I knew exactly what I was getting into with academia, yet having that understanding of what lay ahead does nothing. It provides no comfort. I can’t play the game, I feel disgusted with myself when I even try. Also, I want to preface by saying there wasn’t some kind of moment or crash-out that motivated me to write this. I was not spurned in any way, lmao. I think it’s just the passage of time and experience that has left me so sad and frustrated. I’m always worried about how I express myself, but hopefully, through writing, the pictures get a lot clearer as it’s something I’ve been feeling a lot over the last 1-2 years. Writing is something I really love, yet I never dedicate enough time to it. The malaise has long skunked in, and the stench drifts and wafts towards the direction of a door marked “Exit.”
There is this confidence/marketing ability needed that I cannot for the life of me embody. Selling myself, hyping myself, advocating for myself. Me me me me me. I definitely can be narcissistic, but I can’t jump through this hoop. I’m losing myself listening to things in seminars and presentations that have to be met with a head nod from everyone in the room so we can all signal that we are good people. It feels like one humiliation ritual after another. Perhaps a Julian Casablancas type of “returning to self-imposed solitude” is needed.
I’m such a complainer, but man, the fact that academia doesn’t realize that it is over is bewildering to me. People here genuinely think there’s probably a higher chance of some kind of socialist utopia or ceasefire being achieved through Bluesky posts than of the university simply being shuttered. So much talk about AI policies, so much talk about the harm of offloading your mental capacities to technology, and all I see is inaction spun as adapting to the times, so bit by bit they accept the wolf into the coop, keeping a sign up saying don’t cheat and a CCTV camera that’s dead. The idea that it’s only undergrads using AI is also ridiculous. I see it in almost half of the grad student work I come across, not to mention the occasional faculty member. It’s crept its way into publication and in the rat race that is publish or perish, everyone has hopped on the ride. It’s literally the Zizek quote about a date where the man brings a dildo, and the woman brings a pocket pussy. The very purpose of this existence is just put into a feedback loop that no one bothers to read, an institutional performance that’s lost any connection to why it started.
This noble savaging of poor and working-class people is also incredibly patronizing. Academia does the alienating not the other way around. You take some of the hardworking, intelligent, and idealistic (also psychopathic) people from the general population and spend years conditioning them so they become unable to communicate with normal people. How could some kind of socialist mobilization occur when they’ve spent the last 10-20 years pushing demographics away? All that’s being done is to deconstruct and dismantle, postmodernism and critical theory and the use of Foucault-style power dynamics has made academia in the humanities frame everything as power plays based on your own intersectional oppression points. I’m not even blaming or critiquing Foucault; I think the French pedo would be appalled at what his work has been spun into. The part that gets completely lost or disregarded, what he’s actually describing is that there is no self sitting underneath all the power relations. There isn’t some pristine individual waiting to be uncaged and liberated. The individual is formed and is the product of these power relations. You are made by what forms you, what institution you pass through and what power is moulding you. The body gets psychologized and subjectified and then something that you get to call “you” comes out of it. There is no pre-social authentic self being oppressed by the institution because it is a process of formation.
So then what does the striving student do with that insight: catalogue your intersectionality and submit it for peer review. A framework built to dissolve the sovereign subject is retrofitted to serve solely the construction of the individual. All while maintaining arguments towards creating community and spreading awareness to the oh so poor lumpen. Foucault himself in Subject and Power says that:
The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state’s institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. (Foucault, 1983, p.216)
It just makes me feel so sad. And it’s such a tough subject to write about because any criticism sounds like a right-wing talking point. But this fixation on identity/identity politics is rotting any chance of some kind of leftist movement. A thinker like Foucault, who wrote on how fixed identities applied to the body by sovereign/corporate/institutional power to categorize life and populations, would be horrified to see the people who name-drop him today do the exact opposite–reducing everyone to their identity signifiers.
And just to be clear none of this is a dismissal or criticism of the actual experiences that identity politics emerged from. The writing and mapping of how race/gender/sexuality/class get weaponized against people by institutions is completely real, and the insight and thinkers themselves aren’t the problem at all. They were responding to very real and brutal conditions. The problem is what happened when identity became a credential, which like all credentials do, continue serving the institution more than the people it was supposed to be about. The striving, well-off individual can absorb the language of liberation, and they’re not actually interested in dismantling the power structures embedded in politicized identities so much as they just want to change the power dynamics around identity to serve their beliefs and goals. Identity politics is a high-stakes pickleball game within the college-educated overclass. I will drink a gallon of bleach before having to write a positionality statement that’s glazing my somehow unique perspective of my mixed-race identity and non-bourgeois upbringing, while simultaneously critiquing all aspects of myself, but never so much to criticize the work itself!
Francois Cusset (2003/2008) wrote about how Foucault (as well as Lacan and others) were misinterpreted and/or twisted to fit the already existing moralism/psychology in American and British academia. Meaning that Foucault just acts as an empty signifier for activists and academics to dress up their puritan identity politics in a sexy French turtleneck. And isn’t it interesting that the CIA funded the translation of Foucault? The author Gabriel Rockhill goes through a declassified CIA document from 1985 where it’s shown that the CIA were tracking the French postmodern intelligentsia and cheering on their drift away/critiques of Marxism. I’m not saying Foucault was a CIA asset, or to make the very underqualified claim that he’s flawed according to MY analysis, but it’s a good indication of whose interests the work ended up serving. English-speaking universities got their domes one shot by French theory, they read one book of Foucault, and they set up new journals like “Critical Deconstructions of Zero Calorie Soda.”
But then my blind eyes seem to ignore that Deleuze and Lacan frequently make up the citations I make. Have I somehow unlocked and seen through the CIA’s intentions? I doubt it, I think I honestly fall into the same traps I criticize others for, it’s just perhaps more niche, so I escape the police lineup.
What depresses me so is that none of what I wrote here does anything. You can see the machine, label its parts, and see the shape of the cookie your dough will form into. But for the life of me, I just can’t do it. The exit door is still marked Exit, and the fear of what could be outside that door is something I need to confront after I defend.
References
Cusset, F. (2008). French theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States (J. Fort, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 2003)
Foucault, M. (1983). The subject and power. In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208–226). University of Chicago Press.
-> Slopunk <- 