‘Being TED’

The university intellectual as globalised neoliberal

consumer self
Wesley Shumar

t
Abstract
This article focuses on the ways that modern American universities
are engaged in the process of articulating new producing and consum-
ing subjects. It argues that the image of the engaged ‘media celebrity’
intellectual, as presented in the TED Talk model, has become a cultural
ideal that reconciles a deeper contradiction in the academy. Through a
complex process, university faculty and students are assimilated into
the globalised lifestyle and the identity of cosmopolitans by partici-
pating in a social space that is at once an upscale shopping mall and
at the same time a high tech corporate research park. This global elite
is forged first out of individuals who make it through the university
and then secondly out of those university students who successfully
excel under the twin pressures of elite production and consumption.
Most student, faculty and universities fall short of this ideal. But by
watching TED talks they can aspire to this fantasy ideal through the
image of the media celebrity intellectual.

Keywords
academic identity, commodification of universities, elite academics,
global capitalism, TED Talks

TED began in 1984 as a technology and design conference that was the
idea of Richard Saul Wurman. The acronym stands for Technology, Enter-
tainment and Design. Originally a conference primarily for Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs, TED expanded to include political leaders, academics, phi-
losophers, religious leaders and a host of experts on different aspects of
contemporary society. TED Talks are a product of the conference. Speakers
are limited to a 20-minute time frame. The Talks are done in front of a live
audience at the conference, but then are circulated on the TED website

Learning and Teaching Volume 9, Issue 2, Summer 2016: 89–108 © Berghahn Books
doi: 10.3167/latiss.2016.090205 ISSN 1755-2273 (Print), ISSN 1755-2281 (Online)
 t Wesley Shumar

and now also through YouTube. By the 1990s the TED Conference and the
TED Talks that came out of the conference had become extremely popular
and a much larger enterprise than just a technology conference. Acquired
by British entrepreneur Chris Anderson, TED is now run by the Sapling
Foundation, a non-profit organisation created by Anderson. Not only are
there the regular TED conference presentations, but TED has also spawned
several spinoffs, e.g., TEDx, TEDGlobal, TED-Ed. Currently the main TED
conference is in Vancouver, Canada, with spinoff conferences occurring in
different places. TEDGlobal takes place in the U.K. For many people TED is
a condensed symbol referring to the conference system and the digital video
talks that come out of the conferences. Indeed when one watches a TED
Talk on the website or through YouTube, it is not obvious which conference
that talk came from.
In this article, I am interested primarily in the ways that academics have
been involved in TED either as presenters or those competing to present.
Part of the TED process is to do local talks to gain the attention of TED
organisers at a national or international level. Further, I am interested in
the way that TED ‘hails’ academics to use Althusser’s phrasing. While TED
could be thought of as one of the latest technologies of Althusser’s ideo­
logical state apparatuses, I particularly want to focus on the way that it pro-
duces desirable selves that are packaged and ‘sold’ to an academic audience.
These selves are not only media products but they are also ideal models of
the neoliberal self that set up a particular kind of desiring.1 In other words,
these academics are selling their ideas, their intellectual property, directly
to a buying public. And they are becoming something like media stars in
the process.
While TED was not established primarily for academics, academics
make up a sizeable 21 per cent of the TED talks (Indiana University 2013).
The impact on academia can be very substantial. As the New York Times
reported, when Professor Amy Cuddy did her talk on ‘power poses’ it made
her a superstar with speaking invitations and book contract offers – an
academic’s dream come true (Hochman 2014). In the Silicon Valley culture
people informally call the ‘elite’ of the computing and Internet communities
‘digerati’. William Safire (1992) claimed the first print use of the term was
in a New York Times article in 1992. But informally the term had been used
longer than that. Since members of those communities see the computing
and Internet industries as the pinnacle of Western civilisation, the ‘digerati’
are the elite of the elite, the best of the best. The power of TED is that it

