kicking the habit

I learn via Matt Colquhoun that people are once again figuratively pissing on Mark Fisher’s grave because of something to do with The Canonical Indie Sleaze Guy1, and while it’s sad news on many levels, there is nonetheless an irony in the obsession of these types of vampires with that particular essay that only gets more piquant with time. I mean, way to prove the point of the piece, you know? As Matt has noted (publicly, tirelessly), the Vampire Castle post is a flawed, angry and very human piece of writing, and it gets a bunch of things wrong… but it did not miss its main mark, namely the identification of an early version of the stupid puritanical hectoring that now takes said piece as its target.

But, Matt continues, this is not just a thing that happens on the socnets. He describes his experiences at a recent academic conference with someone giving a paper on accelerationism, and doing the whole Don’t Mention The Devil By Name Lest He Appear And Take Us To Hell routine:

Only then [when Matt raised the issue in Q&A] was [Nick Land] invoked as the bogeyman that damns the entire discourse to irrelevancy. If that is how we choose to deal with our intellectual history, we might as well forsake modernism as a whole because of Ezra Pound or Wyndam Lewis’s politics, or never read Marx again after the Stalinist terrors. It is anti-intellectualism, plain and simple — the last thing I expected from a conference at a university. Then again, perhaps that’s me being naive…

No, not naive—idealistic, perhaps, but not naive. It’s idealistic to fall for the story that academia tells about itself, but I think the vast majority of people in academia go through that idealism. Because why else would you choose to put yourself through that heterotopian privation and weird ritualised arcana? Not for an entry-level lecturer’s salary and workload, that’s for sure.

Naivety, however, requires another step. Naivety requires you to solve the eventual cognitive dissonance engendered by the mergeconflict between the academic ideal and the academic actual, by means of convincing yourself that your fidelity to a given theorist or theory or methodology will be the thing that prevents your being compromised by the system. This decision seems to make it highly unlikely that you will ever realise the way in which you’ll seek to paper over your own moral failings by routinely and systematically pointing out the failings of others.

If you haven’t heard someone say we shouldn’t read Marx because of Stalinism, or that we shouldn’t read Heidegger because of his sustained engagement with Nazism, then either you’ve not been in academia very long, or you’ve not been listening very closely. Anti-intellectualism is simply the spirit of the age—or, perhaps I should say, it has been, because I really do think there’s a shift underway. Academia—and particularly the academia of the Anglosphere—is likely to fare badly in that shift, not because it has rewarded anti-intellectualism any more than any other sector (which it hasn’t), but because the contrast of the anti-intellectual actual to the intrinsically intellectual academic ideal is so much starker there than it is elsewhere.

Or, more simply: it’s easier to spot a hypocrite in a monastery, and far harder to forgive them.


  1. One of the very best things about having given up social media is being totally and blissfully unaware of petty schoolyard bullshit like this, and I would recommend it to anyone. ↩︎

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