The Impact tart, or iTart, is increasingly common in intellectual life. Let me give a couple of examples.
An air-headed ‘colleague’ flounces up to you and says, ‘Oh, this is wonderful!’
You offer a stunned and puzzled look.
‘I’ve just been invited’, he says, ‘to become a member of the Academy of the Social Sciences’.
‘You? How?’
‘Impact’, he says, ‘it’s all about impact. They’ve recognised the impact of my scintillating article in International Scoot!, “Riding as/with … the Baotian Monza 125cc Motor Scooter”’.
‘Really’, you say.
‘Oh, and one just needs to know someone who will nominate you’, he says.
Or you meet a somewhat flashy but shallow ‘colleague’ at a conference reception. After the obligatory and inane pleasantries, she flicks a blond curl out of her eyes and says, ‘I’ve just been made a professor’.
Again that pause as you desperately try to keep your jaw from plummeting to the ground.
‘Is that because of …?’ you say.
‘Oh yes’, she says, ‘the radio show, the newspaper column … Impact; it’s all about impact’.
Scholars, like lapdogs, have a knack of slavishly following the latest arbitrary directive from the powers that be. In the last little while a key element has been the ‘impact factor’ or ‘esteem factor’. Given that it is well-nigh impossible to peer into the crystal ball and determine who will be read and studied in a century or so from now, and given that scholars want to be stars today, if not yesterday, all manner of external signs of one’s ‘impact’ may now be listed.
Universities themselves offer the iTart fertile ground. At the appropriate section of one’s own university web-page (also the favoured ground for the Self-Seller), one may tick any or all of the following: a gong; cash prize; consultancy; election to an academy; honorary doctorate; expert media commentary; reality television show appearance; large ugly ring (signalling a habilitation); Swiss bank account, for aforesaid cash prize …
More and more journals make the iTart drool, for they claim to have a certain ‘impact factor’. Produced through an entirely ‘scientific’ process, the journal may claim an utterly meaningless number such as 3.2567 as its impact factor.
And more and more email messages end with an elaborate signature that reads like a mini-CV, full of titles, strange letters after one’s name, achievements, the latest book and so on. For instance, I recently came across the following:
Professor Richard (Dick) Whacker, DSO, FAHA, RIPA, JeRKR
The Steggles Chicken Professor of Circular Argumentation, Social Disharmony and Mystification
The Centre for Neo-Lysenkoist Studies
Editor of the Journal of Slander, Libel and Defamation
My most recent book is Running Free Range: Foul Holidays on the North Coast
Motto for old age: don’t waste an erection, don’t pass a toilet, NEVER trust a fart.
All of them are of course external signs, flashy baubles that desperately try to conceal the fact that there is little of actual substance to such impact. If you want to talk about real impact, grab a sledgehammer and smash up a bathroom.
(NB: the full ‘Typology of Scholars’ now has its own page. Items will be added from time to time.)
22 March, 2012 at 11:10 pm
In Kim Il Sung’s days fighting the Japanese, as in Britain today, intellectuals, even when they were technically merely hired hands – wage slaves – always tended to be paid rather more than manual labourers and were rather inclined to think of themselves as superior beings….
Since socialism itself is a science, requiring scientific study, it is essential for all party cadres to become revolutionary intellectuals. However, there is no escaping the fact that in class society it is very difficult for intellectuals, even those who have come up from the ranks of the broad masses, to resist the temptations of individualism that inexorably turn them into slaves of their own ambition rather than servants of the masses.
The party plays an essential role in keeping its intellectuals focused on service to the revolution and teaching them to eradicate their natural tendency towards the pursuit of personal ambition at the expense of service to the revolution.
This is why I question the wisdom, however sincere your Calvinist Stalinism is, of placing it beyond the guidance and partisan love of the Party. Who will hold you accountable to object Will of the Proletariat?
22 March, 2012 at 11:44 pm
This comment takes the prize for the most stunning non sequitur. I’m sure there’s a prize somewhere …
23 March, 2012 at 1:20 am
Your whole “Typology of Scholars” series essentially denounces your peers as petty bourgeois egoists.
I cite a perfectly cogent argument derived from peerless Kim Il Sung Thought that such petty bourgeois egoism is the result of cultural pressures in class society, and that only through fidelity to a revolutionary Party can one “eradicate their natural tendency towards the pursuit of personal ambition” – as embodied in the very “Impact Tart” you justifiably denounce.
Yet this is somehow a “non sequitur”?
It is no wonder that the Glorious General of Paektu Mountain Type (May God Grant Peace and Honor to Him and His Family) sent all the theologians down the dirt mines in Changang in the late 1990s.
Communist felicitations to you, sir.
23 March, 2012 at 2:15 am
Here we must take a leaf out the of the Chinese government’s policy and ban all American evangelical missionaries throughout the world.
And to you, товарищ.
23 March, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Denouncing peers? Ah no, it is done in the spirit of scholarly sociological analysis, lovingly carried out.
23 March, 2012 at 7:47 pm
Wissenschaftliche soziologische Analyse? Sehr gut!
23 March, 2012 at 8:30 pm
Those Germans have much to answer for …