There are different ways to approach institutions if you’re trying to live the life of the mind in community. An institution is like a giant and amorphous collaborator. How close are you to an institution? Does it define you in some way? Is the promise of your future happiness contingent upon its robustness and continuation? Do you hold the institution at arm’s length, publicly or perhaps only mentally, saying you serve it only enough to meet the minimum requirements for it to give you what you need?
Is the institution itself loose, as far as such things go, or is it rigid—and if it’s rigid, is it big and multitudinous enough to allow you to be loose? Does it house colleagues, rivals, and friends?
My previous installment started to explore ways that one can think about money and work as they relate to creative, intellectual life, specifically when one’s job isn’t a part of an institution that provides that life. Some of those paths might involve building up some form of oneself (like selling expertise as a small consultancy), or living “parasitically” by using a day job as an institution to subsidize your passion projects.
Of course, these alternatives don’t easily supply legitimacy. Trying to replicate legitimacy outside of the institutions that provide it requires time, patience, and work—and the results are hardly guaranteed. Right now there is a silver lining for this, however. For better and for worse, the very institutions which have reinforced and been reinforced by the authority of expertise are looking very shaky. Reasons and examples are too enormous to explore here but I trust I’m not saying controversial. So let me get to the point. The present is a dangerous and also an incredibly exciting time to participate in the social production and reproduction of knowledge, to see old fortifications crumble and new scaffolding raised, to see the forms we’ve been used to bloom, kaleidoscopically, into something else.
The future probably won’t look pretty. The wars, famines, migrations, inventions, diseases, ecological catastrophes, and reformulated social bonds that await us are going to really be something. But a bit of anarchy in our epistemology and methodology strikes me as inevitable given our social, cultural, technological, and political present, and though this is sometimes very bad, it is also sometimes very good. Philanthropy or patronage, as well as DIY research, design, and application (basement labs, citizen science, homeschooling pods, alternative institutions of book lending and instruction) might provide USEFUL and NECESSARY correctives to the staleness that grip a lot of the think tank/academic world.
Of course, when things are this big and this messy, there is also no synopsis. We’re surfing the wave, not watching it. The synopsis allows us a picture or a story of how things are; it’s like a road map and therefore the next destinations can be charted. You don’t necessarily know what is coming but you think you know when to recognize that whatever does come is the next thing. Without a synoptic view of what’s going on, you might be unsettled and anxious: you don’t know if the novel thing you’re encountering is really actually the next thing, the big thing, the small thing, the event that will crack open futurity, or the passing fad whose public flashes up and dissipates in a nano-epoch.
My advice (ugh, advice??) in this scenario is not necessarily to cling to the synoptic view you might have had five or twenty years ago, but instead to push deeper still into all the directions hidden by your previous institutional shelters. Embrace the abnormalcy of how different your life, all our lives, could have been and could still be. Get weird with it. It’s hard and endless but not thankless: you’ll understand the world more richly.
What does this have to do with institutions and legitimacy? Well, if twentieth century forms of legitimacy are eroding and slowly “sedimenting” downstream elsewhere in time and space and culture, it’s an exciting time to experiment with those elsewheres. Remember, the institutions we’re used to were simply the sediments of an earlier period. Some of the upcoming opportunities will be tied to markets and wealth in some way (e.g., venture capital, philanthropy), and some will be antithetical to that world, based in other kinds of economy.
There are people doing a lot of very interesting things and reaching wide, distributed audiences through the internet. Self-published books, obsessive blogging and investigative journalism, instructional videos, tutoring networks, mutual aid, esoteric consultants, tech startups, interesting applications of quantitative data, labors of love (by and for the tiniest audiences), philanthropy and patronage. Little of this is new in itself but instead the environment is what is novel, exciting, and unpredictable. There are crackpots, yes, but there are also geniuses. And new iterations of intellectual legitimacy and authority and, ultimately, trust are in the process of being created.
I find this very useful to think about when I get overwhelmed with riding the wave, as you put it. Sometimes the dramatic changes in the structures we inhabit combined with the uncertainty of the future become a form of despair for me, like why bother when the current structures of production and distribution and audience are changing? Working out of that self-imposed despair (for myself) requires a more honest recognition of the nature of the change, which you've described so well here. New scaffolding can be scary, but very exciting.