Institutionalized nihilism: An outline of the academic function

Abstract

This essay is a variation on the theme of academia and academic practices in Sande Cohen's work. It develops through reference to two systems of discourse: Cohen's semio-critical analysis of academic writing and its cultural and political implications; and writings on epistemology, social-psychology, and semiotics, not just in themselves relevant to the analysis of academia, but including some of those orientating Cohen's writing. Taking the discipline of history as the paradigmatic academic practice, it outlines the academic function as a technological device that authorizes and facilitates the wide range of cultural and political behaviour generated by the economic system of totalitarian capitalism. It argues that the academic function discloses itself not as knowledge seeking ‘truth’ but (in the Platonic sense) as sophistry with privileged currency and value in the socio-economic climate of information and opinion. The academic function, therefore, operates cognitively in terms of equivalence and identity: its language encodes it as a socially affirmative, natural attitude, as a common sense. Additionally, both by its claim to universality and by its internal logic of self-amplification, its authoritative expertise has a theological aura, a clerical posture. Its structure is narcissistic since the world the academic function reflects and interprets is a likeness of the techno-sphere it helps to maintain. It culminates in nihilism because the profuse production of expert opinion on heterogeneous topics results in the redundancy of meaning and the negation of all values except production for its own sake. Even so, as Nietzsche recognized, because it negates, nihilism can also liberate.

Keywords:

• academic
• capitalism
• history, narcissism
• nihilism
• technology

Notes

1. See: http://www.historyandpolicy.org/index.html (accessed 1 February 2008).