NEG

1nc – Links
 1nc – identity link
Participation in identification processes in academia causes complacency and
inequality in the academic industrial complex. Minority knowledge production
is consistently cast away as “mad” and theory is deemed ethnographic solely
because of the identities of authors. Attempts such as the aff to theorize
solutions out of political violence through academia reproduces these
inequalities and hierarchal differences inside the AIC.
McWade 19 – graduate of Lancaster University, writer on gender, mental health and social
theory (Brigit McWade, “Was it autoethnography? The classificatory, confessional and mad
politics of lived experience in sociological research,”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41285-019-00090-4. SA)

A central critique of identity politics is that by

participating in such processes of identification, and therefore
classification, we become complicit in practices that actively (re)produce hierarchies of
difference, and therefore inequalities (Brown 1993; Tyler 2015; Voronka 2016). Of particular relevance, Voronka provides a
perspicacious examination of ‘how essentialized notions of lived experience [in mental health] risk efacing the material, ontological and epistemological
differences among us that matter’ (2016, p. 189). For Voronka, the identity of “person with lived experience”, as a new classification in mental health
research and governance, not only reproduces dominant discourse, it also universalizes ‘widely heterogeneous bodies of experience together’ (2016, p.
190). Moreover,identifying oneself as a person with “lived experience” in the context of mental health research
relies upon other ‘sites of privilege’ (Voronka 2016, p. 197) such as whiteness, heterosexuality and class .
Rachel Gorman and her co-authors of the Mad People of Colour’s Manifesto have argued that the Mad identity is racialized: ‘the mad
movement presents a mad identity based on white people’s experiences and white people’s
theories’ (2013, p. 27). A recent UK symposium organized by the National Survivor User Network asked ‘Why is survivor research
heteronormative and white?’ (Perry 2016), and Jayasree Kalathil and Nev Jones highlight how ‘both user/survivor research and ‘mad theory’ remain
Euro-American phenomena’ (2016, p. 183). Meanwhile, Nev Jones and Timothy Kelly highlight how ‘intra-psychiatric differences’ (2015, p. 55) Was it
autoethnography? The classificatory, confessional… are not sufficiently attended to in the mad movement, marginalizing the voices of those who are
significantly impaired by their madness and distress. Given these important contentions, Russo asks: ‘Do
our experiences on their
own guarantee that we will disrupt dominant approaches? … The task ahead of us might actually
be about unlearning what we know and are used to … For me, it is becoming increasingly clear
that new paradigm cannot be identity based ’ (Russo 2016b). Even if we acknowledge the
multiple differences incorporated within any given identity, attention must be paid to who can
assume such identities, what kinds of mad knowledge that might disseminate, and what kind of
work they might be expected to do given their identification . If the aim is to create new theories of madness and
distress how can we know these differently, without the long-established psy epistemologies? And, if our identities are produced within psy discourse and
power, how can a movement formed around that identity dismantle those power relationships? To address these questions, I return to the history of
autoethnography and native anthropology and put this in conversation with the development of survivor research and mad studies. In the first published
paper specifically discussing and outlining the concept of autoethnography, David Hayano asserts that the auto ethnographer must have, ‘some prior
knowledge of the people, their culture and language, as well as the ability to be accepted to some degree, or to “pass” as a native member’ (Hayano 1979,
p. 99); you can either belong to the group you’re researching, or you can be immersed in that group through ‘personal interests’ or ‘family connections’
(ibid.). Perhaps most importantly, autoethnographers ‘possess the qualities of often permanent self-identification with a group and full internal
membership, as recognized both by themselves and the people of whom they are a part’ (Hayano 1979, p. 99); insider status may be by birth, or by
interest and acquisition over time, but it must be recognized by others in that group. Here, it is who the researcher is—their group identity and
identification—that determines whether the project is ethnography or autoethnography. Hayano also emphasizes that the ‘insider/outsider (or
autoethnography/ethnography) dimension is best seen as a continuum rather than a rigid dichotomy’ (Hayano 1979, p. 99). This is less clear; it both
matters who are you are and what you know and to which group you belong, but there is no clear distinction between those on the inside and those who
are not. Nevertheless, the loosened category of autoethnography that Hayano describes continues to be infected with racialized and colonial discourse of
anthropology in which the division of labour remains untroubled between “natives” who research themselves, and outsider ethnographers who can
research whatever they want. The same issue can be seen in user/survivor research, and particularly its translation in mental health services as “peer”
work (Voronka 2017), or public–patient involvement (PPI) (Rose et  al. 2018). Such work continues to produce ‘ethnographically detained’ (Weheliye
2014, p. 24) knowledge-producers, both absorbing and segregating mad knowledge and discourse within the academy. Hayano’s use of ‘continuum’
interests me because this is the precise reasoning I employed to gain research ethics approval for my accessing the service as a service-user would. Whilst
agreeing that I wasn’t a “real” service-user, I argued that I was nonetheless able to experience what it might be like for a service-user because,
B. McWade as anti-stigma and government policy discourse repeatedly claim, we all exist on a continuum of mental (ill) health. The tenet of inclusion
discourse is that everyone is equal but different. However, the significant ethical and political limitations are that to be included we must frst identify
ourselves, and the process of identification naturalizes those classifications, and obscures the multiple ways in which differences materialise in practice
(e.g. in the practices of (auto)ethnographic research). Indeed, there exist numerous accounts of why and how it matters a great deal how you are marked
—gendered, racialized, classed, disabled and so forth—as to what happens to you if you experience madness and distress (see for example: Metzl 2009;
Daley et al. 2012). Escaping ethnographic detainment The injection of stories of the self into research writing is part of a history of epistemic challenges
to the assumption that some people study and others are studied. However, in the context of mental health, we might question whether using stories can
successfully redress inequalities in knowledge production when the story of the self is the primary diagnostic tool of the psy disciplines. Voronka (In
Press) elucidates this issue sharply by detailing how her personal story is heard by health professionals, academics, researchers and social workers as a
case history that tells some kind of truth of her internal  world, which they have the expertise to diagnose. Despite her invitation to hear her story
otherwise—that those experiences were socially and politically produced—Voronka was only met with responses that emerge from institutionalized and
disciplinary ways of hearing and interpreting a mental health service-user. It is seemingly impossible for these professionals to hear Voronka in any other
way. I also found similar responses presenting versions of this paper at conferences, particularly the desire to affirm how “brave” I was for sharing
personal experiences (which you will notice I don’t really do), and also an attempt to resolve the question concerning my identity once and for all. It
seems one cannot ask for these phenomena to be thought of differently, without someone thinking it is a puzzle that they are able to master. Like the
stories they respond to, our audiences’ engagements are also epistemically situated within a host of discursive practices concerning the investigation of
human minds. As Russo has argued in relation to both psy and social science research use of patient stories, ‘[p]eople with psychiatric experience are
treated as data sources. By assigning the tasks of understanding and making meaning of madness to ‘experts’ and not to those directly concerned, the
great majority of narrative analyses perpetuate the role and power divisions central to psychiatric [sic] treatment’ (Russo 2016a, p. 216). Again,
Voronka’s (2017) work demonstrates this clearly, in revealing how service-user (peer) researchers are called upon to tell their stories in ways that restrict
their access to conduct analysis; the storyteller remains the analysand. Writing in 1970, Jones outlined a similar problem in relation to native
anthropology, which he saw as lacking non-Western theoretical foundations. The division of labour remained stuck between data collectors (natives) and
intellectuals/theorists Was it autoethnography? The classificatory, confessional… (white, Western anthropologists) developing their own ways of making
sense of that data from an outsider perspective. Crucial to the project of decolonization and desensitizing knowledge production is to move away from
considering experience as data to be analyzed to understanding it as a means through which we collectively theorise. Experience is embodied and
materializes in context; access to this theorizing is both constrained and enabled through the identities and classifications that produce us as subjects.
Wehilye (2014) has argued that political identity-based resistance does not need to ‘assume full, self-present, and coherent subjects working against
something or someone’ (Weheliye 2014, p. 2), but can operate through a materialist conceptualization of suffering arising in the context of political
violence rather than individual wounds. Crucially, this means that to ignore embodied experience is to eface ‘alternatives modes of life alongside the
violence, subjection, exploitation and racialization that defne the modern human’ (2014, pp. 1–2). Wehilye
describes how Black
Studies entered academia in the 1960s in the USA, but that this was pre-dated by ‘a set of
intellectual traditions and liberation struggles that have borne witness to the production and
maintenance of hierarchical distinctions between groups of humans’ since the eighteenth
century, and as such, ‘black studies represents a substantial critique of western modernity and a
sizeable archive of social, political, and cultural alternatives’ (Weheliye 2014, p. 3). He outlines how despite
this, minority discourse has been segregated from white European thought ‘to the jurisdiction of
ethnographic locality’ (Weheliye 2014, p. 6), whilst white European theorists are deemed translatable
almost anywhere. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s work, he describes how since the logic of capitalist
classification of humans has existed, those who are marked as not-quite-human or non-human
have produced knowledge and strategies of resistance about it. Yet, when geo-political shifts
provide ruptures for this work to enter the academy, such as the recruitment native
anthropologists and the black and minority ethnic studies that followed, or in the case of Anglo-
American survivor research when deinstitutionalization began in earnest (Campbell 1996), this work
is deemed more ethnographic data than theory precisely because of the identities of
the people who produce it. There is a further layer to this. First, before “outsider” scholarship is
academically sanctioned it has already existed for some time as form of collective witnessing.
Once translated into the context of the academic-industrial complex the logic of
liberal individualism disconnects this knowledge from its collective and embodied
origins, and reproduces inequalities around knowledge production at the very same
time it attempts to theorize its way out of such political violence . Once the idea of
studying oneself becomes academically sanctioned, its potential for speaking truth to power is
politically neutralized as ‘outsiders imagine it to be “an anybody-can play pick-up game
performed on a wide-open, untrammeled field”’ (Ann DuCille cited in Weheliye 2014, p. 5). We see this in the history of
autoethnography I present above, in a significant tranche of reflexive research accounts being labelled as autoethnographic without any explicit
politicized aims (see for example, Lake 2015; Helps 2017), and it is apparent in the multiple ways I have toyed with autoethnography as a method in the
study of madness as a socio-political phenomenon. In my engagements with Mad Studies, I have learned about trailblazing work amongst the Canadian
survivor community, which I describe here without asserting B. McWade that these are the only examples of such work or that this only happens in
Canada. Firstly, there exists a Psychiatric Survivor Archive in Toronto2 that preserves the history of survivor organizing and theorizing; Danielle
Landry’s work centers the importance of such archive-making (2017). Survivor
and mad studies scholars have also
critically analyzed the ways in which stories told by members of the C/S/X community are co-
opted as evidence that treatments and services on ofer are effective, again depoliticizing the
context in which people become mad in the first place (Costa et  al. 2012). Furthermore, they have directly
challenged the way in which research conducted within large organizations (such as the mental
health service and universities) fail to take into account psychiatric survivor research and theory,
but repeatedly ask the same (incorrect) questions without effecting change (Psychiatric Disabilities Anti-
violence Coalition 2015). All of these actions directly challenge the discourses of equality that infect the
inclusion politics of knowledge production in late capitalist academia. Holding this space open is
very difficult to do, is significantly under-resourced, and requires a way of doing scholarship not
encouraged in academic career development (see for example, Church 1995). Furthermore, when “high-
knowledge crazies” (David Reville’s wonderful term) attempt to tell their stories otherwise, they are
continually drawn back into a space in which already-made identity classifications occlude what
madness might say if it was allowed to be heard outside of the epistemic categories that
currently define it.
 1nc - generic
Political action through academia accelerates a desire that parallels speed
elitism – their calls to maximize action in the academic debate space manifests
itself as ephemera that precludes critical engagement to counter neoliberal
globalization
Hoofd 10 – assistant professor @ Utercht Univeristy & author of Higher Education and
Technological Acceleration: the Disintegration of University Teaching and Research and
Ambiguities of Activism: Alter-Globalism and the Imperatives of Speed (Ingrid M. Hoofd, “The
accelerated university: Activist academic alliances and the simulation of thought,”
http://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/10-1ephemera-feb10.pdf#page=8, SA)
The call for participants to become active and productive in co-organising the international event – of course, without any monetary
remuneration – is also much present in Investigacció’s rhetoric. They suggest that participants should engage with one another not
only at the meeting, but especially through the online spaces Investigacció has created for the purpose of generating activist research.
‘Take action!’ says their flyer, ‘[...] make it so the conference is yours!’ This
seductive appeal to the subject-
individual as the centre of creative production is very common to neo-liberal consumerism and
its emphasis on cybernetic interactivity. But it is also false in that it gives the participants a sense
of control over Investigacció that they actually do not have – eventually, the main organisers
(have already) set the agenda and handed out the stakes. In short, the organisers fail to situate
themselves by pretending everyone is on the same level of privilege – for example, not requiring
monetary compensation – in © 2010 ephemera 10(1): 7-24 The accelerated university articles this project,
and this failure is strangely an effect of their attempt at reviving a more democratic academic
structure. The non-validity of this collective or consumer-control becomes apparent in terms of
the actual meeting and its website. This illusion of control is also apparent in terms of the
activist-academic’s general influence on subverting technocratic globalisation; counter to the
common notion that the masses dabble in individual escapism , I would argue that many individuals
worldwide are in fact more and more politically active. Nonetheless, this activity seems less and
less capable of reaching the desired effect of countering or subverting neo-liberal
globalisation. This is, as Jean Baudrillard, whom I will discuss shortly, would have it in ‘The Implosion of
Meaning in the Media’, because the desire to be politically active is in fact increasingly a function of
acceleration under late-capitalism. Political activity in general becomes an important motor
behind capitalist circulation, and the new technologies intensify this process with their quality of
instantaneity and simulation. Investigacció thus fails to see that their call for activist action and their
anti-academic stance implicitly upholds a particular theory of the politically energised
subject that also underpins speed-elitism . The arguments from Investigacció that research
should be done solely in the service and for the glory of liberatory social movements, in effect
puts social movement activism on a pedestal that problematically results in a foreclosure of any
critique of complicity of such activism in acceleration. Paradoxically though, it is this temporal
foreclosure that allows for such activity – as for a theory of justice – to concern itself with and
perform justice as if its praxis was ‘truly liberating’. A particularly vivid example of this strategy of foreclosure is
‘Activist Research’ by a group that calls itself Glocal Research Space. This group emerged out of the Infoespai
(Infospace) project in Barcelona, which aims at empowering non-profit organisations and social
movements through mass and new media solutions . Glocal Research Space’s name already suggests a
problematic conflation of the global and the local, pointing towards an instantaneous connection of certain places and spaces and a
technological extension of a specific sort of locality onto the global. The piece mentions that the growing enthusiasm for
social mobilisation seems to be accompanied by a strong emergence of activist-research
initiatives, in particular in Europe and one of its favourite others, Latin America. While such an insight might inform
an analysis of how this emergence appears as a symptom of neo-liberalism, they nonetheless
propose that this emergence is proof of a ‘new form of commitment and antagonistic
subjectivity’ (Glocal Research Space, 2003: 18). Moreover, they claim that social research should be: Research
that pursues the creation of a knowledge that is valued for its practical effectiveness ... as
opposed to an objective and contemplative theoretical knowledge in the traditional academic
fashion. That is, a knowledge that can then be added ... to social mobilization; a knowledge that
generates and maximises action. (Glocal Research Space, 2003: 18, italics mine) The demonisation of
contemplation, and the economist urge to ‘maximise action’, sounds eerily close to the speed-
elitist discourse of accelerating production by seeking to obliterate any doubt, delay or
‘impractical’ critique that may complicate the opposition between doing and thinking . I would claim
that to simply maximise action says nothing about the effects of such action, and the implication
that actions are ephemera . The accelerated university articles automatically subversive not
only repeats the fantasy of the active subject as in control of the outcome of her actions, but
also elides any critical reflection on the complicities of such actions . It is noteworthy also that this call
for the intensification of activity is created through an opposition to a mythical academic space,
again as if that university space is or has ever been purely objective and theoretical. Further on in the
piece, Glocal Research Space argues that activist-research should also be ‘nomadic and travelling’ and that it should be conducted as
‘springing from the relation between subject-investigator and subject-investigated [...] without an object’ (2003: 18). They rightly note
here that academic objectivity is an illusion. Nonetheless, they go on to validate activist-research through claiming that the people
working in these projects are ‘open about their motives and opinions’ (2003: 19) unlike academic researchers. They even flip the
narrative of objectivity in favour of activist-research by saying that the latter overcomes academic institutionalisation and hence
‘generates free, public, inclusive and non-discriminatory knowledge for universal use’ (2003: 19). This statement, as well as their
previous argument that traditional academic knowledge is ‘objective’, effectively defeats their previous argument that objective
knowledge is a fantasy. ‘Activist Research’ shows how the call for justice from Investigacció and Glocal Research Space falls prey to
universalising its particularity by discursively repeating the action-thought dialectic and by eventually acting as if it has overcome this
aporia by aligning itself to an ontological concept of action. But the
justification of action still hinges on the
particular humanist dialectic of action and thought. Therefore, their claim unwittingly erases
how such activist-research is also always situated and limited to its techno-economic context,
meanwhile silencing any type of research or experience that does not fit the humanist point of
view. This claim thus makes the (false) idea of objectivity once more the overarching logic of
social change. The idea that ‘knowledges generated by social movements’ (2003: 19) can in any
way be transparently read as objective truths, as opposed to academic knowledge, not only
discards the possibility that academic practice is culturally and historically contingent, but also
employs the strategy of writing oneself into the margins as an empowering tool that obscures
the privileges that allow such forms of empowerment. It is also interesting that ‘Activist
Research’ asks for ‘subject-researchers’ and ‘subjectinvestigated’ to enter a ‘composition
process’ (2003: 18), and even goes so far as to argue that ideally, the researcher is the activist s/he investigates. This suggested
confusion of the boundary between researcher and researched appears to complicate the traditional academic scene, though I would
argue that the indiscernible entanglement of subject and object is today always already the case. To argue however, as Glocal
Research Space does, that subject and object should enter a composition process presupposes that they are initially discreet entities
which then requires a sort of nomadic crossing-over. This implies again that the activist-research nexus is a highly productive one.
Likewise, the emphasis on nomadism in, for instance, the Spanish Universidad Nómada (Nomadic University) invokes the humanist
imperative of this online space of thought, which is really an effect of the imperative of various forms of border-crossing for
acceleration – hence the stress on ‘hybridity’ and ‘trans-nationalism’ on its website (Universidad Nómada, 2010). The website also
drums up a certain radicality of the © 2010 ephemera 10(1): 7-24 The accelerated university articles Ingrid M. Hoofd 20 Universidad
through images of street-activists on its homepage, which is in fact hosted at the American company DreamHost in California. These
new dispersed and online ‘spaces of thought’ like Edu-Factory, Facoltà di Fuga, Investigacció, and Glocal Research Space are
therefore heavily implicated in the continuous flow of information that neo-liberal capital and its prime tools of colonisation require in
their relentless craving for networked overproduction. The rhetoric of overcoming the contemporary constraints of the university from
a supposed autonomous location is itself implicated in the duplication of Bill Readings’ ‘university of excellence’ into networked
spaces through the myth of independent thought and transparent communication. As Armitage and Derrida suggest, thought indeed
appears here as formally subsumed under neo-liberal capital. In other words,
thought is limited as well as produced by
the current horizon of techno-speed, which is itself grounded in the humanist promise of
transcendence and transparency. In light of this, it is also no surprise that contemporary academic
obsessions in the humanities and social sciences lie with analysing or locating subversive
potential within those projects and peoples, like those who engage in networked activism and
alliance, which validate academia’s own conditions of possibility within the hegemony of speed .
But clearly, more can and should be said about the concurrent acceleration of capital by means of
humanist thought and politics – after all, this article is itself also a symptom of the current
university’s neoliberal-humanist mandate that demands that thought be productive. If
humanism today has mostly mutated into speed-elitism, then the affirmation of acceleration
also promises a change beyond neo-liberalism .
 1nc - Relationality
It is impossible to explore relationality – relations to nature, the environment,
each other – in spaces of the university. Any attempt is exploited to produce
alienating labor processes
Hall 20 [Hall, R. The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of
History. Postdigit Sci Educ 2, 830–848 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00158-9]//jz

