ABSTRACT
This chapter evolves a theoretical prism to understand the often-invisible ‘effects’ of subjectification that structure the disciplinary space of a university. Using anecdotal entry-points from their experience, the authors examine how the university produces itself in space and time – and simultaneously, collaborates with the state to generate normative orders of reason and citizenship. The anxieties constitutive of a prison-industrial complex are accurately reproduced within the neo-liberal instance of the university – with its emphasis on instrumentalizing academic fields of inquiry to the near-elimination of ‘non-strategic’ disciplines like humanities and social sciences. The ways in which enumerative surveillance-mechanisms trump the ‘ideal’ of free speech/debate is made apparent in a recent move by the Indian state to link biometric data to all student records (including applications, admissions and certifications). With the state’s self-proclamation as the entrepreneurial ‘origin’ and ‘limit’ of the university, what remains for us – the authors suggest – is an alternative pedagogy, or perhaps something radically ‘other’ than the university.
