What We're Reading:
Thinking

By Samantha Hill

Liane Carlson writes about thinking for The Revealer, and what happens when we lose faith in thinking as scholars. Echoing Hannah Arendt’s critique of academic thinking, and those who rank among the professional thinkers, Carlson emphasizes the communal nature of thinking as an activity that we engage in, while reflecting on the declining state of academia today.

Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.

It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”

But I am skeptical of that line. I think the answer is likely simpler: it is hard to think about precarity in moments of precarity. Climate change is arguably the biggest source of global precarity, or soon will be, but the expectations put on academics, tenured and untenured, and writers, established or unestablished, are another. There simply is no room to start a story with no end or a monograph that might not be accepted when on the tenure clock. The financial realities prevent it. The perverse outcome of this increasing precarity in all aspects of life is that we no longer write the types of books we teach. Who could write an Origins of Totalitarianism or Genealogy of Morals today? Not an academic looking for tenure, at any rate. That, more than anything, is what depresses me—that the last moments of an old world will be accompanied by books pared down to a modest, acceptable form by the sputtering of the tenure machine.