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extends the notion of who can be digerati from computing and Internet
industry people to those in myriad professions, including even introverted
academics. Pierre Bourdieu (1988) suggested that university professors are
part of the dominant class in society because they have a lot of cultural
and symbolic capital. However, unlike other professions, they do not have
a lot of economic power and for Bourdieu this made them a dominated
fraction of the dominant class. One thing that is particularly interesting for
university professors is that TED talks garner them symbolic (and maybe
even economic) capital that is convertible among a much larger audience
than just other colleagues in the university. In this way it has a tremendous
entrepreneurial potential for academics.
In order to situate TED for an academic audience it is important to think
about the cultural transformations that have been going on in universities
over the last forty years. As universities have become more commodified,
they have called for faculty to have a very different sense of their identities
within these institutions. In fact, one cannot appreciate the importance
of TED as an identity model for university professors, without looking
at this larger history of cultural transformation. At a point in the early
2000s, faculty longed to be TED, TED was a cultural ideal. Many faculty
put together TED talks and began the process of giving their talks at lower
levels and encouraging their friends and fellow faculty members to vote
their talk up on the TED site hoping to make it to a TED talk and then
ideally hoping to be a top TED talk. I had many conversations at my uni-
versity with people who were envious of local academics who had a TED
presence and who supported colleagues who were trying to get attention
for the TED videos. And even as the excitement may be dwindling among
academics, in that they no longer desire to ‘be TED’ as strongly as maybe
they did a few years ago, the principle importance of TED as a model for
the academic self is still a very important issue.
TED talks are a media product, and as such they are a product that reifies
individuals promoting a version of their identities that can be packaged.
The question becomes what kind of media image do academics want to
have? Do they wish to be the successful capitalist trading on their media
image for the creation of wealth for themselves? Or do they want to have
a different kind of media image, one that proposes different kinds of value
and one that increases everyone’s wealth in ways other than monetary?
This alternative image of the university professor who is the skilful teacher
and mentor, the thoughtful researcher, collaborative colleague, is an image

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that is barely seen any more. And it is not valued by universities that are
looking to increase grant funding and raise awareness of the university as
an important site for economic development.
TED allows the academic to reify the self in very important ways. At one
level, TED is part of the commodification of the university. But for the most
part TED is tangential to the university. The role it plays in the commodi-
fication of the university is that it gives faculty new ways to think about
selling themselves, as a commodity, to a consuming public. And this con-
suming public is different from the traditional ways that academics increase
their social worth. Like all employees, academics become commodities in
the Marxist sense, in that they sell their labour power to their employers.
Originally universities were not commodity-producing institutions and the
kind of labour power faculty sold was based more on a guild or appren-
ticeship model. But over the course of the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first century, state support of the institutions of higher education has
declined in many parts of the world, and universities have been encouraged
to be businesses selling education as a ‘product’ in the marketplace. Before
returning to TED, I will overview the process of the commodification of the
university.

Universities and cultural change

The commodification of higher education in the United States has gone
through three phases so far. Each of these phases corresponds to develop­
ments in post–Second World War capitalism in the West and has been
talked about extensively by contemporary social and cultural theorists.
While these three phases followed each other chronologically in the U.S.A.,
in other parts of the world they are much more overlapping and more like
three ‘planes’ of transformation.2 This is now also true in the U.S.A. as
earlier phases of commodification are still interacting with later ones. So
I will refer these phases of commodification as moments, in Althusser’s
sense of theoretical moments, not just particular moments in time. These
moments do unfold through time but they overlap and develop at different
rates of speed in different places. These phases of university commodi­
fication are important for academic identity formation. As Butler (1997)
following Althusser (1971) suggests, we are ‘hailed’ as subjects. And that
calling out happens with a particular name in particular eras, and hence we

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are defined by the era. I shall briefly underscore this point after overviewing
each moment.
The first moment of higher education’s commodification happened in
the 1960s and 1970s when the expansion of higher education in the U.S.
was connected to the politics of the Cold War and the economics of higher
education were linked to the golden age of American capitalism. As that
expansion came to an end and the first big crisis of overproduction of the
postwar period began, higher education saw its resources and its market for
students contract. The response to this situation was to define education as
a product that needed to be sold in a segmented and stratified marketplace
(Slaughter and Leslie 1997). The response was to transform faculty into
labour and then to de-skill and reduce payment to that labour force by
increasingly using casualised labour and creating a dual market of highly
paid permanent faculty and low-paid temporary faculty (Shumar 1997).
This set of transformations created something of a legitimacy crisis for
higher education. As education became reified and sold more as a product
and less as a set of essential educational relationships, a series of social
questions began to emerge. First, what was the value of this product, this
credential? Did it only have sign value, value as a credential, or did it indeed
have some kind of greater utility (Collins 1979)? Second, if this was now a
consumer industry and the student was the customer, in what way was ‘the
customer always right?’ This first phase did not occur in Europe, Asia and
other places at the same time because most other countries still had intact
state funding for higher education and they were not yet moving to the
market model. However, the amount of state funding for higher education in
Europe, the U.K. and other places was starting to be cut back at this point.
We can think of this first moment as defining the professor as huckster.3
In 1997, Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Vir-
ginia, wrote playfully in Harpers about the meaning of students enjoying his
course on Freud. He suggested that such a course should not be amusing.
But that indeed it was his job to entertain those students and that there was
a dynamic tension between the professing of ideas and the edutainment of
the modern young adult middle class. In many cultures across the world,
professors have to navigate the tensions between entertaining their students
enough to get high marks on student evaluations or to be rated highly
on professor ranking sites, but at the same time appear rigorous enough
to satisfy their colleagues, department heads and deans. These pressures

