Slides for my talk on the alienated academic at the University of Sheffield, EdD Residential, on 15 February 2019

1. the alienated academic: the
struggle for autonomy inside
the university
Richard Hall ¦ @hallymk1 ¦ rhall1@dmu.ac.uk ¦ richard-hall.org

2. How do we connect critique to a political
horizon that works to abolish rather than
fetishise academic labour?

3. Categorical critique: explanation at a level that cuts through (i.e.
intersects) the differences in professional experience, to find what
is common among us.
The hopelessness of labour: to mistake the manifestations for the
cause of our problems breeds helplessness and hopelessness.
An intersectional synthesis: connecting contemporary Marxism
with the literature of feminism, (de)colonialism, identity politics.
What is to be done? A workers’ enquiry into the class composition
of academic labourers.

4. living a feminist life:
•does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct;
•although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better
in an unjust and unequal world (in a not-feminist and antifeminist world);
•how to create relationships with others that are more equal;
•how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less
supported by social systems;
•how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete,
histories that have become as solid as walls.
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 1.

5. Awakenings
Part 1: the terrain of academic labour
Crisis / Alienation
Part 2:the terrain of academic alienation
Knowledge / Profession / Weltschmerz /
Identity
Part 3: the terrain for overcoming alienation
Indignation / Autonomy

6. Awakenings

8. autonomy does not mean the absence of accountability
where markets are dysfunctional, we should be prepared to intervene

10. University means University
for lender and purchaser

12. whether academics are awake to their role in the
reproduction of systems of alienating oppression…
whether those who labour in academia are able to
imagine that another world is possible. (p. 4)

13. • authoritarian managerialism
• human capital theory
• markets and money
• discourses of productivity, excellence, entrepreneurship and
impact
• proletarianisation accelerated through imposed competition
Against self-mediation (wilfulness)
ill-being, precarity, overwork, quitting, debt

14. Part 1: the terrain of academic
labour, Crisis / Alienation

15. Crisis infects academic life, whilst enabling the system of capital to be
presented as a natural, transhistorical solution that requires an
ongoing process of structural reform. (p. 37)
Whilst it is important to critique the conditions and relations of
production inside the University, and to recognise the differential
levels of exploitation experienced intersectionally, it is also crucial to
look at how social reproduction underscores these conditions and
experiences. [p. 60]

16. Alienated labour mediates our activity.
grounded in a conscious and qualitative lack of agency or
autonomy, where ongoing, systemic exploitation and
dispossession are the norm… reproduced by the individual who
has to submit through a lack of power-over her own social
reproduction (p. 74)
•Hegel (self-externalization or renunciation; estrangement;
sublation)
•Feuerbach (projection of own essence onto an imaginary)
•Lukács (reification – labour activity dominates through external
autonomous laws)

17. Alienation erupts from the disconnection between political
economy and human richness. Its realisation is driven by
estrangement and loss catalysed by what it takes to produce
an individual life in capitalist society.
It is driven by the divorce of self from those processes of
production. Moreover, alienation erupts from the enforced,
disciplinary disconnection between ways of explaining and
making the world. (p. 69)

19. aufhebung, is a positive transcendence grounded in
human self-mediation… a historically-specific
eruption in response to alienated labour inside
capitalist social relations. (p. 76)

20. The institutional mediations of the University force the
academic to becomes complicit in protecting her
labour-power, and seeking to enhance its value in the
market.
This lack of subjective power catalyses further
fragmentation between individuals, including
intersectional injustices as subgroups are dominated
and othered. (p. 90)

21. Part 2: the terrain of academic
alienation
Knowledge / Profession /
Weltschmerz / Identity

22. The power-to explain the world… consistently runs up against
narratives of power-over the world that are structured through
private property, commodity exchange and the division of
labour…
As a result, academic knowledge remains grounded in
hegemonic power relations, and has a limited or partial
explanatory power. (p. 102)

24. The labourer consumes herself as she materialises her
product, and in return she internalises the objective character
of her product.
it becomes increasingly important for the academic to enrich
her human capital, in order to maintain her status (p. 137)
[This] marginalises or silences those who are unable to
recalibrate their practice against discourses of excellence and
impact, and whose labour-power is not permanently
accessible to capital, for instance because they are carers,
mothers, disabled or in working poverty. (p. 154)

26. Weltschmerz: a world weariness that lies beyond anxiety, anguish or
ennui; a deeper sense of hopelessness about the academic project.
reflects not only their loss of self in their work, but also constant self-
judgement through internalised performance management. (pp. 161-2)

28. to reconsider how persistent crises of value consistently degrade
community relations, in order to overcome those relations and define
a new anti-productive environment (p. 188)
[Against hegemonic] masculine performance inside the University…
that transmits self-harming activities throughout the academic
peloton. (p. 195)
How is it possible to move beyond separation, divorce, false binaries,
and social estrangement, in order to define an alternative form of
social metabolic control? (pp. 204-5)

30. Part 3: the terrain for overcoming alienation
Indignation / Autonomy

31. whether a focus upon dignity in overcoming alienation and
estrangement from production, society and the self is impossible from
inside institutions. (p. 223)
The struggle for dignity is the struggle for a new form of revolutionary
pedagogy at the level of society. (p. 230)
The practice of revolutionary education is to teach how to question our
indignation and to learn how to move towards dignity, as a struggle for
autonomy. (p. 235)

33. we deceive ourselves if we believe that the structures which
exist in order to reproduce capitalist social relations can be
used as a means to overcome its alienating organisation of
work.
intellectual work, as opposed to academic labour, must be
recombined at the level of society in ensuring that knowledge
is socialised, and that productive technologies are collectively
controlled, such that socially-necessary goods and services
form a realm of abundance beyond self-sufficiency. (p. 244)

35. alienation is not about the revelation of a transhistorical
human essence with an absolute conception, rather
overcoming alienation is a process that reveals a diversity
of human richness grounded in the association of self-
mediating producers of life (p. 257)
There is a need to join in solidarity [inside-and-] beyond
the University (p. 260)

36. The struggle for academic dignity is therefore a struggle against
academic labour and a struggle for love.
The struggle for autonomy inside the University is the real struggle
against the University. (p. 262)
This is the struggle to question the conditions and contours of our
social life. It is a movement of hearts against the present state of
things; most importantly it is a movement of hearts against
enclosure and foreclosure. (p. 263)

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.