In a society dominated by commoditized relations and alienated values, the attempt to close science off from its relations with the values of its contexts makes a tortuous kind of sense. All the same, however, this undialectical and decontextualizing activity seems ultimately to betray an implicit allegiance to a now venerable religious, psychological, and philosophical tradition: THE QUEST FOR THE ABSOLUTE (as the early nineteenth century phrased it). Indeed, this particular characterization of the impotent in pursuit of the impossible may fittingly stand as an epitome of the Imaginary and even morbid quest of the academic discourse for what we might call the System of Systems — for the ultimate closed system where desires are facts and All is One. 😀