In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7 Registering Organization _ t he dream of autonomy is that you can do what you want when you want: lingering over the perfectly crafted cappuccino and conversation with a colleague, reading well into the night, briskly writing in the morning and attending an intimate seminar in the afternoon, flying overseas as an invited lecturer, engaging in an incisive phone consultation. the idyllic professor’s life is the epitome of the inner-directed existence. it is a tour through the intellectual division of labor once associated with the utopian itself—a data miner in the morning, a philosopher in the afternoon. taking the same credit, sharing the same occupation, the adjunct’s flexibility is, by conventional measure, driven from without. a dip in demand in someone else’s classroom can cancel access to one’s own. perpetually replaceable, forcibly interchangeable, instruction is separated off from knowledge production. the teacher at the front of the classroom models labor for others, ever at the ready to appear when called upon. a spirit without specialization, or at least without control over the conditions of expertise, it is the division of labor to which the contingent is mere adjunct. the nightmare of the social factory is that there is no escaping the dull discipline of work. But contemporary knowledge making seems to have enfolded these two states of being. the perquisites of tenure notwithstanding, the good professor works around the clock, each email message rendering the world just a little smaller and closer to hand. no need to go into the office, work is wherever you happen to be, and the next grant, report, or book beckons to be written. the wearily casualized academic day laborer works just as hard at making work available. the next layoff around the corner, there was never an ReGisteRinG ORGaniZatiOn • 169 office to begin with. the “last good job in america,” as stanley aronowitz so invitingly put it, starts to resemble the worst.1 Work is everywhere, and no amount of productivity is sufficient to tame it. professional self-management has difficulty extricating itself from pedestrian total management. Were it not merely cynical, this dystopian collision of privilege and precarity would present a closed circle of solipsism, the solitary career track as all-absorbing or wholly exclusionary. the life of the mind is a drafty platonic cave inhabited by research and teaching. While given in uneven measure, the shuttle between them avoids the third term by which mental labor suffuses a particular kind of institutional space. Omitted from consideration is the factor often most difficult for academics to embrace as equally constitutive of their existential condition—organization. the dreary emptiness of meetings, the vacuous iteration of memos, and the dull tempo of management render service as most commonly imagined a form of bondage to be avoided at all costs. While full-time faculty may sigh at the prospect of another meeting, adjuncts will take this absence as their only just compensation: “at least i don’t have to go.” in either case, administrative work may be expunged from faculty’s self-concept, but it is not so easy to avoid. disavowing it may allow faculty members to imagine their freedom from institutional demands but does little to shape the demands they need actually attend to. Managerialism leads a double life at the university. What is derisively referred to as “the administration” seems to amass (or acquiesce to) greater powers by the day. at the same time, more toil is expended by faculty doing the work of running the place. By formal measure full-timers spend more than 12 percent of their time doing administrative tasks as compared to 2 percent for part-timers.2 at an average for all full-time faculty of 53.3 hours, this week continues to lengthen and is generally considerably longer than that of other workers in the United states (who, in turn, labor longer than their counterparts in europe), and when the category of service is added to administration , more than one-fifth of this time is spent in administrative labor.3 yet, if administration is considered so repugnant, it also holds the fate of many. While the personality that thrives on pushing paper is notoriously the butt of jokes, the sociality of such work, its terms of mediation, cooperation, dispersion, are largely overlooked. if the faculty portraits sketched above are no more than caricature, and long hours are spent in administration, why is such work so typically dismissed and diminished? is...

Share