The hopeless University emerges dialectically though three moments ( Dunayevskaya 2002; Lenin 1981).
First is an engagement with thinking that brings universal concepts into relation with particular
experiences, in order to question existing structures, cultures and practices and thereby
generate new universals. This is a movement of thinking that situates the symbolism of the institution against the range of
ways in which it is imagined in practice, in order to move towards a concrete understanding of its reality. It also places those
existing structures of the institution, alongside its cultures and practices, in relation to the
totality of capitalist social relations. Second is elaborating the relationship between quantitative
and qualitative change. The experience of life inside the University is subject to constant,
measurement and the attempt to validate conceptual clarity about the world through evidence
or data that are a quantity of experience . At particular moments, quantity describes qualitative change, for instance,
in new conceptualisations or discourses of the student-as-consumer, the platform University, the quantified self or the need for
decolonisation. There
are also societal relations immanent to these qualitative changes, and which
challenge the relation of data to discourses, and the reproduction of power and privilege . Thus,
Hegel (2010: 179–80) noted how ‘number stands between the senses and thought’, helping to develop ‘the category of the
internally self-external that defines the sensuous’. Here, the concrete world experienced by individuals is brought into relation with
symbolic, external contexts through mediations like the market. This
imminence between quantitative tipping
points and qualitative change shifts cultures and perceptions and offers a moment of conceptual
or psychological negation. This is the third dialectical moment, the law of the negation of the
negation. Here, there exists the ongoing movement of society, beyond everyday activities like
assessment and laboratory research, or that which mediates social progress, like the power of
the division of labour. Thus, calls for state funding for Higher Education under Covid-19 negate the sanctity of private
property and the consumption of education-based services. However, this negation then reveals the contradictions between the
private and public values of a degree, which leads to further questioning of the idea of the University. Crucially, Hegel (2018) raises
the idea of an external, sensuous consciousness, which Marx (2004) later inverts, in terms of activity in the world being practical and
human-sensuous. This is a reminder that humans make the world and that there is potential for generating
meaning that is not achieved through the objectification of education for the development of
human capital. This dialectical unfolding of particular, concrete experiences of the world, in relation to universal conceptions
that normalise or stabilise thinking, is overlain by individual and structural factors in reproducing the totality of capitalism. Thus,
the University is implicated in our social relations, and our social relations are implicated in
the University, at one and the same time. This immanence impacts levels of control, anxiety
and hopelessness as the structures/forms that shape University work are compelled by the
value-form; the Postdigital Science and Education (2020) 2:830–848 841 cultures/pathologies of the University
exploit our relationship to nature, the environment and each other ; and our
activities/methodologies reproduce alienating labour processes.
 1nc – care/solidarity link
The aff is a counternarrative that seeks to save the university by promoting
discourses of solidarity and care within its walls
Hall 20 [Hall, R. The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of
History. Postdigit Sci Educ 2, 830–848 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00158-9]//jz

The University is emblematic of the collapse in the symbolic power of humans to reimagine the world. Even whilst they
enrich the general intellect of society, or our collective wealth in skills, knowledge, capacities
and capabilities (Marx 1857/1993), University workers have not been able to imagine how such
enrichment might operate beyond mediations like the market, which seem to form an
impregnable realm or kingdom (de Sousa Santos 2020). Instead, those workers have complied with the
acceleration of a society defined technocratically and in economistic terms, at great cost to
those who labour inside it and who are left to compete for scarce privilege, status and power,
though institutional and subject-based structures . At The End of History, these structures create
textures or forms of value, whose content and commodities are created through, first, cultures
revealed as pathologies of overwork, self-harm and self-sacrifice (Hall and Bowles 2016) and, second,
activities of teaching, learning, research and administration that describe methodologies for
control and performance management (Birmingham Autonomous University 2017). Inside these forms, the
pathological and methodological content of the institution is internalised by the University
worker and her ego-identity, thereby diminishing the potential for mutuality . Differential levels
of proletarianisation in the conditions of labour, shaped by competition over status, militate
against the creation of common ground between University workers or struggles for humane
work. These include: & Academic labourers at the University of Sunderland in the UK, fighting cuts to humanities and social
sciences courses in 2020 & Graduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, taking part in wildcat strikes since 2019 to
demand living wages & The 2012 student protests in Québec against debt and the imposition of Bill 78 limiting dissent & Struggles in
2019 at the University of Juba in South Sudan against tuition fee hikes that threatened the right to education 836 Postdigital Science
and Education (2020) 2:830–848 & The history of protest at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, including the 2016 sedition row,
and 2019 struggles over accommodation fees and India’s Citizenship Amendment Act & Struggles for decolonisation, like Rhodes
Must Fall at the universities of Cape Town and Oxford, alongside the educational activities of Black Lives Matter & Movements
against sexual violence on campuses, including the work of the 1752 Group based in the UK In
spite of these struggles,
the University is still painted as a liberal institution that simply needs reform, rather than
transformation or abolition (Meyerhoff 2019). This liberal position maintains the reified symbolic
power of the University and cannot trace the links between institutions under capitalism, which
enable the reproduction of intersectional and liminal injustices, in the name of value (Motta 2018).
Reification is grounded in values and modes of performance represented by white, colonial and patriarchy, and these are the
grounds upon which the institution, its disciplines and individuals are judged and performance-managed (Amsler and Motta 2017).
This enables the separation of the political economy and humanist potential of intellectual work,
separated out in the form academic labour. Whilst this divorces the University from its potential
contribution to social transformation, at The End of History, policy in the bourgeois institution
obsesses over productivity, efficiency and value-for-money (Ansell 2020). Elsewhere, Critical University
Studies has identified how, in governance, regulation and funding, HE is not working, and to look
for solutions that recover or redeem the idea of the University (Connell 2019). Analyses have applied a range
of historical models to the sector (Brandist 2016); focused upon particular fractions of academic labour, like professors (Evans 2018);
highlighted enclosures through discourses of policy and language (Morrish and Sauntson 2019); and
centred upon the acceleration of the Platform University (Hoofd 2017). Alternatives include
recovering ‘the public university’ (Holmwood 2011); building educational co-operatives (Woodin and Shaw 2019);
recovering reified norms of academic freedom (Furedi 2017); refining the idea of the University in relation to the
market (Frank, Gower, and Naef 2019); or considering the social and ecological futures of the University and
its publics (Facer 2019). The University is an anchor point in any social re-imagination, but it needs
to be recentred away from dominant, neoliberal discourse. These counter-narratives tend to
describe organising principles that desire a better capitalist University, framed by hope, love,
care, solidarity and so on. They form a terrain of outrage, but they tend to lack a deeper, categorical analysis of either the
forces or relations of production that discipline and give texture and meaning to the University. There is limited possibility for a
critique that situates University work against its basis in alienated labour (Hall 2018), through which the ‘vampire’ of Capital exists
because it feeds upon living labour (Marx 1867/2004). Moreover, they
risk preserving hegemonic imaginaries that
are not mindful of intersectional and indigenous experiences and ways of knowing the world.
This limits our collective engagement with radical imaginaries (Andreotti 2016; Elwood, Andreotti, and Stein
2019), subaltern struggles (Moten and Harney 2013) or structural disadvantage (Darder 2018),
and instead reinforces how the University has become a failed or impossible redeemer (Allen 2017).
Postdigital Science and Education (2020) 2:830–848 837 At The End of History, the flow of capitalist time reproduces a global,
exploitative, cognitive caste system that is reinforced by the legitimacy of universities in the Global North, their disciplinary
separations and their claims to knowledge-as-truth. Theseclaims are systemic and algorithmic, centre around
particular determinations of effectiveness and efficiency and able to be fine-tuned to reinforce a
trajectory of timeless growth. In part, this is how the University’s forms, pathologies and methodologies amplify the
compulsion for algorithmic modes of control. It is how universities have been able to use abundant living
labour to move online during the pandemic and thereby create new platform ecosystems at low
short-term cost. Here, there are questions around whether the University is too fragile to cope
with the future impacts of financial crisis and pandemic and needs accelerated and agile
reengineering. The World Bank report on ‘Global Waves of Debt’ (Kose, Nagle, Ohnsorge, and Sugawara 2019) and
International Monetary Fund report ‘Debt Is Not Free’ (Badia, Medas, Gupta, and Xiang 2020) highlight the vulnerability of sectors
and economies that are over-leveraged, and in which profitability and investment are assumed under low interest rates and
precarious or surplus employment. A separate World Bank Group report (2020: 7) on the pandemic shock and policy responses
highlights the need to generalise ‘innovations and emergency processes, [so that] systems can adapt and scale up the more effective
solutions.’ Regardless of economic or psychological scarring, at The End of History, turning ‘recovery into real growth’ becomes yet
another opportunity for capital to impose its shock doctrine of structural adjustment. Here, University disciplines are reduced to
highlighting issues around inequality and associated policy responses (Piketty 2020) or analysing the psychological impacts of
economic instability (Collier 2018). In general, the forms, pathologies and methodologies that reproduce the University are unable to
imagine a world beyond capitalist social relations at the end of The End of History. This inability is reinforced by the divorce between
the politics and governance of the University and its deterministic, economic symbolism. The fragmentation of work, shaped by a
loss of co-operation beyond competition, scarred by precarity and oriented around value rather than humanity, generates
hopelessness.
 1nc – method
Their pedagogical shift towards more ethical, more improved methods feeds
communicative capitalism, rendering societal change dependent on Western
Man’s recognition of and allyship with the Other
Hoofd 17 [Ingrid M. Hoofd (2017) “Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The
Disintegration of University Teaching and Research” Palgrave Macmillan, New York,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51409-7]//jz

