investing in the cruel entrepreneurial university

The South Atlantic Quarterly 114:3, July 2015 doi 10.1215/00382876-3130712 © 2015 Duke University Press

Miranda Joseph

Investing in the Cruel Entrepreneurial University

For Randy Martin

As not merely a tactic for survival but also an intervention in the cruelty of financialized entre-preneurial capitalism, a number of scholars, most prominently Lauren Berlant and Randy Martin, have suggested a turn to what they each call the lateral. Against the future-oriented aspirations of the entrepreneur and the regimes of evaluation tied to return on investment, they propose concep-tualizations of present-oriented lateral movement and relationality as an alternative mode of life and value. Theorists working in performance studies make a related proposal for claiming a timespace prior to or next to (and thus at least provisionally outside) the circulation of capital that creates the possibility for an alternative inscription of our labor. This essay explores the potentials and limi-tations of these interventions by examining our attachments to and investments in the entrepre-neurial university and our participation in its mundane institutional practices. In particular, I focus on two of those practices with which I hap-pen to have recently been involved: academic pro-gram reviews and graduate mentoring in a public university in the United States. Ultimately, what I

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492 The South Atlantic Quarterly • July 2015

offer is, at best, cautious optimism for timespaces “before,” “next to,” or oth-erwise outside the dominant modes of inscription. And yet, I hold out hope for the possibility of developing practices of alternative inscription toward which these conceptualizations move, a hope based on the significance of our role in the sustenance of the enterprise.

Two Conferences

The title of this essay derives from the title of a 2013 American Studies Asso-ciation (ASA) conference panel, “The Cruel Optimism of the University of Debt,” jointly sponsored by the ASA Program Committee and Students’ Committee and organized on their behalf by Abigail Boggs. (Sandra K. Soto and I gave a coauthored presentation on that panel examining the new branding efforts of our own entrepreneurial university, the University of Arizona.) Inspired by Lauren Berlant’s (2011: 24), theorization of “cruel opti-mism” as “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible and toxic,” the panel sought to engage the quandary that “despite an awareness of the possibility and even probability of failure and debt, students and scholars inhabit the university as an aspirational site of life-making and, in the most optimistic of moments, world-changing” (ASA Program Com-mittee and ASA Students’ Committee 2013). The panel thus invited explora-tion of our potentially self-undermining attachments to what Berlant calls the “clusters of promises we want the object of desire [the academy, in this case] to make to us and make possible for us” (23).

In the context of that panel and the larger conference theme, “Beyond the Logic of Debt: Toward an Ethics of Collective Dissent,” the referenced cruelty was first and foremost associated with the financial debt carried by graduate students and recent PhDs (often contingently employed). The pop-ular understanding of student financial debt is as a tie to the past that limits the future (Chaker 2009).1 Debt was undertaken optimistically, incurred due to an attachment to “a cluster of promises”—promises of knowledge, certification of that knowledge in the form of degrees, and of a career of a certain intellectual and political substance (i.e., socially significant and even world-changing), as well as financial security (i.e., life-making). Given the dominance of neoliberal entrepreneurial discourse, we might easily slip into articulating those promised goods as a return on investment, as a payoff for time and effort and money ventured, a return that is highly uncertain, com-ing too late and too little for many investors. The “realization” of these prom-



Joseph • Investing in the Cruel Entrepreneurial University 493

ises is “impossible” insofar as the job is not forthcoming; it is “toxic” to the extent that even with some sort of academic employment as payoff, the promised life, burdened by debt, is not a sustaining, good life. The attach-ments are revealed as cruel.

Meanwhile, even those of us with decidedly more privileged relations to the academy in the form of relatively secure employment might be or have been understood to be working for, aiding, and abetting institutions that wear us down, as they fail our desires for them and ourselves.2 That is, our investments—our practices of attachment—take place in an institutional and political economic context that must be understood as a compromised condition of possibility. The academy is instantiated in institutions that are themselves constrained, even if also enabled, by debt—or, to put it a bit more broadly and accurately, constrained and enabled by financialization. Con-temporary universities are constituted by their compromising relations to the financial system, where debt is not so much bond to the past (as it is for students) as motive to renounce the past in favor of the next “entrepreneur-ial” speculation on the future.3

That universities are compromised by their own conditions of possibil-ity in ways that make them compromised conditions of possibility for our fan-tasies is hardly new or news, as Christopher Newfield (2003, 2008) among others has made clear. But the current conjuncture has specific implications. For the institution, as well as for its inhabitants, entrepreneurialism signals that our attachments—our desires, ambitions, optimism—have been inscribed in the hierarchizing and differentiating discourses and temporali-ties of finance. As I discuss below, a number of scholars have argued that financialization transforms temporality, linking, binding, or even collapsing the future with the present (Bryan and Rafferty 2006; Martin 2013, 2014; Joseph 2014) or making past, present, and future highly malleable and thus a tool for those who require flexibility of others (Adkins 2014; Joseph 2014).4

