Abstract
Overworked, stressed, anxious, driven to distraction by managerial targets and feeling generally disenchanted? The Alienated Academic (TAA) offers a fascinating analysis of what lies behind these commonly voiced complaints about working in the modern academy. Hall argues that to understand these phenomena and the precarious and competitive conditions which foster them we need to theorise the role of the university in advanced capitalism. Grasping what has happened to universities and why in recent years, he argues, requires that academics abandon familiar and perhaps comforting notions that they are part of a professional, privileged elite and the idea that higher education (HE) is a type of public good. To accurately describe the university and what it means to be an academic today calls for a completely different set of coordinates. Hall takes up this theoretical challenge and sets out with clarity and force how this might be envisaged from a Marxist perspective (the book is the most recent publication in Palgrave Macmillan’s Marxism and Education series). The result is a thought-provoking and genuinely fresh perspective on the nature of academic work and the politics of contemporary HE.
Hall builds his arguments across nine chapters. TAA opens with a chapter entitled ‘Awakenings’ in which Hall articulates in personal and political terms why he believes acknowledging, sitting with and working through a sense of alienation is a necessary first step to developing alternative ways of organising HE.
The following eight chapters are divided into three parts. Part 1 maps out the socio-political ‘terrain’ of academic labour in theoretical terms. Hall outlines how the increasing commodification of HE is linked to the dynamics of capital accumulation and the changing role of knowledge in economic and social reproduction. He argues that this has precipitated a crisis in university life and that this is part of a general social crisis. TAA argues that reading this situation accurately requires explanatory depth cannot be done without a developed theory of capital and suggests that critiques of HE which pay little or no attention to this are one-sided and ultimately toothless. The first part of TAA also features a very rich and suggestive exploration of the concept of alienation which Hall sees as a pervasive feature of contemporary social life which offers a heuristic device for understanding exploitation, domination and possible lines of resistance. This part of TAA marries in an interesting manner the early humanist work of Marx on freedom, alienation and the division of labour and Marx’s later critique of political economy, the commodity form and the dynamics of capital. This ambitious synthesis of the various stages in the development of Marx’s ideas is also strongly influenced by István Mészáros, the Hungarian Marxist, and a variety of autonomist Marxist thinkers.
Part 2, the longest section of the book, focuses on the academic alienation in relation to knowledge, identity, profession and Weltschmerz (profound world-weariness). This extends the arguments made in part 1, linking them in more detail to institutional change and professional experience. The description of the damaging nature of work and the emotional dimensions of academic alienation are major themes here and likely to resonate with many readers. TAA is especially good at capturing how audit culture and performance management have intensified competition and alienation in HE.
Part 3 outlines how these conditions might be overcome and thus TAA avoids the sort of sterile theoreticism and complacent pessimism which characterises so much ‘radical’ social science. As noted earlier, Hall believes that refusal and resistance begins with acknowledging the full extent of the damage, abjection and estrangement experienced in HE and understanding the structural and political relations behind this. He therefore celebrates indignation as the expression of a desire to transcend alienation and believes this allied with a firm focus on autonomy offers the basis for developing alternatives. Autonomy here is not about academic freedom as commonly understood but about rethinking the purpose of education entirely to overcome unwanted determinations: ‘education is pivotal because the possibility of becoming lies in the individual’s recognition of her stunted subjectivity’ (p. 92). Education for autonomy depends on an explicit rejection of commodified learning and actively building cooperative and democratic alternatives. This demands a radical break from the dominant assumptions and practices of HE alongside educational experimentation inside and outside university based on organic alliances with emancipatory social movements. Working against and across institutional and disciplinary boundaries and ensuring education amplifies marginalised voices and explores subjugated knowledges – Hall’s focus is very much on questions of race and gender – is presented as the basis for a new form of HE and a move towards a new form of social organisation. Hall points to various experiments in cooperatives and popular education as examples of what he means. As such, TAA is a book which can be usefully described as a contribution to longstanding line of adult education scholarship inflected by what has happened within recent social movement mobilisations such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Will Fall.
I found the book immensely stimulating to read. It has an urgency of tone and frank passion which marks it out as different from many of the other lamentations about the decline of the university. Hall is pinning his theses on the door of an institution which he believes can no longer see what it does and that it in fact stands in the way of freedom. TAA is also an ambitious, densely referenced book with an intricate, well-wrought conceptual architecture which seeks to understand academic alienation in a many-sided, dialectical and recursive manner.
Hall’s ambition and mode of argument means some of the specific discussion is a little too truncated though. I would have liked very much for Hall to work through some rival Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations of the current conjuncture in more depth. Further exploration of how alienation as a concept bridges and helps distinguish between Marxism and Critical Theory would have been particularly welcome. Related to this, for a book which is ultimately about radical adult education, the absence of the work of the Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire, who was deeply concerned with alienation, is noteworthy.
To my mind, TAA would be also be strengthened if some of the claims made about the shift to ‘cognitive capitalism’, ‘the proletarianization of the academic labour’ and the rise of precarity were worked through in more empirical detail. Such central propositions call for careful comparative assessment. This is not just a question of substantiating specific arguments rather a type of orientation that I think is crucial for critical theory and radical politics. More generally, while I am fully persuaded by Hall’s arguments about how HE has been reconfigured by the logic of capital, the picture he offers is to my mind too complete and tidy. HE is a more complex, layered, differentiated and conflictual space than TAA describes, not least in terms of diverse intraclass and class interests. Similarly, the contradictions, limits and conflicts within current social movements over strategies, goals and values that Hall draws upon are downplayed (e.g., the value of theories of intersectionality as the basis of organising is highly contentious). These gaps reflect the fact that TAA does not address class (de)composition and class formation – and the role of HE in these processes – in enough fine-grained detail.
Overall, TAA is an excellent and novel contribution to research on HE. It is more than this as well; it has the sort of passion and critical power which is badly needed in dangerous times and illustrates how when alerted to the ‘vast emptiness which is everyday life, our everyday life, we look towards everything which could point to or perpetuate a plenitude’ (Lefebvre, 2014: 616).