1. Ill-being and the Hopeless University, a
conversation at the Ends of Knowledge
Richard Hall ¦ @hallymk1 ¦ rhall1@dmu.ac.uk ¦ richard-hall.org

2. Throughout, quotes point to THU and TAA.
TAA: Hall, R. (2018). The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for
Autonomy Inside the University. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
THU: Hall, R. (2021). The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work
at the end of The End of History. Leicester: Mayfly Books.

3. Key questions that emerge from material and historical entanglements
1. What would a society look like that no longer needed the
University?
2. What would intellectual being look like in this society that no
longer needed the University?
Beyond the University: if it is true that we make the University, then
what do we need to negate, abolish and transcend inside ourselves, in
order to enable our being-beyond the University?
If we make the University, then how does dismantling our one-
sidedness dismantle the very grounds of the University, in order that
we might weave alternative ways of knowing the world?

4. We yearn for something. Which requires a reversal of perspective.
This involves: storytelling and materiality as a new, experiential ground theory;
a realization of the systemic nature of our suffering; a desire to change the
emotional register; weaving voice in safety; mutuality/dignity of difference.
Analysing and theorising structural sources based on similarities in experience,
where:
The goal is to produce the click — the moment at which the structural
source of problems suddenly makes sense in relation to experiences. This
click is which focuses and transforms anger.
The Institute for Precarious Consciousness. Anxiety, affective struggle, and
precarity consciousness-raising.

5. My archive
Felicity Callard’s NNMHR21 keynote on epidemic time and thinking from
the sick bed helped me to remember my own experiences of cycles of
chronic fatigue, depression and anxiety.
Her conversation took me back to feel the edges of my grief, and how
the duality of my forgetting/remembering remains entangled with my
soul.
It was a stark reminder of how the individualised experiences of life
through illness are related to the dominant political economy that
demands overwork and productivity as culturally-acceptable self-harming
activities.
It was a stark reminder of the need to share individual lived experiences,
in order to generate a collective front against capital’s social metabolic
control, which dehumanises and wastes lives.

6. Not privileging my many-sidedness, as ill, in therapy, productive,
always-on, teacher, researcher, under pressure, carer, partner,
but remembering the entanglements and choices.
And the ways in which this is refused or ignored or whatevered
inside the the systemic compulsion to compress us as one-
sided, productive and valuable, labour (-power).
c.f. self-reporting on depression and anxiety, not travelling, work
with Kate Bowles on the anxiety machine, ill-being, weltschmerz
– decomposing the layers to get at the heart of the matter –
courage, faith, justice, hope and peace.

7. The hopeless University
a flag bearer for a collective life that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable
(THU p. 36)
The inability of the University to address crises other than 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, in which
the creation of a liveable environment for humans is secondary. Here, the form
of the hopeless University has become devoid of useful content. (THU p. 25)

8. Capital structures and disciplines University work, feeding off it as a labour of
love, negating its humane possibilities, and as a result breeding despair,
depression and melancholy as a space beyond anxiety. Any hopes that
universities might be places for the creation of new forms of freedom, self-
actualisation, social wealth, or even public good, are marginalised by the
imposition of precarious existences inside anxiety machines that catalyse
overwork and ill-being.
These are amplified by the harassment, marginalisation and discrimination felt
by certain bodies, alongside cultures of silence. 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. (THU p. 26)

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

10. The pathological University
is always the crisis

11. The pathological University is shaped in
relation to competition and value (for money)

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

13. Fragmentation: we cannot simply study
flexploitation amplified through crises: academic work made
precarious, entrepreneurial and proletarianised.
crises of capital shape the symbolism of the University (human
capital/commodity, debt, debt covenants and surpluses).
this is an institution seemingly shaped only in relation to crisis, but
unable to address the great unravelling.
a narrative that catayses academic and student ill-health or quitting,
and in particular of a rise in anxiety.

