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Abstract
What are the prospects for critique in an age of collapse? Collapsing ecosystems, “democratic decay,” vicious “culture wars,” and changing knowledge economies all impact the conditions of possibility for academic critique. Universities have become bastions of “academic neoliberalism,” driven by managerialism, rankings, and punishing overwork. Terms such as “postcritique” capture the possibility that critique has literally “run out of steam,” as Bruno Latour famously put it. This article takes the form of a staged call to arms to address some of these issues. First, it sets out to name the combination of economic and cultural forces that constitute “academic neoliberalism,” and to propose a constructive strategy against them. Second, it critiques debates about “postcritique.” Third, it argues that academic neoliberalism can be resisted and that this is now primary business for the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The article closes by proposing new scholarly practices based in “constitutive criticism,” explicitly oriented towards the retrograde politics of the present.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See During.
2 See Tufekci; Andrejevic.
3 See Considine.
4 See Wark; Cammaerts; Davis.
5 See Warner, “Diary”; “Learning My Lesson.”
6 See Newfield, Great Mistake.
7 See Jessop; Lorenz; Marginson and Considine; Nash; Schimank.
8 See Boossabong; Mathur.
9 See Plumb; Bérubé and Nelson.
10 See During; Giroux; Harpham; Newfield, Unmaking the Public University; Nussbaum; Palumbo-Liu; Brooks and Jewett.
11 See Gill, “Breaking the Silence”; “Academics.”
12 See Burrows.
13 See Blackman.
14 See Lipton.
15 See Standing, Precariat.
16 See Fantone.
17 See Standing, Precariat 197–225.
18 See Wilson; Bennett.
19 See Anderson; Schudson.
20 See Tufekci.
21 See Žižek.
22 See Driscoll and Squires.
23 See Lynch.
24 See Boas and Gans-Morse; Burgin; Mirowski; Stedman Jones.
25 See Brook; Lipton.
26 See Stedman Jones; Burgin.
27 Judith Butler has provided a useful summary of reasons why such calls are likely to fail. See Butler, “Ordinary, Incredulous” 27–28.
28 See Madsbjerg.
29 See Nash.
30 See Marginson and Considine 6.
31 See Readings.
32 See Collini.
33 See Nash.
34 See Kamola and Meyerhoff.
35 See Moten and Harney.
36 See Traverso.
37 See Mirowski.
38 See, for example, Urbina and Ruiz-Villaverde.