For a Fatal Clash of Temporal Structures in Contemporary Academia

It appears that the university today has irreparably strayed from its principle of the pursuit of justice and truth towards an accelerated neoliberal machine in which the once-progressive performance of its ideals has mutated into all kinds of social and institutional violence. Moreover, as progressive academics, we seem to find ourselves in a paradoxical situation in which the productive acceleration of research via more efficient communicative techniques seems also to be fuelling a larger state of social and innovative inertia vis-à-vis neo-liberalisation. This becomes especially apparent in the ways in which the over-production of research seems to have become an end in itself rather than a progressive social force. This paper seeks to explore this paradox by productively implicating itself in communicative acceleration partly by way of the speedy delivery at an international conference of the very argument of speed versus inertia. It proposes that the conceptual and actual paradox between acceleration and inertia – where one temporal form either begets or is begotten by the other – signals a reversal of the foundational principles of agency and causality. This means on the one hand that the argument that plays off against one temporal form against another for the sake of progressive enlightenment or emancipation, effectively no longer makes a real difference in the face of an exceedingly oppressive neoliberal acceleration. This is because such an argument is itself wholly implicated in as well as produced by the technological speeding-up of precisely this false dichotomy. Yet on the other hand, this paradoxical temporal structure also points to as well as pushes us towards the reality of the essentially aporetic endeavour of academic research since its inception, so that the technological and conceptual performance of the hope for a better future and society that this paper likewise performs finally starts to cave in. This eventually leads the paper to make a case for the essential fatality of academic argumentation – and indeed the academic endeavour as such – despite and because of its own good academic conscience.