One can partly trace this ideal of communication to its nascence in North American 1940s communication
theory (which
is today called ‘information theory’) and its problematic conception of meaning as resulting from channelling objects
(like bits and bytes). This ideal in turn is epitomised in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s famous model of signals redundancy
for electronic transmission in their 1963 book The Mathematical Theory of Communication, which became a major inspiration THE
DOUBLE-BIND OF/IN ACTIVIST–ACADEMIC RESEARCH 105for American
communications departments and their
obsession with predictability and propaganda during the Cold War era. This has, especially in the
American but also to some extent in the European contexts, led to a too optimistic
understanding of modern communication and its social possibilities, as well as to a strong moral
obligation towards communicative transparency and effectiveness . But even long before that, Western
science and philosophy, in their very quest for total knowledge , suffered from what Jean- François
Lyotard in another one of his insightful pieces called “Something Like Communication … Without Communication” has designated as
the “communicationalistideology” of Western metaphysi cs (2012, 567), which in our postmodern era leads to
the subjugation of peoples under an exceedingly socially fragmented technocracy. Lyotard here
argues that the shift from modern to postmodern art can be identifi ed with a shift from an occupation with beauty to an experience
of the sublime, which marks the unconscious effect of awe and partial opacity of such art. If we translate this to the functioning of
new media, this means that the meaningful aspect of postmodern media—the way in which they may
bind communities and audiences together—lies not so much in the possibility of representation,
but in a shared experience of fragmentation due to new media’s architecture . Lyotard thus likewise
highlights that in a global society marked by a ubiquitous push for more connection and
communication, sociality paradoxically ends up being destroyed—not in the least because
media technologies fragment and bypass physical territory (2012, 570). In other words, the assumption
that ‘improved’ communication necessarily leads to positive social change elides the current
relationship between a certain promissory ideal of communication and its complicity in a
near-totalitarian and technocratic neo-liberalism that founds itself on the misconception of
communication as transmission of meaning and the binding of communities through a shared
understanding, just as the pedagogical obsession with ‘methods ,’ as I highlighted in Chap. 3 , gives an
illusion of objectivity. Similarly, because mobilising the media as a ‘tool’ for social change will inevitably also accelerate
economic globalisation and the unequal distribution of wealth, the dissemination of information entails a slippage
or a displacement of the researcher’s utopian aim or intention towards such acceleration and its
violent side effects. The propagation and promotion of the discourse of ‘social change’ and
‘making a difference’ is therefore today no longer antagonistic to, but exceedingly implicated in,
the ongoing disenfranchisement of under-privileged communities and disintegration of sociality
worldwide. The activist 106 I.M. HOOFDand academic moral imperative to render ‘the other’ into a
communicating subject has consequently become an increasingly oppressive or coercive
gesture which binds individuals fi rst and foremost under the compulsion to bow to the sublime
power of what Jodi Dean aptly calls ‘communicative capitalism’ in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies
(2009, 19). My argument about the ways academics and activists profess to the ‘communicationalist ideology’ mirrors once more the
work of Baudrillard. His cardinal argument throughout most of his later work is that increasingly all forms of politics, insofar as they
come to exist as mere simulations of politics, fi nd themselves wrapped up in a neo-liberal logic that relies on the collapse of the
realm of representation into the realm of capital circulation. This collapse is possible, argues Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production,
because the expansionist logic of capitalism has found in the incessant mediation of signs an inexhaustible form of production and
consumption (2001, 105–106). Signs, in short, have become objects for consumption, and claims to differences in identity sustain
the exploitation of the conceptual fallacy of binary oppositions (‘self’ vis-à-vis ‘other’) for accelerated economic growth. For
Baudrillard, the concept of the signifi ed emerges alongside the capitalist model of exchange value as a supposed derivative of use
value (2001, 103). Use value (in the form of needs and desires), says Baudrillard in “For a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign,” just like the signifi ed (or the referent), is simply conjured up as an ‘alibi’ (2001, 78) for a capitalism that justifi es itself by
positing those needs and desires for emancipation of the marginalised person as natural. The conclusion for Baudrillard is, as he
explains in “The Melodrama of Difference,” that all
contemporary kinds of otherness, and our desire to
engage with it, liberate it, connect with it, ally with it, and even understand it, are effects of this
new phase of capitalism (1990, 126). Communicative facilitation therefore relies on the fallacy that
such otherness is empirically real and outside the capitalist logic of reproduction. Otherness in
certain kinds of alliance politics and liberation of ‘the other’ is then relative otherness, a mirror
image of the self-same subject that does the facilitation or teaching . New media in particular facilitate this
logic because they allow for the incessant circulation, multiplication, and differentiation of signs. So the media do this by way of
implicating subaltern imagery and voice into the networked fl ows of capital through their affordances of expedient electronic
dissemination and differentiation. The media also provide the academic or activist with the illusion, due
to the pervasive fantasy of media as transmitters of meaning, that this ‘other’ authentically
wants such THE DOUBLE-BIND OF/IN ACTIVIST–ACADEMIC RESEARCH 107 subjective empowerment and alliance
—that we ourselves as much as any ‘others’ naturally want to be or are foremost subjects under
neo-liberalism. But I suggest, in line with Baudrillard’s argument, that such empowerment and connection
become mere moments in the recirculation of signs, and hence of the acceleration of capital fl
ows. In “The Melodrama,” Baudrillard therefore concludes that this new stage of capitalism marked is by a
“humanitarian ecumenism” (1990, 131), in which the other becomes something to “be
understood, liberated, coddled, recognised ” (1990, 125). This means that this state of affairs, as we will see
later on when analysing a few of its exemplary moments, still relies on the “authorising signature of Western
humanist discourse” that Chandra Mohanty, for instance, already identifi ed in the 1980s in her
astute “Under Western Eyes” (1988, 63). However, it does so today not so much due to the cutting
off from the lifeworld of ‘the other,’ but due to the very attempts at bridging, communicating,
or connecting with ‘the other.’
 1nc – performance
The idea that their speech act is subversion enough fails to stop violence
Hoofd 17 [Ingrid M. Hoofd (2017) “Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The
Disintegration of University Teaching and Research” Palgrave Macmillan, New York,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51409-7]//jz

It is due to this entanglement between communication and fi nancialisation that I suggest that
many well-meaning academics and intellectual activists fi nd themselves increasingly in a
double-bind; on the one hand, the possibility of saving radical otherness resides in the safeguarding
of their existence as a ‘secret’ and the ever narrower possibility of miscommunication and
invisibility, while on the other hand, the survival of otherness lies in them submitting to these
totalitarian communicative techniques, like teaching them mass and new media use, voicing out ,
and in general becoming visible online or on television. The fact that this double-bind or tension remains largely
unnoticed or hidden to many academics is fi rstly because the academic profession is already
founded on the ideal of communication as community , which makes them blind to the possibility that today it
might be otherwise, but secondly, and more importantly, because many designated ‘others,’ feeling the pinch of an
exceedingly technocratic global society and its growing forms of disenfranchisement, will very
often exhibit a voluntary involvement with these tools as a means to ‘empowerment’ in the
form of mere survival. This involvement in turn gets misinterpreted by many academics as an authentic desire of the ‘other’
to use these media to their own benefi t, as the more primary self-serving aspect of such teaching or facilitation are obscured,
suppressed, or ignored. We can see here thus precisely the increasing blindness and narrowness of vision as the companion fallout
of the quest for transparency that Virilio denounces in The Vision Machine. 108 I.M. HOOFD Superfi cial sociological
conceptualisations of empowerment or resistance as merely requiring a display of
communicative agency are therefore of little help in understanding the coercive nature of the
entire scenario including the intellectual ‘facilitator’ and self-appointed ‘agent of change’ who
both fi nd themselves nonetheless differentially subjected to this ideal . Likewise, while the
exercise of resistance or subversion though tools of communication often in sociological
literature gets diametrically opposed to the violence of capitalism, there exists today a strong
confl uence of such tools and the ongoing fi nancialisation of the glob e. In the following section, I will
proceed to illustrate how this paradox or double-bind emerges in certain utopian or left-wing theoretical arguments generated in
the well-meaning social sciences and humanities, also leaving the activists and academics that seek to render such ideals productive
trapped in a fundamentally schizoid situation and institutional space.

Their attempt to make radical alterity communicable in this space facilitates the
neoliberal economy which relies on “productive change” rhetoric to consume
Hoofd 17 [Ingrid M. Hoofd (2017) “Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The
Disintegration of University Teaching and Research” Palgrave Macmillan, New York,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51409-7]//jz

Left-wing academic, intellectual, and activist rhetoric, as well as social science methodology, has
of course always emphasised the facilitation of collection and collectivity that communication
technologies provide— whether this entails social community or the coherence and
understandability of reality through the gathering of empirical data . Such research rhetoric therefore
implicitly assumes that the media can or will ‘change society for the better,’ either by allowing
for new communities or by allowing researchers to create a ‘better picture’ of society. Previously
marginalised groups and individuals, so it is also assumed, can build new alliances through the media
in order to facilitate social inclusiveness, and the social sciences can in turn show how new
forms of sociality get formed by way of communication tools . It is for this reason that many social scientists
have now, for instance, turned to gathering ‘big data’ in order to tease out previously unrecognised relationships between
individuals or other entities, and humanists
to turn to the ‘digital humanities’ for the purposes of
improving both teaching and research . Noteworthy here is that such research endeavours often need to rely on, or
even buy access to, what is otherwise proprietary information exclusively owned by Google Analytics, Twitter’s databases, and
Facebook archives. But even beyond the direct enmeshment of the social sciences and humanities with corporate tools today, these
academic fi elds have always relied on the fact that they are communicating their insights to society as additional proof of their own
social relevance. Farfrom being a so-called ivory tower then, academia is and was in fact replete
with the politics and promises that modern communication tools offer for communities at large,
whether these politics be capitalistic, humanistic, or socialistic. What goes by way of
contemporary dominant research paradigms in the social sciences and humanities in turn will
then also illustrate the unexpected effects and fallout of the execution of the communicative
promises and potentials on society at large. Such unexpected and perhaps even negative fallout of the endeavours
and goals of well-meaning academics should by now no longer surprise us. As I noticed in Chap. 1 , the ideals of academia
have for centuries gone hand in hand with an essentially elitist, masculinist, and Westerncentric
outlook onto the world in which a university education signifi ed class status and social upward
mobility. Any academic, as Zuidhof rightly noted in the Dutch case, which I analysed in Chap. 3 , would be foolish to assume she
can completely transcend such a complicity with the politics of the institution. But what is more, any push for transformation
remains at a fundamental level incalculable, inasmuch as genuine change 104 I.M. HOOFD indeed seeks to invite that or those who
have been previously excluded, suppressed, marginalised, or erased. This again means that the workings of the university display a
deeply aporetic structure, since the
march towards communicative enlightenment is fundamentally at
odds with the fact that radical alterity is and should remain principally uncommunicable . The
contemporary university then becomes a prime site of the technological acceleration of this
aporia, as the promise of community, justice, and equality is exceedingly enacted through new
media technologies. In the same vain, this chapter will continue the claim that the utopian or hopeful rhetoric
around media technologies, which is especially prevalent in the well- meaning humanities and
social sciences, currently facilitates the ongoing acceleration and negative fallout of the neo-
liberal economy. This is because in particular this economy increasingly relies on the technological
enmeshment of such meaningful rhetoric or the productive arguments around ‘fostering
change’ and globally fi nancialised information fl ows through the media . Most non-face-to-face
communication today happens through media technologies that are intimately entwined with neo-liberal globalisation through a
handful of media corporations, cable providers, and ISPs and IXPs (Internet Service Providers and Internet Exchange Points)—in fact,
the ownership of the global backbone of the Internet today is largely in the hands of North American ‘Tier 1’ companies like Cogent,
Verizon, Level3, AT&T, XO Communications, and CenturyLink, signifying a new imperialism. This is also to stress that the facilitation
of collection and collectivity that the new media allow social scientists and other researchers to carry out has its appalling precedent
in the data-collecting and classifi cation efforts of, for instance, the British and Dutch Empires during the many centuries of the
aggressive colonisation of other peoples’ spaces and territories. Of course, the
upshot of these efforts was eventually
to render the subjugation and exploitation of colonised peoples more effi cient, and to make the
needs, movements, and goals of such peoples more transparent; all in the service of an
increasing expansion of global capitalism.
1nc – alts?
 1nc - refusal
The alt is a radical refusal of the hopeless University and its hegemonic
scholarship that commodifies the intellect of its laborers in favor of a
reimagination of intellectual work as a movement against Capitalism through a
dialectical process of transcendence
Hall 20 – grad of De Montfort University, PhD. Prof @ university of Leeds (Richard Hall, PhD,
Postdigital Science and Education, “Covid-19 and the Hopeless University at the End of the End
of History,” https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s42438-020-00158-9.pdf, SA)

