In the mood of data and measurements: experiments as affirmative critique,or how to curate academic value with care

Affective data-governance of subjectivities

Data and data visualisations co-create the knowledge environments we encounter as university-employed academics. Data on our academic performances and identities play a crucial role in our motivation. Data move, touch and mobilise us – for better or for worse. As researchers today, we are represented by data and (in some cases) ‘motivated’ by graphs, numbers and bar charts depicting publications, grants and student evaluation that are hosted at the official university websites, but also by measurement of performance at other and commercial websites, such as number of ‘reads’ and ‘requests’ at sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu.

The technologies used to govern academic performance consist of monitoring and comparative instruments. These instruments are based on digital database technologies. Digital technologies – their standards, codes and algorithmic procedures – are increasingly being inserted into the administrative infrastructure of universities. These technologies function by capturing people, organisations and nations as statistics: quantifiable, encodable and machine-readable (Sellar and Thompson, 2016; Williamson, 2016). The technologies are designed to perform and direct social and professional behaviour by producing data visualisations. The use of data as a mode of affective management is based on a particular form of governance. Soft and network-based forms of governance seek to manage incentives by producing ‘motivational technologies’. These technologies can be considered ‘motivational’ since they work through the affective energy to motivate: it is about attracting, drawing and pushing actors to want what you as an academic have to do (Brøgger, 2019). It is a powerful system of mobilising techniques that is increasingly based on the enactment of data visualisations, such as scorecards, barometers, graphs and other materialising media, telling stories that not only rely on (Lather and St. Pierre, 2013; Maclure, 2013) but privilege ‘visibility’, ‘evidence’ and ‘scientific proof’ as part of governance. It seems that ‘Your Fathers’ Paradigm’, to reference Lather (2004), and the glory days of twentieth-century positivism, have returned.

Data are omnipresent and almost omnipotent. However, data, as a language for coding information, in itself are not the problem. Taking inspiration in Ursula K. Le Guin (1996), the problem is the kind of data that primarily brings the affective energy out and not home, or that transforms affective energy into ugly feelings, and how ‘the mood of data’ permeates modern academic lives rendering them almost unliveable. We use the concept of mood as ‘longer-lasting affective constellations’ (Brennan, 2004: 6), in which we are ‘tuned’ in particular ways through data and data visualisations. Not just shortly, but as longer-lasting states of mind and body. As already well-established by scholars within new materialism and agential realism (Barad, 2007; Coole and Frost, 2010; Brøgger, 2018; Juelskjær et al., 2020), speculative empiricism (Maclure, 2013) and affect theory (Knudsen and Stage, 2015; Staunæs, 2018; Blackman, 2019), data and their mediated forms, such as visualisations, are neither neutral nor innocent, but agentic and performative. Thinking through these new materialist conceptual resources and the affective turn, we argue that data co-shape knowledge environments, academic lives and subjectivities. Data have become infrastructural to academic moods. This means that data, in the sense of visuals such as numbers, graphs and charts illustrating our academic performance, are decisive for the atmosphere that envelops us; data determine whether we are ‘in the mood’ to do academic work, and whether and how we are motivated to continue our academic endeavours. Fundamentally, we are in the mood of data – their advantages as well as their downsides – and even when no data are present, data haunt us, because everything can potentially become data (Blackman, 2019). The critical question is, how do data matter and could this mattering matter in other ways?

Below, we first present our feminist new materialist concepts of governance, performativity and affectivity. We then discuss how contemporary soft governance technologies, which monitor our academic performances through powerful visuals, constitute an affective and sensuous architecture for a university environment of exposure. As part of this, we refer to examples from the social sciences and humanities in Europe, the US and Australia. Finally, we elaborate on a smaller experiment conducted with thirty PhD students (at a doctoral training school hosted by the COST Action IS1307 New Materialism) – on thinking academic value and on data mattering otherwise, and not just as an alternative to something already defined. This part of the article draws inspiration from the work of the late feminist speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin and her influential essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1996) in which she disrupts the linear, progressive mode of narratives. The point is not the experiment as such but rather the experimental attitude that our concepts allowed us to perform in relation to academic performance data.