My thinking about our relation of attachment to the university, in its contemporary financialized, entrepreneurial form—about the relation of individual participants (maybe we should call them workers) to the academy as industry—was greatly enriched by an interdisciplinary performance stud-ies conference called “The Labor and Leisure of Performance” (July 2014, University of Erfurt, Germany), in which I participated. We were asked to consider the kinds of labor that, as organizer Giulia Palladini (2014a) put it in her opening remarks, is “often not recognized as such [i.e., as labor] in the moment of its enactment, but is mostly projected toward the horizon of its potential realization in terms [of] value.” We were asked to think about




“performances enacted without the guarantee of payment in the hope that [the performer’s] talent, personality, endurance might eventually acquire an exchange value.” The “projective temporality” in which this activity (not yet the enactment of capitalist “labor-power” defined in relation to value) takes place, situates it as a “prelude” that is defined by the future (Palla-dini, forthcoming).5

Palladini’s framework immediately struck me as apt for the academy, which, like the theater industry as she describes it in her 2010 article, “The Amateur Hour: On Value, Personality, and the Form of Appearance in the Economy of Attention,” is “an economy based on voluntary, unpaid, and only retrospectively evaluated labor” (75). It surely sheds light on the projects that academic workers undertake out of love, amateur in a lost etymological sense (62), or “on spec,” while still in training as graduate students and thus also potentially amateur in the disparaging sense (61), that is, not yet valued as professional by virtue of job or paycheck or even publication. Her framework also brings into focus the entrepreneurial character of the work of grant/fel-lowship/job applications, program-proposing and building, and other future-oriented self-representations that we undertake even once (if) we are offi-cially inscribed in the value systems as tenured faculty, program/department directors and chairs, and so on. Moving beyond the intuitive appropriateness of Palladini’s framework, I want to explore more fully here how the financial-ized entrepreneurial university works: how we work in it—that is, the role of our own attachments to and investments in its sustenance—and how we do and/or could work with, in, and against its dynamic temporalities.

Conjunctures

In preparation for writing, I checked some of my keywords in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). I was entertained to find that definitions of the terms entrepreneur, invest, and speculation record linguistic conjunctures between performance, performativity, certain practices of thinking, and financial business—that is, conjunctures that form the very terrain of this bit of speculation. The entrepreneur is both “one who ‘gets up’ entertain-ments” and “one who undertakes an enterprise . . . owns and manages a business . . . takes the risk of profit or loss”6 (not necessarily different proj-ects, of course). To invest is to

clothe, robe, or envelop (a person) in or with a garment or article of cloth-ing; to dress or adorn. . . . To cover or surround as with a garment. . . . To




clothe with or in the insignia of an office; hence, with the dignity itself; to install in an office or rank with the customary rites or ceremonies. . . . To employ (money) in the purchase of anything from which interest or profit is expected; now, esp. in the purchase of property, stocks, shares, etc., in order to hold these for the sake of the interest, dividends, or profits accruing from them.7

To invest is thus to engage in performative costuming, putting on, taking on clothes or a position in the world and the affective deserts (such as “dignity”) that accrue, even as to invest is also to take on as one’s own a business endeavor and the risks of profit (or loss) that accrue. Investing in a business or financial instrument shares with investing in a costume or an office the connotation that one is inserting oneself into something already out there, the scripted character, the official role, the business plan, rather than entre-preneurially “getting up” something from scratch; but, of course, this dis-tinction gets fuzzy when one is investing in one’s own human capital in order to performatively constitute oneself as the innovative (entrepreneur-ial?) scholar, who precisely does create the new and different.

Definitions of the term speculation range from “contemplation of a profound, far-reaching, or subtle character; abstract or hypothetical rea-soning on subjects of a deep, abstruse, or conjectural nature” to “a plan or scheme for some enterprise or undertaking.”8 Most interesting, the OED marks the value judgment involved in deploying the term speculation as opposed to investing, as it indicates that speculation refers to “the action or practice of buying and selling goods, land, stocks and shares, etc., in order to profit by the rise or fall in the market value, as distinct from regular trading or investment; engagement in any business enterprise or transaction of a ven-turesome or risky nature, but offering the chance of great or unusual gain” (emphasis added).

This distinction between speculation and investment has been objecti-fied and critiqued by a number of scholars. John Clarke (2014: 96) develops “the idea of ‘imagined economies’ . . . as an alternative pole of thinking to all those accounts of the ‘real’, ‘fundamental’ or ‘material’ character of the world that lay claim to the economy as foundational, and which seek to disci-pline thinking by the force of this claimed reality.” Among the “imagined economies” he identifies as circulating in contemporary discourse is the “economy as a financial services sector,” which “is also often contrasted with a different economy: the real economy” of goods and services production (106; original emphasis). The idea of the real economy, he argues, “enables a




critique of speculation, and the dominance of finance capital, as involved in a virtual, unreal and possibly anti-social economy” (107). And Randy Martin (2014: 203) explains: “Supposedly, investment was a decision to allocate capital on the prospect of a long-term perspective for growth, and speculation was an orientation toward short-term gain. The villains would be shareholder value, mergers and acquisitions, short-selling, and the bevy of greed-mongering financiers whose only interest was in arbitrage, not in creating real worth in companies.”

