The digital age is transforming temporality. The speed of political, economic, and social life is accelerating. The financial world now operates on fractions of milliseconds. The news and media revolve on hourly cycles. World-historic political judgments are being taken, impulsively, in the middle of the night, and simultaneously broadcast on Twitter. We have entered a head-spinning age of politics.
And yet critical thinking and writing are lagging behind by months, sometimes by years. By the time our critical analyses are published, the political situation has already changed, and we’ve entered another crisis period. This is due, in part, to the fact that we remain wedded to antiquated processes of scholarly communication and publishing; and also, in part, to outdated norms of reputation, promotion, and tenure in the academy. The result is that critical thinking is getting lapped and is increasingly irrelevant.
This digital publication project is intended to be a corrective. The ambition is to get critical ideas out into public debate in an accelerated way to keep up or, better yet, to overtake the new temporality of politics in the digital age.
On this website, you will be able to read and comment directly on a punctual first draft of a book manuscript addressing the most critical question in politics today: “What is to be done?” I intend to publish a revised and corrected version of this manuscript with a university press as a book as soon as possible. I am proceeding with this digital edition, however, without a contract or a publisher at this point, in order to avoid any delay whatsoever in having the political conversation that we need to have today. The goal is to think critically and debate first, in order to address the important political questions now, and then worry, later, about scholastic matters.
Digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to reconfigure intellectual exchange and to renew and rejuvenate critical writing, editing, and publishing for a new age. I hope you will join me in this effort. I will make efforts to support others who share the ambition for timely critical exchange and communication. And I hope you will treat this digital project with the generosity of spirit and collegiality with which it is born.