Working the Clock: The Academic Body on Neoliberal Time

Abstract

In this paper, I want to use the term ‘body’ both in regard to the bodies of individual academics and in regard to the academic collective within the university. I wish to argue that both bodies have been colonised by aggressive neoliberal managerialism and its attendant technologies. In particular, I shall argue, borrowing from Nanni's work on imperial colonisation, that the technologies of time are core to this process of colonisation. Nanni argues that, while time is a human universal, the ways in which time is measured, perceived and conceptualised are not (2012: 6). He argues that ‘time was both a tool and a channel for the incorporation of human subjects within the coloniser's master narrative; for conscripting human subjects within the matrix of the capitalist economy; and ushering ‘savages’ and superstitious ‘heathens’ into an age of modernity (Nanni, 2012: 4). An exploration of the technologies of time thus provides a productive entry point into contemporary power struggles (McKenzie, 2013: 486) within universities and an explanation for increasingly ‘overextended, underfocused, overstressed and underfunded’ (Vest, 1997: 43) academic bodies.