Movement for a Free Academia—literature database
Movement for a Free Academia—literature database |
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Davies, B., & Petersen, E. B. (2005). Intellectual workers (un)doing neoliberal discourse. International Journal of Critical Psychology, 13(1), 32–54. Added by: Thessa Jensen (25/05/2023, 09:15) Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (27/05/2023, 08:56) |
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| Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed Published BibTeX citation key: Davies2005 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Neoliberalism, Power Creators: Davies, Petersen Collection: International Journal of Critical Psychology |
Views: 2/269
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| Abstract |
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"In this paper we explore how academics make sense of their current work conditions and in particular how they have been subjected, and have subjected themselves, to neoliberal discourse. Inspired by Richardson (1997), we present an interview with an academic about the impact of neoliberalism on her intellectual work, using poetic representation. We analyse the poetic representation by drawing on several conceptual technologies from poststructural theory, including the idea that power induces rather than merely represses. The paper explores the ambivalent take-up and refusal of neoliberal discourse through an analysis of the ‘infinitesimal mechanisms’ at work on the embodied subject, each with ‘their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics’ in subjecting individuals (Foucault, 1980:99). We examine how ‘the mechanisms of power have been – and continue to be – invested, colonised, utilised, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended etc’ (Foucault, 1980:99) through the subjection of individuals in today’s universities."
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| Notes |
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References in the abstract:
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings. Brighton: The Harvester Press. |
| Quotes |
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pp. 50–51
"in submitting to this discourse, and in becoming good at doing what it is that brings in the money, there is the ever present danger that the discourse becomes so normalised that the need for critique is no longer visible."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
(27/05/2023, 08:49)
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p. 52
"As subjects make meaning of themselves and of what they do through current readily available, popular or institutionalised discourses, or through theoretically sophisticated and complex discourses, it is not possible to step outside those discourses to see what invisible baggage they carry and naturalise, or to see the ways those discourses might bind them in ways they could not have predicted. Such subjects, which include ourselves, are each embedded in history, in the discourses through which the world is being spoken and written into existence, and through which it is made meaningful, through which practices are understood and valued. The liberal discourses through which individual subjects are constituted suggest that we can stand outside history, outside discourse, and rationally choose how we will take up this or that aspect of it as if we were not already embedded
in it, already establishing and re-establishing history through constituting ourselves within it."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
(27/05/2023, 08:55)
Comments:
A very bleak view. But a view that underpins this paper because it explains how neoliberalism is able to succeed in controlling even those with manifest individualism and intellectuality such as academics.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
(27/05/2023, 08:56)
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