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Subjectivising academics: the ranking apparatus, social transformation, and a 'crisis of subjectivity'

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Abstract

By positioning academic rankings as the telos of audit culture, the paper tries to demonstrate the transformative political reason that is immanent to the emergence of rankings. Given the imperatives in historical capitalism both to govern and to accumulate, rankings are analysed as an apparatus of social transformation for the production of more governable subjectivities for capital. The paper presents how rankings operate as one of the material-semiotic-affective apparatuses of capitalist governmentality, and how that apparatus both is constituted as a system of objects and in turn constitutes subjects of control. Perhaps most significantly, by understanding rankings simultaneously as ‘semiologies of signification’ and ‘asignifying semiotics’, a dialectical space of struggle over subjectivity production can be realised and a praxis of counter-conduct and resistance be conceived.

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Notes

  1. In the governing of academic life, an ‘apparatus’ (dispositif) is ‘a wider ensemble of power mechanisms (techne) and discursive formations (episteme), forms of visibility of power (theasis) and elements connected to subjects’ ethics such as ethical habits of acting and thinking (ethos) (Hannus and Simola 2010, p. 3).

  2. To clarify, a ‘modulation’ is ‘a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’ (Deleuze 1992, p. 4). As obscure as this might sound, the point is to emphasise the protean fluidity, morphological versatility, and the adaptability in the ‘modulation’ as a mode of control. This contrasts to the ‘molds’ or ‘distinct castings’ of disciplinary power, and which are characterised by enclosures, institutional ‘armatures’, and the more rigid quality of the ‘grid’.

  3. The ‘formal subsumption of labour’ alludes to a situation where ‘capital incorporates under its own relations of production labouring practices that originated outside its domain’. Posterior to this, the ‘real subsumption of labour’ is where ‘the integration of labor into capital becomes more intensive than extensive and society is evermore completely fashioned by capital’ (See Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 254–256).

  4. A Tracing is the semiotic and material creation of a system of objects brought into relation with the materiality of the world-system (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 85).

  5. Seriality also implies equivalence, from which the pseudo-market aspect of rankings is derived.

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Welsh, J. Subjectivising academics: the ranking apparatus, social transformation, and a 'crisis of subjectivity'. Subjectivity 13, 153–178 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00096-8

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