Common language : academics against networking and the poetics of precarity

Bernstein, Sarah and Malone, Patricia; Rys, Michiel and Philipsen, Bart, eds. (2022) Common language : academics against networking and the poetics of precarity. In: Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics . Palgrave, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 129-143. ISBN 9783030881740

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Abstract

Academics Against Networking (AAN, 2019–2020) was a zine compiled by Nell Osborne and Hilary White and circulated for the cost of postage. The zine's two issues comprise lyric essays, poetry, prose, Tweets, images, and combinations thereof that respond in some way to the provocation of the title. The contributions take a wide variety of formal approaches, but they share much in common: each writes against networking's instrumentalization of grammar, against its impoverished modes of thought, and against the debased sense of subjectivity and community the logic of such a grammar engenders. In this chapter, we read the vital contributions in AAN as articulating a poetics against and in spite of the market logics of the contemporary academy.