn't. There is no point. It is simply a fact that the information set expands because people get to know new things. No doubt, some things are forgotten but if they were written down it is increasingly easy to retrieve them.
What is the relationship between an individual knowledge project – say, an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, or the creation of a Large Language Model – and the aim of a discipline or field?
None. However, such a relationship may be asserted arbitrarily from time to time. Thus I may say 'the am of philosophy is to sodomize the alterity of the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbour's cat. Yet, I am the first philosopher to make this the explicit. Yet, I have been denied tenure and my wife beats me.'
In areas ranging from physics to literary studies to activism to climate science, we asked practitioners to consider the ends of their work – its purpose – as well as its end: the point at which it might be complete. The responses showed surprising points of commonality
because they were meaningless
in identifying the ends of knowledge, as well as the value of having the end in sight.
we can't identify the ends of a thing which has no teleology. There is no 'value' in bullshitting.
As scholars of the Enlightenment,
shitty ones.
we draw our inspiration for this intertwining of end and ends from an era that initiated many of our models for producing, sharing and using knowledge.
Nothing was initiated back then. We may say there was a Renaissance or rediscovery of certain texts and that Western European savants became proficient in Greek but it simply isn't true that any entirely new discipline was initiated.
Enlightenment thinkers combined practical and utopian definitions of ends as they called for new modes and institutions of knowledge production, understanding ends as large-scale goals that must, at the same time, be achievable.
But they themselves quoted classical texts which themselves referred to the ancient wisdom of the Egyptians etc.
In the early 17th century, Francis Bacon called for both a new start to knowledge production and a reconsideration of its ends. ‘[T]he greatest error of all,’ he wrote in The Advancement of Learning (1605), ‘is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge.’
His great error was to accept a bribe. The plain fact is that even smart dudes who do well for themselves can write bollocks.
Its ‘true ends’, he later wrote, were not professional reputation, financial gain, or even love of learning but rather ‘the uses and benefits of life, to improve and conduct it in charity’.
This is the economics of the Epicureans with a little Stoic leavening a la Cicero.
Advocating an end to scholasticism, the medieval educational programme that emphasised dialectical argumentation and deductive logic, Bacon devised his Novum Organum (1620), ‘new organon’, as both a blueprint for and the beginning of a generations-long and worldwide effort to seek new ‘ends’.
No. It was to seek empirical regularities of a useful sort. Bacon wasn't free of Aristotelian notions of teleology.
His work is generally taken as an origin point for the Scientific Revolution.
No. The Copernican Revolution predates Bacon's birth. In any case, Roger Bacon could be seen as his precursor even in England.
In this way, the Enlightenment offers a model of how the end of one view of knowledge production can be a launchpad for new ideas, methods and paradigms.
No it doesn't. We now know much more about 'scholastic' precursors. Bacon was a lawyer politician who wrote well.
The fracturing and decline of Aristotelian scholasticism during the Renaissance gave rise to a host of philosophies devised to replace it.
No. It was the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and then the discovery of Chinese texts and practices which led to the rise of empiricism. However, it was economic expansion which boosted the new empirical sciences. Laboratories cost money. CERNs expansion will cost 27 billion.
The conflicts of the Thomists and Scotists, the inadequacies of revived Hellenistic doctrines, the discomforting mysticism of Rosicrucianism and Kabbalah, and even the failed promise of Platonism to provide a modern, comprehensive alternative to Aristotle led thinkers like Bacon to seek answers in other fields.
No. People like Bacon wanted to get rid by trading with the Indies and settling the Americas. This meant better ships which meant better clocks and better sextants and better telescopes and complicated mathematical calculations made simpler by logarithmic tables or 'Napier's bones'.
Bacon’s terms – exitus, finis, terminus – suggest a focus on endpoints as well as outcomes. Knowledge, in his philosophy, had ends (ie, purposes) as well as an end (a point at which the project would be complete). The new science, he believed, would lead to ‘the proper end and termination of infinite error’ and was worth undertaking precisely because an end was possible: ‘For it is better to make a beginning of a thing which has a chance of an end, than to get caught up in things which have no end, in perpetual struggle and exertion.’ Bacon believed scientists could achieve their ends.
