Academic Work in the Platform University: Subsumption in Two Mode

This paper draws on the work of Marx, Srnicek and Mau to describe the role of digital platforms in the subsumption of academic work, an intensification of ongoing neoliberal processes of management and marketisation (Robertson 2007, Hall 2016). Two modes of academic labour are transformed: the affective work of care and collegiality, and the production of value in the ‘knowledge economy’. Affective work is transformed through the management of students as data, typified by the ‘virtual learning environment’ and the ‘interactive tutor’, while the work of knowledge production is transformed through the enclosure of knowledge as content/data, and by the intense value-additive effects of algorithmic processes such as search, auto-summarise, statistical modelling and synthetic reviews. The effect of these processes, as per Marx/Mau’s ‘despotism of subsumption’, is to distance scholars from the ‘body of knowledge’, the community of scholars, and organic intellectual practices. Platform capital as a social form materialises itself in new pedagogical and collegial relationships, as well as in extractive research methods and in new modes of exploitation. As both affective and knowledge workers, the body-minds of scholars are inserted into a technical infrastructure of data and algorithm, digital flows and computational models, where production is constantly intensified and where quality is subsumed into quantity at every point in the value cycle.