The University is being explicitly restructured for the production, circulation and accumulation of
value, materialised in the form of rents and surpluses on operating activities . The pace of restructuring
is affected by the interplay between financial crisis and Covid-19, through which the public value of the University is continually
questioned. In this conjuncture of crises that affect the body of the institution and the bodies of its
labourers, the desires of Capital trump human needs . The structural adjustment of sectoral and institutional
structures as forms, cultures as pathologies, and activities as methodologies enacts scarring. However, the visibility of scars
has led to a reawakening of politics inside and beyond the University. The idea that History had
ended because there is no alternative to capitalism or its political horizon, is inquestion. Instead,
the political content of the University has reasserted itself at the end of The End of History. In this
article, the idea that the University at The End of History has become a hopeless space, unable
both to fulfil the desires of those who labour within it for a good life and to contribute solutions
to socio-economic and socioenvironmental ruptures, is developed dialectically. This enables us
to consider the potential for reimagining intellectual work as a movement of
sensuous human activity in the world, rather than being commodified for value …
…The duality of financial and viral pandemics has exposed the fraud at the heart of narratives of meaningful intellectual work at The
End of History. It exposes the fraud at the heart of the structures, cultures and activities of universities in the North Atlantic, whose
pathological and methodological forms reproduce space-time inextricably forvalue. Capitalism
as the means of social
organization continues to be ruptured by intersectional, temporal and geographical injustices
that erupt from points of labour and points where labour touches society . A range of indigenous
resistances, struggles grounded in race, gender, disability and class, emergent revolts against
toxic ecological policies and climate forcing and resistance to economic and political populism,
form a movement that places the institutions of Capital in stark opposition to humane values.
Through struggle, the political economics of Capital’s war on Labour are revealed, although in
many instances they require critique. For University workers, such critique centres the
institutional inability to respond meaningfully to this re-emergence of History, beyond
unilaterally declaring business-as-usual in the face of Covid-19, or noting a climate emergency
whilst remaining implicated in the consumption of fossil fuels . At the end of The End of History, when the
abstracted power of capital has revealed its pollution of systems of life and living, the hopeless
University demonstrates the inferiority in its soul. It is dominated by strategies for public
engagement, internationalization, teaching and learning, research and sustainable development,
which collapse the horizon of possibility and are limited to algorithmic solutions to insoluble,
structural and systemic positions. The hopeless University is a flag bearer for a collective life that
is becoming more efficiently unsustainable . Mutuality and voice point beyond hopelessness. As Adorno (1966:
17–18) noted,‘[t]he need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject’.
For Bloch (1986), engaging with the internalisation of anxiety and its projection into the world as fear is a means to recover a more
authentic sense of what the Self might be in the world. An authentic moment of freedom is Postdigital Science and Education (2020)
2:830–848 843 learning that a better capitalist University, like a capitalism that works for everyone,
is impossible because the structures that reproduce the world for-value militate against a
liveable life. Instead, hope emerges in care for ourselves against the institutions that have
brutalised us. It emerges in a reconnection of the idea of human-as-intellectual, with the human-
as-psychological and the human-in-nature, rather than the human divorced from themself as a
worker and exploiter of the natural world. The hopelessness of capitalism, amplified by the
University and its focus upon knowledge transfer, spillover, human capital, impact, excellence
and so on, is refused where people remember and uncover their own capacities. The hopeless
University hides our latent or undeveloped abilities from us, or it strips our developed skills,
knowledge and capacities from us, in the name of value. Refusal emerges from the ability of
University labourers to conceptualise themselves as a force for themselves, rather
than focusing upon their privilege and status (with a limited consciousness as a class in itself). A moment of
possibility lies organisationally, in seeing similarities, connections and solidarities across the range of academic and professional
services staff, and students, who labour inside the University, and making connections to struggles at the level of society. Refusal
emerges where people understand the potential of and in their own mass intellectuality (Hall and
Winn 2017). This offers a different route away from hopelessness, through constant reflection on
what has been incorporated or lost, and thereby emerges renewed through mourning . This is
Bloch’s (1986) idea that a life that sits authentically with hopelessness moves towards hope precisely because it acknowledges what
is possible from inside the current situation. This
is not a melancholic or despairing hope for a return to an
idealised University. As History returns, the hegemonic symbolism of institutions that further
estrangement from active knowing, doing, being and becoming must be refused and their
ontologies and epistemologies negated (Holloway 2016). Instead, particular imaginings of universal
concepts of human existence inside capitalism are a moment of resistance and refusal.
Understanding and recognising those particular experiences point towards unity-through-
difference as a new mode of organizing social life. Thus , in refusing the idea of the hopeless
University , indigenous, feminist, decolonial, queer, disabled, intersectional conceptions,
counter-cartographies and narratives offer guides (Mbembe 2019). These counterpoints frame
intellectual work in relation to the body, soul, psyche, collectivity and nature, through the past,
present and future. This moves us from functional analyses of our near-term extinction (Bendell
2018) to a discussion of what it means to live well in this moment, and the potential to discuss
alternative, plural horizons of possibility (Elwood et al. 2019). As Cleaver (2017: 290) argues ‘We are no longer talking
about replacing one world with another, but one world with many.’ Here, socially useful intellectual work at the end
of The End of History uncovers processes of knowing, doing and being, rather than sanctifying
knowledge that can be commodified. In respecting the unity of our difference, as humans rather
than academics, professional services’ staff or students, we can turn our attention to ‘the only
scientific question that remains to us…: how the fuck do we get out of this mess?’ (Holloway 2010:
919). For University workers, this begins from the question: how do we know the University? In the act of knowing, empathy
emerges, rather than imaginaries that are aggrieved, disappointed, helpless or hopeless. The symbolism of the hopeless 844
Postdigital Science and Education (2020) 2:830–848 University is a limit to any such transformation, because it is structured around
forms, pathologies and methodologies for the commodification and mediation of intellectual work .
With no categorical
analysis of this symbolism, labourers idealise hope, and yet hope is no plan . Instead, a dialectical
process of transcendence is needed, which highlights the one-sidedness of knowledge,
institutions and disciplines as limiting factors in determining understanding (Dunayevskaya 2002). This
is a moment of courage, which recognises the need to know authentically and plurally the
diseased and pathological context for suffering inside the University. This recognises alienation,
ill-being and ill-health as symptomatic of structural processes experienced differentially.
Suffering is absolutely relative, and in this emerges a potential horizon of possibility . A next step asks
whether it is possible to forgive the University, and take responsibility for how we feel about it, alongside our own projections and
internalisations. Instead
of being dominated by the University, projecting our own hopes and fears
onto it, as well as internalizing its modes of privilege and performance, this might begin the
process of focusing upon intellectual work as it is integrated inside ourselves as complete
humans capable of sensuous, practical activity in common.
 1nc - hopeless
Be hopeless
Hall 20 [Hall, R. The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of
History. Postdigit Sci Educ 2, 830–848 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00158-9]//jz
Responses to the pandemic have tended to mirror those for climate forcing, although the timescale requires more intensive action.
In the scramble to maintain business-asusual and the same form of the institution or its key
function as a competing business, sustainability is overlain on top of existing strategies for
teaching, research, internationalisation, commercialisation and so on . Here, institutions project
responsibility onto the individual for managing her resilience or mindfulness, or the value of her programmes of study and research,
and then use the crisis to make cuts and re-engineer. As
institutions and sectors use the crisis to accelerate
commodification, there is a risk that a new hopeless or depressive position subsumes autonomy
and withers hope (Iorio and Tanabe 2019), or living concepts like hygge (Larsen 2019), inside the University. The
University worker’s position is rendered more hopeless where she can see induced behaviours
are incongruent with her inner being. However, they are enforced through sanctions,
surveillance or performance management that are toxic, and subject 838 Postdigital Science and Education
(2020) 2:830–848 to constant revolutionising alongside the coercive necessity of alienated labour
(Marx 1844/1974). This is the logic of the University, in which all potentially sensuous or meaningful
activity is objectified as powerlessness and self-loss. In the reproduction of the capitalist
University, this catalyses hopelessness in two senses. The first lies in the inability of the
University to address crises other than in relation to value, through the imposition of
authoritarian forms of management, pathological cultures of growth or business-as-usual, and
methodological activities that fixate on commodity exchange. It has therefore become a useless use-value, in
the sense that its social worth and its feasibility are defined by flows of capital, with the creation of a liveable environment for all
secondary. The hopeless University has become devoidof useful content. The second sense lies in an understanding of
how capital structures and disciplines the labour of love inside the University, negating its
humane possibilities, and as a result breeds despair, depression and melancholy as a space
beyond anxiety. Any hopes that universities might be places for the creation of new forms of freedom or social wealth are
marginalised by the imposition of precarious existences inside anxiety machines that catalyse overwork and ill-being (Hall and
Bowles 2016). Increasingly, those who work inside universities have either to become self-exploiting or self-harming or to deploy
enough cognitive dissonance to overcome the lack of authentic hope that another world might be possible. Dissonance is
harder to maintain as academic work becomes more explicitly remade for-value and determined in the
market. Inside institutions that reproduce structures/forms, cultures/pathologies and activities/methodologies that are withering, a
starting point is sitting with hopelessness as a trigger for authentic grief and mourning. Rather
than uncritical hope,
defensive lamentation or yearning for an idealised, historical and public place, this process of
grieving demands that labourers understand how hopelessness is reproduced inside the
University. Discussions have opened up about the reinforcement of objectification and the
denial of subjectivity, such that University workers become habituated to inhumanity. This is
reflected in the recent analyses of the Zombie University (Smyth 2017); the Automatic University (Williamson 2020); the University
in ruins (Readings 1996); the Psychotic University (Sievers 2008); Whackademia (Hil 2012); the University as a ruined laboratory
(Dyer-Witheford 2011), or a branch office of conglomerates (Derrida 2001); terminal subjectivities in HE (Allen 2017); the need to
hospice the University (Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, and Hunt 2015); and fugitive existences in the University (Moten and Harney
2013). Thehopelessness theory of depression is useful here in framing these metaphors through
the relationship between depressive symptoms and the loss of agency, alongside the
amplification of individual vulnerability inside environments that are negative imaginaries
(Schneider, Gruman, and Coutts 2012). Inside institutions like universities which govern themselves overtly and covertly through
endemic intensification, selfharm, shaming, performance management and intersectional injustices (Ahmed 2017; Gill 2009), it is
possible to analyse the development of vulnerability using Chabot’s (2018) work on global burnout. He focuses upon the impact of
overwork, alongside mental and physical exhaustion, in relation to values-driven, service work .
This is especially the case in sectors that are performance-managed around excellence and whose
metabolism is defined as a struggle over scarce resources, status and privilege . Chabot (2018: 12) states
that burnout ‘replaces the richness of a healthy relationship between individuals and their work with an immense void of
meaninglessness’. Postdigital Science and Education (2020) 2:830–848 839 Here hopelessness has a layered complexity linked to an
inability to consider future positives, such that a negative miasma or contagion generates vulnerability (MacLeod, Rose, and Williams
1993). Inside highly competitive environments, vulnerability also tends to shape a deeper relationship between defeat, entrapment
and depression (Tarsafi, Kalantarkousheh, and Lester 2015). Here, persistent and seemingly inevitable negative
events become ‘occasion setters’ that can trigger hopelessness (Abramson, Metalsky, and Alloy 1989).
These might include negative student assessments, being overlooked for promotion or tenure,
daily micro-aggressions, an unmanageable workload, limited research grant success and so on.
Forms, pathologies and methodologies shape environments in which negative outcomes come
to be expected (Abramson et al. 1989; Abramson et al. 2000). These have been described in a range of quitlit
(literature about quitting the Academy) and sick-lit (literature about illness in the Academy).
Hopelessness, powerlessness and vulnerability are amplified through histories of patriarchy,
colonialism, exclusion and intersectional injustice, which engender cultural and political
depression (Fitz-Henry 2017; Xiao et al. 2014). It is important to recognise the differential ability to exist without hope or to
withstand structural injustices that limit individual agency in the face of hopelessness. Intersectional injustices are reproduced inside
forms, by pathologies and methodologies that question the legitimacy and value of certain bodies (Ahmed 2017). Sitting with
these injustices potentially uncovers ways of knowing the Self in relation to the structural
inequalities and textures of the institution, and thereby to understand issues of trust, agency
and voice. This is central in enabling individuals, working in a divided, competitive
environment, and who are struggling with a range of negative events, to work against seeing
themselves as useless. This is central in understanding tactics for survival pending revolution,
including cynicism, stoicism, apathy, refusal, becoming fugitive, exodus or organising. These
describe the boundaries of personal agency in hopeless ecosystems. Thus, whilst pessimism might
more accurately describe the Weltschmerz felt by many staff and students (Abramson et al. 1989),
hopelessness becomes a useful heuristic for analysing the forms, pathologies and
methodologies designed to exploit labour inside the University . A systemic treatment of hopelessness
places the individual, her environment and her society into asymmetrical relationship, rather
than focusing upon the individual’s learned helplessness or psychological deficits. This takes the
particular evidence of increased occupational health referrals, reports of mental distress, and suicides not as individual failings, but
instead as moments for reconceptualising those experiences at the level of the University (Morrish 2019). The collective, academic
capacity to do this work of critique was questioned half a century ago by Le Baron (1971: 567): ‘I could exhort my fellow academics
to work within academia towards a new consciousness, transcending habits of egoism, competition, and possessing, but I am all too
conscious of Marx’s biting attacks on such “idealistic” and “utopian” methods.’ More recently, Szadkowski (2016: 49–50) argued that
‘the hierarchically organized community of scholars is a rather non-antagonistic force to capital’. As the scholarly community of the
University demonstrates its hopelessness, subalternUniversity workers might come to hospice the
organisation as it passes away (Andreotti et al. 2015). This may be the case for those struggling with
the inability of intellectual work inside the University to overcome helplessness in the face of
environmental crises. Here, the ability to sit with hopelessness, or to exist without hope, enables an acceptance of being in
the world, rather than the University’s 840 Postdigital Science and Education (2020) 2:830–848 insistence that we labour to control
it. Understanding the ways in which the University seeks to impose control, and the ways in which hopelessness ruptures the Self
inside the organisation, requires a dialectical mode of analysis.
 1nc – fatal strategy
The alt is to adopt a Fatal Strategy to underscore the paradoxical process
behind the accelerated university – a process that pulls the rug out from speed
elitism that opposes the semiotic change to undermine the humanist death
drive.
Hoofd 10 – assistant professor @ Utercht Univeristy & author of Higher Education and
Technological Acceleration: the Disintegration of University Teaching and Research and
Ambiguities of Activism: Alter-Globalism and the Imperatives of Speed (Ingrid M. Hoofd, “The
accelerated university: Activist academic alliances and the simulation of thought,”
http://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/10-1ephemera-feb10.pdf#page=8, SA)