The governing, performative and affective nature of academic data visualisations

Data are characterised by their governing, performative and affective nature. Soft, network-based governance refers to the horizontal interactions by which various public (universities in this case) and private actors (such as private universities, Academia.edu, ResearchGate) coordinate their interdependencies (Rhodes, 1997; Klijn and Koppenjan, 2012). In this respect, governance denotes actors’ self-regulation within networks. Meanwhile, governance also comprises ‘meta-governance’, which refers to the ‘governance of (self-)governance’. This ‘soft’ governance is usually contrasted with ‘harder’ modes of governance regulated by the rule of law. It is a system of rule that uses mobilising techniques and is based on the production of devices designed to compare, measure and monitor performance. These incentive-based forms of management are designed to enable voluntary co-option and make agents want to do what they have to do (Brøgger, 2019). Through persuasion, they rely on self-enrolment and constitute an advanced management through ‘motivational technologies’.

This article takes an interest in how data technologies have become integral to the modern (self-)governance of academic performance, and how data technologies have performative power in the sense that they trigger affective registers and thus produce particular sensuous environments. In this way, data do more than they show. Data are performative. Universities across continents curate our data as a visual architecture using interfaces designed for desirous seeing – and inquisitive (self-)governance. Individual performance graphs, bar charts and network pictograms are increasingly used to represent researchers and their academic value, as well as the value of their research and writing. Data have become key to modulating academics in new ways. Data are produced and deployed by educational leaders and ‘new professionals’ for the purposes of human development and informed decision-making. As such, the current use of data is informed by contemporary diagnoses of governance, such as governing through data (Lawn, 2013; Williamson, 2016), which, in turn, is closely affiliated with the mechanisms of ‘governing by numbers’ (Rose, 1991; Grek, 2009; Ozga et al., 2011) and ‘governing through standards’ (Brøgger, 2019).

The concept of performativity is inspired by recent innovations in poststructuralist philosophy, often termed feminist new materialism (Braidotti, 2000) and material feminisms (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008), and, in particular, queer-feminist versions of performativity philosophy (such as Butler [1993] and Barad [2007]). By feminist, we mean versions of thinking and acting that engage critically in analysis of and curious, creative and imaginative altering of conventional power relations and genealogies related to intersectional gender categories. This is a thinking that embraces care and ‘a future and justice to come’ (Derrida, [1993] 2006) for the planet, future generations and the diversity of species, and that is guided by the question how the past, present and future may be enacted and thought otherwise. In particular, queer, post-human, postcolonial and black studies that engage with new feminist materialism or posthumanism in a frictional manner (see, for instance: Browne, 2015; Keeling, 2019) elaborate on this question by continuously asking who and which actions get to count as human in this world as well as within the authoritative annals of the humanities and sciences (Åsberg, 2018: 158; Hartmann, 2019).

Whereas realist approaches tend to examine, for instance, how data, and the use of data, interact with a world that is already structured and categorised in certain ways, performative approaches, by comparison, centre on the ways in which data and its selection, use and visualisation are involved in the creation, shaping and (re)configuring of affects, categories and practices (Brøgger, 2019). Such approaches create space for ‘how matter matters’; that is, how something materialises or manifests a given phenomenon and what kind of significance and performative effects it produces. On a broader and feminist utopian level, the notion of performativity allows change to happen, and thereby other futures and justices to come. The performative turn is propelled by, on one hand, Butler’s notion of performativity as a ‘reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (Butler, 1993: 2), and, on the other hand, by expansions of this notion suggested by proponents of the material turn, such as Karen Barad. Barad (2003) widens the concept of performativity by emphasising the agency of matter. In this way, she enables a notion of agency that includes both human and non-human agency. The notion of performativity thereby provides an opportunity to explore how something may change from the register of matter to the register of energy and affects; for instance, the ways in which the colour and shape of scorecards and graphs create performative effects in the affective register of joy or sorrow, of pleasure or pain.

