A Pace of Our Own? Becoming Through Speeds and Slows – Investigating Living Through Temporal Ontologies of The University (In Feminist Encounters, Fall Issue 2017) (original) (raw)
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Advocates of 'slow scholarship' have called for building relations of care and solidarity across the university. But, when academia is romanticized, the possibilities for these relations are limited. To de-romanticize academia, we frame universities as terrains of struggle between competing political projects with colonial and decolonial histories. Nostalgia for the university is often tied to an ideal of liberal democracy. Feelings of anxiety about 'speed-up' originate in the liberal ideal of the slowly deliberative citizen in the public sphere. We show that this over-politicizing of temporality has the converse effect of depoliticizing other important political struggles. While jettisoning these problematic assumptions of 'slow scholarship' advocates, we maintain their desires for building relations of care and solidarity. This requires revealing the university's 'temporal architectures' and 'spatial clockworks'—how some people's temporally and spatially privileged situations are interdependent with others' oppressed spatio-temporal situations. For example, the (slow) scholarship of tenured faculty is dependent on the (sped-up) time and labor of graduate students, contingent faculty, and service workers—as well as the constrained spatio-temporal conditions of off-campus domestic workers and incarcerated persons. These intertemporal and interspatial relations intersect with other dynamics, including racism, sexism, labor exploitation, and bureaucracy. We demonstrate an approach of intertemporally and interspatially reflective scholarship through analyses of the movements of #theRealUW and #DismantleDukePlantation at our own campuses, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Duke University. This allows us to envision possibilities for solidarity across different struggles, for expanding alternative modes of study and temporal sub-architectures, and for amplifying already existing forms of resistance in the university’s undercommons.
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Accelerationism is a theoretical movement that seeks to mobilise reason and technological development as a strategy for moving beyond capitalism. The first wave of accelerationism took the effects of capitalism at their most pernicious and suggested that they have not gone far enough. More recent work has complicated this project and explored political, epistemic and aesthetic accelerations. The central push to accelerate, and therefore to manifestly alter time, has consequences in terms of how one understands temporality in education. This article outlines the development of accelerationism and examines whether this theoretical movement can aid critical analysis of the growing presence in education of commercial technology providers, new modes of data analytics, and the application of machine learning algorithms to analyse data. These developments provide a useful example in relation to which a critical question can be asked: is it possible to accelerate technological development in education separate from its capitalist development?
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The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow-moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects....
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow-moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.
The Aesthetics of Accelerationism
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Neoliberal education reforms, most markedly No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top, have codified such initiatives as privatization of public education, testing and accountability measures, and the transformation of teaching from a dynamic relationship of art to one of technical proficiency. Yet resistance to neoliberalism, and its education reforms in particular, have yielded no victories, despite the economic crises of the past decade; rather, neoliberal tenets seem more entrenched than ever. The purpose of this paper is to present an alternate response to neoliberalism, in the form of accelerationism, that does not rely on a return to a primitivist localism or direct action (such as that of the Occupy movement). Briefly stated, accelerationism does not try to reform neoliberal tendencies by going around them or from “within”; rather, it argues for accelerating those forces so that we can go through the free-market system, and thereby arrive at a post- capitalist future. The theoretical framework employed in this paper is accelerationism. Originating from Marx’s (1993) analysis of labor power and surplus value in terms of technology and machinery, and developed further by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) in their call to turn away from a folk politics and move instead towards welcoming the means of capitalism (through its consequences of both deterritorialization and reterritorialization), accelerationism is a political argument that the effects of capitalism cannot be ameliorated or diminished, but rather that they should be increased and accelerated so that we can push through to a post-capitalist future. The term accelerationism was coined pejoratively in 2010 by Benjamin Noys, but was picked up by Williams and Srnicek (2013), who called for a repurposing and recovery of a democratic future. Capitalism, and specifically the neoliberal financialization of capital, which Williams and Srnicek trace back to the Thatcherite (and later Reagan) moment beginning in 1979 and which gained new importance after the economic crises of 2007-2008, paradoxically produces the very conditions of scarcity and precarity that its promises of surplus and infinite growth claim to resolve. Neoliberalism has no future; its only path is to a cataclysm of resources and ecology. Direct action does little to nothing in the face of market forces. The prescription, then, is to accelerate the processes of neoliberalism in order to reach possible, post- capitalist, futures. While accelerationism as presented by Williams and Srnicek is not a perfect prescription, it is important to not dismiss the idea, as Noys (2014) does by tracing it back to Italian futurism/fascism and to the neo-reactionary and inherently pessimistic work of Land (2011). To be clear, accelerationism is not a matter of speed, wherein, like with Italian futurism, the point is to drive a car as fast as you can (with predictable results); rather, acceleration “is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility” (Williams & Srnicek, 2013, para. 02.2). In this way accelerationism is a positive force, one that is a productive philosophical perspective that is most useful as an exercise in speculation. That is, what would accelerationist interventions today look like tomorrow? How can we appropriate the spoils of late capitalism in the form of (posthuman) technology in order to stake a claim to the future? The mode of inquiry used here is what Shaviro (2015) refers to as an accelerationist aesthetics. Shaviro points out that accelerationism does not work as a practical political philosophy, since an acceleration of neoliberal market forces, in which there are already more losers than winners, would at worst no doubt exacerbate that fact on the backs of those least able to weather such an onslaught, and likely result in an antihumanism as advocated for by Land (2011). Conversely, accelerationism “offers us, at best, an exacerbated awareness of how we are trapped” (Shaviro, 2015, p. 34). Instead, Shaviro argues that accelerationism is best understood and utilized as an aesthetic philosophy, wherein “Speculative fiction can explore the abyss of accelerationist ambivalence, without prematurely pretending to resolve it” (p. 21). To that end, the most effective aesthetic form that we currently have to begin to comprehend – and repurpose – the neoliberal nexus is that of science fiction. As Rucker (1983) explains, “The tools of fantasy and [science fiction] offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext” (n.p.). It is through the aesthetic of science fiction that I will consider the various accelerationist pedagogies already available to us, and what they tell us about speculative futures. In this way, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) description of capital as a “body without organs,” we can deploy a speculative science fiction discourse analysis as an avenue through which to play with accelerationism as an aesthetic philosophy, one that is “effectuated through fiction, a fiction that maps vectors of the future upon the present” (Reed, 2014, p. 529).
Running to Stand Still: Late Modernity's Acceleration Fixation
Cultural Politics: An International Journal, 2007
That we live in a time of unprecedented and ever increasing change is both a shibboleth of our age and the more or less explicit justification for all manner of 'strategic' actions. The seldom, if ever, questioned assumption is that our now is more ephemeral, more evanescent, than any that preceded it. In this paper, we subject this assumption to some critical scrutiny, utilizing a range of empirical detail. In the face of this assay we find the assumption to be considerably wanting. We suggest that what we are actually witnessing is mere acceleration, which we distinguish as intensification along a pre-existing trajectory, parading as more substantive and radical movement away from a pre-existing trajectory. Deploying terms we are, we suggest, in thrall to representation of the same at the expense of repetition of difference. Our consumption by acceleration, we argue, both occludes the lack of substantive change actually occurring whilst simultaneously delimiting possibilities of thinking of and enacting the truly radical. We also consider how this set up is maintained, thus attempting to shed some light on why we are seemingly running to stand still. As the Red Queen said, 'it's necessary to run faster even to stay in the one place'