All this meant was 'verification'. If a discovery increases efficiency and thus profit then nothing more is required. Science 'pays for itself'. Bacon wanted to keep open the door of Equity so new remedies could be created. Similarly, in any useful type of study there should be an instantia crucis- or, as would later be said, an experimentum crucis or crucial experiment. Basically, the buck has to stop somewhere. You can't just go on arguing the toss forever.
The following year, however, the scholar Robert Burton took a less sanguine view of knowledge production in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Considering the lot of ‘our divines, the most noble profession and worthy of double honour’, who despite that worthiness had little hope of material reward or encouragement, he asked rhetorically: ‘to what end should we study? … why do we take such pains?’
But some clergymen were very richly rewarded indeed. Even the Dissenter could take in students and earn quite well. His own children would be likely to rise in commerce because of the 'goodwill' the father had earned.
The (enviable) certitude of the natural philosopher juxtaposed with the (highly relatable) lament of the humanist scholar suggests a division between modes and objects of enquiry that remains stereotypical of the STEM-humanities divide.
Nonsense! One of this year's Medicine Nobel winners was demoted and had to take a pay cut back in the Nineties. She was denied tenure. UPenn sold of its patent on work she had done for peanuts. It turns out that hedge fund guys can make better decisions than a highly credentialized 'faculty' of fat-heads.
We continue, fairly or unfairly, to associate the natural and applied sciences with specific and comprehensible ends, while the search for humanistic knowledge seems endless.
No. We think there are diminishing returns to humanistic knowledge. There are increasing returns to some type of scientific research. Do an Arts degree by all means while making discoveries about your gender, sexuality and whether or not you can become a stand up comic or draw comics really well. Don't bother with a PhD. It will make you stoooooopid.
Seeking to sidestep such stereotypes, we asked knowledge producers to revisit Bacon’s foundational question of the Enlightenment: what is ‘the last or furthest end of knowledge’?
This wasn't the foundational question for anybody. The question was whether Society could cohere even with a diminishing role for Prince and Prelate. The answer was- yes, definitely, if you happen to speak English. Russian?- forget about it.
Some may be quick to point out that past efforts at ending often appear quixotic or ludicrous with the advantage of hindsight. For literary scholars, the paradigmatic examples of this are Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941)
literary scholars are as stupid as shit. Borges's story raises an interesting mathematical question.
and the character of Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871-2).
Eliot, like her readers, knew that his method had been superseded by Teutonic scholars. Still, at a later point, the data Casaubon had accumulated could have been useful for a different type of analysis.
Casaubon’s work on his Key to All Mythologies is literally unending;
No. It was just a key everybody already knew to be useless. Still, assembling data may turn out to be useful. Science and Maths, as far as we know, are literally unending.
he dies before completing it, leading his young wife Dorothea to worry that he will guilt her into promising to continue the work after his death. Scientists too have sometimes conceived of their ends as providing, as Philip Kitcher wrote in his essay ‘The Ends of the Sciences’ (2004), ‘a complete true account of the universe’, but the idea that such an account could exist, or that, if it did, we could comprehend it, remains very much in doubt.
So what? We may end up getting hit by a bus tomorrow but that is no reason not to get out of bed.
The aspiration for a global end is generally delusive and potentially dystopian.
It does no great harm- just like aspiration to become Miss Teen Tamil Nadu.
Our goal, then, is not to offer a single or final answer to the question of knowledge’s end(s), but rather to open and maintain an intellectual space in which it can be asked.
If that space doesn't have a free bar, nobody will want to visit it.
Scholars across fields may bristle at the idea of their work ending,
funding ending. They are welcome to work in their spare time.
with ‘defences’ of various fields commonplace today.
There are also 'defences' of 'basic income' or just 'gimme free money!'
The disciplines as we currently occupy them are artefacts of the 19th-century origins of the research university,
because Humboldt was into Film Studies and Queer Theory- right?
which gave us the tripartite structure of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.
