sites: new series · vol 12 no 1 · 2015 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11157/sites-vol12iss1id258 – article –
ACADEMIC CRITIQUE OF NEOLIBERAL ACADEMIA Andrew Whelan ABSTRACT Academic critiques of neoliberalism do work: positioning their authors and their readers as subjects invested in the moral logic the critique establishes, and thereby moralising the collaborative accomplishment of the reader-writer relation. This relation and its constitution is a feature of contemporary leftist academic culture, and of the mechanics of critique as a social or ‘solidarising’ form of writing/reading. The academic critique of neoliberal academia warrants scrutiny particularly, given the casualisation of academic work and the emergence of a majority precarious academic labour force. Attending closely to it highlights some vulnerabilities of the academic critique of neoliberal forms, and illuminates the extent to which it constitutes its object in problematic ways: in terms of the political consequences or otherwise of critique as intellectual practice, of the model of subjectivity posited by the critique, and of the historical relations between academic practices and neoliberalism itself.
Keywords: Neoliberalism, critique, precariat, para-academics, academic culture introduction …the university remains the most anomalous institution. Neither can capital eat it up, nor can it vomit it away. (Edu-factory Collective 2010, 7) If academic labour is going to be conceptualised, conducted, and described as a kind of critical struggle against the logics of ‘neoliberalism’ (or at least, as a presumably meaningful and consequential element to such struggle), there are a variety of specifics which need to be very clearly delineated, lest the endeavour remain at a somewhat general and unfocussed level. The costs of remaining at this level are high, intellectually and politically, and I aim to show how these costs are borne by some confusion as to the political and affective implications 1