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are the kinds of things that start to threaten the legitimacy of a university
course and a university education.
The second moment of the commodification of higher education cor-
responded to the rise of the information society in the 1980s and 1990s.
Increasingly during this period, as the Comaroffs (2000) discuss in ‘Mil-
lennial Capitalism’, production and consumption were becoming linked
in ways that made it harder to separate them. Speculation was becom-
ing a critical part of growth and fuelled the development of zones of the
knowledge economy based in the new soft productions of the information
society. Universities were central to the idea of knowledge economy zones
and they played a critical role in the development of what Ritzer and Jur-
genson (2010) call prosumption, the spaces where workers lived, produced
and consumed. These knowledge zones where production and consump-
tion merged were vastly different from the spaces where more traditional
forms of industrial production were done. They were also different from the
consumer society that grew up after the Second World War. In that older
structure of modernity, production, distribution and consumption were
clearly separated spaces and activities. But now production and consump-
tion are merged activities as well as merged spaces. Ironically many of these
prosumer spaces used older factories in urban spaces to create the loft living
spaces that also have offices and shops in them. In this moment, the uni-
versity town came to replace the factory town as the model for productivity.
And as software companies began to look like universities, universities
increasingly came to resemble a cross between a corporate research park,
a shopping mall and a country club (Shumar 2008). Indeed in the U.S. and
many other countries, we are still deeply involved in this second moment
of the commodification of the university as many universities, including my
own, have major building projects going on to re-structure the social space
in ways that allow the prosumer identity to flourish (Ritzer and Jurgenson
2010). Perhaps Stanford University has emerged as the ultimate example of
this model. Linked closely to the technology companies and development
of Silicon Valley, Stanford represents a kind of elite corporate structure of
future universities, one where the cultural capital of a TED talk might find
greater resonance. Another thing to be said about this second moment in
the commodification of the university is that several larger and more power-
ful universities have become the drivers of regional economic development.
No longer an ivory tower, the university is central to regional economic
development (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). This is true not only in the

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U.S.A. but in several other countries as well. In Britain, policymakers are

very aware that in order for a region to become a leader in development it
should both focus on some area of advanced technological development and
there should be a university partner.
In this second moment, where the university is transformed into a cor-
porate research park, and the university town replaces the factory town
as a cultural ideal, academic identity, as an elite knowledge worker, is an
important image. As we will discuss in more detail later, research is defined
as that which is economically valuable, and status is defined by having
high profile grants and being able to contribute products or at least ideas
for products in the knowledge economy. Here the neoliberal transformation
of the self becomes more complete. Gone is the image of the university
professor as village pastor, or as intellectual hidden away in the ivory tower.
University researchers are now a central part of the capital accumulation
process, and their intellectual property plays a critical role in the knowledge
economy. The identity work that the modern American university faculty
member engages in is the work of becoming a cosmopolitan consumer
and producer. This model is meritocratic and allows the image of a sort of
equity to be articulated in the process of individuals taking up these subject
positions. However, a deeper inequity is articulated in this system, as not
everyone can be an elite knowledge worker. As Castells points out in The
Information Society, cosmopolitans have remained consistent at about 13
per cent of the population and while the global system benefits the cosmo­
politan elite, most academics do not fall into that category.
The third moment of the commodification of the university overlaps with
phases one and two and we could refer to this as commodification meets
audit (Shore and Wright 2000). Another way to think about this theoreti-
cally is that the commodification of culture has been part of a neoliberal
agenda that in the U.S. really began in the 1970s with calls for cutting
taxes, reducing the size of government bureaucracy and at the same time
strengthening the state, especially in areas that supported the expansion
of capital accumulation (Harvey 2000). While the regular use of the term
‘neoliberalism’ has only been more recent, that is perhaps because the neo-
liberalising project has reached a kind of critical mass in the new millen-
nium. We can think of neoliberalism as a term that captures a particular
set of contradictions, rather than just as a name for the free market. On the
one hand, the continued global expansion of the consumer economy is part
of the neoliberal system. Tearing down borders to allow the free exchanges