Just as there had been a division between Divinity, Law and Medicine which originally were separate. Then Divinity widened a little and ultimately turned into the research university because it paid to do so.
This model, which trains scholars
these guys aint scholars and weren't trained and don't produce any knowledge whatsoever.
in narrow but deep disciplines, emerged out of the Enlightenment’s 200-year shift away from the medieval curricular divisions of the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).
These are the seven 'liberal arts' after which you could specialize in law, medicine or theology.
The rise of the research university, first in Germany and then in the United States, put an end to this system.
No. Humboldt learned different subjects in different institutions with different teachers. His idea was to bring everything under one roof and to some extent that did happen in some places. However, specialist institutions continued to exist.
The fact that such academic structures have changed dramatically over time shows that
institutions change when society changes because the economy has changed. This has nothing to do with Bacon or Humboldt or any one else.
they are not inherent, and the past few decades have witnessed widespread interest in interdisciplinarity in the form of institutional programmes and centres as well as in new fields such as American studies, area studies and cultural studies.
Which fit you for a job as a barista.
However, critiques of interdisciplinarity point out that such efforts are frequently additive rather than interactive: that is, they combine established disciplinary methods rather than remaking them.
Stupid pedagogues can't make or remake shit.
Questions of purpose, unity and completion have been key to, if often implicit in, the discourse of interdisciplinarity that has dominated discussions of academic institutional organisation.
Those were discussions between the stupid and the useless
Of course, knowledge production does not take place solely within the ivory tower. It was precisely during the Enlightenment that writers such as Joseph Addison called for philosophy to be brought ‘out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee-houses’.
Philosophy was in the Agora before the Academy. The former paid for the latter.
The period saw the takeoff of ‘improvement’ societies, which initially focused on agricultural and public infrastructure but soon expanded to include the arts and sciences more broadly. Some of these organisations, such as Britain’s Royal Society (originally the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge), remain important institutions for bridging the continuing gap between universities and the public.
Which Guttenberg had bridged well enough. With the decline of the financial power of the Church, it was the public which paid for the Universities- one way or another.
But other extra-academic efforts have had the goal of repudiating the university, rather than connecting with it. The Thiel Fellowship, founded by the Right-wing venture capitalist Peter Thiel, provides recipients with a two-year $100,000 grant on the condition that they drop out of or skip university in order to ‘build new things instead of sitting in a classroom’.
Because Thiel could make a lot of money if one or two out a hundred awardees hits the jackpot.
For many, academic organisations appear moribund and continuing improvement requires new institutional arrangements. Ending one institutional arrangement often happens in the name of starting something new.
Or just saving time and money. Every time I get sacked my employer likes to pretend I will be pursuing 'new opportunities'- i.e. some other relative will be guilted into giving me a job.
Once we start looking for the ends of knowledge,
we find none unless we look under the sofa and stumble across the TV remote which means our time wasn't wholly wasted.
then, we notice that interlocking questions about purpose and completeness are central to many of our scholarly undertakings.
We can ask such questions about anything at all- e.g. shitting or masturbation. They can't be central to 'scholarly undertakings' unless they are similar to shitting or masturbation.
It can be easy to identify some knowledge projects that failed for good reason: alchemy, phrenology and astrology, for example, are now understood as abandoned pseudosciences (though the latter has taken on new life in 21st-century culture). Other disciplines’ deaths have also been reported, albeit perhaps prematurely. In 2008, Clifford Siskin and William Warner argued that it was time to ‘write cultural studies into the history of stopping’. In a blog post titled ‘The End of Analytic Philosophy’ (2021), Liam Kofi Bright opined that the field was a ‘degenerating research program’. Peter Woit used similar language to describe string theory in an interview with the Institute of Art and Ideas earlier this year; he called it a ‘degenerative program’ whose goal of unification had been ‘simply a failure’. And Ben Schmidt, in his blog, has diagnosed ‘a sense of terminal decline in the history profession’ given cratering numbers of academic jobs. These fields have produced valuable knowledge, but (according to these authors) they may have taken us as far as they can go.