The affective intensities of data are likewise constitutive (Lupton, 2018). Inspired by feminist new materialist approaches, we argue that data is not to be considered merely as dead matter; rather, it should be considered as ‘vibrant matter’ and as enacting ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2010), as ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effect dramatic and subtle’ (Bennett, 2010: 351). This thing-power or the vibe of data matter is affective, but not determinate. Data may affect us in different ways, and the affects resulting from this may vary. An analytical approach towards the thing-power of data must, therefore, enable us to grasp the affective energy as flowing activity, as well as a pattern in which affects are composed, figured, entangled, mobilised and recruited. We use two concepts here: affectivity and affects. The concept of affectivity allows us to think broadly in terms of intensities and tensions and in terms of processes of being touched and moved. This is referred to as indeterminate affectivity (Massumi, 2002). However, there are limits for the indeterminacy. Therefore, a concept of affectivity must be able to approach the participation of the emoting body as affect. When data are mobilising and recruiting someone through affectivity, this affective mobilisation and recruitment is onto-formative: ontologically it co-constitutes subjectivities. As Teresa Brennan (2004) writes, [i]s there anyone who has not, at least once, walked int a room and “felt the atmosphere”? The affective atmosphere envelops us and affects our academic subjectivities, our research and writing. The concept of affects, on the other hand, concerns affective intensities and tensions that we can name and code semantically and decide whether they belong to various comfortable or less comfortable registers. This concept of affects makes it easier to focus our analytical attention on positive, comfortable registers and to express positive feelings such as excitement. Furthermore, the concept of affects also makes it possible to pay attention to negative affective registers, including feelings of shame, despair and disgust. Affectivity/affects do not only tell us something about academic actors, but also about how these actors are being governed. The affects link to sensual perceptions and materialisations of current trends in the academic regime of governance and representation. In the wake of modern forms of governance, affects – something that we used to know and understand as private – have indeed become political.

Diagnosing soft governance and devices that force affective energy outwards

Data hit different sensorial and affective registers, moving us and making us wonder (Maclure, 2013: 229). These affective qualities make data a powerful tool of governance. Data become virtual and concern the futures to be and the futures not to come; what is allowed to emerge and what remains invisible, silent, even dying. The visual datascapes and data-subjectivities of academia put researchers in precarious situations, and this calls for new approaches to data, as well as new critiques and ethics. The precarious position of academics is, of course, not solely an issue of datafication, but also involves precarious time contracts, low wages, internationalisation etc. However, the role of data as motivational technology seems to play a key part in the self-management of academics, and we have therefore chosen to focus upon this issue here.

In academia, we encounter ‘soft’ governance in the guise of technologies targeted at mobilising the individual researcher. We witness how universities offer information on researchers’ performance rates to academic peers and a wider public. They share this information on the university website so that everyone can check out the individual academic merits of each researcher with regard to their ability to gain funding, publish in high-ranking journals and teach. All of these data visuals revealing performance create a tremendous amount of peer competition and peer pressure. They imply a certain form of external monitoring, but also an internal monitoring to the extent that these processes consist, in part, in making people co-opt themselves into governing others and themselves.

The extended use of powerful visuals to display performance data is a technology that lays out an affective and sensuous architecture for a university environment characterised by exposure. At the universities in Denmark, similar to many other universities around the world, we type our own individual publications and activities into so-called ‘research information management systems’ designed to manage research-related outputs such as grants, publications and awards. We type while we surreptitiously glance at how, on colleagues’ website profiles, such data turn into ever-growing graphs of publication rates and network formations. In the US, student evaluations singling out individual professors are compared. In Australia, graphs depict external funding. It is an output-driven environment of exposure enacted through visibility, transparency and naming, created and upheld through relation making and comparison. It works affectively through processes of movement, attraction and repulsion. Moreover, it decisively affects the ways in which we manage our work lives and ourselves. The performance visuals affect us or, to use the feminist philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) concept of touch: We are touched by the visuals. Touché is a metaphorical substitute for wounded. The Italian word ‘toccare’ means to strike or hit. The visuals are designed in a way that makes it possible to hit us and expose us. In that sense, data visuals wound us and they manage to enter researcher bodies and make them receptive for the affect circulating around, since these affects trigger the competitive pressure, the vanity and eagerness to perform of each academic.

The display of performance on university websites is sensuous because it is pre-reflectively felt, experienced and crafted by sight and touch. It works from a distance as well as through close contact – typed through the manipulation of researchers’ fingers systematically recording publications, grants, honours, projects and partners in electronic research databases. These repetitive haptic entries transform into publication graphs and grant diagrams that can be observed by anyone who visits the universities’ websites. The data architecture is fused with and facilitated by an ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed, 2004) that works by affecting the minds and bodies of academics. Pride, vanity, admiration, shame and envy are just a few of the affects that may surface when faced with impacts, ratings and assessments; affects that may be further emphasised when data materialise as visualisations. This is important. Perhaps competition and pride have always existed in academia. However, the new visualisations, joked about in the corridors and carefully examined in the dead of night, make it difficult to avoid the fact that the representation itself, rather than what it represents, becomes the main motive for academic behaviour. It is a process of learning to motivate yourself through the rewards adding up to a longer list and a steeper graph, unaware of all the affective labour, all the (gendered and racialised) identity struggles and all the self-governing exercises that the data technologies carry within (McKnight, 2020).

