Introduction

This chapter aims to explore the affective dynamics of contemporary academic capitalism that academia has gone through in neoliberal and market-oriented times. After the introduction – more than 25 years ago – of the term ‘academic capitalism’ by Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie (1997), it is now widely used to understand the global reach of changes connected to processes of alliances between university, industry and government in higher education and research policies (Etzkowitz, 2016; Holmwood, 2016). We follow the definition of academic capitalism as a knowledge/learning regime (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004) that shapes academics’ conduct while baring the roots of collective and democratic forms of participation.

In particular, along the lines of Chapter 1 in this book, we are interested in exploring the ambiguities and ambivalence of academic capitalism that affects the psychic reality of academia, seducing those who work in it. For example, the expression ‘in the mood of data’ (Staunæs and Brøgger, 2020) expresses with great effect how data have become infrastructural to academic moods. Academic performance data, such as scorecards, barometers, graphs and other materialising media, have become part of academia and of us living in academia. They are designed to affect and direct behaviour through forms of exposure, comparison and self-monitoring that are deeply entangled with a vulnerable affective economy. We intend to contribute to the critical literature that denounces the inequalities of academic labour and contrasts the voice of neoliberalism sustaining the political rationality of the market and market forms of relations (Jessop, 2008; Giroux, 2011; Bozeman and Boardman, 2016; Bottrell and Manathunga, 2019).

In this chapter, we interpret the neoliberal, corporate academia as the icon of an affective economy in which affect takes the place of money. Within such a context, academic practices of management through affect produce intensities rather than identities.

The theoretical framework of the chapter is delineated through the concept of affective economy, and is grounded in the literature on affective capitalism. Avoiding a definition of ‘what affect is’, it follows instead the traces of ‘what affect does’.