But people are welcome to pursue them in their spare time or to cater for a niche market. There was a time when a University student may have been expected to write Latin or Greek verse. No doubt there are still plenty of people who derive pleasure from doing so in between working as tax attorneys or actuarial scientists.
Rather than focusing on a single field, we surveyed knowledge producers from across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, inside and outside the university, to answer the same question: what are the ends of your discipline? While we encouraged them to consider multiple kinds of ends, we did not prescribe a definition for the term and we recognised that some would reject the premise itself. We did not expect consensus, but we did find points of commonality. This synthetic approach revealed four key ways in which to understand ‘ends’, which emerged collectively: end as telos, end as terminus, end as termination and end as apocalypse.
But we all already had this understanding. We are familiar with the distinction between 'means' and 'ends'. If you do a boring job, it is a means to an end which has to do with being economically secure or having a happy family life. That is the 'telos' or purpose of your labour. A terminus is the end of something. One might say, 'whatever end you pursue, you die. Some go to the good place. Indeed all that exists is but a means to an end of God's devising or desire. Termination is not different from arriving at the terminus. Apocalypse means 'rending of the veil' and refers to the final judgment or eschaton.
The first two definitions relate most directly to the work of a discipline or an individual scholar: what is the knowledge project being undertaken,
it is to add to an existing knowledge base
and what would it mean for it to be complete?
For that base to be as complete as possible. Peter Turchin was a tenured Science professor who decided his area of specialization was played out and switched to a sort of mathematical history.
Most scholars are relatively comfortable asking the former question – even if they do not have clear answers to it – but have either never considered the latter or would consider the process of knowledge production to be always infinite, because answering one question necessarily leads to new ones.
But some questions are stupid. 'Where is the toilet?'- is sensible. 'Where is the where of toilets?' isn't.
We argue that even if this were true, and a particular project could never be completed within an individual’s lifetime, there is value in having an identifiable endpoint.
There is even more value in having short and medium term checkpoints such that forecast progress is checked against actual outcomes. This is where pruning and deadheading should occur.
The third meaning – termination – refers to the institutional pressures that many disciplines are facing: the closure of centres, departments and even whole schools, alongside political pressure and public hostility.
These two silly-billies think what they are facing is equivalent to what happened to people like Einstein when Hitler took over Germany.
Over all this looms the fourth meaning, primarily in the context of the approaching climate apocalypse, which puts the first three ends into perspective: what is the point of all this in the face of wildfires, superstorms and megadrought?
A lot of science and econ and law and diplomacy is about tackling that stuff.
For us, this is not a rhetorical question. What is the point of literary studies,
becoming a better writer
physics,
figuring out stuff which leads to big technological breakthroughs
history,
is a bit like literature but it also provides data sets
the liberal arts,
becoming more 'gentlemanly'
activism,
being a fucking nuisance
biology,
medicine, agronomy etc.
AI
better computers and robots
and, of course, environmental studies
reversing global warming
in the present moment?
These two fools may be useless but there are University Departments which are doing useful things.
The answers even for the latter field are not obvious: as Myanna Lahsen shows in her contribution to our volume, although the scientific case is closed as far as proving humans’ effect on the climate, governments have nevertheless not taken the action needed to avoid climate catastrophe.
for reasons economists can explain. This is a mechanism design problem.
Should scientists then throw up their hands at their inability to influence political trends – indeed, some have called for a moratorium on further research – or must they instead engage with social scientists to pursue research on social and political solutions?
What they shouldn't do is listen to these two cretins.
What role do disciplinary norms separating the sciences, social sciences and humanities play in maintaining the apocalyptic status quo?
None. Disciplinary norms don't matter. An Economist can quote Tennyson and a Eng Lit Professor is welcome to wax poetic about Quarks.
To some extent, then, particular ends are less important than the possibility of discovering a shared sense of purpose.
But both are completely unimportant. Discovering you are sharing a spouse, however, can be very important.