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of goods and services around the globe is an ideal of most consumer capi-
talist industries. And at the same time, the massive quantity of goods and
services that need to be produced to fuel this global appetite should be done
as efficiently and with as little regulation as possible but also done in a way
to avoid crisis. The neoliberal economic project of global consumer capital-
ist expansion comes into direct confrontation with the logic of neoliberal
market discipline. In other words, the growth of speculative development
and hedonistic consumption fuelled by a speculative market has produced a
twin crisis, both requiring audit. One crisis is a crisis of deregulation, weak
and fraudulent underwriting and predatory lending. The second crisis is the
result of the first – debt. If frivolous unchecked and unregulated expansion
has produced lying and cheating, it has also produced debt. And debts need
to be reduced by controlling spending and making sure that we get our
money’s worth for what has been produced. In the university this has meant
a questioning of the knowledge produced and the quality of the instruction
to the next generation of workers. Have students received their money’s
worth? And it has recently raised the question of whether it is worth it (to
consumers) to borrow all this money for a questionable service.
This third and most recent phase has produced highly contradictory and
fraught identities. On the one hand there is nostalgia for the well-established
professor of old, from a day where scholarship was not so closely tied to the
market and research was truly curiosity-driven. On the other hand there
are winners and losers in the new marketplace of academic ideas. We will
discuss these more recent identities in more detail below.

TED as identity model

While there are a number of forces pressuring for new academic identi-
ties, none of them is more glamorous, exciting and potentially valuable
than TED. What TED does is allow the academic (as well as other knowl-
edge workers) to present themselves as a business selling a product, and
of course the product is themselves. In an era when many families and
policymakers are calling for university education to be more practical and
lead to a good job in exchange of high tuition costs, TED offers academics
a way to discuss how their product or service has immediate market appli-
cability. And finally TED is a thoroughly modern media product. It takes
interesting entrepreneurs and interesting ideas and makes their 20-minute
video product available in a wide range of venues. Both for those fortunate

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enough to get a ticket to attend a TED event in person in one of the global
locations and for those who watch TED talks of all kinds on a phone, tablet
or computer, TED is a world of ideas at one’s fingertips.
A discussion of the TED talks of two academics in more detail will show
the potential impact of TED on the academic identity. Amy Cuddy’s 2012
TED Global talk, mentioned above, is an ideal example of a university faculty
TED talk. In the talk she discusses research on what she calls ‘power poses’.
The talk is based on research in psychology and shows that the movement of
the body seems to have an effect on affect and cognition. As Cuddy tells us,
if you hold a pencil in your mouth it forces you to smile. And the fact that
you are smiling will make you feel better. After sharing with us some of this
cutting edge research and its implications for human improvement, Cuddy
then tells us she was a kind of unwitting subject in some of this research.
She was in a horrible automobile accident and had some significant cognitive
impairment after being thrown from a car. She was a college student at the
time and fought her way all the way back to a PhD programme at Princeton.
But she tells her audience that she suffered from impostor syndrome and
felt she did not really deserve to be a PhD. Before a major presentation her
advisor suggested she ‘fake it’ even though she felt she could not do it and
should quit. She found faking it worked. Much later at Harvard Business
School she met a student who also felt she did not deserve to be there. Cuddy
realised she was looking at herself, and she advised the student to fake it.
The thing Cuddy tells us about power poses is that they change how we feel
about ourselves and how we look to others. When we fake it, we become the
thing we fake. At this point some audience members appear to have tears in
their eyes, and they are clapping. This is a very powerful story.
What makes this a good TED talk? First, the theoretical ideas she pre-
sents have immediate practical application. Second, these ideas lead to
practices that can be shared and can be used directly to improve anyone’s
life, especially in terms of getting things that individuals might want. Third,
Cuddy’s personal life story, and her own struggle back from debilitating
injury are a direct link to the theory and the ideas she is promoting. Fourth,
she is a very likable and appealing presenter. She has a good, on-camera,
presence. The ideas that Cuddy presents resonate in this neoliberal milieu.
As Ilana Gershon (2011) says in her article on ‘neoliberal agency’, in this
moment everyone is a business and everything is a business. Cuddy has
become herself a small business and the techniques she encourages are the
products she is selling.

