Humanists work hard, but at all the wrong things, the commonest of which is the fetid fester of a hypothetical socialist dreamworld, one that has become far more disconnected with labor and material than the neoliberalism it claims to replace.

And again,

We are not central because we have chosen to be marginal, for to be central would be to violate the necessity of marginality. We practice the monastic worship of a secular God we divined in order to kill again, mistaking ourselves for the madmen of our fantasies. We are masochists in hedonists’ clothing. We are tweed demolitionists.

It’s important to note that the acidity of Bogost’s language is not run-of-the-mill Internet hyperbole: In my estimate, at least, it is a calculated and careful rhetoric. And that makes him worthy of our attention.

Read The Turtlenecked Hairshirt at Ian Bogost’s blog (n.b. that there are several comments worth reading, too). Bogost’s assertions are timely, but not unprecedented, and it is important to reflect on the simultaneity of the rise of the digital, the death of Theory, and recent interest in a philosophy that exceeds conventional anthropocentric bounds. It follows, inevitably, that it is time to ask what all of this means for the university, and for academe. To my mind, it is Greg Ulmer who has already done some terrific — if sometimes uncanny — thinking on the matter.