Ultimately, we hope to show what the benefits would be of knowledge projects starting with their end(s) in mind.
These guys might benefit a little, but these guys are as stupid as shit.
How can we get anywhere if we cannot even say where we want to go?
Just get on a bus or a train or a plane and you will get somewhere.
And even if we think we have goals, are we actually working toward them?
Are we getting paid? If not, then maybe we should have the goal of doing something well enough to get paid for it..
Ideally, a firm sense of both purpose and outcome could help scholars demonstrate how they are advancing knowledge rather than continuing to spin their wheels.
No. To demonstrate you are doing something you actually have to be doing it and getting it documented and publicized. I have a firm sense of both purpose and outcome yet I'm not actually being paid by super-models for sex (no kissing).
As we noted, our survey found four ideas of the ends of knowledge: telos, terminus, termination and apocalypse. But in answering the question of the ends of their disciplines, our contributors fell into another set of four groups, which cut across the three-part university division of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. One group took the approach of unification: how could the author’s field achieve a unified theory or explanation, and how close is the field to that goal?
Grothendieck's 'yoga' is the project of unification on the basis of greater generality. Sadly it appears that, in math, there will be more incompossible types of mathematics than there can be mathematicians but this also means, so long as there is 'multiple realizability', there will be no wholly general unification of the sciences.
A different way of putting it is to say there will be no 'mathesis universalis' or algorithmic way to crank out all knowledge.
Clearly this particular group was as stupid as shit.
A second group argued that the purpose and endpoint of knowledge production is increased access, and that such access is key to social justice.
Fuck that! Through Google I have great access to all sorts of stuff. But I just look at porn. Social justice is about giving me free money so I can be trained in the art of pleasing super-models by super-models. Fuck. Just realized, those super-models could be men or chicks with dicks. Also, I don't actually watch porn on the internet. I just said that to make myself look macho. I actually watch on funny cat videos.
Discussions of utopian and dystopian outcomes comprised a third group,
were they stroking themselves off as they talked? Details of that sort matter.
while a fourth located their ends in the articulation and pursuit of key concepts such as race, culture and work.
They were the Grievance Studies nutters. How come White men have white penises? That's not just Racist, it is also totes Misogynistic unless, obviously, they are consensually entering the assholes of gay men of colour as part of a wider program of reparations.
These four groupings – unification, access, utopia/dystopia and conceptualisation – synthesise many of the ways that knowledge workers respond when asked to consider their discipline’s ends, from seeking a point of convergence for knowledge to articulating the central project of their field.
But they are all stupid and useless. The fact is these guys might just be pedagogues or glorified child minders or affirmative action hires.
In this way, we asked contributors to reimagine their places within the university structure.
I'd vote to be a cheerleader from a strict Catholic background discovering lesbianism for the first time. In my spare time, I kill vampires. Is Camille Paglia- who was hot back in the Eighties, which is where this fantasy is set- actually the Head Vampire? No! It is Audre Lorde! Gasp!
As we know, any individual scholar’s research or methodology – what we have called her knowledge project – might diverge significantly from those of her colleagues within a department or discipline.
It might be a little shittier- true. The shame of it is that the Liberal Arts could still be flourishing if good teachers who enjoyed their subject hadn't been forced to publish or perish and join a meretricious citation cartel.
The 19th-century formation of the university established our three primary divisions of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
No it didn't. People doing law or math founded the 'social sciences' which only came into their own in the twentieth century. Humanities meant Classical philology which could shade into belle lettristic political or philosophical commentary. The natural sciences had an independent origin and entered Universities after governments introduced standard curriculums for what would move in the direction of universal education. Speaking generally, it was Government educational policy which shaped the Universities. In general, there was no great continuity of the sort these two cretins are trying to suggest.
Now, we are proposing a thought experiment
i.e. a proposal which could be implemented unless it is self-contradictory
of a new four-part structure.
as opposed to stuff that's useful or which people will pay for and useless shite taught by glorified child minders.
What might a department or division of unification or conceptualisation look like?
Shit, if these two cretins have anything to do with it.