In the academic environment of exposure, comparison and self-monitoring are deeply entangled with a vulnerable affective economy that is in constant need of maintenance. While we try to avoid the embarrassment of feeling ashamed, we strive to sense the flame of fame and the kick of being admired. We notice how Abir’s publication graphs tower over our own. We let out a sigh of resignation when looking at Sarah’s funding diagram and its exponential increase. And we point our finger at Robert’s lack of networking skills before we continue writing chapter 28 of our Collected Grant Applications.

The fear of not performing, of being left behind, ignites a competitive, mimetic desire. This mimetic desire (Girard, 1966) includes a mediator, a third party, who is both admired and despised as an ideal of and a barrier to the desired object. Desire turns into the mimesis of another’s desire: in this case, the mimesis of a university peer (Brøgger, 2019; Brøgger and Staunæs, 2016). The desire is transformed into an imitation, or even a parody, of the other’s desire: in this case, the desire for our peers’ (Abir, Sarah and Robert) performance and, of course, the admiration this may yield. The mimetic desire may turn into yet another affect, namely envy, where admiration turns into competitiveness. Envy is nurtured when the environment of exposure orchestrates and supports continuous competition between peers (Ngai, 2006). The ways in which the rankings and number of our peers’ publications exceed our own materialise in front of our eyes as they meticulously follow the movement of graphs and diagrams. Envy is an intense affect that is felt when the stomach contracts and the mouth shrinks in a bitter sigh: ‘It should have been me … It should have been me. They do not deserve it. I have worked myself to the bone to achieve this’. Envy affects us when we feel simultaneously attracted and repulsed (Staunæs, 2018). When we simultaneously admire and detest. A mindset that simultaneously brings together academic peers and tears them apart. Envy is a wrathful devotion (Walton, 2004) that motivates multiple entries in the research database: more graphs that can turn into big data and impressive representational Is. Although some bodies are more attentive than others to the complex of envy, it is not just a private matter: it is a sensory perception of the underbelly of contemporary educational discourse and governance practice. The affective complexes surrounding ‘the moods of data’ need to be addressed as more than merely a private matter and in dire need of critiques and transformation.

Experimenting with care: devices that bring home affective energy

Envious feelings ask us to consider if this affective management through ‘visuals’ is liveable for academics and sustainable for the university. It seems, as already mentioned, to be a return to our ‘fathers’ (unhealthy) paradigm’ – to twentieth-century positivism (Lather, 2004) – forcing energy outwards and away from the university and the academic subjectivities. Rather than moralising about the existence of ugly feelings and the necessity of ‘thinking positively’, we perceive these abdominal feelings as affective messages about what hurts and where (Staunæs, 2018). How can we move beyond the exhausting ontologies sucking the life out of academia and university governance – ontologies that lurk in the shadows of affective governance? How might we experiment with an architecture of curating academic value that nurtures feelings of commitment and admiration while minimising uncomfortable and malign aspects of affective complexes? What kinds of (data-)devices will nurture other kinds of moods, affective economies and energies? One might be tempted to think that an affirmative critique is simply describing either acceptance of or resistance to data, but reading through Foucault (1997), and Butler’s (2002) rewriting of Foucault, critique is a ‘virtue’ and an art rather than just a practice of ‘resistance’, or has become the means by which it is re-described. A critique beyond criticism may therefore point to the art of not being governed quite like that (Foucault, 1997: 44).

Inspired by this phrase ‘how not to be governed like that’ – in our case through constant performance measurements, discipline and control – it may be possible to envision and speculate about other ways of communicating and appraising academic value. Ways that break with what current data and data visualisations allow academic life to become. Arguing that data has performative effects opens up the opportunity for intervention, the opportunity to change what is conditioning the current exhausting state of affairs. We may enact an ‘attitude experimentale’ (Foucault, 1997) in our thinking and explore how academic value and the data architecture may be otherwise. What does such an experimental attitude look like? We asked 30 PhD students to join an experiment in which they were asked to ruminate on and collect artefacts, other than graphs and numbers, that make it possible to ‘bring home energy’ to the university and the academics.

