Andrea Brady on the Anxiety Machine That Is Academia

In a new, three-part essay for Stillpoint Spaces, poet Andrea Brady is forthcoming about "the mental distress which now typifies academic life" (a life that, for better or worse, many poets are living). Her piece "considers how the university as ‘anxiety machine’ produces intolerable working conditions that drain academic workers of their health, creativity and will power." An excerpt from part 1 of "Bind me—I still can sing—":

...It was only recently that I recognised that this feeling that I was an insufficient container of my panic is a mimesis of my working conditions.  Kate Bowles writes,

‘This is the story academics tell ourselves as we flip open the laptop on Sunday mornings: we tell ourselves that the boundarylessness of our time and service is a privilege and even a practice of freedom. Over and over I have heard academics say that they couldn’t bear to punch the electronic time clock as our professional colleagues do. But the alternative is the culture of deemed time: by flattering us with what looks like trust in the disposal of our modest obligations, the university displaces all responsibility onto us for the decisions we make about how much to give. There is the problem of imposing limits on ourselves.”

Even if it is actually futile to try to impose those limits on an infinitely expandable workload, this futility is registered as a personal and moral failure.  I should learn better habits for managing my email.  I should download software that keeps me off the phone / the internet / social media.  Working conditions become an aspect of personal hygiene.

It has been widely acknowledged that mental illness has become endemic throughout capitalist societies, a result not only of new diagnostic categories, the normalisation of illness or increased awareness among populations but as a specific consequence of the way we work and live now.  J. D. Taylor argues that ‘Anxiety and fear are psychological marks of domination in all social structures, but a specific anxiety and fear emerges in financial capitalism through the accelerating demands and pressures of working and living in the neoliberal era.’

Continue here.