Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the paradox between academic speed and inertia by implicating itself in communicative acceleration conceptually as well as actually. It proposes that this paradox eventually pushes us towards the fatality of academic research as such since its idealistic inception.

Paper long abstract:

It appears that the university today has irreparably strayed from its principle of the pursuit of justice and truth towards an accelerated neoliberal machine. 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. 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 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 progress, effectively no longer makes a real difference in the face of an exceedingly oppressive acceleration. Yet on the other hand, this paradoxical temporal structure also 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.