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Further, Cuddy herself is a commodity we want to buy. In 2014, the New

York Times reported that Cuddy’s TED talk was the second most viewed
TED of all time (Hochman 2014). We want a piece of what makes her great,
even heroic. Cuddy has presented herself as a reified package that can be
consumed. But not only in video form, we can buy her book that the New
York Times tells us will come out sometime next year or we can hope to
get her to participate in a speaking engagement at our institution. Cuddy
embodies the ideal of what TED can be, the academic who is powerful,
assured, has an admiring public and can sell herself and her ideas to a
larger education world. It is the academic’s neoliberal dream. It inspires us
to long to be TED.
The second TED talk we will discuss is by Dan Gilbert who is a very
interesting model of the successful university professor. He is a Harvard
psychologist, presenter of one of the top twenty most popular TED talks as
well as a couple of other TED talks. Gilbert’s TED talk exudes the kind of
power positions that Cuddy talks about. He is relaxed and expansive. He is
very casual in jeans, tee shirt and walking shoes. And his clothing is not
designer jeans and tee-shirt, but just the kind of working-man clothing that
has come to exemplify successful, status-secure males in today’s academic
culture of the social sciences.
Gilbert’s work on happiness is very fascinating. He points out that his
research, and the research of others has shown that we are very bad at
predicting our own happiness, and at setting up the conditions for our
own happiness. First, Gilbert shows us that whether people have had
a very positive experience or a very tragic experience, after time has
passed both individuals will tend to report a similar level of happiness
with their lives.
He then moves on to talk about an experiment that his group did, where,
in a course on photography, students produced two photographs and they
were allowed to keep one. In the first group the students had to decide
right away and their decision was final. One photograph was taken away
from them and they got to keep the other. The second group had four days
to change their minds on which photograph they would like to keep. The
result was that the first group was happy with their choice but the second
group, no matter whether they stuck with their original choice or switched
before the four-day window was up, was less happy with their choices. Gil-
bert’s point here is that the constraint produces contentment and the choice
leads the individual always to second-guess. Did I make the right choice?

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But even further, Gilbert tells us that when individuals were told about
this course and asked which one they would want to take – the course
where they had to make a decision right away about which photograph
they would get or the course where there was some room to change your
mind – most people chose the second situation, the one that would lead to
greater unhappiness.
In the neoliberal era, Gilbert’s research seems to have a lot of applicabil-
ity. In a moment when we are all being encouraged to see ourselves as our
own business (Gershon 2011), and responsible for our retirement, health,
income and well-being, being able to make good choices and avoid the
pitfalls of greater unhappiness appears to be a very important skill. Gilbert
has become something of a media star too beyond his talks on the TED site;
he is the spokesperson for a series of television commercials for Prudential.
The theme of each of these commercials is that choices we make now can
greatly affect our retirement funds, what we do in our lives and, of course,
our overall happiness. One commercial was aired during the 2013 Super
Bowl. The spot itself cost about four millions dollars. In this spot individu-
als in Austin, Texas were asked to participate in an ‘experiment’ where they
placed a post-it on a large wall indicating how old they expected to live.
Participants then reflected on the idea that people are living longer and they
need to save more for retirement. While not really an experiment, Gilbert
said that he got involved because he was interested in people thinking about
the future and he knows that we tend to discount the future. The Prudential
pension fund, of course, hopes that we will all think more about the future,
imagine ourselves as living longer and invest more money with Prudential.
Gilbert’s concerns as a well-meaning social psychologist seem to line up
nicely with Prudential’s, and all fit well into Gershon’s notion of neoliberal
agency. I shall return to neoliberal agency later in the article but first I will
situate the discussion of these leading TED talks within the recent context
of academic identity formation.

Academic identity and global capitalism

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in academics and
their identity formation. This is especially the case as neoliberal and new
managerial policies are having a real impact on the academic imaginary
and the trajectories that individual academics follow (Archer 2008; Clarke,
Hyde and Drennan 2013; Harris 2005; Mills and Berg 2010). Mills and Berg