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

15. Ill-being in the anxiety machine

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

17. The anxiety machine normalises ill-being/weltschmerz/hopelessness
• normalised: anxiety-driven overwork as a culturally-acceptable self-
harming activity in the academic peloton
• pathological: the design of a system driven by improving productivity
and the potential for the accumulation of capital
• methodological: forms of anxiety (machines) that generate automated,
hyperactive and repetitive institutional responses, which are of such
competitive advantage that they are not a systemic bug

18. Cultures revealed as pathologies of overwork, self-harm and self-
sacrifice.
A miasma of hopelessness that another world might be possible.
Inside highly competitive environments, vulnerability also tends to
shape a deeper relationship between defeat, entrapment and
depression.

19. Ill-being and the degradation of lives
the systemic reproduction of vulnerability continues to degrade lives (THU, pp. 126-7)
the inability to take their bodies out of the line of fire… The body’s response to overwork,
a deterioration in labour conditions, ongoing competition, and so on, is a mark of what is
reasonable and what is unreasonable, and the ability to push back or refuse. (THU p. 127)
Segregation is a pivotal concept in relation to ill-being… inhuman conditions of work are
shaped by the introjection of managerial control and command as a form of self-repression
[that] prioritises the commodity-as-subject, and presents humans as non-subjects…
[Where] bodies assimilate themselves to particular norms, forms of psychic violence are
enacted (THU pp. 129-30).

20. Capital entangles ill-being inside those who are made really or potentially surplus with the defence
of its own autonomy. Amplified by individual isolation and fear, ill-being is shackled to the
conditions of competition inside the University peloton. (THU p. 130)
In spite of the potential for co-operation, the habitual compulsion to compete drives hopelessness
precisely because economic obligations negate humanity. (THU p. 132)
the result is ‘mutilated, crippled and frustrated human existence’ (Marcuse 1967). Thus,
meaningful change at the end of The End of History demands a deeper understanding of
individual existences that have been subsumed under the compulsion to live for-value. Inside the
peloton, the struggle is for position, rather than for liberation from it.
Thus, the absolute movement of the University peloton, is a tragedy for its workers. It generates
pseudo-selves, vulnerabilities, estrangements, half-lives, narrow or false existences, and solitude
(THU p. 134).

21. The reversal of perspective: becoming non-productive
to reconsider how persistent crises of value consistently degrade
community relations, in order to overcome those relations and
define a new anti-productive environment (TAA p. 188)
How is it possible to move beyond separation, divorce, false
binaries, and social estrangement, in order to define an
alternative form of social metabolic control? (TAA pp. 204-5)

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

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

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

25. How do we connect intellectuality (work) to a political horizon
that works to abolish rather than fetishise academic labour?

26. General antagonism
Halberstam (2013: 5) ‘making common cause with the brokenness of being, a
brokenness, I would venture to say, that is also blackness, that remains
blackness, and will, despite all, remain broken’. Being asked to make
accommodation with a system that denies that it is the cause of illness
demands that we
take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our
ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that
we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will
replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down,
we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of
wanting and being and becoming (ibid.: 6).

27. General antagonism: struggling and yearning
The hopeless University is a flag bearer for a collective life that is becoming
more efficiently unsustainable.
• When the abstracted power of capital has revealed its annihilation of
systems of life and living, how do University workers widen the horizon of
possibility beyond algorithmic solutions to insoluble, structural and
systemic positions?
• Can we can ask ‘the only scientific question that remains to us…: how the
fuck do we get out of this mess?’ (Holloway 2010: 919).
• Can we compost how we feel about our work and lives?

28. If the struggle is against the University’s demand that we are one-sided,
human capital, realised in its forms, pathologies and methodologies,
what forms, cultures and practices do we need to be otherwise? (THU p.
244)
As history returns, this is also a struggle for reintegrating hope and
hopelessness, such that we can be courageous and faithful in articulating
our yearnings. This is a yearning beyond the forms, pathologies and
methodologies of University labour. It is for intellectual work in society,
which takes self-determination as its content and thereby opens-out new
forms that give everyone free access to human intellectuality: everything
must be for everyone. (THU p. 250)

29. In moving beyond, our attention must be drawn to new
modes of being and becoming, in which our lives are
liberated from our toxic institutions. At the end of The
End of History, we remember that these are practical
problems to be addressed in the present. (THU p. 251)
For what do we yearn?

30. For what do we yearn?
As the world burns.
Our ability to breathe in the world.
Our ability to imagine the world otherwise.
A richer archive for us to study, with-and-for.

31. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.