We are asking how knowledge production might change to fit the present moment if we organise ourselves not by content – English, physics, computer science and so on – but by how we understand our ends.
Cool. Hobos who share a particular understanding of ends with savants should get tenure even if they are illiterate.
At the same time, these ends are necessarily interconnected, and individual research projects would likely fit into several at once. As Hong Qu argues in his contribution to our book, for example, individual researchers and teams working towards autonomously learning AI systems, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), will need more deliberate exposure to moral philosophy, political science and sociology to ensure that ethical concerns and unintended consequences are not addressed on an ad hoc basis or after the fact but are anticipated and made integral to the technology’s development.
Hong Qu worked for Youtube. My point is that the cutting edge stuff isn't being done at universities. Still, it might be useful to have a smart guy like him on your board so as to pretend you are addressing ethical concerns or some such shit.
Educators, activists and policymakers will concordantly need more practical knowledge about how AI works and what it can or cannot do.
They can watch a Youtube video.
Achieving the immediate end of AGI entails the pursuit of a new and more abstract end greater than the sum of its disciplinary parts: ‘a governance framework delineating rules and expectations for configuring artificial intelligence with moral reasoning in alignment with universal human rights and international laws as well as local customs, ideologies, and social norms.’
That's bullshit. America will do what it needs to do to keep up with China. A few Ivy League Professors might get paid to sit on boards or committee
Qu explores potential dystopian scenarios as he argues that, if the end of creating ethical AGI is not achieved, humanity may face a technological end.
If China gets a lead in AI, people like Qu might find themselves having to report to 'unofficial' Chinese police stations or else risk getting killed by their smart fridge.
In this way, current disciplinary divides are driving a society-wide sense of potential doom.
No they aren't. That type of crazy is confined to people too stupid to understand that SHAPE SHIFTING LIZARDS HAVE TAKEN CONTROL OF THE DMV!
Returning to the Enlightenment shows how concerns
among useless cretins
over disciplinary divisions have been present since their inception. In 1728, Ephraim Chambers, editor of the Cyclopædia, wondered ‘whether it might not be more for the general Interest of Learning, to have all the Inclosures and Partitions thrown down, and the whole laid in common again, under one undistinguish’d Name’.
This is because he had an encyclopaedia to sell. In the old days, there were travelling salesman who would tell you that you could save a lot of money on school and Collidge fees by making monthly payments for the next 20 years of a brand new edition of some shite cobbled together by Grub Street hacks.
By the end of the century, the redivision of knowledge had been formalised in the proto-disciplinary ‘Treatises and Systems’ of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Publishing is a different market. Higher Education is about getting Professors to bore your kids into restful slumber. The alternative is that they will give themselves a hernia by incessantly jerking off.
In 1818, the rise of specialist groups like the Linnean Society and the Geological Society of London led the eminent naturalist Joseph Banks to write: ‘I see plainly that all these new-fangled Associations will finally dismantle the Royal Society.’ Disciplinarity was seen as ending some kinds of knowledge while not fulfilling their ends.
But nothing of the sort happened. Why mention the subject? There was no 'disciplinarity' in the Royal Society. It was simply rather stuffy and snobbish.
The boundaries established in the mid-19th century and hardened throughout the 20th
there were no boundaries. There still aren't- for smart people. It is a different matter that the learned qualifications need special qualifications to practice.
are now maintained managerially and financially as well
these two Associate Professors were mercilessly beaten by University 'managers' when they tried to present their proof of the Reimann hypothesis. However, when they found the cure to cancer, it was Accountants who came and sodomized them brutally. 'This will teach you to say in your lane', they said, laughing evilly. Other Eng Lit Professors were too terrified to come to the aid of these two victims of gang rape. They too had their own tales of woe to tell. One lady had tried to pass off her pathbreaking work on Astrophysics by pretending it was a structural analysis of the Faery Queen. She was beaten and raped by the custodial staff who can be just as bad as the Administrators and the bean counters.
as through methods and curricula; they are often reified
which is still better than being raped
by architecture and geography,
Architecture went to Yale with Management. Both were members of Skull and Bones. Geography started off as a street-smart disabled Feminist of colour. Sadly, she made common cause with Finance after Margaret Albright called her a 'lipstick Lesbian'.
with humanities and STEM departments housed in buildings on opposite ends of campuses.