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(2010: 334–5), looking at the field of anthropology in Great Britain, comment

upon the evolving contradiction between the nineteenth-century ideology
of a ‘republic of letters’ and the development of the intellectual self and the
developing marketisation of higher education in Britain. This tension is
fuelled not only by a sense of loss but the obscuring of the fact that the older
notion of a ‘culture of letters’ depended on the invisible mechanisms of a
class-based patriarchy which guaranteed this privilege of a small number
of individuals. This is not their point, but it is the case that marketisation/
commodification and massification are themselves a contradictory pair that
unfold over time together.
While traditionally academic identity was formed primarily in relation-
ship to one’s field of expertise as well as along a life-course path, current
rapid changes have a significant impact on the arena in which these iden-
tities develop. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of field, the traditional dis-
tribution of resources and power within the academic field has changed
dramatically. All of the authors cited above are very aware that an emphasis
on a more market-based education has devalued traditional powerful areas
of the liberal arts. And this change in the value of educational capital and
power relations has caused many academics to seek to redefine their fields
and their expertise (Barnett 2013; Delanty 2001; Harris 2005; Marginson
and Considine 2000). And while there may be continuity with traditional
forms of academic identity in particular fields, the current era has expe­
rienced the influence of the different phases of commodification, marketi­
sation and neoliberalisation. Finally, as these traditional areas in the liberal
arts decline in academic power and prestige, there has also been a resultant
increase in the use of casualised labour and a loss of permanent academic
positions in these fields.
Archer (2008), for instance, talks about the myriad ways that younger
academics in the U.K. are pressed by neoliberal policies, and how their
identities are influenced by marketising and auditing pressures. She holds
out hope of people’s ability to take some advantage of this situation (a
thought I will return to later) but acknowledges the tremendous shift in
academic lives. Harris (2005), also working in the U.K., shows the impact
of ‘economised’ language on academic identities. As she points out, our
definitions of democracy have shifted from political ones to economic ones.
Democracy is not so much a matter of choosing one’s own destiny but rather
a choice between options. Likewise, research is increasingly being valued,
and even defined, by work that is directly applicable to the market. This

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has a very big impact on what is professional knowledge and what it takes
to be a high-status professor.
Outside of higher education, anthropologists have struggled to under-
stand the importance of identity in the global system and why issues of
identity multiplied in different contexts and in different ways. In their essay
‘Millennial Capitalism’, John and Jean Comaroff (2000) prophetically dis-
cussed the spinning of speculative millennial capitalism and how it was
destined to hit a crisis. Part of their argument focuses on the two forces of
identity production, which they pose as a problem. First, in the development
of global capitalism there are the forces of a political imaginary, which high-
light ethnic and gender identities as a site of conflict and so political projects
are organised more around identity politics than say traditional class-based
politics. The second force of identity production is the process of global con-
sumer capitalism and the drive to produce commodified subjects in a global
marketplace. At times these forces that press on identity production overlap
in interesting and unexpected ways. Part of the production of commodi-
fied subjects is the production of the above-discussed prosumer identity, a
force that is felt more by global elites, although many others experience the
merging of production and consumption (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010). While
as Castells (2010) points out, elites as a group have not grown in the global
system and continue to be only a small part of the urban populations in
global cities, nevertheless academics are encouraged to be these prosumer
global elites (or look like them), as universities take up a larger place in the
knowledge economy and as knowledge and information are pressed to exist
primarily in commodified forms by neoliberal ideologies.
One thing the Comaroffs find profound about this is that class, identified
as a primary identity in industrial capitalism, is somehow erased from the
double articulation of identity in the contemporary neoliberal global scene.
The Comaroffs state:

We seek, here, to interrogate the experiential contradictions at the core

of neoliberal capitalism, of capitalism in its millennial manifestation:
the fact that it appears both to include and to marginalize in unantici-
pated ways; to produce desire and expectation on a global scale … yet
to decrease the certainty of work or the security of persons; to magnify
class differences but to undercut class consciousness; above all, to offer
up vast, almost instantaneous riches to those who master its spectral
technologies – and, simultaneously, to threaten the very existence of
those who do not (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 298).

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At the same time, as the Comaroffs again point out, elites are becoming
more separated in space and time from the workers in the global system. No
longer living in the same social space in clear class relations, they are half a
world away from where the increasingly exploitative industrial or even pre-
industrial productive processes are going on. They go on to point out that
these elites, so separated from the processes of production happening on a
global scale, have become the ideal consumer of these global products. We
might update that insight by following Ritzer and Jorgansen’s argument that
elites have become global prosumers, caught up in processes where produc-
tion and consumption have significantly overlapped. This is an important
part of the second phase of the commodification of the university discussed
above. It involves the production of spaces where faculty and students can
live out prosumer lives and experience their identities in these ways.
Of course, while elites might be imagined as the ideal type of the en­
lightened, self-actualised producer and consumer, we are all imagined and
we imagine ourselves as commodified subjects. A neoliberal subject in
Gershon’s (2011) sense is a subject who carries themselves as a business
and interacts with other businesses in a self-maximising rational way. This
subject exists in an individualised market reality where all sense of scale
and the social are eliminated, all subjects are considered of equal scale be
they global corporations or human individuals. Like Ritzer and Jurgenson
(2010), the Comaroffs (2000) point out this consuming subject, the cor-
porate executive whose interests are the interests of the corporation, will
return from their productive activities throughout the globe to their elite
lives in a global city where their condo is located in the heart of the best that
consumer capitalism can buy. This dialectical contradiction of the reified
self, the prosumer who is consuming, and consumed, object and subject, is
to some extent reconciled by the image of TED. TED allows for the imagina-
tion of an elite knowledge worker, who is consumer and consumed, and
has become part of the media spectacle, at the same time as they become a
venture that might be very profitable.

