Slides for presentation and seminar at the research group of Assembling Postcapitalist International Political Economies (POSTCAPE), at the University of Tampere, Finland. This is on Wednesday October 5th, 2022, at 15-18.00 (EEST) and 13-16.00 (BST). For details, see http://www.richard-hall.org/2022/09/07/online-seminar-the-alienated-academic-and-the-hopeless-university/

1. On alienation, hopelessness and the
abolition of the University
Richard Hall ¦ @hallymk1 ¦ rhall1@dmu.ac.uk ¦ richard-hall.org

3. Categorical critique: explanation at a level that cuts through (i.e.
intersects) the differences in professional experience, to find what
is common among us.
The hopelessness of labour: to mistake the manifestations for the
cause of our problems breeds helplessness and hopelessness.
An intersectional synthesis: connecting contemporary Marxism with
the literature of feminisms, (de)colonialities, identities.
What is to be done? How do we get ourselves out of this mess?

4. bell hooks Audre Lorde
Angela Davis Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Sara Motta Sarah Amsler
Vanessa Andreotti Joyce Canaan
Linda Tuhiwai Smith Eve Tuck Eli Meyerhoff
Nancy Fraser Fred Moten
Nick Dyer-Witheford Karl Marx
John Holloway Raya Dunayevskaya Gargi Bhattachariyya
Krystian Szadkowski Joss Winn

7. The material and historical relationship between value and values:
• relationships conditioned by competition and metrics;
• intersectional inequalities and embedded ill-being;
• performance management, workload inequalities and casualisation;
• learning and teaching as service-driven innovation/commodification;
• demands for knowledge exchange, research impact and commercialisation;
• finance capital and the need for efficiencies/new markets;
• USPs, brand, risk;
• tensions between vocation and business; and
• (data-driven) accountability, autonomy and authority.
‘To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is
essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most
deeply and intimately begin’. (hooks, 1994, p. 13)

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. Crisis infects academic life, whilst enabling the system of capital
to be presented as a natural, transhistorical solution that requires
an ongoing process of structural reform. (TAA, p. 37)
[Alienated labour] grounded in a conscious and qualitative lack of
agency or autonomy, where ongoing, systemic exploitation and
dispossession are the norm… reproduced by the individual who
has to submit through a lack of power-over her own social
reproduction (TAA, p. 74)

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. 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 [c.f. private property,
commodity exchange and the division of labour].
This lack of subjective power catalyses further fragmentation
between individuals, including intersectional injustices as
subgroups are dominated and othered. (TAA, p. 90)

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

15. 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)

16. 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)

17. 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)

18. Faced by the realities and lived experiences of intersecting crises, the University
has become hopeless, in two respects.
1. It has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction
of capital, and has become an anti-human project devoid of hope.
2. It is unable to respond meaningfully with crises that erupt from the
contradictions of capital.

19. At The End of History, the University is emblematic of the
collapse in the symbolic power of humans to reimagine the
world.
Yet we are at the end of The End of History.

20. This book relates socially-useful, intellectual work to the idea of
the University, in particular in the global North. In taking the
University as its unit of analysis, the argument centres upon the
critique of spaces that are often celebrated as places for self-
actualisation, becoming and belonging.
However, increasingly work inside these allegedly most liberal of
institutions reflects a deformed reality, in which existences as
students, teachers, professional services’ staff and researchers
have become a source of hopelessness. (THU, p. 2)

21. Prosaically [and experienced differentially], hopelessness erupts
from a ack of autonomy over working conditions, deepening
performance management, and the intensification of work. These
have become normalised through the generalisation of overwork,
and in a lack of self-care, described as culturally-acceptable, self-
harming activities.
Poetically, our hopelessness reflects self-denial, and the denial of
that for which humans yearn. University workers are subject to
disconnections, separations, estrangements and modes of
alienating work, which are enforced structurally. (THU, p. 2)

22. hopelessness has a layered complexity linked to an inability to
consider future positives, such that a negative miasma or contagion
generates vulnerability.
Inside highly competitive environments, vulnerability also tends to
shape a deeper relationship between defeat, entrapment and
depression.
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.

23. Cultures revealed as pathologies of overwork, self-harm and self-
sacrifice.
Activities of teaching, learning, research and administration that
describe methodologies for control and performance management.
Inside these financialised and abject forms, the pathological and
methodological content of the institution is internalised by the
University worker and their ego-identity, thereby diminishing the
potential for mutuality.

25. hopelessness centres the concrete and abstract ways in which
capitalism and its institutions continue to construct the world and
dominate nature.
Hoping that its entanglements might be overcome through evidence-
based logic denies the reality that the University is a space for:
scholarship that denies self-autonomy; community that denies true
equality; and global conversations that reproduce coloniality, and
refuse alternative ways of knowing the world.
The University acts, not for society, but for capital as the automatic
subject that mediates our existence and denies our being. (THU, p.
185)

27. Instead, what is required is an ability to organise intellectual life in
society, rather than University workers helping to organise life for society.
This must emerge from an understanding of the forms, pathologies and
methodologies that the University represents, in order to give up on its
possible redemption.
It means grieving its loss in as full a way as possible, so that: first, its
skills, knowledge and capabilities might be liberated into society; and
second, new organising and governing principles might be enacted
beyond its walls. (THU, p. 185)

28. If the point of being human is knowing and
transforming ourselves, can we forget about
acting on the system of production, and refocus
our action upon ourselves, in order that we
abolish the present state of things by abolishing
ourselves? (THU, p. 198)
by sitting with hopelessness and its
entanglements with our desires for our work, our
relationships, our environment and ourselves, we
have the possibility to generate dialogue about
the present state of things, in order to define
new, absolutely negative paths. (THU, p. 200)

29. the alienated self and community must be abolished
through social struggle, which seeks practices that
transcend identification and organisation. (THU, p. 240)
unfolding/sublation; entanglements/becoming;
grieving/composting

30. The material production of new, plural histories and archives, written
with care and compassion, describes the content of our beings at the
intersection of crises.
By sitting with hopelessness, we are able to discover that for which we
yearn, grounded in the equality and dignity currently denied inside the
hopeless University.
In recognising that the University-as-is is antithetical to good living, we
begin a qualitative leap that is grounded in struggle. Our struggle is to
understand our entanglements, estrangements, and relations, and
thereby to realise our many-sidedness. (THU, p. 251)

31. We are entangled.
In respecting the unity of our difference, we can ask ‘the only
scientific question that remains to us…: how the fuck do we get out
of this mess?’ (Holloway 2010: 919).
• How do we know our work? (singular, particular, universal)
• Can we forgive the University? (essence, appearance, existence)
• Can we hospice the University? (a new quality of life)
• Can we compost how we feel about our work and lives? (negation
of the negation)

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