To finally raise the stakes of this circular logic of acceleration, it

is useful to turn to Jean Baudrillard’s ‘The
Implosion of Meaning in the Media’ and ‘The Final Solution’ in The Vital Illusion in which the
effects of such a circular logic and its relationship to the rhetoric of transcendence figures
prominently. Initially, one could think that Baudrillard’s assessment confirms my analytical
suspicion regarding activist-research projects. In ‘The Implosion’, Baudrillard starts from the
premise that the increase of information in our media-saturated society results in a loss of
meaning because it ‘exhausts itself in the act of staging communication’ . New media
technologies exacerbate the subject’s fantasy of transparent communication, while increasingly
what are communicated are mere copies of the same, a ‘recycling in the negative of the
traditional institution’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 80). New technologies are simply the materialisation of that
fantasy of communication, and the ‘lure’ (1994: 81) of such a technocratic system resides in the
requirement of active political engagement to uphold that fantasy. This translates in a call to
subjectivise oneself – to be vocal, participate, and to ‘play the [...] liberating claim of subjecthood’
(1994: 85). The result of the intensifying circular logic of this system , he says, is that meaning not only
implodes in the media, but also that the social implodes in the masses – the construction of a
‘hyperreal’ (1994: 81). Contra the claim of Glocal Research Space that such praxes of alliance are ‘without an object’ (Glocal
Research Space, 2003: 19), this does not mean that objectification does not take place at all. Instead , and
in line with Baudrillard’s argument, the urge to subjectivise oneself and the objectification of the
individual go hand in hand under speed-elitism – a double bind that locks the individual firmly
into her or his technocratic conditions. © 2010 ephemera 10(1): 7-24 The accelerated university articles Ingrid M.
Hoofd 21 Indeed, the argument in ‘Activist Research’ that ‘research [should be] like an effective procedure [which is] in itself already
a result’ (2003: 19) describes the conditions of Readings’ ‘university of excellence’ where any
research activity, thanks to
technological instantaneity, translates immediately into the capitalist result of increased
information flow (Readings, 1996: 22). Active subjects and their others become the cybernetic objects
of such a system of information flow. The insistence in ‘Activist Research’ on free, travelling and
nomadic research simply makes sure that this logic of increased flow is repeated. Because of this
desire for increased flow and connection, activist-research projects are paradoxically highly
exclusivist in advocating the discourses and tools of the speed-elite . The problem with projects
like Edu-Factory or the productive cross-over of activism and academia is therefore not only that
their political counter-information means just more information (and loss of meaning) as well as
more capitalist production, but that it puts its faith in precisely those technologies and fantasies
of control, communication and of ‘being political’ that underlie the current logic of
overproduction. It is at this point that John Armitage and Joanne Roberts in ‘Chronotopia’ contend that such a ‘cyclical
repetition’ (Armitage and Roberts, 2002: 52) is particularly dangerous because the fantasy of control
remains exactly that, a fantasy. At the same time, this increasingly forceful repetition can only
eventually give way to ‘the accident’ because chronotopian speed-spaces are fundamentally and
exponentially unstable. Armitage and Roberts’ idea of ‘cyclical repetition’ through chronotopianism does thus not mean an
exact repetition of the speed-elite’s quest for mastery – instead, I would argue that it is this immanent quality of difference in
repetition, of the ‘essential drifting due to [a technology’s] iterative structure cut off from […] consciousness as the authority of the
last analysis’ as Derrida calls it in ‘Signature Event Context’ (Derrida, 1982: 316) that allows for the accident or true event to appear.
The difference through technologically sped-up repetition appears then perhaps as a potential, but only precisely as a growing
potential that cannot be willed – in this sense, it will be an unanticipated event indeed. One
could then speak of an
intensification of politics in what is perhaps too hastily called the neo-liberal university, opening
up unexpected spaces for critique in the face of its neo-liberalisation, which in turn points to the
fundamental instability of its enterprise. Activist-research projects add to this intensification by
virtue of their technoacceleration. This intensification of politics is no ground for univocal
celebration, since it remains also the hallmark of the neo-liberal mode of production of
knowledge through the new tele-technologies as excellent, regardless of its critical content. The
current university’s instability mirrors and aggravates the volatility of a capitalism marked by
non-sustainability, a growing feminisation of poverty, the rise of a new global upper class, and
highly mediated illusions of cybernetic mastery. This nonetheless also opens up new forms of
thought, if only appearing as ‘accidents’. Derrida hints at this, but also at the university’s elusiveness, in ‘Mochlos, or:
the Conflict of the Faculties’, when he claims that he ‘would almost call [the university] the child of an inseparable couple,
metaphysics and technology’ (Derrida, 1993: 5, emphasis mine). Almost, but never quite – here then emerges the possibility of truly
subversive change. But this change will not be brought about by the mere content of the critique, but
by the way it pushes acceleration to the point of systemic disintegration or © 2010 ephemera 10(1): 7-24
The accelerated university articles Ingrid M. Hoofd 22 implosion. In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard calls this the ‘fatal
strategy’ that contemporary theory must adopt: a sort of conceptual suicide attack which aims
at pulling the rug out from under the speed-elitist mobilisation of semiotic oppositions, and
which shows the paradox behind any attempt at structural predictions. In ‘The Final Solution’,
Baudrillard relates this intensification of the humanist obsession with dialectics, mastery, and
transparency – the quest for immortality that is at the basis of techno-scientific research – to
destruction and the death drive through the metaphor of and actual research around cloning,
which strangely resonates well with Derrida’s investigation of the tele-technological archive in
Archive Fever. I read Baudrillard’s ‘Final Solution’ here as a metaphor for the duplication (cloning) of thought into virtual spaces
outside the university walls proper. If contemporary research seeks to make human cloning possible,
argues Baudrillard, then this endeavour is equivalent to cancer: after all, cancer is simply
automatic cloning, a deadly form of multiplication. It is of interest here to note that the
possibility of creating an army of clones has likewise garnered much military interest, just as
academia today more and more serves military ends . As the logic of cloning as automatic
multiplication is typical of all current technological and humanist advancements, the
exacerbation of this logic can only mean more promise and death . At this point my argument mirrors the
apocalyptic tone of the activist-research projects. In the final analysis, the problem with Edu-Factory, Facoltà di Fuga,
Investigacció, Universidad Nómada, Ricercatori Precari, and Glocal Research Space is that these projects entail a very
specific form of subjugation with dire consequences for the slower and less techno-genic
classes. Techno-scientific progress entails a regress into immortality, epitomised by a nostalgia
typical of the current socio-technical situation, for when we were ‘undivided’ (Baudrillard, 2000: 6). I
contend that Baudrillard refers not only to the lifeless stage before humans became sexed life forms,
but also makes an allusion to psycho-analytic readings of the ‘subject divided in language’ and
its nostalgia for wholeness and transparent communication. The desire for immortality, like
archive fever, is therefore the same as the Freudian death drive, and we ourselves ultimately
become the object of our technologies of scrutiny and nostalgia. The humanist quest of totally
transparency of oneself and of the world to oneself that grounds the idea of the modern
techno-scientific university, is ultimately an attempt at (self-)destruction, or in any case an
attempted destruction of (one’s) radical difference. The urgent political question, which Stiegler
problematically avoided in Disorientation, then becomes: which selves are and will become
caught up in the delusion of total selftransparency and self-justification, and which selves will be
destroyed? And how may we conceive of an ‘ethic of intellectual inquiry or aesthetic
contemplation’ that ‘resists the imperatives of speed’, as Jon Cook likewise wonders in ‘The Techno-University
and the Future of Knowledge’ (Cook, 1999: 323)? It is of particular importance to note here that the very
inception of this question and its possible analysis, like the conception of the speed-elite, is itself
again a performative repetition of the grounding myth of the university of independent truth,
justice and reason. Therefore, in carrying forward the humanist promise, this analysis is itself
bound up in the intensification of the logic of acceleration and destruction, and that is then also
equally tenuous. This complicity of thought in the violence of acceleration itself in turn quickens the machine of the © 2010
ephemera 10(1): 7-24 The accelerated university articles Ingrid M. Hoofd 23 humanist promise, and can
only manifest itself in the prediction of a coming apocalypse – whether it concerns a narrative of
the death of thought and the university, or of a technological acceleration engendering the
Freudian death drive. We are then simply the next target in the technological realisation of
complete γνωθι σαυτον (know thyself) – or so it seems. Because after all, a clone is never an exact copy, as
Baudrillard very well knows; and therefore, the extent to which activist-research projects hopefully invite alterity can thankfully not
yet be thought.
1nc - !s
 1nc - ! - scapegoating
Academic spaces like debate funnels their politics as a moment inside the
academy with no reproduction in the outside world – they surrender to the
labor in academia which trades of by scapegoating their political discourse as
commodities to perpetually reproduce a violent system
Bryant 13 collin college – professor of philosophy, (Levi Bryant – “Paradox of Emancipatory
Political Theory”, https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/the-paradox-of-
emancipatory-political-theory/SA)
There’s a sort of Hegelian contradiction at the heart of all academic political theory that has pretensions of being emancipatory. In a
nutshell, the question is that of how this theory can avoid being a sort of commodity. Using Hegel as a model,
this contradiction goes something like this: emancipatory political theory says it’s undertaken for the sake of emancipation from x.
Yet with rare exceptions, it is only published in academic journals that few have access to, in a jargon
that only other academics or the highly literate can understand, and presented only at
conferences that only other academics generally attend . Thus, academic emancipatory political
theory reveals itself in its truth as something that isn’t aimed at political change or
intervention at all, but rather only as a move or moment in the ongoing autopoiesis of
academia. That is, it functions as another line on the CV and is one strategy through which the
university system carries out its autopoiesis or self-reproduction across time. It thus functions— the
issue isn’t here one of the beliefs or intentions of academics, but how things function –as something like a
commodity within the academic system. The function is not to intervene in the broader political system– despite what
all of us doing political theory say and how we think about our work –but rather to carry out yet another iteration
of the academic discourse (there are other ways that this is done, this has just been a particularly effective
rhetorical strategy for the autopoiesis of academia in the humanities). Were the aim political change,
then the discourse would have to find a way to reach outside the academy, but this is precisely what
academic political theory cannot do due to the publication and presentation structure, publish or perish logic, the CV, and so on. To
produce political change, the academic political theorist would have to sacrifice his or her
erudition or scholarship, because they would have to presume an audience that doesn’t have a
high falutin intellectual background in Hegel, Adorno, Badiou, set theory, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek,
Foucault (who is one of the few that was a breakaway figure), etc. They would also have to adopt a different
platform of communication. Why? Because they would have to address an audience beyond the confines of the academy,
which means something other than academic presses, conferences, journals, etc. (And here I would say that us Marxists are often
the worst of the worst. We engage in a discourse bordering on medieval scholasticism that only
schoolmen can appreciate, which presents a fundamental contradiction between the form of
their discourse– only other experts can understand it –and the content; they want to produce
change). But the academic emancipatory political theorist can’t do either of these things. If they
surrender their erudition and the baroque nature of their discourse, they surrender their place in the academy (notice the way in
which Naomi Klein is sneered at in political theory circles despite the appreciable impact of her work ).
If they adopt other
platforms of communication– and this touches on my last post and the way philosophers sneer at the idea that there’s a
necessity to investigating extra-philosophical conditions of their discourse –then they surrender their labor
requirements as people working within academia. Both options are foreclosed by the
sociological conditions of their discourse. The paradox of emancipatory academic political
discourse is thus that it is formally and functionally apolitical. At the level of its intention or what it says it
aims to effect political change and intervention, but at the level of what it does, it simply reproduces its own discourse
and labor conditions without intervening in broader social fields (and no, the classroom doesn’t count).
Unconscious recognition of this paradox might be why, in some corners, we’re seeing the execrable call to re-stablish “the party”.
The party is the academic fantasy of a philosopher-king or an academic avant gard that simultaneously gets to be an academic and
produce political change for all those “dopes and illiterate” that characterize the people (somehow the issue of how the party
eventually becomes an end in itself, aimed solely at perpetuating itself, thereby divorcing itself from the people never gets
addressed by these neo-totalitarians). The idea of the party and of the intellectual avant gard is a symptom of unconscious
recognition of the paradox I’ve recognized here and of the political theorist that genuinely wants to produce change while also
recognizing that the sociological structure of the academy can’t meet those requirements. Given these reflections, one wishes that
the academic that’s learned the rhetoric of politics as an autopoietic strategy for reproducing the university discourse would be a
little less pompous and self-righteous, but everyone has to feel important and like their the best thing since sliced bread, I guess.
[ ASIDE: Autopoiesis refers to the activities a living, conscious, exchange, or information system must engage in to continue its
existence from moment to moment. For example, cells must engage in all sorts of processes to continue to exist as cells. A cell is
simultaneously that which produces and what is produced. Likewise, capitalist economy must engage in acts of exchange and
production at each moment to continue to be that economy. It is both the market that produces itself and the market that is
produced through activities of exchange (cf. Althusser on the necessity of reproducing the conditions of production). Academia too, if
it is to continue to exist, is simultaneously both that which produces itself and that which is produced. It does this through scholarly
work. As an autopoietic system, academia is not concerned with its referent or what its discourse is
about, but is a strategy for simply continuing to reproduce itself. This is the article, the
production of students that will later become professors and researchers, conference
presentations, and so on. In the humanities, politically inflected discourse has proven to be an extremely effective strategy
of autopoiesis (which is why we can wonder whether it’s really political at all). Why? It provides a telos for researchers ,
giving them meaning to their work (when they’re really just reproducing their own discourse). It provides a strategy for addressing
those forces of power that are outside the academic system but which threaten it (administrators, legislators, boards of trusteees,
the public) by giving a rationale for their work. In the eyes of administrators, for example, scholarly work on Dante might appear
decadent, but if you can persuade them it has vital political importance you might convince them to let you continue your work in
reproducing the discourse of your discipline. Finally, it provides an auto-immune system, that defends against that which would
prevent autopoietic operations. You can castigate the critic by casting aspersions on their politics (or lack therof), thereby insuring
that your kind of work will continue. ] But the situation is even worse! Despite its solipsism and the fact that we perpetually end up
only addressing one another rather than the broader world, the university discourse has been one of the most effective– if not the
most effective –discourse in gathering knowledge of how the social field functions, how oppression is produced, how power
functions, and all the rest. We just haven’t yet created a more effective machine for producing this sort of knowledge. Of course, this
machine is sadly deficient in applying those critical tools to itself (to see this, amuse yourself one day applying the tools of critical
theory to your critical theorist friend and see how he reacts. Apparently everyone else is a dupe and he’s the only one that doesn’t
have a discourse structured by dominant sociological relations; narcissistic denial, anyone?). Now Marx, especially in Grundrisse,
distinguished between production, distribution, and consumption. He argued that there’s a production of production, a production
of distribution, a production of consumption, a distribution of production, a distribution of distribution, a distribution of
consumption, and a consumption of production, consumption of distribution, and a consumption of consumption (that last one is
fascinating!). Now I’ll tell the story of this baroque grid another day, but what I mean to say here is that the university system has
managed to create a system of production (S2 or academic knowledge), a production of itself ( the
reproduction of the
academic system through the production of new academics and the writing of articles (academic
commodities) that perpetually reproduce this system, and a production of consumption
(academics consuming the work of each other), but it’s done a piss poor job creating a system of
distribution (disseminating it’s “knowledge” throughout the broader social world outside the walls of the autopoietic system of
academia) and a system of consumption (devising strategies to assist non-academics in integrating those S2’s or knowledge). The
academic system is solipsistic, even though it claims to be worldly. The question is how to break the self-enclosed membrane of that
solipsistic cell, so that the form and content of theory might be aligned with one another.
 1nc – ! - neoliberalism
Knowledge production inside the university creates non-thought by doubling
information production into speed spaces which perpetuates a fantasy of
reason and culture which masks projects that parade speed-elite neoliberalism
Hoofd 10 – assistant professor @ Utercht Univeristy & author of Higher Education and
Technological Acceleration: the Disintegration of University Teaching and Research and
Ambiguities of Activism: Alter-Globalism and the Imperatives of Speed (Ingrid M. Hoofd, “The
accelerated university: Activist academic alliances and the simulation of thought,”
http://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/10-1ephemera-feb10.pdf#page=8, SA)

