Parting reflections of a disillusioned scholar
By Adam Szymanski - 27 January 2023. Originally published on Twitter on 9 September 2022.
My postdoc at UChicago recently finished and I am embarking on a new phase of life which is oriented around the fine art market.
Over the last couple of years, I devoted a significant amount of intellectual energy to interpreting the dramatic changes which took place in Western democracies and published a couple of new articles on the topic.
This was a natural area of concern for me since most of my earlier writings on cinema grappled with how images from the canon of contemporary art cinema troubled mainstream scientific narratives around mental illness.
As I conducted research for my PhD, I corroborated an intuition which I had since my teen years that medical narratives of psychological pain which encourage pharmaceutical intervention habitually failed to acknowledge the relational and existential dimensions of human suffering.
Beginning in 2020, I was able to use my research on the history of the mental health field (and its obvious shortcomings) to critique the rise of Covidism in the West. This political movement is based on the primacy of medical power and an indefinite state of exception.
I am of the opinion that the liberal democracies of Canada, the USA and much of Europe have entered into a post-constitutional era. Since 2021, constitutionally-enshrined rights and freedoms in these countries have become contingent on compliance with vaccine decrees.
We have effectively arrived at a situation in my home country of Canada where there is a two-tiered society which cleaves along vaccination status. Employment, education and travel opportunities are significantly different depending on which side of the divide one is on.
On top of it, leaders in these countries went to great lengths to stereotype unvaccinated persons in the worst sort of way. This added a layer of social stigma and exclusion on top of the legal barriers.
What I find to be most disheartening about the situation is the degree to which academics, artists, journalists and influential people with cultural capital not only went along with the scapegoating, but actively encouraged it.
North American universities which pride themselves on diversity, inclusion and a pluralism of ideas coalesced around the exclusion of the unvaccinated, mandated uniform masking, and tolerated no alternative thinking on the matter.
The tragic irony of it all is that many of the most fervent Covidians operate from 'the left' and are supposedly concerned about social justice. At this point in history, the term has been emptied of almost all its meaning.
The same academics who identify as 'left-wing' and advance a postmodern cultural program didn't bat an eye when millions of workers were systematically fired from their jobs for being unvaccinated or when small business owners lost their livelihoods in the lockdowns.
After witnessing how so many of my peers in academia acquiesced to the state of emergency and continue to ignore how democratic countries have shifted into a post-constitutional era with a two-tier social system, I must admit I am dismayed.
I had honestly thought that scholars who studied the history of the 20th century, who read critical theory, and who had familiarized themselves with art cinema would respond differently. I now realize that I was naive.
The loss of faith in my peers has affected me much more than my loss of faith in the university as an institution (the latter was never very strong, anyways.)
That said, I have met incredible people over the past two years who share sympathetic views, including a number of them who continue to work within the university. I see these events of recent history as a forceful realignment in my social life and as a turning point in my career.
I've always made a point of doing what inspires me the most in life, of surfing waves of potential. That is what I will continue to do as I take on new market-oriented projects outside of the university.
I do think there is still much to be written on the topics I have touched on here, but I have decided that I am not the one to do the writing, at least for now.
I have spent an inordinate amount of time doing research and writing on my computer as a way to come to grips with what has mattered most to me over the course of my life. I am grateful that so much of it has happened with institutional support.
I feel the pull to leave my writing desk and enter into a new mode of existence now. I think it will grant me greater autonomy over the long run and then I may return to writing in the future when the economic and affective conditions in my life are different than they are today.
I finished a new manuscript during the lockdowns entitled "Recomposing Subjectivity, at the Cinema: Cinephilia and the Adventure for Existential Health." It's a book of film philosophy about the therapeutic value of cinema, written through the oeuvre of Olivier Assayas.
I am still finalizing details with the publisher so it will likely be a while before it comes out. But please know that it is complete and will eventually come out. I think it is my best and most important piece of writing thus far, so I look forward to that day.
It is a book that takes seriously the phenomenon of cinephilia as a research method, and celebrates the seventh art's capacity to create deeply transformative experiences which can change one's sense of self and alter the course of one's life for the better.
I'm not sure how much I will be tweeting in the coming months, but if I do, the content will likely express a broadening of my interests to include the art market, NFTs and decentralized Web3 technologies.
Dr. Adam Szymanski holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University and completed postdoctoral research at McGill University and the University of Chicago. During the pandemic, he wrote about "Existential health in an age of medical totalitarianism" and “On the Scapegoating of the Unvaccinated”.
The original Twitter thread republished above can be found here.