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— Written by Reece Barlow

If someone were to sit down to try and figure out how to change academia and scholarship for the better, any hope they may feel will almost certainly be crushed by the weight of the existing system and it's institutions. Whatever alternatives we propose must clear a high bar set by contemporary society, which is both hyper-critical and hyper-rational. The nature of critique which defines our current times is marked by suspicion. A new idea is likely to be met with comments on where it falls short, or what is wrong with it, as opposed to what the idea could make possible. Similarly, ideas which cannot be empirically tested, measured, and logically justified according to contemporary logics are dismissed before they have a chance to broaden the scope of our imaginations. Both of these requirements restrict serious engagement with stories and dreams, which in turn limit our capacities for imagining new alternatives.

Imagining radical, alternative futures through storytelling and imagination, without paying heed to conventional reasons as to why those ideas couldn't work, facilitates freer thinking about the kinds of futures we want to inhabit. After all, futures are rarely discovered through critique and rational analysis. Futures must be collectively desired and have stories told about them as a means to realize them.

The recently published novel, MAYA: Seed Takes Root, with rich, expansive worldbuilding, serves as a backdrop against which questions regarding the importance of radical imagination play out. The story takes place on the fictional continent of Neh, ruled over by near-immortal gods known as Divyas and co-inhabited by seven unique, intelligent species. Neh's broader economy, culture and science is built around Maya Trees, a specially engineered, interconnected network of trees which contains the Maya network, a kind of shared consciousness that is integral to life on Neh. This fictional world is similar enough to ours that we recognize how its characters navigate its institutions, hierarchies and social norms, yet simultaneously possesses enough difference to serve as a backdrop to speculative thought experiments concerning knowledge, technology and society. Daily tethering to a Maya Tree is a legal requirement for all citizens of Neh. Doing so connects ones mind to the Maya network, akin to a living Internet, where the memories and experiences of every person who tethers is stored. Maya is used by everyday people for entertainment, learning and dreaming. The Divyas, however, use the combined power of the minds who connect to it, and its enormous store of data, as a means of predicting likely futures - and then subtly "nudging" the desires of individuals towards futures they consider beneficial.

The Maya network is rooted, quite literally, in trees whose function is partly facilitating the imagination of those who tether to them. Potential futures are predicted/imagined and then the appropriate desires are coaxed and molded to make certain versions of those futures a reality. The Divyas argue that their use of Maya provides stability by averting wars, famines, and other disasters. An interesting question raised by the novel however, is whether all their nudges, engineered in pursuit of stability, has, in fact, blunted the power of imagining alternative futures altogether? In other words, when individual desires are shaped in service to preserving stability, how feasible does imagining a truly alternative future become?

Readers may draw multiple parallels between the situation on Neh and our own contemporary world. For a scholar who has spent the last three years writing for this newsletter - first critiquing, and more recently imagining, alternative ways of living a scholarly life - the concept of Maya spoke to notions of academic freedom and resisting the academic system, even when one must to some extent exist in that system.

Much like the citizens of Neh, the modern scholar tethers daily to a global scholarly consciousness. And, like the Divyas, scholarly institutions gently nudge the direction their work takes. There are no hard rules about what questions a scholar can, or cannot, pose. And yet, there are some questions which will never occur to us as being worth asking in the first place. Our scholarly desires are thoroughly shaped by funding incentives, publishing expectations, and competition for recognition, without us taking much notice of it. By many measures, researchers enjoy almost complete academic freedom, with very little of the choices they make in their work formally regulated. And still, a scholar knows how to behave, what questions to ask or not, and what success looks like through our own version of Maya, a shared scholarly consciousness, which consists of the work we publish, the questions that get funded, and the careers we desire. It should also be noted that, broadly speaking, these institutions provide a certain stability to our scholarly endeavors. Precarity can abound at the individual level, however the steady presence of universities, journals and government funding agencies make the conditions within which we work enduring enough to make knowledge creation possible. Small sparks of resistance arise here and there, but they do not, perhaps cannot, land on dry tinder capable of supporting a larger flame. The conditions within which we work are maintained in such a way that prevents this kind of chaos. And while a spark sputters and flickers out of existence, the hearts wherein it was born are turned towards a more productive use of their desires: that work for and with the system instead of against it.

In the novel, a means of resisting the prevailing influence of the Divyas is found in the protagonist, Yachay. Unlike every other person on Neh, he has never tethered to a Maya tree. Not only is he "invisible" to the Divyas, he has also grown up in a completely different paradigm to everyone else. Yachay read books, and practiced riddles, both for fun and as an intellectual exercise. He learnt to write in Tridha, a system of writing on the verge of extinction that blends symbols and colors to convey more complex meanings than conventional scripts. Everyone else simply tethered to Maya. Yachay is separate from the influence of Maya, and by extension the Divyas: the unique positioning of his character creates the possibility of a freer form of thought.

Scholars, unfortunately, are not able to replicate Yachay's complete separation from our own unique version of Maya. We can, however, make an effort to untether ourselves, at least partially, from the expectations, norms and traditions of our guiding, nudging institutions. In doing so, we may create space which will be filled with speculation about unconventional futures we would like to inhabit. The alternative, if we take our cue from a conversation a dissatisfied young Diyva has with the most powerful of the Divyas, is a stable future where our institutions direct us to manage the decline of what already exists:

If this essay stirred something, be it a question, a reflection, a story of your own, we want to hear it. Even if it’s something negative, it’s okay. The Scholarly Letter exists because we believe that intellectual life begins in conversation and communing. Respond to this email we want to hear what you have to say and share.