Fast Food Research in the Era of Unplanned Obsolescence

Karl Marx once complained how those intellectual skunks, as he liked to call academics, only studied for the sole ‘purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world’. The real point of any intellectual endeavour, for Marx, is not to interpret the world in various ways, but to change it. For today’s ‘academic skunks’, it proves hard enough getting their various interpretations of the world read, let alone actually changing anything. But this tragic truth is also farcical. Academics don’t mind being ignored so long as their interpretations about their dead-end corners of the world get published in some respectable (dead-end) journal. As a professional academic myself, I am no different. And I am no different because the professionally regulated market for scholastic knowledge, where I operate, expects research which is seen but not read. The professional conventions of academic life, and the institutional arrangements that support academic research, promote constant productivity which necessitates and requires merciless standardisation. As a cultural dope of the contemporary university, I like many of my peers follow these conventional arrangements without question. The results: vast amounts of commodified but disposable knowledge. You could say that what we are producing is fast food research.