Which is like Apartheid- right? I'm not saying non-STEM peeps don't smell bad but why should they be denied the right to mingle with those who successfully completed toilet training?
For a long time, these tactics and strategies worked:
Eng Lit Professors were cowed and obedient
they gave the new disciplines that emerged from the Enlightenment time and space to grow.
Had Eng Lit Professors been allowed to teach those new disciplines they would have shrivelled up and died.
The strategies that got us this far, however, may not be the ones we need to move forward.
Just beating and raping Eng Lit Professors is not enough. We must find a final solution to the problem they pose.
If the utmost end of the university is or should be the advancement and distribution of knowledge – an increasingly open question in some quarters – then,
it needs to hire smart peeps to do useful stuff.
at the largest scale, the ability to determine and articulate shared ends among fields of knowledge
is one even hobos have
would be an important step toward addressing institutionally entrenched, often counterproductive, divisions and authorising new systems and organisations of knowledge production.
No. A polymath like Von Neumann might be able to do something of that sort. Oppenheimer did in fact do something like that- for a time. But two Associate Professors of Eng Lit can't do shit. They are too stupid and ignorant.
I suppose there may be billionaires or trillionaires who do have the bandwidth to do 'project management' for specific tasks of vital importance. But they won't be found in Universities.
Can we escape the discourse of competition and crisis, which tends to keep us focused on the health of individual disciplines or college majors, by reorganising knowledge production around questions or problems rather than objects of study?
This is like saying 'can we, who have been trained in abacus use, avoid getting the sack- now everybody has a calculator on their smart phone- by reorganizing the production of solutions to arithmetical problems? Surely, the nano-technologists could ally with the Queer Theorists so as to persuade the Sinologists to blackmail the Immunologists to say that abacus use cures cancer?'
What if, instead of endlessly attempting to analyse and remedy the troubles of a particular division, we turn our attention to the system of division itself?
Why not, instead of flushing away a turd, we turn our attention to a holistic method of reincorporating it into the body? If this involves coprophagy, you will need Associate Professors of Eng. Lit. because that is what they are trained to do.
Our volume is an initial attempt to see what the advancement of learning could look like if
cretins take it over
it were to be reoriented around emergent ends rather than inherited structures.
Why stop there? Why not look at what the career advancement of these two Professors could like if their genetic structure was reoriented around emergent ends- e.g. turning into winged unicorns which fart out rainbows- rather than inherited genetic structures?
The question of ends must continue to be pursued at increasing scales,
by cretins. Otherwise they might accidentally do something useful or worthwhile. I heard of an Eng Lit Professor once who could actually write decent English. The faculty raped and beat her to death even though she was only a fictional character in a John Updike novel. Imagine what they would have done to her if Vikram Seth had been the author!
from the individual researcher, to the office or department, to the discipline, to the university, to academia and to knowledge production as a whole.
But universities- at least at the higher level- are oligopolistic and have big information asymmetry and adverse selection problems. Moreover, they don't answer to 'departments' or 'disciplines'. The way forward is the way already being taken. Some disciplines will wither on the vine. Others will loosen their links to Universities if they haven't done so already. What we don't know is what will happen to the global Intellectual Property regime if America turns isolationist or China rises too rapidly.
The shared project of considering the end(s) of knowledge work reveals the rich history and scholarly investments of individual disciplines as well as the larger goal of producing accurate knowledge that is oriented toward a more ethical, informed, just and reflective world.
So that's why Eng Lit Professors can neither write good English nor get their students to develop a love for literature! They are too busy orienting themselves in some foolish, virtue signalling, manner.
We are, in many ways, only at the beginning of the end.
Whereas, in many more ways, we are only in the middle of farting furiously in the face of these blathershites.
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