Further, Martin and others argue that financialization generally, and/or the pre-eminence of derivatives specifically, has collapsed this distinction, violating the temporality that sustains it. Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty (2006: 63) point out that, despite the name, the derivatives markets have become the primary site of price formation rather than being “derivative” of price formation in “spot or cash markets.” And in their recent work with Chris Jefferis, Bryan and Rafferty (2015) argue that finance fundamentally shapes the “real” economy and the social relations of production, so that our financialized daily lives consist of working to make payments in support of debt-based derivatives. More generally, the point is that finance cannot be dismissed or morally condemned as some sort of parasitical superstructure (Nesvetailova and Palan 2014)—it is a key element of the set of practices that we collapse together into the word economy.

However, as Clarke (2014) reminds us, the practice of making value-laden distinctions between speculation and investing, between financial and real economy, has a social reality. A version of that discrimination is fre-quently deployed in the academy, where critical assessments of the political and/or intellectual integrity/reality of various endeavors are quite common. For instance, I have criticized those whom I perceived as proposing new ini-tiatives solely to make themselves appear entrepreneurial and enhance their images as “change agents”; implicitly, I prefer proposals emerging from authentic commitment to and interest in the substantive value of the project. The value hierarchy of those judgments, in which substantive real-ity is valued over some empty market measure, inverts the distinction Wendy Brown has described so acutely between value-free “best practices” (for achieving the abstract market value of “competitive advantage”) and tra-ditional or otherwise normatively selected practices that are concretely con-nected to cumbersome realities such as specific and conflicting group inter-ests (Brown 2014).9

What would it mean to sustain a commitment to transformative politi-cal and intellectual projects intended to advance a specific interest in conflic-




tual social processes while acknowledging that the derivative is constitutive? Certainly, it would require that our critiques of others move beyond ressenti-ment. But more importantly, how would we understand and orient our own practices?

As I have noted, among the arguments against the derivativeness of derivatives is their alleged transformation of temporality. The “projective temporality” Palladini describes, which presumes a meaningful distinction and relation between present and future, is not uniquely shared by perfor-mance and academic industries. As Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan (2014: 1) put it, “capitalism is a system of delayed gratification. One invests today in order to gain profit tomorrow.” What might seem to be distinctive in the academic and performance contexts is that what is advanced/invested is human activity that is not yet inscribed as a form of appearance of value rather than value abstracted in the form of money; and certainly, it matters the extent to which such projective investments are explicitly oriented toward and configured for financial exchange—as opposed to being cast, explicitly, as an outside to that financial system. However, like the unpaid internships that have recently been a topic of debate, the not-yet-inscribed status can be a distinction made for the purpose of enabling the hyperexploitation of what is obviously value-producing labor-power.

Projective risk-taking can be (and often is) increased through leverage, that is, borrowing that allows increased present investment and thus increased possible future reward or loss; in financialized capitalism, such risk is managed through derivatives. Bryan and Rafferty (2006) suggest that the recent rise to predominance of derivatives (which are in themselves nothing new) constitutes a fundamental transformation. In effect, derivatives com-plete the “annihilation of space through time,” that Harvey (2001: 245), quot-ing Marx (1973: 535), attributes in part to the deployment of credit, which has been used to overcome the spatial distance that slows turnover time and thus the realization of profit. According to Bryan and Rafferty (2006), derivatives do the converse—they annihilate time through space (or rather through rela-tionality, as physical space is also annihilated)—constituting the distance between now and then as a present relationship that takes the form of appear-ance of a calculation. And precisely because derivatives are representations of these relations as calculations, they are a mechanism for overcoming not the spatial blockages to capital flow but the conceptual blockages of incommen-surability: derivatives make everything everywhere always commensurable. Liquidity (the possibility of exchanging one investment for another, investing oneself otherwise) is thereby increased.




A key characteristic of neoliberalism is that the entrepreneurial mode of taking and managing risk is normative not only for capitalists and corpo-rations but also for individual subjects, for whom it is cast as the means of life-building. So, on the one hand, we are inscribed in a projective temporal-ity in which the present is to be lived as prelude, and on the other hand, our daily practices are “financialized” such that we are subject to derangements of the linear temporal order on which such life-building projects would seem to be based. “Cruel optimism” might be one name for this contradiction and thus also indicate a latent potential to disrupt our interpellation in that pro-jective temporality, especially (we might for a moment imagine) insofar as we are “doing it” (practicing attachment) even though “we know it” (are aware of the impossibility and/or toxicity). Of course, the work of the theo-ries of ideology and attachment to which I allude is to explain why that dis-ruption is never realized; nonetheless, we might keep an eye out for the affects and effects of “knowing it.”

