Introduction: conceptualising the connections between affect, capitalism, and academia

Around the globe, we see university sectors in crisis, involving restructures of academic labour and much affective turmoil. In this book on ‘affective capitalism in academia’, our chapter takes on the tasks of clarifying the connections between the concepts affect, capitalism and academia, and situating their dynamics in an historic crisis context. We see complex linkages, calling for careful conceptual scaffolding across chapter sections.

To begin, we draw on Marx to outline two key logics of capitalism. First is that institutions, in the fields of market competition, exploit use-values of productive ‘commodities’, especially labour, to create exchange-value that accumulates profit-as-capital to invest in further production. Second is a structural necessity to value labour unequally, to accord ‘high’ worth to the labour of relatively few, compared to many whose labours are significantly exploited to build profit.

Marx applied these logics to fields where institutions compete to accumulate capital in economic form, but universities, in national sectors, do not compete for economic capital. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s extension of Marxian logics to further ‘forms of capital’, we conceive universities as competing for prestige – symbolic capital – that accumulates power to confer ‘legitimate’ credentials. Yet sustaining symbolic reputation requires basis in a more substantive form: cultural capital in scholarly modes. University fields thus reward prestigious scholarly production as ‘high value’ (while academics who mostly teach gain lesser reward), which attracts academics who embody dispositions – or habitus – for scholarly labours. Marxifying Bourdieu’s habitus concept, we argue that dispositions embody a tension between use and exchange purposes, which academics struggle to balance in their labours.

We then diagnose the Australian university sector as a field of accelerating workforce restructures that throw academic dispositions out of balance and into the affective turmoils of what Bourdieu calls hysteresis. Drawing on qualitative data from how Australian education-research academics’ experience field restructures, we analyse how university senior-level governors, in steering these restructures, diminish substantive research and, with it, the field’s historically hard-won relative autonomy.