The way in which I argue that many new university and activist-research projects paradoxically contribute
to this global re-stratification of otherness through technological acceleration , also connects well with
Bill Readings’ work on the contemporary university. In The University in Ruins, Readings argues that the change from the
‘university of reason and culture’ to the present-day ‘university of excellence’ means that the
centre of power has shifted largely away from the nation-state (Readings, 1996: 22). To read power as
residing primarily in the sum of ideological and repressive state apparatuses hence no longer makes sense. It would therefore not
suffice to critique the university simply as an institution that functions as the nurturer of
national culture and the cultured elites for the nation-state. Readings points out that it is telling that
strong oppositional critiques of the university seem to become possible precisely at
the moment where its centralising power and knowledge have vacated its premises .
More importantly, the function of the university of excellence – one that successfully transforms it
into yet another trans-national corporation – relies on the fantasy that the university is or
should be still that university of reason and culture, and that it originally did pursue universal
truth, justice and knowledge. So the invocation of the fantasy of an originary university of
knowledge and truth to which Edu-Factory’s and other similar activist-academics carefully seek
to be responsible, facilitates the doubling of the production of information – as if it were still
knowledge and culture – into speed-spaces outside the university walls proper . According to
Bernard Stiegler in Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, new technologies of acceleration therefore lead to a
tension in contemporary university practices under neoliberalism: they make possible thought
through continuous differentiation into the virtual, but likewise reduce and manage thought to
its calculable double – thus creating non-thought . The point for Stiegler is then to bring about ‘epochal
redoubling’ which synthesises the current tension into an affirmation of technology as well as humanity (Stiegler, 2009: 7). While I
agree with Stiegler on the ambiguity and doubling at the heart of acceleration, his imagined solution is nonetheless suspect. This is due
to his narrative of the heroic overcoming of this tension in which an analysis of the complicities of a politics of difference is glaringly
absent – in other words, the conceptual problem in Stiegler, activist-research, and eventually also in this article, is one of discerning
(or thinking) ‘good’ from ‘bad’ doubling. I claim for now rather, in line with Derrida and Armitage, that alter-globalist activism here
in particular functions as the supposed ‘other’, and hence authentic locus of truth © 2010 ephemera 10(1): 7-24 The accelerated
university articles Ingrid M. Hoofd 13 and justice, where that
fantasy of the originary university – which is the
mirror-image of the fantasy of some future utopian university – is allegedly to be re-found.
Alterglobalism can have this function because it is itself largely structured by the concepts and
technologies of neo-liberalism. The borderlands of the real and the virtual, of West and the non-
West, of thinking and doing, as well as of ‘alternative’ global activism and academia, become
highly productive sites in the expansion and quickening of neoliberal capital. Activist-research
projects and alliances, as well as all narratives – like this one – that invoke the interplay between
activism and academia as a positive means for the quest for truth and justice, are therefore
symptomatic of the contemporary redefinition of the university, caused by the relative crisis of
the nation-state in the face of trans-national globalisation. The university – if we still want to call it that –
thus becomes in essence a nomad institution, able to vicariously pop up in various geographical
and virtual spaces in the name of connecting to ‘truly liberating’ activists or non-Western
peoples, as long as this facilitates technocratic (re)production. This tech nologically endowed dispersal and
quickening of thought and expertise is paradoxically the effect of the desire for progress and liberation
that humanist society seeks. The new activist-research endeavours are the latest productive results of this – productive, that
is then, in the humanist and capitalist senses of the word. The emphasis in these initiatives on displacement and dispersal can thus
once more be expected to valorise the terms and concepts of speed, such as mobility, flexibility, nomadism, transformation and
creating connections, as well as a general rhetoric of autonomy and radicality, while expressing a strong allegiance to that project of
justice that often goes under the heading of new social movements and technologies. The rhetoric of overcoming boundaries, both
(inter)nationally and institutionally, plays a crucial role in the portrayal of such activity as liberatory or subversive. The
romanticisation of certain forms of activism or otherness, as if they were harbouring ‘ultimate
justice’, cross-bred with the appeal to the university of reason and culture as ‘original’,
facilitates the emergence of technologically endowed nomad activist-academic-research
initiatives as the new spaces and bodies for the generation of trans-national capital – as if that
Enlightenment ‘subject of reason and autonomy’ still exists (or has ever existed). If one were to be unfriendly, one could perhaps say
that through these projects, speed-elitist neo-liberalism parades as if it were justice.
 1nc - ! – communitive cap
The aff is a search for a purer university – the imperative for debaters to use
academia as a space to positively impact society at large accelerates
communicative capitalism and renews the importance of the university
Hoofd 17 [Ingrid M. Hoofd (2017) “Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The
Disintegration of University Teaching and Research” Palgrave Macmillan, New York,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51409-7]//jz

CYBERNETIC COMMUNICATION AND THE ‘PURE’ UNIVERSITY As we have seen in the previous two chapters,
the accelerated auto-immune logic of the neo-liberal university emerges in teaching and other
pedagogical practices in the humanities in a most double-edged way . New and supposedly more
democratic teaching practices and formalisations on the surface appear as catering to the
demands of an increasingly emancipated student body , yet on the other hand, staff and students are
exceedingly subjected to a logic of acceleration and automation that generates a host of tensions and obscure reproductions
of power. These reproductions happen, for instance, through forms of e-learning that are mobilised through the new
communication technologies, but also have to do with the speeding-up of the  general
entanglement of academic and communicative techniques . Taking its cue from the problematic
ambiguity of socially responsible teaching and the nostalgic calls for a ‘purer’ past university in
the last chapter, this chapter in turn seeks to delve into what this accelerated techno-logic
may more specifi - cally mean for calls to socially responsible research in the contemporary
university. Of interest here is also the fact that some academics, in a problematic attempt to counter the mere quantifi
cation of academic research output by way of journal rankings and citations, have called for ‘social impact’ or ‘public
dissemination’ of academic work to be an additional measure of research infl uence. These
proponents also often see social media as ‘tools’ to reach a wider audience for their ideas and
publications. In “Citations are not enough,” for instance, Asit Biswas and Julian Kirchherr argue that tenure committees should
also look at the social media output of scholars (2015, n.p.). However, I suggest that while this call at least draws
attention away from self-gratifying statistical and peer-review measurements within research
circles, the call towards measuring or evaluating social responsibility as an additional component
of ‘impact’ via social media exactly accelerates the founding ethic of university research and
writing as a supposedly uniformly positive service to ‘the public’ or ‘society at large.’ This is for
one because it mistakenly collapses the media realm with the public or the social as such, but
also because the mediation of research entails directly those techniques of capital acceleration,
with all its negative fallout. Telling here is that especially during the early 1990s, a fair amount of intellectual
effort in North American humanities departments has been devoted to scrutinising and
communicating the relationship between academia and society, and moreover that such ideas
of communication have also partly been transformed into digital humanities initiatives . The Digital
Humanities Research Network at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, for instance, devotes its entire 2015–2016 workshop line-up
to the theme “Going Public,” which explores “a variety of questions around the public digital humanities and the wider role of digital
technologies in public scholarship.” Likewise, Columbia University kicked off their 2013 “Research Without Borders” discussion series
with a panel on “Communicating Your Research: Social Media and the Research Cycle,” which explored social media as a way to
promote humanities research and have it remain socially relevant. It is noteworthy that these
calls demonstrate a
profound loyalty to some of the central tenets of the university today, namely those of the
generation of new insights for the purposes of progressive social transformation ‘outside’ the
university. The spirit of the university to which they all profess has been for a long time, and
indeed undeniably should remain, one that is wedded to the ideals of truth and knowledge for
the higher purposes of justice, equality, and emancipation despite its unintended negative
fallout. In order to execute these ideals, the university has since its early inception in medieval Europe of course relied on the
production and dissemination of such knowledge by ways of an increasing multiplicity of technologies of communication, like books
and journals, and later radio and television. The
progressive innovation around ever more sophisticated
media tools has indeed become one of the linchpins around which such a dissemination—and in
turn the spread of a revolutionary Enlightenment—could occur. The humanities and the social
sciences today 100 I.M. HOOFD likewise share much (if not all) of their enthusiasm about new
technologies with the so-called hard sciences, which for centuries has relied on ever more
intricate machines for the purposes of probing and visualising physical ‘reality’—a problematic
which I already highlighted in Chap. 1 . Any claim to immediate empirical access to the observation of reality and
society, and by extension a claim to the problems, incompleteness, or contradictions in the understanding of reality or society,
therefore provides, as Bruce Robbins astutely points out in Consequences of Theory, the lifeblood of all the academic
professions (1991, 7). This means that all these academic fi elds are rightly pressed to justify their existence in terms of their social
relevance. And also because such relevance needs to be properly communicated to all members of
society, it is in the very spirit of positive social transformation for a plethora of communities that
the claim to a kind of universal communicability is made. relatively novel strand of research that
seeks to rejustify the existence of the humanities is of course the so-called digital humanities.
Proponents of the implementation of big data research in the humanities—often carried out
under those controversial auspices of the ‘digital humanities’—have so far argued their case by
suggesting that the gathering and visualisation of big data has the potential for unexpected
insights into social relations and human activity. These advocates therefore claim that, even if any data
visualisation is necessarily bound by a set of subjective and technical choices, big data research may enrich the humanities with
previously hidden perspectives on cognition, emotion, and society. Instead, opponents of this implementation in turn lament the
increasing encroachment of techniques of calculation and quantifi - cation onto the humanities, and argue that such techniques
signal the demise of the rich practices of close reading and the necessarily boundedness of interpretation to an embodied social and
cultural context. Richard Grusin, for instance, in “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities” notes perceptively that the rise of the
digital humanities coincided with the deepening of the economic crisis that has negatively affected the critical strand of the
humanities (2014, 79). He
suggests in turn that the central disagreement between digital and critical
humanists consists of a tension between critique and production, and that the digital humanities
therefore have fallen prey to the exact “neoliberal values that have been seen to be the cause of
the current crisis” (2014, 85). Grusin, and many others with him, therefore takes issue with the problematic claim to
objectivity and depth that the dominant discourse around big data THE DOUBLE-BIND OF/IN ACTIVIST–ACADEMIC RESEARCH
101presents, and dismisses the digital humanities in general as a largely misguided means to help humanities departments survive
the onslaught of the general quantifi cation of academic practices that neo-liberalism has introduced. Correctly chiding nonetheless
those who assume that critical work does not consist of “making things,” Grusin fi nally proposes that “humanists
should be
working together to defend the value of humanistic inquiry in and of itself from the instrumental
logic and systematic defunding brought about by the neoliberal assault on higher education”
(2014, 85 and 90). In deepening, while also complicating Grusin’s argument—which helpfully
points out that critique is also a form of production, but still remains wedded to the humanist
promise—even further, I propose that the turn to big data in the humanities in fact signals a
much profounder conundrum in academic research ever since its idealistic beginnings in
Enlightenment thought, of which its neo-liberalisation is only a logical progression . This deeper
problem, I suggest, pivots around the contradictory claims that big data equally renders its object of analysis—whether social
phenomenon or cultural text—more superfi cial (and unknowable) as well as more penetrable (and knowable). This
contradiction parallels the immanent aporia of the academic humanist enterprise, whose
institutional mission of, as I called it in Chap. 1 , ‘exposing the world and humanity to the light of
truth and emancipation’ (and its negative historical baggage of oppressive universalism, social
scrutiny, and colonialism) has today deconstructed itself by also exposing the limits of its own
idealism. This indeed means that the quest for total knowledge has started to become a near-pervasive
‘exposing-itself’ of academia by way of the implementation of a plethora of internal forms of
surveillance and hierarchical ‘sousveillance’ carried out via extensive ‘datafi cations’ of staff and
student behaviour and output. In the heated debates around the digital humanities then, we
can see quite clearly that the problem of the university today consists not simply of its neo-
liberalisation, but of the acceleration of the university’s unfi nishable idealistic mission by way of
an enmeshment with and displacement of its aporia into technologies of calculation and
prediction like big data techniques. As I suggested by way of also reading Virilio’s The Vision Machine as an insightful
allegory of the university today, the increasing ubiquity of techniques of perception marks a growing blindness to the world around
us. ‘Big data’ could therefore be said to be the exemplary contemporary symptom of the aporetic structure of the university, as it
can likewise be read as an allegory of how the expansion of knowledge about, as well as 102 I.M. HOOFDthe unknowability of, the
world, society, and human cognition, remains fundamentally conjoined today. Despite
all these efforts at carving out
clear methods for research, it appears, however, that today, well-meaning academics in the
social sciences and the humanities who specifi cally seek to fi ght the negative fallout of global
capitalism fi nd themselves increasingly in a conceptual and practical double-bind. This is
because, while bringing about social transformation is one of the key aims of most progressive
intellectual movements which increasingly seek to harness the powers of communication tools
for all kinds of democratic and equality-fostering ends, ‘change’ also constitutes very much the
clarion call of the current neo-liberal paradigm with its hallmarks of destructive crisis and
instability. We can notice this call for peoplecentred change especially in the mottos of
contemporary technology and new media companies. The slogan of Philips Electronics, for instance, which since
2004 reads “Let’s Make Things Better,” illustrates this well, as does Apple’s famous motto “Think Different” and Google’s “Don’t Do
Evil.” The social media company Facebook meanwhile famously “helps you connect and share with people.” Now one may be
tempted to dismiss such company slogans as empty marketing gimmicks, but I would hesitate to relegate these mottos entirely to
the dustbin of capitalistic false promise and deceit. Rather, I think that the
very pervasiveness of the general
sentiment of ethical social change that such slogans exhibit should tell us a lot about the
contemporary stage of late capitalism in which the emphasis on social progress in and of itself
has for a long time been imbricated in technological innovation and the quest for the perfection
of media and communication tools that indeed emerged out of university research and partly
even out of the humanities (the mathematical logic that computers abide by, for instance, was fi
rst developed as a branch of philosophy ). In this sense, it is perhaps no coincidence that all the above discussion
series from Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia that critically investigate the role or the corruption at the heart of the university, not
only rely on the acceleration of book printing technology via the powers of dissemination via digital tools of printing and distribution,
but also emerge after the very decades that saw the realisation of the Internet—arguably the ultimate database of books—as a
widespread ‘socialising’ phenomenon. Indeed, it
appears that the coming into fruition of a certain ideal
about communication by way of the new media coincided with a new-found scepticism about
the public role of the university, in turn leading to a call for a renewal of its founding tenets.

