You can practically feel it when you walk into any humanities seminar on a Wednesday afternoon: the meticulous consideration of names, the brief pause before someone drops a citation, and the way some thinkers are discussed with a respect befitting something uncommon and unique. Strangely, it makes me think of the store on the corner of my former university town where boys congregated to look through plastic sleeves of Magic: The Gathering cards after class. The same silence. The same exchange of value.
Naturally, there isn’t a formal deck of “theory trading cards.” However, if you spend enough time in academic settings, you will start to notice the metaphor writing itself. Foucault is an uncommon foil. Judith Butler, a limited-edition chase card. The equivalent of an alpha-edition Black Lotus, a scholar that no one outside of a specialized journal has heard of is sometimes called upon by collectors who wish to convey that they are more knowledgeable than everyone else. It’s difficult not to question whether academia ever truly moved past the schoolyard logic of trading as you watch this develop across departments, conferences, and Twitter threads.
Beyond aesthetics, there is a deeper parallel. According to recent studies on collectible card games, booster packs are made with pre-assigned rarity in mind, with print runs purposefully concealed from customers. The researchers contend that the excitement stems from pre-engineered scarcity. When you substitute “graduate seminar reading list” for “booster pack,” the comparison loses its adorable quality. Citations serve as money. Lack of access to archives, languages, and trendy thinkers that no one has yet to translate has earned reputations.
Years ago, Brian Martin argued in his work on academic hierarchies that position rather than skill is the source of power in higher education. The metaphor captures that aspect. A well-designed card does not make it valuable. Somewhere upstream, the system determined that it would be valuable. The same is subtly true of the theorists who are politely shelved and those who make it onto comprehensive exams. Everyone seems to know this, but no one really wants to say it aloud.
I believe that the digitization of the entire process is what has changed. It used to be necessary to be physically close to a specific library, advisor, or late-night photocopying location in a basement in order to understand continental philosophy. The search costs have now been reduced to nearly nothing thanks to JSTOR, Google Scholar, and PDFs exchanged on Discord servers. There is no longer any friction. Paradoxically, a sharper hierarchy results from frictionless access. When everyone can read Deleuze, whoever reads him first, in French, or with the appropriate person gains prestige.
Even when they act otherwise, younger academics I’ve spoken to seem acutely aware of this. Her department, according to one PhD candidate, is “honestly just a long card game where the deans are the judges.” When she said it, she half-laughed. One possible explanation for the metaphor’s ease of use is that the system has always operated in this manner, and a generation that grew up with Pokémon and Magic just has the vocabulary to identify it.
Not all of this is necessarily damning. Every cultural domain has hierarchies, including music, literature, fashion, and even sports cards, which were commodified in the 1980s before anyone thought to write about them. Perhaps the discomfort stems from the idea that academia follows more rigorous rules. It doesn’t. Rarity, reputation, and the subtle economics of who is removed from the pack are its driving forces. That part still feels uneasy, regardless of whether it’s an issue or simply a characteristic of how knowledge arranges itself.