Recognizing the compromised conditions of possibility, the “crum-bling” of “traditional infrastructures for reproducing life,” Berlant (2011: 8) suggests that instead of aspiring to a future, many people aspire to “living in an impasse.” If the usual meaning of impasse is the timespace of blockage in which forward movement is not possible, the impasse is also, as Berlant (2011: 4–5) rearticulates it, a “temporary housing,” “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wan-dering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found the genre of event.” Berlant (2011: 57, 60–61) elaborates practices of attach-ment that take the form of lateral movement and relationality—conversa-tion, encounter, mapping, glancing, checking-in, the ritual and habitual.10 These practices respond to a need to maintain and stabilize a sense of self in the world for subjects whose existence is so precarious that future orienta-tion gives way to survival—but not only survival (Berlant 2011: 57, 59). There does seem to be a certain richness to this life in the impasse; and it is now, not deferred to a future for which one has been saving or investing.

Berlant (2011: 261) concludes Cruel Optimism with an explicitly ambiv-alent expression of optimism for a “lateral politics,” which, like living in the impasse, is “a dense sensual activity of performative belonging in the now.” She recognizes, however, that this is not much different from the dominant neoliberal displacement of material political engagement by a “sense of




belonging” (262). Martin (2013: 98) has also focused on and expressed opti-mism for the lateral in his theorization from the derivative, arguing that “while derivatives are devised in a language of futures and forwards, of anticipating what is to come in the present so that a significant difference can be acted upon, the act of bundling attributes together speaks of a lateral orientation.” He locates the ascendance of derivatives in the 1980s in its “social basis”: the struggles for decolonization that tore apart the unities of colonialism. Martin (2013: 100–101) contends that “the derivative is a finan-cial instrument that colonizes cultural experience. . . . an unconscious embrace of terms of exchange that are uneven and unequal, where desire is traded for a depreciating debt. . . . not simply an escape from some intoler-able power but a capacity of assembly, affinity, and association—a value-giving circulation that capital in general and finance in particular always claims as its own.” And yet he seems to think we might appropriate this derivative logic that “yields a we of affiliated attributes rather than a consoli-dated subject position” (2013: 103).

Berlant and Martin thus, in different ways, propose the possibility that the relational present might be claimed not only as a defensive survival tactic but, in the mode of the derivative, as an agentive intervention. What would this look like in the context of the entrepreneurial university and the prac-tices it solicits from us?

The Entrepreneurial University

“You are the CEO of your own graduate education,” I tell my advisees. I like the sound of that phrase because it conveys managerial duty and places responsibility with the student, where it belongs.—Leonard Cassuto, “Spotting a Bad Adviser—and How to Pick a Good One”

Books and articles promoting or complaining about the “entrepreneurial” transformations of higher education institutions have proliferated over the last three decades. A Google Scholar search on the phrase “entrepreneurial university” (in quotation marks) recently turned up 4,390 results since 2010, with 10,400 “anytime” hits (though notably only 3 occurred before 1980). A number of these are actually handbooks and courses for wannabe leaders of entrepreneurial universities. Entrepreneurialism has become a kind of over-arching “best practice” of university governance.

Promoters and critics of the “entrepreneurial university” share an understanding of its characteristics. Clark (1998: 5), a promoter, identified




five “common elements” or “pathways of transformation”: “a strengthened managerial core; an enhanced developmental periphery; a diversified fund-ing base; a stimulated academic heartland; and an entrepreneurial culture.” Gary Rhoades (2005: 38), a critic, has (with Sheila Slaughter), played a key role in describing the emergence of what they call “academic capitalism”—which he summarizes as “a cultural system that valorizes higher education’s dual economic roles: generating revenue for academic institutions and pro-ducing knowledge and wealth to boost the global competitiveness of corpora-tions.” Rhoades (2000: 42) engages some of the same features Clark men-tions, but as “myths”: “The three myths are that: (a) no change occurs without managerial initiative, (b) managers focus fragmented academic units and loyalties, and (c) they rationalize budgeting and planning.” He notes, too, the growth of what Clark calls the “developmental periphery,” though he casts it as part of the enhancement of central managerial (as opposed to faculty) control: “Academic managers have also created centers and institutes outside the control of academic departments to facilitate mar-ket engagement” (2005: 39).

The incitement to institutional entrepreneurialism is often framed as a mode of taking charge, shifting “from passive to active” (Clark 1998: 8) in the face of what is portrayed as the “given” of a changed world: “The entre-preneurial response . . . gives universities a better chance to control their own destinies. The response may be seen as a way to recover self-control and self-direction” (13–14). Such narratives echo the incitement to entrepreneur-ialism with regard to individual subjects under neoliberalism, charged with caring for themselves through, for instance, preparing for retirement with investments in mutual funds as they can no longer rely on pensions or gov-ernment welfare programs, even as their substantive means of saving for their retirement are systematically stripped away (Martin 2002: 12; Joseph 2014: 71ff .).

