Penny Newell

The Meta-poetics of Creative Labour in the University

This chapter harmonizes an understanding of poetry with observations about creative work-life in “the university”—an institution framed and critiqued by the likes of Giroux, Collini, Nussbaum, and Gill, according to terms antithetical to poetry: accountability, measurability, and productivity. As a rejoinder to this broader diagnostic of the university as an “ideas factory”, I analyse abstract language in operation in UK higher education institutions, namely innovate, explore, and impact. With academics working to substantiate such vacant words, writing functions to mediate between creativity and its more accountable forms, as both nexus of desire and modus operandi of work. Theorizing this operation as the meta-poetics of creative labour, I bridge Marxian theories of human labour processes with the role of raw materials in the production of surplus value. Ultimately, the relationship between desire and utility is one of internalized subordination, serving to mystify and codify creative labour as accountable and productive.

and Performing Skies

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 20 ·1 : pp .48-55 ht tp : / /dx .do i .o rg /10 .1080/13528165 .2015 .991597 The landscape has its formation and as after all a play has to have formation and be in relation one thing to the other thing ... not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky. Gertrude Stein (1935: 125) The act of imagination, as we have just seen, is a magical act. Jean-Paul Sartre (1940: 125) Between the extreme slownesses and vertiginous speeds of geology and astronomy ... you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that ... a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack ... Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004: 288–9)

Συνίστασθαι and Performing Skies

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 20 ·1 : pp .48-55 ht tp : / /dx .do i .o rg /10 .1080/13528165 .2015 .991597 The landscape has its formation and as after all a play has to have formation and be in relation one thing to the other thing ... not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky. Gertrude Stein (1935: 125) The act of imagination, as we have just seen, is a magical act. Jean-Paul Sartre (1940: 125) Between the extreme slownesses and vertiginous speeds of geology and astronomy ... you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that ... a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack ... Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004: 288–9)

and Performing Skies: Towards an alternative Aristotelian poetics

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 20 ·1 : pp .48-55 ht tp : / /dx .do i .o rg /10 .1080/13528165 .2015 .991597 The landscape has its formation and as after all a play has to have formation and be in relation one thing to the other thing ... not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky. Gertrude Stein (1935: 125) The act of imagination, as we have just seen, is a magical act. Jean-Paul Sartre (1940: 125) Between the extreme slownesses and vertiginous speeds of geology and astronomy ... you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that ... a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack ... Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004: 288–9)