ABSTRACT
When everything is capital, labor disappears as a category as does its collective form, class, taking with it the analytic basis for alienation, exploitation, and association among laborers. Dismantled at the same time is the very rationale for unions, consumer groups, and other forms of economic solidarity. This work has been primarily conceived as an application of Fairclough's conceptualization of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Although it operates in conjunction with McKerrow's critical rhetoric project (CR) and is grounded in an understanding of the fundamental and transformative role played by labor in contemporary society, CDA remains the principal lens through which academic labor is analyzed. However, one of the hallmarks of CDA is that it is a transdisciplinary approach to the relationship between semiosis and the social world. The notion of transdisciplinarity suggests that the various disciplinary constructs that inform a project are not haphazardly borrowed, but, instead, alter and change one another through their use.