Particular managerial structures and strategies are only one compo-nent of the entrepreneurial university. Other aspects include more familiar financial practices. Universities sell bonds to build buildings that then must have their own revenue streams (most often dorms, gyms, stadiums, and other student-oriented facilities); they seek direct investments in research by for-profit companies as well as the licensing of patented discoveries made while doing publicly funded research; and, of course, they engage in multi-faceted tuition revenue maximization strategies. In the United States, tuition dollars are most often directly supplied by government and private bank loans to individual students who are then “personally responsible” for repay-




ment; many of these loans are then recirculated as financial instruments that might very well be a part of the mutual funds that we university employ-ees, among others, might be hoping will fund our retirements. (This is just the most narrowly literal sense in which we are invested in the cruel entre-preneurial university.) Private for-profit universities in the United States, most straightforwardly entrepreneurial, capture federal financial aid, both loans and grants, as private profit. And public universities seek to capture private tuition dollars from the private sector, by contracting with employers of the potential students. The recently announced agreement between Star-bucks and Arizona State University, in which the university gets the start-up capital and a guaranteed flow of students for the seventy fully online degree programs it is already aggressively marketing, is an unusually large and well-publicized example of this phenomenon.11

Although the cruelty of debt-funded education for undergraduates is fairly obvious and a topic of extensive popular media attention, the ways in which it might also be a site of cruel optimism for university leaders has not received the same press. Bob Meister (2011: 128) argues that while those leaders have articulated “enrollment-generated revenue growth [via larger and larger numbers of students who each pay more and more] . . . not [as] a defensive strategy for revenue replacement but rather an opportunity for aggressive revenue growth they could not afford to miss,” the ever-increasing (unsustainable) tuition prices will still never cover the costs of the larger enrollment and the declines in per-student state funding.12 And, as Soto and I suggested in our paper for the ASA panel, entrepreneurial pursuit of reve-nue growth might also be a kind of whistling in the dark, the putting on of a brave face, given that, in a sense, universities are always already underwater, with a burden of financial (and other) obligations that is out of sync with the deflated evaluation of the academic enterprise in the dominant discourse. Contemporary culture warriors such as governor of Florida Rick Scott (Jas-chik 2011), who proposed cutting social sciences from the state’s universities because they were not, in his view, vocational training, and US Congressio-nal Representative Lamar Smith, who is seeking to cut funding to the National Science Foundation by attacking the content of funded social sci-ence research (Mervis 2014), are examples of a long-standing strategy of undermining societal evaluation of and public investment in universities by attacking the value of particular fields. Meanwhile, sociologists such as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, authors of Academically Adrift (2011), received a great deal of popular attention for their contention that students do not learn very much in college;13 and PayPal founder Peter Thiel likewise




grabbed headlines for paying young adults to drop out of college and become instant entrepreneurs engaged in “value creation.” According to the Thiel Fellowship website, “value creation can look like founding a nonprofit, startup, or general project that you have received enough funding or recogni-tion for to have the option of continuing post-fellowship” (Thiel Foundation 2015; see also Kolodny 2013).

Maybe with some combination of whistling, revenue growth, and duct tape, our university executives will get us through to the next year. But not without our help. All constituencies must be and are actively enrolled in the entrepreneurial ideology (which, per Louis Althusser, is a set of practices more than a set of beliefs). Our fantasy of sustaining ourselves and achiev-ing our goals by cooperating, risking, venturing our resources of time, money, and labor-power hold this contradiction-ridden enterprise together. Given the devaluing of universities, the hailing of undergraduates as wise investors in their futures via their own human capital (surely a high-risk investment), even when it entails increasing levels of cost/debt, is a strenu-ous endeavor. It is undertaken through relentless popular media representa-tions of claims (often constructed by organizations with a vested interest in college-going, such as the College Board, the for-profit company that offers the SAT) that college is “worth it” financially—that is, it will put graduates on the happy side of the increasing inequality of wealth and income.14

With varying degrees of belief and commitment, faculty, too, sustain the unsustainable, the institutional attachment to the promise of self-salva-tion through innovation and initiative with our own labor (often, with a kind of potlatch of busier-than-thou performances). The entrepreneurialism of the university depends on faculty participation in applying for grants, con-tracts, patents, and licenses, on faculty initiatives that can help distinguish the university as the world leader in this or that area of study or educational program. Along with administrators, faculty are subjected to a rhetoric of inevitability that suggests that “becoming CEOs of our own careers” (Cas-suto 2014) is the only strategy for taking control of the situation—and, of course, by the promise that their own ambitions and self-exploitative labors will ultimately be rewarded. The extent to which faculty have actually taken up the call for an entrepreneurial response to “the crisis” has been remark-able and remarked upon, though largely with regard to the sciences, where the lure of funding by industry, as well as federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation or Department of Energy, is powerful and immediate (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004).15 But the rest of us have been engaged as well, through not only research but also teaching: budgeting sys-




tems that distribute funds across the university based on enrollment put col-leges, departments, and sometimes even individual faculty in competition with each other for students, and they prompt creativity in attracting stu-dents through various hybrid, online, and tech-enhanced pedagogies. Mean-while, “outreach” attracts those of us who want our work to have a political “impact” even as it serves the entrepreneurial goal of creating “public-private partnerships.”