The aff’s localized advocacy shifts moral responsibility for violence from the
state to the individual, strengthening individual’s connectivity and productivity
towards the global economy
Hoofd 17 [Ingrid M. Hoofd (2017) “Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The
Disintegration of University Teaching and Research” Palgrave Macmillan, New York,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51409-7]//jz
In light of the proliferation of such adversarial agendas, I want to further complicate the debate around ethics in higher education in
this section. I will do so by addressing the issues at stake in the translation of these urgent reformulations of teaching ethics in an
arts and social sciences division of a contemporary university that is arguably the epitome of the post-colonial global knowledge
enterprise. Using Derrida’s insightful interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas on ethics, I will claim that the current debate on
teaching ethics in higher education engenders a multiplication of what Derrida calls the ‘aporia
of hospitality,’ which I understand as one way in which one could identify the generally aporetic
logic of academia as it also returned in Ortega y Gasset’s text as essentially an oppressive and
elitist invitation for all. Since the ‘managerial’ IDEALISTIC SELF-DELUSIONS AND THE LIMITS OF NOSTALGIA 77reformulation
as well as the call for reviving ‘real’ critical thought both labour under the mark of a growing sense of urgency, I once more stress
that these two stands—as we saw in the Utrecht ‘theory versus methods’ discussion—are not oppositional at all. Rather, the
discourses and confl icts internal to this Asian university and inside the media and communications ethics classroom, as well as the
adversarial tone of the debate around teaching ethics, really point towards the Janus-faced acceleration of politics under
technocratic neo-liberalisation. At fi rst glance, we
can certainly fi nd testimony of the ‘retreat of politics’ in
the sort of justifi cations and the terminologies that proliferate throughout the various areas in a
contemporary university like this one in which ethics as a sort of ‘method’ is being revived as a
valid part of the curriculum. The overwhelming majority of books and articles that concern themselves with ethics within
NUS’s library fall within the fi elds of (human resource) management, public relations, and professional communication—very much
the new communications programme and business school double degree staple. On top of this, a whole mass of writings have
emerged over the last decade around the necessity for ‘business ethics’ and ‘computer ethics.’ The
tendency within these
writings is time and again an implicit (and at times even blatantly explicit) strengthening of a
problematic neo-liberal moralism: the emphasis invariably lies on individual (rather than
state) responsibility, open and highly mediated fl ows of information, and greater effi ciency
and productivity, all inundated in a discourse of strong technological instrumentalism. The
idea in these texts and courses is usually to provide the students with a set of rules which are
presented as morally absolute tools —hence also the dominance of Kant, Rawls, and Mill in these course outlines. Some
even advocate the necessity of some universal ‘global ethics’ which ideally should be taught through the supposedly neutral
communication technologies of global connectivity. A good example here is Roseann Runte’s “Re-Educating Humankind: Globalizing
the Curriculum and Teaching International Ethics for the New Century” in the recent volume The Ethics of Teaching. Runte argues
that a “new ethics of globalisation is needed” to combat the current powerlessness felt by many individuals, in which “deft use of
the Internet and information and communication technologies” should accomplish a renewed global awareness and empowerment
(2006, 340). Such pervasive neo-liberal discourses, which rather simplistically equate globalisation and new media with progress and
emancipation for all, return in the reformulation of this Asian university’s aims and curricula, 78 I.M. HOOFDwhich I touched upon in
Chap. 2 : in 2002, the university launched its new vision with the phrase “towards a global knowledge enterprise, building synergies
between education, research and entrepreneurship.” The three coloured rings in the crest, which were taken from an older colonial
university and stood for creating, imparting, and applying knowledge, were reformulated into ‘creativity, innovation and
entrepreneurship.’ The university’s centre for teaching and learning development courses of the last few years, which are
compulsory for new teachers, in turn seek to assimilate and impassion teachers within and through the relatively new institutional
imperative. These courses likewise put a strong emphasis on so-called collaborative small group learning where teachers
become ‘managers of the group process’ and students learn independent thinking, initiative,
and ‘the soft skills necessary for the global workforce demands of the twenty-fi rst century .’ The
use of the new media, as I discussed in depth in Chap. 2 , are strongly pushed within this vision, which has resulted in a growing fl ow
of capital to new areas like media and communications, science, technology and society, interactive digital media, computing, and
engineering in the university. This teaching form is not simply an issue of catering for volatile markets, assured a former Dean of
Engineering in his public speech a few years ago, but is according to him indeed “the moral thing to do.” Upon
closer scrutiny
of the university’s history, this new neo-liberal imperative in this university appears as a happy
convergence of its earlier colonial and Cold War legacies, and local nationalistic inter-ethnic
politics, in turn constituting a new ‘glocal’—local and cosmopolitan—elite thriving on discourses
and infrastructure of communicative capitalism . This particular Asian university has emerged from earlier colonial
teaching institutions like Raffl es Medical School, and later on in the century got marked by a highly politicised split which effectively
clamped down on the communist voices that were highly prevalent in its former arts and social sciences faculty. To ‘use our new
tools morally and wisely’ has become tantamount to ensuring that capital production and accumulation goes as unhindered as
possible. This is precisely what several critics of neo-liberalism, like John Armitage and Joan Roberts, have called the neo-liberal
‘elimination of noise,’ which I alluded to with the Dutch Utrecht University example, and which grounds itself in the humanist utopia
of transparent communication that Virilio identifi es as the source of a profound blindness. In “Chronotopia,” Armitage and Roberts
likewise draw out how this
utopia of communication works currently in favour of what they call the
‘global kinetic elite’—a highly affl uent cosmopolitan IDEALISTIC SELF-DELUSIONS AND THE LIMITS
OF NOSTALGIA 79elite, whose hegemony is founded on discourses and technologies of
instantaneity, connectivity, mobility, and transcendence, akin to what I have dubbed the ‘speed-
elite’ in Chap. 1 .
AFF
aff answers
 AT: vagueness bad
Their obsession with blueprinted methods and separation of the theoretical
from the material crowds out nuance and leaves the judge to default to
normative Western modes of adjudicating critical thought – vote aff to subvert
the university’s imperative for clarity
Hoofd 17 [Ingrid M. Hoofd (2017) “Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The
Disintegration of University Teaching and Research” Palgrave Macmillan, New York,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51409-7]//jz
Several years ago, the media and communications programme in NUS saw the need for an ethics module, and I was invited to create
and teach this module. That this course became mandatory within this particular programme is, in light of the connection I outlined
in Chap. 1between communication technologies and academic acceleration, no surprise: the integration of more and more complex
media technology into society creates a host of new ethical dilemmas, and students, so the argument goes, should be taught how to
manage these dilemmas and technologies in their ‘real’ jobs after university. This argument is of course not unique to this particular
university. The
shift from an industrial social order towards a society marked by new media
technologies has resulted in a proliferation of debates and agendas on the teaching of moral
guidelines in academia and other educational institutions, and in many ways follows Ortega y
Gasset’s call to teach the students what they need to know by way of imparting only that
cultural and moral knowledge that may function as a ‘method’ or roadmap . At Utrecht University, for
instance, the Media and Culture Department in the Humanities Faculty at which I currently teach has attempted to heed students’
needs by responding to the advice from an external visiting committee demanding more transparency in teaching. The Department
did so by implementing the requirement that end goals and methods are made explicit in module syllabi and student theses, and
that courses are to focus on the transmission of clear skills rather than ‘obscure theory.’ But while
such attempts at
transparency are seemingly well meant and generous to the students, they ultimately divorce
methods IDEALISTIC SELF-DELUSIONS AND THE LIMITS OF NOSTALGIA 73and skills from their grounding theoretical
(and hence always subjective) perspectives, much like Ortega y Gasset implies that the teaching
of mere ‘roadmaps’ is an ultimately neutral or positive affair . Methods, as its etymology indeed
suggests, are convenient roadmaps in Ortega y Gasset’s sense, but are always specifi c to a
certain theoretical tradition and hence can always be questioned for their limitations. What is more,
the emphasis on methods seems to arise from a fear of the confusion and partial subjectivity of
student assessment on the basis of the inter-subjective teacher– student relationship within a
certain tradition, and hence appears as an attempt to stamp out the ‘noise’ emanating from the
Lyotardian ‘demise of great narratives’ in the postmodern European context . This obsession with
methods can therefore be interpreted as akin to the onslaught of cybernetics and quantifi
cation, which seeks to suppress the complications of thinking as dialectical in the university at
large from the larger speedelitist context which this cybernetic machinery serves. Staff and student
work in turn increasingly resembles a fi nally immoral—because blind to its reproduction of inequalities—form of automated
production and an ever more hastily churning out of research and writing. Student theses, for instance, having to bow to the
demands of a standardised assessment form in which supposedly crucial aspects of the thesis are presented as separate entities (for
instance, the method employed needs to be rendered explicit and is assessed separately from the
theoretical framework in the form), leads to narrow ‘assembly-line’ write-ups that merely seek
to ‘tick the boxes’ without any critical or holistic considerations around rhetoric and perspective .
More disturbingly, students that attempt a more daring or original piece of writing for their theses
tend to get penalised when, for instance, not explicitly stating the method employed, even if
management claims that the form is not meant to be prescriptive . This deplorable practice is therefore
reminiscent of the ‘drilling’ and disciplining of the student (and the lecturer or supervisor), as the compulsory transparency of goals
and methods lead to a situation that becomes completely blind and disrespectful to how the outcome of the pedagogical student–
teacher relationship can and should never be fully known in advance in order to remain a scene of insightful transformation for the
student and teacher away from the cybernetic compulsion of the neoliberal economy. In other words, if
the pedagogical
scene wishes to be as hospitable and promissory as possible so that radically new
understandings may emerge (and the student can truly grow), it is imperative that module goals
remain partly oblique and emergent, and that methods 74 I.M. HOOFDare always also questioned
and unpacked for their partial and subjective (often European and masculine) theoretical
underpinnings and traditions. After all, the term ‘theory’ is derived from the Greek θεωρειν or ‘being
a spectator in a theatre,’ and hence always implies not only a partial or subjective position, but
also an element of contextual inter-subjectivity. The formulation of strict methods is therefore one particular
instance of a problematic transcendence via an erasure of the non-neutral grounds of theory. The faculty examination board at
Utrecht thus attempts to ‘eliminate the noise’ of teacher and student subjectivity and respond to the demands of the market, while
failing to understand that not only such inter-subjective ‘noise’ is precisely what makes teaching, learning, and pedagogical
communication possible, but also that the main ‘culture’ of the humanities traditionally is one of questioning methods and critiquing
all forms of non-neutral automation in order to invite a radically different future. The
acceleration of the aporia can
therefore be keenly felt around these pedagogical demands from the management (and
beyond) as well as in my supervision and teaching at Utrecht University; an increasingly unsure
student body demand being taught ever clearer ‘methods’ and ‘skills,’ while at the same time,
some of these students get ever more self-doubting and even display a recalcitrance with the
university as such, being unsure how to properly understand their own fears and doubts as a
logical product of the aporetic demands the university and the lecturer makes on them . What is
more, the rendering transparent of methods and goals while eliding the controversies underlying them has in many cases the
paradoxical outcome of making the students understand less, as they, for instance, logically cannot comprehend why all the great
texts of the humanities tend not to have an explicit methods section, while they have to focus so much on methods in their theses.
Eventually therefore, this attempt at complete transparency does the students and the staff a disservice, even if it seems to dutifully
cater to their needs and uses. Interestingly also, while
the harking back to the teaching of theoretical
traditions in media studies may seem an antidote to the obsession with clear methods and
roadmaps, the acceleration of the aporia emerges even stronger in such well-meant attempts to
rethink the pedagogical scene as one of Bildung via theoretical—yet eventually also largely
white and masculine—culture. In order to counter the obsession with methods and end goals, several of my colleagues
and I at Utrecht University set up a task force for rethinking student assessment and pedagogical goals. Our line of reasoning largely
is that a more appropriate and generous teaching and IDEALISTIC SELF-DELUSIONS AND THE LIMITS OF NOSTALGIA 75assessment
should instead focus on the teaching of the main grounds, theories, and traditions in the humanities at large, so that an ethic of
critique and questioning can once more be foregrounded in the media and culture curriculum, as it was in the past. While this at
least allows the students to address methods and texts in a critical fashion, the question of course
remains whether such a revision—while certainly remaining more hospitable to subjective
student and staff otherness than the blind quest for objective module transparency and
methodological automation—not also remains wedded to a nostalgic and ultimately
problematic Enlightenment agenda. Such a nostalgia for the grounds of (critical) theory hence
also appears as a complicit product of the acceleration of higher education, insofar it also
performs the Janus-faced logic of academic optimism in light of larger social desperation. What is
more, the art of critique (which comes from the Greek κρινειν or ‘to separate’) also requires that aspects are split
out or distinguished from one another—left from right, East from West, and neo-liberal from
liberal—whereas such divisions are nonetheless intimately entangled with and constitutive of
one another, so that technological conditions that collapse the semiotic and functionalist
spheres, the simulated playing out of such illusory differences lead to their accelerated
reproduction. The problem is thus one of conceiving a truly radical form of questioning or critique by looking closer at the
‘theatrical’ aspect of θεωρειν, while admitting that such a questioning itself performs such theatricality just as much. It is for this
reason that, for instance, Gary Genosko addresses the problem of radical theory in Baudrillard’s work as similar to the problem of
how to conceive of ‘political theatre’ in “The Drama of Theory,” about which more in Chap. 5 . So in short ,
I suggest that the
debates and agendas that see the solution in a rigorous implementation of moral or
methodological roadmaps almost always concern the issue of how to teach a form of refl ection
fi t to deal with the moral confusion and supposed ‘loss of values and direction’ (in line with Ortega y
Gasset’s lament of fragmentation) due to the arrival of the information age; any illusion of grounding university teaching in some
superior European cultural and theoretical tradition runs the risk of closing off alterity, so that it must also question its own grounds.
This also becomes clear in the ethics course I had to set up for the communications programme in Singapore, to which I will now
turn.
 affect inevitable/necessary/RC
Neoliberalism is an affective event – in order to challenge it, our resistance
must be affective too
Zembylas 19 [Michalinos Zembylas (2019): The affective dimension of everyday resistance:
implications for critical pedagogy in engaging with neoliberalism’s educational impact, Critical
Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2019.1617180]//jz

Resistance is a central concept of the social sciences – a concept that has been widely used in
feminist, cultural, poststructural, postcolonial and critical theories (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2016). Despite
its extensive use, however, there is considerable disagreement and ambiguity as to what exactly it denotes (Hollander & Einwohner,
2004, p. 549). In their frequently cited review of the origin and status of the concept in the social sciences, Hollander and Einwohner
point out that resistance has been used in diverse, imprecise and contradictory ways. One can make a similar argument about critical
pedagogy, namely, that the use of the concept of resistance in this field has also been diverse and
contradictory, depending on the theoretical framework within which resistance has been framed (e.g. see Kirylo, 2013). It is
safe to argue, then, that there is no unified way of defining resistance in critical pedagogy besides a
general understanding of this concept as individual or collective acts of opposition, yet what
constitutes opposition is not always clear . While debates in the social sciences over the meaning and implications of
the concept of resistance have proliferated in recent years, one aspect that has not been adequately explored is the notion of affect
(Hynes, 2013). As Hynes has pointed out, CONTACT Michalinos Zembylas m.zembylas@ouc.ac.cy Open University of Cyprus, P. O.
Box 12794, Latsia 2252, Cyprus CRITICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2019.1617180 © 2019 Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group since Hollander and Einwohner published their review in 2004 there
have been
significant shifts in social theory, and most notably affect theory, that call for a
reconceptualization of what counts as resistance. ‘Affect’ can generally be understood as
relational and embodied intensities that circulate as ‘forces of encounter’; in this sense, affect
encompasses and exceeds more individualized conceptions of emotion (Seigworth & Gregg,
2010). What has conventionally been termed ‘resistance’, then, may be reconceptualized in
terms of a flux of affects that produces political effects which challenge understandings of
power or control (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Hence, recognizing the affective dimension of resistance
complements earlier understandings of power and resistance on the basis of a simplistic
opposition of human agency and social structure. As Alldred and Fox (2017) suggest: ‘power and
resistance are differing aspects of the affective flux between relations in particular assemblages;
all events are consequently sites in which both “power” and “resistance” may be discerned’ (p.
1170). In other words, it is suggested that there is need to pay attention to resistance as an affective event,
rather than merely as an individual or collective acts of opposition. In particular, resistance
against neoliberal reforms in education – e.g. high stakes testing, accountability, standards, and audit regimes
(Giroux, 2008; McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005; Taubman, 2009) – involves significant affective repercussions for
teachers and students (Zembylas, 2018b; Bialostok & Aronson, 2016; Hanley, 2015; Moffatt et al., 2018). While there
are many definitions of neoliberalism, generally it denotes emphases on productivity, economic
liberalization policies, and the significance of the individual (see Springer, Birch, & MacLeavy, 2016).
Neoliberalism itself, then, is an affective event, as collective affects emerging from neoliberal
policies and practices (e.g. fear, anxiety, anger) are inextricable aspects of the sites, networks
and flows of neoliberalism in societies (Anderson, 2014, 2016). Scholars of critical pedagogy have analyzed the
pedagogies of the neoliberal project, whose aim is to produce apolitical consumers and future citizens (Odysseos & Pal, 2018), yet
the affective dimension of resistance against neoliberalism’s educational impact has not been adequately theorized. The main
objective of this article, then, is to discuss the affective dimension of resistance in critical pedagogy in a way that would recognize
neoliberalism’s affective repercussions. The point is not merely to show that affect is involved in the
emergence of resistance in critical pedagogy, but rather to expand the articulation of resistance
in neoliberal education through the lens of affect theory . Specifically, I am interested in theorizing how
critical pedagogy can cultivate ‘everyday’ or ‘invisible’ acts of resistance (Scott, 1985, 1989, 1990) that
constitute forms of ‘counter-conduct’ (Foucault, 2009) in ways that acknowledge, engage with, and further enhance
teachers’ and students’ critical engagement with the affective aspects of resistance and neoliberalism.1 In other words, I
theoretically bring together critical pedagogy, affect, everyday resistance, and counter-conduct to examine the following questions:
How might we understand resistance in critical pedagogy as a form of affective work? What are
the pedagogical implications of recognizing the affective dimension of resistance, particularly in
relation to cultivating counter-conductive practices towards neoliberalism?

