• Governing Academics: The Historical Transformation from Discipline to Control

    Author(s):
    John Welsh (see profile)
    Date:
    2016
    Group(s):
    Political Philosophy & Theory
    Subject(s):
    Political science, World politics, Education--Sociological aspects, Genealogy, Culture, Politics and government--Citizen participation
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    societies of control, Meta-Disciplinary, Academic Politics, Foucault, Political theory, Political history, Sociology of education, Cultural sociology, Governmentality
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/cswa-3y10
    Abstract:
    Given the transformation in the government of academic life over recent decades, the article attempts to derive a political critique of the changing psychosocial conditions of academic life via a historical juxtaposition with the nomos of the labour camp in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The aim is to address the need to think beyond normative disciplinary power, to explore a distinctly capitalist governmentality in relation to Foucault’s genealogy of power and to elaborate the techniques and practices of an emergent ‘meta-disciplinary’ technology of labour control in academia. Therefore, a broadly Foucauldian analysis on these questions will be undertaken, and augmented with Marxian and post-Freudian insights into the role of capital accumulation dynamics, in order to texture the conventional presentation of governmental rationality. The result is a metonymic presentation of the ‘camp’ as a physiological structure of capitalistModernity,whose imprint can be discerned in numerous social and institutional settings, in this caseAcademia and theGulag. From this outcome, insights into the transformation of living and labouring in academia, and the effects on psychological and intellectual well-being stemming from the new complex of control can be derived. The piece concludes with some thoughts on strategies of intellectual survival in academia, on counter-conducted techniques of subjectification and on possible means of resistance in the meta-disciplinary idiom.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1007/s10767-016-9228-4
    Publisher:
    Springer Nature
    Pub. Date:
    2016-6-17
    Journal:
    International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
    Volume:
    30
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    83 - 106
    ISSN:
    0891-4486,1573-3416
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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