I seem to fall prey, again and again, to “service” opportunities that involve articulating our ongoing work as entrepreneurial. Recently, I chaired the septennial Academic Program Review Self-Study Committee for my department, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, at the Univer-sity of Arizona. I was responsible for managing the creation of a book-length document representing our department qualitatively and quantitatively, in advance of a site visit by a team of reviewers from inside and outside our uni-versity, including colleagues in the field, colleagues from other departments, an alumnus, and a community member—a group collectively charged with evaluating and reporting on us to the administration. The game here is to ventriloquize, to communicate through the review team what you want from the administration in terms of key investments of resources. The provost’s 2013–14 guidelines for the self-study explicitly required the unit to “provide a summary of the recommendations of the previous academic program review and changes made in response to the recommendations” (Academic Program Review Management Team 2013: 14) and to articulate its:

1. Mission, role, and scope2. Major goals or strategic directions for the next 5 years (may append a stra-

tegic plan)3. Relationship of goals to the University Strategic Plan and Mission as

expressed in the University of Arizona’s Five-Year Strategic Plan (http://provost.arizona.edu/files/note_Strategic%20Plan_FY_2013v2.pdf).

And it incorporates a whole section on learning outcomes assess-ment, which therefore demands that you have, or claim to have, an ongo-ing system of self-evaluation and improvement with regard to your curric-ular programs.16

So, on one hand, this review process, now generally required of all departments at US universities, explicitly requires one’s department to have a coherent developmental narrative, temporally connecting past to future as a deliberate trajectory of self-realization relative to a stable mission; on the other hand, to the extent that the narrative is supposed to be directly linked




to the current version of the annually revised university strategic plan, it does in fact require the department to be a “liquid” entrepreneurial shape-shifter, reinventing itself relative to every move in the market.

Of course, most faculty members engage this program review task with cynicism, primarily concerned to minimize time expenditure. I took up this task with my usual humiliating earnestness, understanding it to be an opportunity to try to realize some arguments I had made about counter-accounting (Joseph 2014), about struggling with rather than only against measure, striving to seize the means of production of measure and value and the collectivities constituted by those means, rather than escape mea-surement. That is, I meant neither to comply earnestly nor to fulfill merely the form of the thing in the most minimally passable way (which can consti-tute the sort of meaningless box ticking that staves off interference from the powers that be and can even throw a wrench in the works of the evaluation system), though that was the approach some wise colleagues took to their assigned sections of the report. No, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to begin to represent our derivative value, the value of our interdisciplinary connections, our impacts, not by citation count or impact factor, but rather through social network graphing that would demonstrate even as it quanti-fied the substantial extent to which we are touching diverse fields within the university and across the profession.

So I asked my department head to allocate funds for the necessary software; she generously agreed and, in addition, sent me a sociology gradu-ate student to teach me how to use it. And I spent hours entering data into Excel spreadsheets and playing around with the graphing application to make compelling pictures. While my efforts were certainly those of a begin-ner, the results did effectively demonstrate certain components of our rela-tional extensiveness, for example, across fields through faculty publications in a truly impressively diverse array of disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals; across campus through graduate students from many departments who take our courses, enroll in our courses and our PhD minor, or enlist our faculty on their exam and dissertation committees; and through our gradu-ate students who enroll in courses or PhD minors offered by other depart-ments. I did not intend to stage such spatial accomplishments against the articulation of projective temporal ambition implied by the “strategic plan-ning” components of the report, and yet, it does seem an alternative account, focused on present richness rather than future return. Of course, I can see how very quickly this approach could be appropriated for comparative rank-ings of people or units relative to “best practices” of “engaging” or “partner-




ing” or “synergy,” to use three of the four headline terms in the university’s current strategic plan (see neversettle.arizona.edu). That is, my ostensibly extracurricular project, offered out of a political and intellectual commit-ment, could feed right back into the entrepreneurializing machinery. But in a sense, that was my ambition—this was meant to be a demonstration proj-ect to show that it is possible to value and measure the things we care about. And as Nicholas Ridout (2013: 45) has argued, it is actually the norm of pro-fessional labor of all sorts, whether professing or doctoring or lawyering—almost anything paid by salary—to engage in some amount of self-disciplin-ing commitment and devotion beyond the economic compensation that drives the attachment of the worker to the job. That is, the difference between entrepreneurialism for capital and entrepreneurial “world-changing” may be hard to discern (Chow 2002).

My other major service engagement over the last couple of years has been as Director of Graduate Studies. In that role, it has been my responsibil-ity to help design and occasionally deliver professionalization programming and to mentor individual students who are applying for funding or jobs. I encourage or even coerce them, through formal program hoops, to partici-pate in conferences, apply for grants and fellowships, publish their work, and to represent those activities in attractively/effectively formatted curricula vitae. That is, it is part of the normal routine to encourage students to develop the whole expensive professional performance—the form of appearance of value—in the speculative (usually debt-funded) hope they might one day get paid to do it. In response to students who have adjusted their goals to the realities of the market by prioritizing aspects of their lives such as personal or political relationships, I find myself encouraging them, nonetheless, to act as if they have an ambition to be nationally/internationally successful scholars.