After ‘preparing’ the PhD students through relevant reading matter ¹ and a lecture presenting the new modes of governing through data, as well as ‘daydreams’ about generating different worldings, we invited them to invent new forms of social science fiction that make reality look a little different by bringing in tools capable of ‘bringing energy home’ – instead of forcing energy out (Le Guin, 1996). We asked them to experiment with re-articulations of academic value and to design data technologies that would allow a curious caring about alternative forms of academic value.

The students engaged with selected passages (from the post-human and feminist new materialist archive on affirmative critique and speculative ethics) and different artefacts that they invented, picked up and/or speculated about during the session. Thereby, the participants were invited to use the conceptual toolbox we presented and think and feel academic value in relation to different senses and affects. The selected passages that the PhD students were asked to consider were physically spread across the floor, inviting the groups to wander reflectively among them. They were individual quotes by feminist thinkers, such as Haraway animating the students by inviting them to ‘stay with the trouble’ (2016: 1) and Barad reaching out on ‘how to become touchable’ (2012), to become repons(e)-able. Some of the quotes were rewritten as part of the participants’ presentation of their work. In order to emphasise the material nature of thinking, the PhD students were asked to choose an artefact, and use this as a vibrant thought generator that could help facilitate thinking as well as explaining their thoughts on alternative approaches to academic value/data. Perhaps this thought generator would be the device or technology invented to present academic value, or perhaps it would be just a cog in the invention of yet other devices that ‘would bring home energy’ (Le Guin, 1996: 151). The students could use different equipment or online resources; choose an object in the room, nearby rooms or their bags; or simply go out into the streets of the city we were staying in and pick up ‘something’. We closed the session after two hours and each group presented their artefacts and papers on small podiums spread around the room. The groups were then asked to physically walk through the artefacts and explain their own choice of artefact, narrating and curating academic value in a caring fashion. Each group explained their choice and how they envisioned ontologies of dreams and hopes in academic representation (and for whom).

The experiment resulted in a diverse exhibition of concrete products and speculations on academic value and performance. In the last part of the article, we speculate about what happened in the experiment. The point is not the products coming out of the experiments but how we in future experiments could continue the work on curating academic value otherwise. Le Guin’s (1996) ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ allows an exploration of unknown and not yet discovered horizon. In many ways, it constitutes an experiment concerned with states of indeterminacy, open endings and researchers’ ability to ‘levitate’ for a while and postpone resolution. Challenging the need for determinacy, closures and concrete output as weapons of domination makes it possible to discover knowledge and experience anew. Le Guin helps us ponder the different uses of data and academic value and how other technologies and artefacts may bring with them different and more liveable world(ings).

Carefully experimenting

How could data devices be grounded in not only an eagerness and curiosity to find and present evidence, for knowing and concerns, but also a curiosity, providing an alternative to inquiry, that cares about and not only for the subjects researched and the academics involved (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017)? In the final part of this article, we exemplify how an affirmative and experimental attitude towards (motivational) data technologies might unfold, and we refer to the work conducted by the 30 PhD students and ourselves. Opening these explorative avenues presupposes taking seriously the performative nature of science and measurements, and thus the performative nature of experimenting.

In our experiment with curating academic value otherwise, we wish to move from experiments with facts and eagerness to experiments with care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). The measurements of academic performance are in need of reconsideration, transformations from inquiry to care. The point is not how to get rid of data or how to become radically ungovernable, as we learned from Butler and Foucault above. Rather, we are concerned with how to use data and data technologies, not as weapons of dominance, but in a caring way – a way that does not just care for. During the experiment, the PhD students therefore aimed to work beyond ‘pure criticism’ of data and beyond moralising practices of data governance towards an ethics of engagement and what Karen Barad (2012) playfully calls response-ability, meaning responsibility in the sense of making your self able to feel the response of your way of responding. We worked with an ‘attitude experimentale’ that addressed academic value in other ways that go beyond binaries and ways of asking that can only prompt determinate and not more open answers. Following Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), we emphasised a shift from matters of fact and matters of concern to matters of care and mutual interest.

