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.