In a sense, the Director of Graduate Studies role might well be under-stood to include the job of supporting our students in constituting them-selves as “good vaudevillians,” as Palladini (2010) describes them; or, given faculty self-interest in graduate student success, the Director of Graduate Studies might be seen as the entrepreneur of “amateur hour.”17 Palladini (2010: 71) argues that “amateur hour,” “the performance offered for free, par-ticipated in . . . a distinctive form of exploitation. . . . whose means of produc-tion the (potential) worker (i.e. the performer) did not control and that was achieved by a competition with other (potential) workers.” Meanwhile, the possibility of success depended on the crafting of a persona that realized “the form of appearance of her value,” as Palladini (71) says, making Marx’s




description of “exchange value” into a double entendre: “A good vaudevil-lian . . . was first of all the performer capable of producing a specific body-image, one that was striking, effective, and, more importantly, recognizable to the audience.” This production involved investment in “facial make-up, costumes, and poses as well as identity stereotypes. . . . Ethnicity, gender, and sexuality featured prominently” (71). Ultimately the goal was “to catch the attention of a dis-attending audience and accumulate what Georg Franck has termed ‘attentive capital’” (73). I hear the echo there of my advice to stu-dents, when I tell them to imagine the reader of applications as weary and overworked, when I say: “get their attention in the first sentence and don’t make them do any of the work to figure out what you are about, want to do, have to offer.”

But then again, I also suggest that students inhabit the present, take their six months of reading for comprehensive exams as a luxury they will never enjoy again, their dissertation writing as an opportunity to focus fully on their own research in a way that will be at best a rare and occasional treat should they be so lucky as to get a job. This turn to the present is, of course, the orientation toward the lateral in the face of precarity that Berlant (2011) describes. And in advising students to dwell in the present, I recognize that dwelling, like the domestic space of social reproduction, must be read as making a necessary contribution to capitalist production—that it serves as a constitutive outside, if outside at all. But at the same time, this advice con-verges with Palladini’s (2014b) thinking about the “prelude”: definitionally “parasitic,” “a promise of future development,” she points out that there are contexts, such as musical composition, in which “the prelude ultimately sab-otaged the parasitical structure in which it was originally embedded, and it acquired its autonomous status.” And in this autonomy, Palladini sees politi-cal promise.

Palladini’s (2010: 61) argument is in conversation with Ridout’s (2013: 15) effort to articulate the possibility that “passionate amateurs” might provide (ephemeral, or even, in a sense, fictional) evasions of the capitalist accounting of the labor of performance by evoking a category of labor that denies its status as work, that is undertaken “outside of a previously asserted and projected value.” Ridout (2013: 15) describes “those who work together for the production of value for one another (for love, that is, rather than money) in ways that refuse—sometimes rather quietly and perhaps even ineffectually—the division of labor that obtains under capitalism as usual.” Both Ridout and Palladini find optimism in temporality: for Ridout (2013: 56), a temporal fold, a suspension of measured work time, and for Palladini, the time between performance and evaluation in which performance work




not yet inscribed as commodified labor holds the potential for that labor and its subjects to be or become something else . . . maybe communism (Ridout 2013: 5–6).

Earlier in this essay, I asked what it might mean to us to recognize that the derivative is constitutive. At that point, it meant the need to recognize that there is no real economy outside of or untainted by financialization, no place of purity in which to stand and from which to lob critiques of the sell-outs. We cannot count on temporal folds or time between as a real outside to capital if financialization is the manufacturing of such temporal spaces into tradable commodities. But also, with Martin, recognizing that derivatives are constitutive might imply that the timespaces between—in which com-modifiable affinities and associations are generated, mobilized, calculated, circulated—are potent, world making. Taken in conjunction with my propo-sition above that the contradiction-ridden enterprise to which we are attached can only muddle onward by virtue of our investment in it, one might start to think that we have some world-making potential. Meanwhile, I have described experimenting with two apparently quite different strategies: dwelling and counter accounting. As narrated here, these apparently opposed strategies of withdrawal and engagement are both highly imperfect and impure. But I wonder if they might not be seen as interdependent, a local or inward focused reframing and reevaluating as a supplement to a recalcula-tion and public re-presentation. In my earnest way, I continue to hope and act as if, in our mundane institutional engagements (“as a fraught relationship with industry, with its institutions, and with capitalism itself, rather than as flight or freedom from them” [Ridout 2013: 6]), through and as a recognition and constitution of our affiliations and relations, we might inscribe our col-lective labors otherwise, in ways that matter to others as well.

Notes

I owe huge thanks to Abigail Boggs, Giulia Palladini, and Fiona Allon, each of whom invited me to participate in the opportunities for intellectual exchange that they created (in each case, with others, of course) and that prompt and structure this essay. I am truly grateful to my graduate students and colleagues at the University of Arizona for the many conversa-tions and collaborations that provide the experiences from which I draw my narrative here, as well as for their wise and interesting perspectives on our collective and individual strug-gles to make our way in the academy in this historical conjuncture. In particular, I thank Sandy Soto for pushing me past defensiveness, Liz Kinnamon for being grumpy and inspir-ing, and Eric W. Schoon for teaching me how to use UCINet. Giulia Palladini and Imre Sze-man provided very helpful feedback on a first draft of this essay. Michael Hardt, Sandy Soto, Robyn Wiegman, and SAQ managing editor Stacy Lavin provided crucial assistance with the final polish.




