ABSTRACT
Academia is replete with disciplinary and control apparatuses that have been intensified under neoliberalism as precarious governing. Political power in combination with economic incentives under capitalism increasingly view humans in terms their use, productivity and willingness to homogenise under the rubric of progress that imputes value and competition to every process and organism. In the neoliberal university, this means that lecturers and students, like university processes, are recuperated by capitalism as axioms, rendering them commodifiable and, therefore, artificially scalable because of the abstraction of space and time under capitalism. The productive pedagogue and learner are thus valued for: (1) their resource use, increasingly measured by performance metrics and surveillance apparatuses that quantify their compliance to structural systems and deliverables; and (2) their development capacity for the neoliberal university, especially in terms of scalability; that is, their ability to do more and more in less time without breaking down. This has huge implications for social reproduction in and outside of classrooms as progress narratives render time flat and linear, obscuring the unfolding of multiple temporalities. In this chapter, I diffractively read the critical theory of Nancy Fraser through the philosophy of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, in order to think about how we might find time for pleasure in learning and teaching as ‘timely’ interventions; that is, timeous interferences in speeded-up times of pressure.