Caring is more than just being concerned or having something in mind: ‘thinking and knowing are often not caring, not even mindful, nor is caring an unproblematic endeavour’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 13). Caring does not have the ‘power to do or affect’ a specific moral obligation. Rather, it is an ethics of a common ground – a ‘thick, impure involvement in a world where the question of caring appropriately needs to be posed’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 6). Puig de la Bellacasa differentiates between the notion of ‘caring for’ and ‘caring about’. The former implies that you already in advance presume to know what the other person needs. The latter explores and senses reciprocally what the other person may need. One of the groups of PhD students chose artificial fur as an artefact and emphasised its soft, embracing nature. Created by humans due to its artificial character, not utilising other species. Something that could be offered to you as an academic, something not connoting measurement and performance, rather a particular kind of warm spaciousness. A different kind of motivation. Warm but not heated. Calm, not hectic. All of which, they explained, felt very different from what they actually experienced as PhD students. In their daydreams, the warm fur was connected to hopes of academic lives in which they were invited to the managers’ offices, not to receive information on how to provide the expected outputs, but to be cared about – a warm spaciousness supporting their academic creativity.

Going back to academic value and performance, how could we, concretely and experimentally, shift from approaching data as matters of fact to matters of care? In the final section, we read the experiment diffractively through Le Guin’s fable about the carrier bag theory. We focus on how the students’ products and speculations on alternative ways of communicating and valuing academic performance enable another set of senses than the visual, and how they succeed in ‘bringing home affective energy’ to the academics rather than producing malign affects.

Bringing home affective energy

In an email exchange after the session, a PhD student explained:

When we started thinking of objects, we were presented with different choices. Therefore, we ended up picking three objects. My ‘object’ was sound notes and tone. I perceive this as something unfolding between bodies (human or non-human), and therefore I did not bring any physical object to the podium. Instead, we created a common sound in the group by clapping our hands. Not to applaud anything, but to make sounds and accentuate their entanglement with notes, tones and vocal intensities – the sound and rustle of different knocks. Applauding can work as a motivational technology, but sound, notes and tones are capable of bypassing instrumental motivation and opening up towards listening and other ways of collaborating, thereby creating a context in which critiques as affirmation and problematisation are possible at the same time. (Anki Bengtsson, Stockholm University)

In the tiny pamphlet ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, Ursula K. Le Guin (1996) explores an old feminist urban myth. In a subtle tone, she tells of how the hunter community had organised a fifteen-hour working week with ‘a lot of time for other things’: ‘So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn’t have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths’ (Le Guin, 1996: 149). But, as Le Guin cleverly points out: ‘It wasn’t the meat that made the difference. It was the story’ (1996: 149). The crucial difference is telling the most gripping tale – a story that has not only action, but also a powerful hero who puts everything ‘into service in the tale of the Hero’ (150). The problem is, Le Guin writes, that it is not their story: It is his. The form the hero takes is crucial, in relation not only to what kind of story can be told, but also to how the narrator and the others – their kids, skills and representations – can be included in the fictional tales. There are different and perhaps more inclusive forms of narrative and of narrating than having the mammoth hunter, his spear, meat and dread as the guiding principle.

What does Le Guin suggest instead of having individual heroes dominate history? She redefines heroism. Le Guin simply proposes the bottle, in its older sense of container, as the hero. The bottle as a thing that holds something else (Le Guin, 1996: 150), rather than the stick or bone. Survival requires a container. A container is needed if one does not want to miss anything and to carry, collect and store food, meat, oats, fruit, berries, seed and children: ‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient’ (Le Guin, 1996: 150). Le Guin questions the representation of a big, long, hard thing as the first cultural device. What seems to inspire Le Guin are not tools that force energy outward, such as the stick or bone, but tools that ‘bring energy home’: the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained.