Their understanding of resistance refuses an analysis through affect theory –

this dooms their movement to failure as they fall victim to the psychic impacts
of neoliberal violence
Zembylas 19 [Michalinos Zembylas (2019): The affective dimension of everyday resistance:
implications for critical pedagogy in engaging with neoliberalism’s educational impact, Critical
Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2019.1617180]//jz

In this section, I briefly illustrate how resistance

is an affective movement of becoming, rather than an
individual act, with consequences for students’ and educators’ bodies, theory, research and
practice in education. While others have acknowledged the role of emotions and affect in
making sense of how neoliberal changes in education are experienced by students and
educators (e.g. see Bialostok & Aronson, 2016; Hanley, 2015; Moffatt et al., 2018), my illustrations – which come from my
own research over the years (e.g. Zembylas, 2010, 2015, 2018b, 2018c; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2018) – intend to demonstrate
not only how neoliberal policies in education use affects (e.g. fear, anxiety) to produce certain
subjectivities (e.g. see Finn, 2016; McKenzie, 2017; Sellar, 2015; Staunæs, 2011), but also how educators and
students engage in micro-political movements of affective resistance. To do so, I am using the idea
of policy prolepsis introduced by Webb and Gulson (2012) as a methodological tool to identify
the particular ways neoliberal policies in education induce and prompt particular behaviors and
desires in educators and students.2 Policy prolepses, according to Webb and Gulson, are a category of becoming-policy
that shape policy interpretations and practices within the spaces of desired, yet incomplete, policy initiatives and interpretations.
‘Policy prolepses operate through affective tones’ (ibid., p. 91) and ‘are coded affectively’ (ibid.,
p. 92), positioning policy interpretations as well as subjects themselves . What follows, then, are two brief
illustrations of policy prolepsis that show the complexities of affective resistance produced in neoliberal education and its
implications. The first example is concerned with how the becoming-policy of standardized
professional standards in schools operates affectively in paradoxical and unexpected ways; the
second example is concerned with identifying the ambivalent affective assemblages of
educators’ and students’ resistance against neoliberal policies at the university level. In the first
example, it is shown how the politics of standardized professional standards in schools instill
fear, anxiety, stress and anger in teachers, who generate 8 M. ZEMBYLAS micro-political ways of
resisting the affective atmospheres invoking normalization of teachers’ pedagogies (see Zembylas,
2010, 2018b). For example, teachers engage in false compliance, agreeing at a rhetorical level with
some aspects of professional standards, while resisting them in practice or denouncing
standards in small circles of trusted colleagues . Importantly, teachers acknowledge the emotional
ambivalence of engaging in false compliance: the assemblages of fear and anxiety on the one
hand, and the affective atmospheres of solidarity with colleagues, on the other. Clearly, resistance
is not always progressive or emancipatory, as teachers themselves often recognize that their
subjectivities are caught up in the affective conditions created by such policy interventions,
producing tensions, paradoxes and ambivalences in their lives. One may, in fact, explore the
numerous (anticipated and unanticipated) micro-political ways of resistance by teachers that
might change the rhythms of schooling, producing alternative affective spaces that sometimes
enable new embodied encounters and relations (e.g. between teachers and students or between teachers and
their colleagues), while other times simply reinforce the negative atmosphere of fear or anger.
Illuminating the counter-conductive elements of teachers’ resistances can reveal more
specifically how counter-conduct is always prone to the entanglement of governing and
surveillance practices (Odysseos & Pal, 2018). Hence, teachers’ affective resistance towards standardizing processes in
schools finds itself caught between a negative affective atmosphere (e.g. fear or anger) that could be reproduced and, at the same
time, the production of new and unexpected ways of resistance against the material and affective forces that impinge on teachers’
bodies. In all of these different possibilities, an
analysis of the affective dimension of resistance requires that
we focus upon the micro-politics of the (intended and unintended) affective assemblages in
which teachers are a part of. My second example pertains to university students’ protests in
2015 and 2016 against neoliberal and colonial education policies in South Africa, calling for
decolonizing higher education and greater access to education, which has resulted in disruptions
of examinations and academic programs (Zembylas, 2018c; Luescher & Klemenčič, 2016; Nyamnjoh, 2016; Pillay,
2016).3 I want to draw attention to students’ collective affects (e.g. anger) which circulated
through affective economies that operated across universities in the Western Cape (Bozalek &
Zembylas, 2018). Collective affects were invigorated by a growing protest against neoliberal and
colonial policies in higher education. The anger instilled in students by such policies was
transmitted onto local university communities by circulating images of protests through the
media. In particular, protests have become a prominent feature of public and university life in South Africa. The process of
students’ occupation of university premises, in some cases, and the visibility it gave, especially
through violence and the damages caused to university property, made it a transfiguring
moment in the lives of the participants and the local community . Hence, there were voices who
acknowledged their concomitant responsibility as a result of performing damage to public property that cost considerable amounts
of money at a time of scarcity of resources. In our research, for example, there
were students and educators who
noted how, and in which ways, their subjectivities were produced within assemblages that
included ambivalent affective economies – on the one hand, an assemblage of anger against
neoliberal policies; on the other hand, CRITICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION 9 an assemblage of
disappointment and skepticism for the use of violence as a form of protest, thus questioning the
moral legitimacy of (violent) resistance. Counter-conduct offers a compelling concept to understand the form of
students’ protests as refusals of subjectivities and as acts of disobedience against being conducted as ‘consumer-students’ (Odysseos
& Pal, 2018). However, the
framework of counter-conduct, also allows us to grasp counter-conducts as
affective mechanisms that may either forge new ways of resisting neoliberal policies or could
become co-opted by the politics of violence . Through this tension, it is shown that there are
ambivalent affective atmospheres circulating in counter-conductive practices of students and
educators that could neither be ‘simply oppositional nor always fully articulated as part of a
clear and long-term strategy of resistance ’ (Odysseos & Pal, 2018, p. 17). These observations illuminate
the affective ambivalence and paradoxicality of resistance against neoliberal policies; in other
words, there are limitations in resistance efforts that signal clearly that such attempts may end
in failure, possibly reproducing the risks that neoliberalism preys upon. This brief illustration also
shows that any such analysis needs to remain attuned to exploring neoliberal policies in
education as complex affective sites of producing and contesting subjectivities of students and
educators – sites that are open to evading, resisting and redirecting neoliberal and colonial
imperatives (Odysseos & Pal, 2018).
 individualized action good/spills up
Their understanding of individual resistance/our speech act is reductive –
affective dissonance galvanizes resistance beyond specific identity or ideology
but towards ending violence
Zembylas 19 [Michalinos Zembylas (2019): The affective dimension of everyday resistance:
implications for critical pedagogy in engaging with neoliberalism’s educational impact, Critical
Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2019.1617180]//jz

My analysis has shown that whatever

form neoliberalism is taken to be in schools and universities, the
neoliberal present has important affective implications. The affective economies of
neoliberalism that are produced in schools and universities create particular ‘capacities to affect
and be affected’ for teachers and students alike. It is thus extremely important to develop
methodological and theoretical tools that critically trace the capacities of teachers and students
for affecting and being affected in their engagements and negotiations with neoliberal
education, and specifically how these capacities are normalized, embodied or enable alternative
counter-practices (Zembylas, 2018b). Hence, what is required is a continued critical engagement with neoliberalism’s
educational impact in ways that take into consideration the affective potentialities of resistance. Considering the affective
potentialities of resistance in critical pedagogy can be the starting point for alternatives visions of educational policies and practices
that challenge forms of neoliberal education. I would argue, then, that what
is needed in the study of resistance in
critical pedagogy is what Thrift (2008) calls a micro-biopolitical approach (Thrift, 2008) which
understands the complexities and ambivalences of neoliberal affects and norms that operate at
the mundane, ordinary, and everyday level in schools and universities and the consequences
that are produced (Zembylas, 2018b). This micro-biopolitical approach on conceptualizing resistance in critical pedagogy is
valuable not only because it pays attention to the affective consequences of mechanisms and
techniques of neoliberal education in schools and universities, but also because it invokes what
Braidotti (2013) terms ‘affirmative critique’ (see also Staunæs, 2016). An affirmative critique in critical pedagogy, for example,
is the sort of critical engagement with ideas 10 M. ZEMBYLAS and things that creates affective spaces for
alternative counter-conduct practices against neoliberal education . In other words, recognizing the
affective dimension of resistance in critical pedagogy creates openings for an affirmative critique
that has the potential to transform teachers’ and students’ capacities to affect and be affected . In
considering the approach I am suggesting here to affect and resistance in critical pedagogy, one can indeed raise several questions
and concerns such as: How
may critical pedagogy itself function as an ‘apparatus of power’ (Anderson,
2014) which uses affect to mobilize resistance towards certain ideologies or structures such as
neoliberalism? How are these mobilizations of resistance connected to broader collective
conditions and processes of resisting certain ideologies or structures at the macro-political
level? How do teachers’ and students’ practices and bodily capacities reproduce or enrich
certain mobilizations of resistance through their encounters? How can those practices and
bodily capacities be reproductive, adaptive or resistant, whether intentionally or not ? (e.g. see
McKenzie, 2017). There are no definitive answers to these questions, but they must be posed to show the complexities and
ambivalences emerging from attempts to link affect and resistance in critical pedagogy. Hence, I would argue that any viable
theorization of resistance in critical pedagogy must not be limited to ‘conventional’
understandings of resistance but must emphasize how affects condition the ways neoliberalism
emerges, circulate and are transformed by forms of resistance waged by teachers and students.
Greater acknowledgment of the ways in which schools and universities play a fundamental role in the affective conduct of
individuals, encouraging and directing the self-perceptions, economic behavior and socio-political actions of students, citizens, and
workers (Odysseos & Pal, 2018) will renew theorization of resistance in critical pedagogy in two ways. First, by
gesturing
toward the particular ways in which affects come to have force and socio-political significance,
critical pedagogy disconnects resistance from a psychologized perspective or a perspective that
defines resistance in dualistic terms as a matter of either human agency or social structure . This
would mean, for instance, recognizing that resistance is not a set of individualized actions but rather it
is very much embedded in the affective infrastructures of neoliberal education . To create renewed
affective relations and assemblages as counter-conduct in schools and universities, then, would essentially mean to invent new
affective practices that instigate empowerment and resistance against the various
manifestations of neoliberal education. As Alldred and Fox (2017) conclude: It is therefore more accurate
to see power and resistance as dual fluxes that permeate all assemblages, a shifting balance that
is never finally settled. Defining a certain affect as an assertion of power or an effort at
resistance is less important than assessing the capacities that these affects produce . (p. 1171) For
example, it is argued that ‘affective solidarity’ is necessary for a sustainable politics of transformation
(Hemmings, 2012). Hemmings proposes an approach that moves away from rooting transformation in politics of identity and
towards modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance experience can produce.
Although affective dissonance with the experience of neoliberalism’s educational impact, for instance, cannot guarantee a resistant
mode, ‘that sense of dissonance might become a sense of injustice and then a desire to rectify that’ (Hemmings, 2012, CRITICAL
STUDIES IN EDUCATION 11 p. 157). The recognition
of affective dissonance as the point of departure for a
possible affective solidarity among teachers and student highlights that affective dissonance
with neoliberalism’s educational impact may be a productive basis from which to seek
solidarity with others – not based on a shared identity or ideology, but on feeling the desire
for transforming the injustices inflicted by neoliberal policies and practices . Second, the recognition of
the affective dimension of resistance in critical pedagogy helps us understand the affective present in and beyond schools and
universities as a series of processes and practices in ‘the everyday’ in which the focus is on the actions that are mobilized to produce
something rather than on their representations or what they supposedly mean. By examining the consequences of affects at the
micropolitical level, resistance can be understood in terms of the ways actions produce capacities to affect and be affected, that is,
‘in terms of the forces circulating in assemblage and the consequent capacities that are produced in assembled relations, including
human bodies and subjectivities’ (Alldred & Fox, 2017, p. 1171). Calling upon theoretical
insights in critical pedagogy
that recognize and examine the affective dimension of everyday resistance is likely to challenge
the ‘invisible’ infrastructures of neoliberal education in schools and universities. All in all, the call for a
critical pedagogy to acknowledge the affective dimension of resistance marks an important and necessary moment that allows
critical pedagogy to be further enriched in attempts to address the challenges faced by teachers and students in neoliberal
education. Schools and universities are at a critical juncture whether and how they will be able to develop pedagogies and ideas that
neither return to an idealized, pre-neoliberal past, nor expect a sudden revolution but instead resist against the self-formations
involved by neoliberalism (Odysseos & Pal, 2018). What I have offered here is an attempt to illuminate the affective dimension of
resistance and its implications for critical pedagogy through theoretical insights that enhance individual and collective capacity for
counter-conduct in neoliberal contexts. Being
attentive to the complexities and potential ambivalences in
teachers’ and students’ forms of resistance enhances our analysis of how critical pedagogy more
broadly, and schools and universities more specifically, are themselves implicated in
transformations of neoliberal education (Odysseos & Pal, 2018).