ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the role that higher education plays in the production of dividualities and how academic bodies, specifically, become implicated in the rhizomatic politics of neoliberal capitalism and globalization. A Foucualdian reading of academic life uncovers the processes that discipline subjects through educational discourses. Schizo-academia refers to the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of academic life. Schizo-academia functions through connections and flows where each attachment is ultimately a detachment: in order for a desiring-machine to make a new connection it must detach itself from an existing flow. Masochistic academic bodies are always waiting because of the contractual alliances that are produced dialogically. The grotesque academic body embedded in carnivalesque atmospheres considers academic life through ongoing regenerations that are intricately connected to social heteroglossia. Academic carnivals can explore a completely different, nonofficial, extraecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations; they a second world and a second life outside of officialdom.