Neoliberal agency and TED as identity model

Universities have always played a central role in symbolic production and
reproduction. They have critically articulated various knowledges and new
technologies for the development of advanced capitalism. In America by
Design the historian David Noble (1977) did a wonderful job showing how

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universities played that role throughout the twentieth century and why
they became important sites for creative symbolic work, away from the
more instrumental and disciplining spaces of the factory and corporate
headquarters. With examples like the Bell Labs, Noble shows the begin-
ning of the process of the university town becoming the substitute for the
factory town. With the rise of consumer capitalism and the information
revo­lution, symbolic production not only reaches its pinnacle in impor-
tance but researchers, faculty, administrators and others become very self-
conscious about the tremendous importance of symbolic production. So
much so that by the 1990s, as Richard Florida (2012) points out, urban
development no longer depended on the building of stadiums and sports
arenas to lure companies and workers to a town but now required cafés,
craft breweries and music and art venues to draw the culturally creative
symbolic analysts into town.
Scholars on the left, even as they critique these forces, have also been
an important part of the process of symbolic production. There is no easy
way to get outside of the dialectics of objectification in late capitalism. On
the one hand many scholars have been critical of capitalism and its more
brutal effects, but on the other hand they have helped to play an important
role in the production of the image of academic elites and the creation
of the academic as cultural hero, an image that TED plays upon. Many
left-leaning scholars are heroes who sell books or lectures simply because
they are big names that people want to be associated with – in a word they
are stars. In this powerful ideological apparatus of the university, ‘TEDs’
are hailed as the radical chic and become cultural icons to be consumed
by the intelligentsia of the society. In the pages of the New York Review of
Books and the New York Times, left elite academics pose as critics of the
system but embody a form of symbolic producer that all could desire. Pre-
cursors to the modern hipster, these left academics have become pessimistic
about their ability to affect change and so they ironically mock their own
political positions and intentions. In the 1990s many took the form of the
postmodernist, critical and nihilistic. In the 2000s many took the form of
the poststructuralist, a return to an earlier moment of symbolic critique at
the dawn of the consumer era.
Be they media corporate executives returning to NYC from Mumbai or
elite leftist intellectuals returning from home from global conferences, these
symbolic producers are themselves object as well as consuming subject.
This is what Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010) call the prosumer, they are both

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consumer and producer wrapped into one identity. It is in this historical

context that we encounter the TED speaker. In one very savvy and hip mar-
keting move, TED has come to be the imagination of what the university
could be in the future, what the university should be, and what academics
should all desire to be. Everyone wants to give a TED talk! We all know
people who have given TED talks. Many in U.S. universities have competed
to be part of TED. Our universities have sponsored training so that the best
of us, the most interesting of us, can be groomed, supported, voted for and
hopefully in the grandest and most noble of quest, become forever reified
in digits as a TED talk.
Just as most workers are not cosmopolitan elite prosumers living in
expensive lofts in global cities and travelling the world, not every academic
is an elite intellectual who has a public voice. In fact the vast majority of
academics have part-time jobs, and even those who have full-time jobs
spend more time doing the teaching and service that keep the system afloat
that, among other things, makes a space for that veneer of elite intellectuals
who we hear on public radio, read in the Times Higher Education or see
in TED talks. And as Harris (2005) and Archer (2008) have argued, those
academics are pressured by a neoliberal system (that includes the offices
of research, their department heads, their vice chancellors or provosts)
that asks them to define themselves, their research, their identity and their
value as scholars in market terms. Are they doing things that have eco-
nomic value? Are they contributing to their students’ future employment?
How can they justify themselves and their jobs? This is a system of double
disenfranchisement. They are both not elite academics with a public voice
and they are queried about their social value – what are they contributing
to the economy? In this contradictory context, TED does some interesting
work. TED mythically reconciles these contradictions as it hails us all to
become better than we are by imagining ourselves as stars on the stage
of TED.