1 Student debt has also inspired a great deal of important critical analysis, including works by Adamson (2009), McClanahan (2011), Meister (2011), and Williams (2006), among others.

2 I allude here to Berlant’s (2011: 95–120) discussions of attrition. 3 This often means refinancing bonds. University of Arizona President Ann Weaver

Hart has recently spoken of her frustration that, despite having entrepreneurially invested substantial amounts of money in investment bank fees to refinance, the uni-versity benefited very little because the legislature swept the savings rather than allowing the university to use the funds for other purposes (Kelly 2014). On the other hand, she has said that the legislature was more generous with the expenditure on bankers’ fees, leaving that in the university’s hands.

4 Adkins presented the paper cited here at yet a third conference that has had significant impact on this essay, as will become evident through my references to several papers given there: “Rethinking Money, Debt and Finance after the Crisis,” University of Sydney, August 2014 (for a description of the conference, see http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research /social_studies_of_finance/events/index.shtml). Presentations from this conference inspired a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (see Cooper and Konings 2015).

5 Palladini’s thinking on this topic is developed in a forthcoming monograph, The Scene of Foreplay: Theatre, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York, under contract with Northwestern University Press.

6 Oxford English Dictionary (online), s.v. “entrepreneur.” 7 Oxford English Dictionary (online), s.v. “invest.” Original emphasis. 8 Oxford English Dictionary (online), s.v. “speculate.” 9 As Wendy Brown describes it, the discourse of “best practices” is a tool of neoliberal

governance that depoliticizes by mobilizing all stakeholders to participate coopera-tively in supposedly neutral techniques toward a collective goal of competitive advan-tage while taking individualized responsibility. According to Brown, the “best prac-tices” discourse thus isolates responsibility (blame) even while binding individuals to the whole—she calls it cooperation without collectivization.

10 See also Berlant’s (2011) discussions of “lateral agency” (114–17) and “lateral politics” (261–63).

11 According to the original version of the agreement (since somewhat modified), for each student, the school and student loans foot the bill upfront; Starbucks reim-burses the student, in some part, later, if the student completes the degree. In his 2013 presidential address for the American Studies Association conference on debt, Curtis Marez (2014) describes a scene in which the students in one of his classes compared their relation to their universities as similar to the debt peonage of share-croppers tied to the company store; that Starbucks will only pay for Arizona State University and no other school and only after the fact, and only upon degree comple-tion, seems the fully realized version of that scenario.

12 As Meister acknowledges in his first footnote (2011: 147–48), his argument depends on the theory that universities will maximize revenues and then expend that maximum amount; this theory is also the basis for conservative claims that government financial aid, such as Pell grants, simply enables tuition increases by greedy and wasteful univer-sities that need to tighten their belts. The conservative arguments, which target govern-ment support for higher education through their portrait of universities riding high on




the hog of taxpayer dollars, work in conjunction with the latter-day culture warriors I discuss just below. For Meister, entrepreneurial university executives are not so much “welfare queens” as worker bees for the financier queen bees. And while the conserva-tives are promoting privatization, he ultimately aims to argue that “privatization” can-not solve the problem of declining state support (130).

13 Evidence of this popular attention appears as publicity on the book’s publisher web-site: www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo10327226.html.

14 Many thanks to Angela Stoutenburgh for drawing my attention to the “worth it” dis-course. For examples see “Is College Worth It?” 2014 and Leonhardt 2014. Mean-while, schools roll out various financial literacy and responsibility programs. See, for instance, the Arizona “Earn to Learn” program: www.azearntolearn.org.

15 A gap between faculty in fields that are “close to the market” (as Slaughter and Rhoades [2004] put it) and those with greater distance from market engagement sometimes seems to be a political as well as economic difference. Or at least that is the argument that Good Enough Professor (K. W. 2014) makes: she explains the division at the Univer-sity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, between those faculty and departments that were moved to protest the unhiring of Steven Salaita for his tweets and those who either sup-ported the chancellor’s decision to fire or did not see the issue as relevant—as, really, a division between anachronistic purist truth seekers, on one side, and the modern prag-matists whom she portrays as vulnerable to exploitation by those seeking private gain rather than public good, on the other.

16 For a diagram of the process included in the manual, see Academic Program Review Management Team 2013: 18, 20.

17 Obviously, my attachment to the graduate students’ trajectory is all about what Ber-lant (2011: 23) would call “our endurance in the object”—my sense of myself depends on the promise of their success. But it is not just a question of personal ego; placement metrics are noted, compared, and circulated as if they might be consequential to the future funding or even existence of any given program. I do not know if the threat that hangs over a poor placement record would ever be realized, but it certainly hails grad-uate directors.

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