Resource

Why does the bringing-to-surface-of-depth cause us such anxiety? It’s not like we scholars who spend so much time down there have anything to hide, right? What does it matter if everything we could only access in print and in person, in classrooms and universities were suddenly flattened, laid bare for all to see?1

There are many reasons to fear this surfacing — differences in texture, potential for distraction, nostalgia for the haptics of human touch. We hear talk of streamlining and optimizing, we start going to union meetings, maybe dust off Kapital.

We flee the irradiated wastes of of hyper-capital, hyper-attention, fast-cash, fast-fashion, microservices and microplastics leaching into the groundwater, poisoning everything once and forever. We burrow away from this surface fast and as far as we can. We struggle to live out the half life of its unprecedented detonation. This sprawling superhighway that conducts us, day and night, between reality and desire, without compensation. This implacable cycling of the the shortest circuits of our reptilian brains. Searching, feeding, pumping, dumping, dithering amongst the rocks.2

It is not entirely selfish, after all, to crave the isolation, the cloistering of knowledge, the joy of finding something hidden. It allows us to contemplate things at our leisure away from the crowd and the astonishing speed at which ideas are disseminated on the surface, borrowed or stolen outright with no acknowledgement or citation

Perhaps the scholar retreats into the catacombs to escape the influenza of influence.3 The pandemic of influencers consumed with the sound of their own voice, immune to anything that might undermine their inalienable right to opine, for whom any request for qualification is regarded as gatekeeping, nepotism, patriarchy, fealty to the old white ghosts of yesteryear.

I could continue this jeremiad, bemoaning the loss of ‘real’ knowledge and serious study, lamenting the end of close reading, extolling the hidden, solipsistic nougat of interiority for which no one can be bothered to dig. I could expel all of this hot air and I still would have completely missed the point.4

Footnotes

  1. Cf. Heidegger’s treatment of truth (Wahrheit) as Ent-borgenheit, un-concealing, unveiling, a-letheia (ἀλήθεια) in Being and Time and elsewhere. See also the treatment of fear (Angst) in Division One (Being and Time).

  2. Cf. Eliot’s Wasteland: “Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think”

  3. Cf. the theme of influenza explored by countless scholars and critics e.g. Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973) and Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) to name a few.

  4. Cf. Nietzsche’s famous refrain from On the Genealogy of Morals: “Bad Air!”