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On Being and Becoming the Monstrous Subject of Measurement

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Abstract

This chapter explores the mechanisms by which academic subjects willingly make themselves amenable to measurement. It explores how measurement is deployed via practices that commodify academic labour and promote an individualising and competitive milieu that is simultaneously experienced as repellent and desirable. In particular, it examines the complicity of the academic subject, who becomes increasingly willing to be formed and to form herself into a figure that might be described as the measured monster of the contemporary university . Exhibits from job and promotion applications, software programs and citation collation websites are explored for traces of this monstrous subject. Monstrous , in this sense, is less like the monstrous creature of great leathery wings and a horny head, or the misshapen freak, than the neat clean numerical subject delineated by measurements.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_wolf_the_quantified_self.

  2. 2.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/bill-gates-backed-research-network-targets-advertising-revenues.

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Correspondence to Susanne Gannon .

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Gannon, S. (2018). On Being and Becoming the Monstrous Subject of Measurement. In: Riddle, S., Bright, D., Honan, E. (eds) Writing with Deleuze in the Academy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2065-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2065-1_6

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