ABSTRACT
The previous chapter addressed the topical role of anonymity as an enabling feature of the Evaluation Machinery: in order for that machinery to be capable of extracting and processing scientifically meaningless informational parameters for the purposes of wanton planning and control schemes, its enforcers – save those who occupy with their “names” purely logistic positions of oversight and authoritative validation – must be anonymous. This chapter turns its attention to those same enforcers (i.e., our peers, ourselves) from a different angle: it looks at how the figure of the peer is key both in providing a cover to what is effectively a sham based on an abuse of numbers, and in making sure that that cover is not blown – at least for as long as it takes for all processes of the Evaluation Machinery to be fully automatized, and possibly applied to equally automatized processes for the generation of “scientific products”. To see how the peer can become the protagonist of that “covert operation”, we must recognize how that figure undergoes a fundamental transformation: voided of its essence as a bearer and linchpin of the – at once singular and shared – pursuit of truth, and thus reduced to a shadow of his former self, the peer turns into the carrier of a control function, which implies a threat. That threat is directed at the trait which is constitutive of the very dignity and ethicality of scientific inquiry; namely, its allegiance to the sourcelike, never pinpointed and yet undeniably ever redounding principle of sense, which needs the acknowledgement and preservation of its truth in order for a measure to be bestowed for human building and dwelling. However, that allegiance has long been and is now more than ever menaced by a will which urges science on the path of progressive technicized societization. Hence, by threatening that menaced dignifying trait, while at the same time fabricating a figure-peppered fraudulent narrative of “excellence” and “value”, the peer perpetrates, on behalf of the Evaluation Machinery, the most severe vilification and at once the most vile attack on scientific life, and, consequently, on the wholesomeness of our human communities.
