Affective Academe: Immaterial Labor, Higher Education, and the Pandemic

Affective Academe:Immaterial Labor, Higher Education, and the Pandemic Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) To regard the negative affect of the pandemic as lingering or persisting long after people cease dying from COVID-19 in greater or lesser numbers requires a different sense of epistemology and metaphysics—specifically, one that can account for the psychology and phenomenology of negative (and positive) affect. It is a sense of the pandemic that may begin in authoritative pronouncements of its arrival and departure but is one that does not end with them. Rather, on an affective account of the pandemic, the pandemic is over when it ceases to produce negative affect. The epistemology and metaphysics that will best guide us through this time of virtually unprecedented death and despair in the US are not the existentialisms of Søren Kierkegaard or Friedrich Nietzsche but rather affective theories with the ability to account for negative and positive affect. In this regard, the leading candidate is the queer theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It is a philosophy that utilizes a theory of affect that produces epistemologies ideally configured to account for these unprecedented times, particularly as they relate to academe. In specific, Sedgwick's work allows us to identify strong theories of academic affect amidst the changes that have been writ large upon the face of higher education in America during the pandemic. In addition, the need for these strong theories of academic affect will persist long after authorities dub the pandemic over. For most living academics, the negative affects of the COVID-19 pandemic will probably never end because the pandemic has fundamentally changed the way higher education operates. From the increased reliance on the virtual classroom and meeting space to the declining enrollments and the Great Resignation,1 higher education operates very differently than it did before the World Health Organization announced the arrival of the pandemic. One of the things that the pandemic has done is to foreground the importance of a strong theory of negative affect in academe. While most academics have experienced negative affects in academe, these affects have been for the most part only understandable via weak theory—that is, [End Page 431] what Silvan Tomkins describes as theory that "can account only for 'near' phenomena" (1962–92, 2:433–34; cited by Sedgwick 2003b, 134). Thus, for Tomkins, weak theory is "little better than a description of the phenomena which it purports to explain" (134). Strong theory, such as the paranoia that Sedgwick discusses in "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You" (2003b), is theory that is (again following Tomkins) "capable of accounting for a wide spectrum of phenomena which appear to be very remote, one from the other, and from a common source" (Tomkins 1962–92, 2:433–34; cited by Sedgwick 2003b, 134). Her work in this essay was the watershed moment not only for the combination of affect theory with paranoia but also for discussion of the affective dimensions of academe via strong theory.2 Whereas elsewhere I have argued that paranoia is a strong theory for understanding negative affect in academe,3 here I would like to expand this discussion to include both pandemic and labor. Specifically, just as paranoia is a strong theory that provides an account of some of the affective dimensions of academe, so too are pandemic and labor. Along with paranoia, pandemic and labor provide a portrait of affective academe via strong theory. And like paranoia, pandemic and labor are both strong theories that provide academics an understanding of the negative affects of neoliberal academe. The only question that remains regarding pandemic and labor as strong theories of academe is the degree to which each is focused solely on negative affect. In the case of paranoia, while it is primarily focused on negative affect, Tomkins does concede that it may strive for positive affect. "The only sense in which [the paranoid] may strive for positive affect at all," comments Tomkins, "is for the shield which it promises against humiliation" (1962–92, 2:458; cited by Sedgwick 2003b, 136). What is important to remember in this context is that for...