In many ways, the same features as the stick and bone and the idea of a Hero with a capital H characterise the monitoring and comparative data devices used to govern academic performance. The devices that make academics encodable and quantifiable force energy outwards and create a world of individuals competing against each other. They foster ‘bashing and killing’ (151), as Le Guin puts it, a constant battle in which there can be only one winner: in this case, the ultimate grant applicant, published scholar or teacher. In contrast to the gripping tales of the Hero, Anki, our experimenter, suggests different ways of curating academic value. First, she changes the sensorium from visuals to sound, which is characterised by another intensity – sound power – that can be felt in the body as vibrating notes and tones, as Anki reflects. To clap is to engage other body parts than the eye. It engages the hands and the ears. Thereby, other senses than the gaze, which is often referred to as an objectifying perpetrator-sense, are enacted. Listening to and following the rhythms of people clapping happens not only through the ears but as an attunement due to our entire sensory system. To clap is to enact the senses that register the rise and fall of haptic and auditory intensities, the senses often associated with a receiving rather than an objectifying mode. Sound has always been a vehicle in power, and it has been used as a tool for governing purposes. But the sound of hands clapping may be transformed from only applause to a possibility of listening. To listen is to become smaller, less rational and more sensational, to fall into the rhythms of the others’ bodies and to let yourself flee and move, to allow yourself to be touched (Barad, 2012). It may turn into the art of developing ears that momentarily suspend meaning, representations and words while privileging sound bites and haptic friction, mutual touch and engagement. And just as it affects the ways of being governed ‘like that’, it also affects the art of ‘governing like that’. Rather than the tale of the Hero curated by visual graphs, numbers and bar charts, the sound of hands clapping unfolds between bodies. One individual does not own the communal clapping. The sound sustains by everybody joining in and engaging in the making of the sound. According to Anki, making this sound is diffracted with other caring ways of collaborating since it includes listening to, rather than looking at, controlling and checking your own and your colleagues’ recent credentials on a website. While the visual devices are designed to perform and direct social and professional behaviour, clapping and listening seem to open the senses and allow critique to become affirmative. The hands clapping and touching each other invite an affective pedagogy in which there is a more haptic curation of academic value: something that carries (to paraphrase Le Guin) and cares.

In an important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing are what matter does, or rather what matter is: matter is condensations of response-ability. Each of us is constituted as responsible for the other, as being in touch with the other (Barad, 2012: 7). Maybe Anki’s description concerns a device bringing affective energy home; a device that touches us as academics in an ethically sound way; something that makes us response-able. Something to carry oneself – and others – in.

‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ is a feminist, affirmative criticism of mainstream storytelling. Le Guin does not say that ‘long, hard objects to bash and kill with’ do not exist, just as we do not argue that data and data visuals do not exist and do not matter. Instead, she questions whether focusing on these objects and their stories is what makes you pass as human, or in our case, as an academic. She argues in favour of making space for other ways of passing that do not entail these objects; ways that do not celebrate the powerful – and willing to kill (individual) Hero, but celebrate and cultivate the embodied connections of knowledge sharing and caring. Le Guin and Anki focus elsewhere and emphasise the stories that are not told, what is being silenced or banished to the margins of grand tales. Thus, each in their own way, they suggest possible ways to speculate about the tendencies for other wor(l)dings and other ways of coming to matter. Thereby, they avoid reducing sensuous data and narratives to mere conflict, competition, struggle, triumph, conquest and death.

Concluding remarks

Taking the inescapability of data within academia as our jumping-off point, our readings of ‘datafication’ became an experiment – a critique beyond criticism in which we looked for tendencies in data matter with the next generation of academics. We addressed ethico-political considerations as to how we might relate differently to data and curate academic value by other means – the more-than-metric, more-than-individual, more-than-representational logics and more-than-representational Is – and thereby change (the mattering of) data from inside the entanglement of data/academic subjectivities. Our focus on the entanglement of affectivity/affects and data matter adds to the existing research on possible ways of grasping new forms of governance in academia. As the initial diagnosis showed, the affective complexes surrounding ‘the moods of data’ need to be addressed as more than merely a private matter.

The experiment and the diffractive reading of Anki’s sound artefact through Le Guin’s carrier bag theory showed how a feminist new materialist critique beyond criticism begins and continues in affective-material-semiotic entanglements. The ‘attitude experimentale’ helped us all in the training session to speculate about, invent and cultivate devices that may motivate academics, value academic performance and bring energy home. In that sense, Anki and the rest of the PhD students contributed with caring and response-able answers to the current datafication of academia, rather than just giving up.

You may term this attitude experimental ‘cruel optimism’, to paraphrase Lauren Berlant (2011), but you may also appreciate how this ‘attitude’ helped us address the possibilities of transforming corporate and neoliberal academia at the structural level through the matter involved in the structural feelings, the moods, that envelop us in ways beyond the subjective level. This may not result in a revolution, but it matters and plants the seed for minor revolts, one baby step at a time.