This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the transformation of academic life that is currently taking place under the sign of ‘neoliberalization’. The main aim is to differentiate appropriation from exploitation as strategies of surplus labour dispossession, to identify the growth of appropriative techniques in academic life, and to situate the proliferation of such techniques in the broader transformations of global political economy. Alloyed with poststructuralist social theory, the historical materialist thrust of the article demonstrates how, in the technologically articulate ‘social factory’ of advanced capitalism, the spatial operations of these techniques of dispossession have a particularly ‘aesthetic’ character that is immanent to their appropriative operation, and which renders their workings both more discreet and effective. The article aims: (1) to problematize the neoliberal concepts of efficiency, transparency, and autonomy, in terms of practical outcomes; (2) to stimulate reflexive consideration of the ‘positioning’ of academics themselves in the reproduction of these techniques; and (3) to ask how these techniques might generate new ‘historical subjects’ of struggle and organization in academic life.

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Discipline and Punish has been the seminal text for students of the rationality of disciplinary power. In recent years, critical scholarship has become increasingly keen to move analytically beyond the normative mode of disciplinary power. As such, D&P is increasingly marginalized as a text, in favour of Foucault’s later works. In this discursive context, this paper has a twofold aim. Firstly, I want to think through the transformations in labour control over the last 30 years of neoliberal counterrevolution in terms of the movement beyond disciplinary power. Secondly, I shall critique the autonomous and normative governmentality concept by the reinsertion of the ‘genealogy of capital’ in terms of the ontology of axiomatic capitalism. I shall address the undertreated genealogical movement from disciplinarity to governmentality, by arguing for something provisionally tagged meta-disciplinarity. The worth of such a move is to challenge the critical potency of the governmentality concept as is, in the belief that the ‘meta-disciplinary’ offers the most promising and relevant ligature from Foucault’s work into Marxist scholarship on the transformations of neoliberal capitalism and the technologies of its megamachine that confronts us 40 years on.

Assuming the ‘neoliberalisation’ of academic life to be axiomatic, this article delves into the operations of its political economy with the aim of expanding critical vocabularies, analytical categories and research trajectories. In particular, it indicates where an immanent critique of neoliberal academia can be begun. While the capitalist transformations of academic life are justified by ideological claims eulogising ‘production’, ‘competition’ and ‘marketisation’, the neoliberal regime has proven decidedly ineffective at fulfilling these claims. An effective critique of neoliberal reform must, therefore, explore and interrogate the degree to which the practical effects of neoliberal reform diverge from its underpinning theoretical claims, and why this might be so. The principal question here pertains to rent and rent-seeking behaviour in the academic space, as a mode of activity inconsistent with the legitimating tenets of capitalist ideology. To the extent that rent-seeking activities can be identified in neoliberal academia – in distinction to ‘value-producing’ labour or ‘profit-making’ entrepreneurialism – a more potent critique of neoliberal reform will be forthcoming and an immanent critique of the neoliberal regime of capitalist accumulation in the academic space put into motion. By positioning the neoliberal regime within a broader shift towards accumulation by ‘appropriation’ in the world-system, a strategic reason can be identified for the proliferation of rent-seeking behaviours in academic life and beyond. The article argues that these rent-seeking behaviours have materialised in a range of gatekeeping techniques across the academic space, with which many inhabitants of that space have become complicit, resulting in the increasing dispossession of surplus through the practice of tolling realised in those techniques. The article develops a Marxian critique with additional insights from world-system theory, critical social theory and critical geography. Examples of gatekeeping technique considered throughout the article include master degree programmes, journal publication structures, conference fees and Graduate Record Examinations.

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