Weak theory rationalizes the academic profession’s loss of living wages.
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
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that flat ontology structurally resembles — and rationalizes — the precaritization of academic labor is a genuinely surprising connection: theory’s metaphysics as apologia for academic deinstitutionalization.
- SEED: This is fertile ground for the reader’s planned article defending mediation politically: weak theory as ideological cover for labor precarity in the humanities.