Flat-ontology theory mimes and rationalizes the precaritization of academic labor

Evidence

Denoting the epistemic posture of empiricism, nominalism, and positivism that registers proliferating agents (people, rocks, animals, plants, songs, books, languages) as they occasion not relations but exchange, realism of this sort esteems itself democratic: empiricist knowledge requires not conceptual literacy but sensory attunement. A fascination with folkways, amateurism, imagined Indigenous epistemologies, and anti-abstraction propels ANT-style repudiations of higher-order concepts: when knowledge is immanentized, “amateur” and “weak” and “lay” become the buzzwords of retreats-qua-advances. And it is in this way that such a realism often signals indifference to the deinstitutionalization of higher education: flat ontology mimes the flattening of the academic profession, while weak theory rationalizes the loss of a living wage for theorists. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 299

Categorization

• XREF: This is a fully Jamesonian move — ideology as symptom of material base — echoing the Frankfurt School critique that theory’s form betrays material conditions. — connects to: Business ontology colonizes education through imported practices, language, and self-surveillance. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1655
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense: the claim that ‘flat ontology mimes the flattening of the academic profession’ connects epistemology to labor precarity — the very deinstitutionalization (‘the new critical modesty’) mirrors economic restructuring.
• SEED: Could fuel the reader’s Antitheory ‘fight’: the collapse of critical distance as an economic symptom of academic deprofessionalization.
• ADDENDUM: Parallels the Frankfurt School reading that ideology is the form society takes in thought — theory’s epistemological modesty tracks its own deinstitutionalized labor conditions.