Conclusion
It is important to look dialectically at TED, its implication for academics,
and the neoliberal moment in general. Just when the neoliberal ideology
seems to have such a strong grip on the academy, there is a thriving move-
ment of craft-oriented entrepreneurs in the world who seem to be producing
other forms of value in the heart of the global consumer capitalist system.

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TED itself is a product of this contradictory moment. It is a non-profit

organisation. TED Talks are the resultant product of the TED Conferences.
The revenues from conference proceedings and donations allow TED to dis-
tribute the videos on YouTube for free. There is a wealth of information and
good ideas presented in these talks, they are a tremendous resource. And
the Internet and other advanced information technology make their distri-
bution simple and easy. In some ways they are like other self-organising
online communities that exist through generalised reciprocity where people
contribute to the whole with no thought of repayment. Because people
contribute to the wellbeing of all, with resources that are infinitely renew-
able, the community becomes richer with each contribution. But unlike
other self-organised online communities, TED also lives off elitist notions
of advanced consumer capitalism. TED talks are not just interesting and
valuable because they have good or useful ideas but they are also the ideas
of elites who university faculty might desire to be or be close to. The social
symbolic capital of these elites who are invited to give TED Talks increases,
as does that of TED itself because it is associated with high-status individu-
als. It is classically an example of how status works. Elites associate with
other elites and this enhances their status. Further TED presenters literally
might become rich from the effects of their media presence on TED through
increased sales of their books or going on the lecture circuit.
If we think outside the specific context of TED and TED talks, this con-
tradictory moment in global capitalism is one where neoliberal ideology
is dominant. But if we just critique the neoliberal as scholars, we might
serve to reinforce that ideology and its hegemony. The critique, if done by a
prominent scholar could itself become a TED Talk that would have similar
potential of increasing status and selling the author. In her work on Venture
Labor, Gina Neff (2012) tries to straddle this tension by talking about the
new media workers in New York’s ‘Silicon Alley’ before the dot com crash.
Workers there were taking on greater personal risk as entrepreneurs and
competing with entities of much larger scale than themselves. But to some
extent they were successful at bringing new kinds of value to the media
economy and creating goods and services that were not based on the tradi-
tional notions of scarcity but accessible to lots of people very inexpensively.
In 2015 we could argue there is a global craft economy that is doing some of
the same things. And these new entrepreneurs, be they environmentalists,
or clothing designers, or beer producers might be positively pointing a way
forward beyond the neoliberal.

105 \
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In that context, TED is both positively entrepreneurial in that it is a ‘pro-

social’ force, but it also reinforces stereotypical notions of entrepreneurship.
And most importantly for academics, it creates a role model and an identity
that, rather than being critical of the current moment, is only partly creative
in seeking new ways forward; it creates an identity of the academic as a
successful business and producer of knowledge goods for a global capitalist
economy. I might suggest that TED embodies this contradiction in that its
model of production is based on scarcity (only the best and the brightest
can rise to the top) while its distribution is based on plentitude (everyone
can have TED talks for free). If academics were able to embrace the TED
model, but build talks that were based on a different, less competitive, more
cooperative model, coupled with free Internet distribution, that might really
be something.

t
Wesley Shumar is an educational anthropologist at Drexel University
in Philadelphia, PA. His research has focused on higher education,
digital and online education and ethnographic evaluation in educa-
tion. He is author of College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification
of Higher Education and the forthcoming Inside Mathforum.org: Analy-
sis of an Internet-based Education Community.
Email: shumarw@drexel.edu

Notes
1. I would like to make several caveats at this point. First, university professors are only
one fragment of that larger TED audience. Second, I am very aware of the way digital
media have transformed mass media and so we are no longer simple consumers of these
ideologies that hail us but are in fact active participants in the production and consumption
of the products. Like the worker who makes herself into a commodity to sell her labour
power, TED allows us to become the objects of our desire.
2. For a related and interesting analysis that focuses more on Australian universities, see
Marginson and Considine (2000). Also see, Davies, Gottsche and Bansel (2006). For a
perspective from Denmark and the U.K. see Wright and Boden (2011).
3. The image of the huckster is that of a door-to-door sales person or a small purveyor. In
North America this term has taken on a negative connotation as someone who is selling
something of questionable value.

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