A non-representational autoethnography of protoacademic desire in the 3rd-century Industrial Society
An installation by Alessandro Graciotti and Alessia Derudas
A consumer friendly abstract (an invite to consume this space)
This installation is a ‘non-representational autoethnography’ in that it takes the music, feelings, and experiences of my pre- and post-doctoral academic identity-making and turns them into an ethnographic representation of my ‘self’ that aims to disentangle itself from any subjection and enslavement to the oppressive, capitalist relations produced by (proto)academic desire in the 3rd-century Industrial Society. My co-author (Alessia) and I (Alessandro) are asking visitors to become part of this story by engaging with the image of academic precarity that we are painting.
The premise is simple: Alessia and I are investigating what it means to become an 'academic' in a world shaped by capitalism. Beginning from the experience of academic uncertainty (one may even have a permanent contract and yet keep on struggling to feel like an ‘academic’ who belongs - hence why I talk about 'protoacademic desire' in relation to both pre- and post-doc subjects), the work examines how universities produce research commodities (us) to use before an end date. At least, that is how academic workplaces feel like.
I will refer to something we call the норка: a burrow, shelter, hidden room, and mobile refuge. Written in Cyrillic to preserve its partial opacity, the норка names a space of resistance in continuous variation (one academic battle after another) against the institutional forces that turn academic life into a deathly (or ‘life-denying’) process of commodification. It is both a response to the academic job market and a psychic energy grounded method for surviving it (those who fuel and thrive in office politics do not need a норка - they have palaces). норка -based nomadism will get you from one more-or-less precarious academic job to another; nomadism can also help you get from an abstract, oppressive mental state to a safer space made of allies. Music is one of these allies: music will be used as bibliographical references.
The installation (i.e., the норка) includes a CD player and an original soundtrack composed during my (Alessandro's) PhD; it is how we feel the норка sounds like. Visitors are invited to listen, read through the content on this website, and anonymously contribute songs that sustained them through their own rites of (academic) passage (e.g., a PhD, a postdoc, a first lecturer post). These contributions form a collective playlist - we certainly do not wish to be the bluetooth speaker gatekeepers at our own party (if so, we would own palaces): a bottom-up act of placemaking that transforms individual precarity into shared resonance.
The норка thus becomes a bonus level within academic life: hidden, fragile, and unfinished, yet capable of always opening nomadic ‘someplace else’-s. Songs submitted by visitors will be included in an anonymous, public playlist and will be used in the future to extend this story so that it becomes every contributor's own account of academic precarity.
Introduction ↔ Conclusion: Droplets of an event
Italy is the country that I love. Here I have my roots, my hopes, my horizons (Berlusconi, 1994)
Instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it (Deleuze, 1994: 28)
This is the paratactic story of a PhD student’s rite of passage in what we (tentatively) define as the 3rd-century Industrial Society (ca. 1950-2050), which we (tentatively)^2 define as follows (e.g., Adorno, 1968):
I disappeared with Harley Warren in some pre-doc swamp (Lovecraft, 1925) and came out of it an unemployed PhD candidate on benefits. A Kafkaesque trial in a Kafkaesque burrow, lost in castration. How can anyone be entangled in such stubbornness that desires an academic career? “The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire” (Lacan, 1992: 319).
This is, however, that stubbornness which helped me overcome my own symbolic disintegration (or so my psychoanalyst said). I could not stay put. I had to become ‘nomader’ and start ambushing the ‘othering’ space of current protoacademic subjectification (i.e., continuous unemployment or an eternal series of both psychic and existential states of precarity). Every power-lifting rite of passage starts with deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) - a spatial landslide within and against deathly power relations (e.g., Brighenti, 2010). And so did mine, and still does: I have sought ‘academicness’ in an oppressive present that keeps on actualising the bleakest future - the more one tries to settle in ‘academic’ territory, the more one turns one’s life into a wasteland; an object for a way bigger and neoliberal subject - i.e., contemporary ‘academia’ / the Institution - to thrive.
Academicness requires movement (dear academic, how many times have you needed to settle elsewhere?), and movement towards, within, and away from precarity is a traumatic encounter with the reality of the Institution - which we (tentatively)^3 define as the encounter with metaphysical nihilism, turning you into a commodity: “I and I/In the reality/I feel so strange/Reality comes” (DAF, 1981; translated by the authors). De/territorialising nihilism - or your commodification into a lifeless fog - is not fun, nor is going ‘beyond the pale’ (Experimental Audio Research, 1996) in the 3rd-century Industrial Society. But it is a requirement for escaping the abyss... at least for the time being: meeting a Nietzschean trickster on a rainy night in June, with stone mushrooms in my pockets, gifted to me by a Yoruba deity while sleeping on a sofa in sound houses (Spectrum, 1997), whose sounds I (Alessandro) left in the CD player and whose walls I (Alessia) re-erected in this pop-up white space (if you are not currently physically visiting the installation, please see this webpage for reference).
“Travel always gets me” (My Bloody Valentine, 1988) – and so I travelled. Not necessarily by ambulating. A fast and furious war machine against the solid state of my symptoms of precarity (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), dancing the synthome (Lacan, 1976) to the rhythm of actions turning my ‘self’ against new (yet familiar) reactions that keep my ‘self’ in check: dominant, dysfunctional academic codes and conventions are treated as foreign as I integrate allies and alloys - creating new modes of (proto)academic behaviour in the 3rd-century Industrial Society. And all of this, it seems, just to survive.
Should participating in protoacademic desire always mean being on the move? Again, the only thing one can truly be blamed for is compromising or abandoning one’s own desire (Lacan, 1992). I found that, for academicness to follow beyond paranoid survivalism, ‘I’ had to become ‘someplace else’ (Cheval Sombre, 2012): a subject-in-process continuously (re-)generating alternatives within and against the production and consumption of “unconscious investment[s] of a fascist or reactionary type” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977, p. 105) - which characterise our beloved academia in the 3rd-century Industrial Society.
Not merely to confront, but also to exceed "the immediate conditions we inhabit” (Braidotti, 2022: 7), I understand that I must keep moving – becoming-other than a 'death-by-academia' outcome as I am being shaped by an other concept or image of 'academicness' that defuses “psychocosmic catastrophe[s]”(Battiato, 1998 – translated by the authors), decoupling my ‘self’ from “fitter/happier/more productive” territorialising refrains (Radiohead, 1997).
Unsafe European homes { The burrow-норка^i
That small, interior world widened as I learned its names and its boundaries; as I discovered new refuges and ambushes in its miniature woods and jungles (Thomas, 1943)
As of December 2024, there are two recorded wins for the blue dog; one done through an extremely rare glitch and the other done through intentional mix-maxing (Zelda Wiki, 2025)
When confronted with nihilism (sbam!), one should strive to furnish a space devoid of desire, guided by the rhythm of life-affirming (re-)creation. For nomadic subjects, this means (tentatively)4 actualising a virtual space where a new ‘self’ might re-assemble into ‘someplace else’. Protoacademic desire becomes revolutionary for a (proto)academic life long repressed: “it ain’t no fiction what I believe!” (Alec Empire, 2001).
Protoacademic desire, seize the burrow of 3rd-century Industrial Society ‘academicness’, dig multiple entries and exits, and keep re-creating new enclaves – other-burrows whose rooms and landmarks are always on the move. For if “the executioner disappears without my reprisal, always on the verge of presence” (Uochi Toki, 2010b – translated by the authors) my direction’s undetected.
Thus, the burrow becomes the норка, which is itself a burrow - but also an Ohm Sweet Ohm (Kraftwerk, 1975): a form of electrical resistance against the denial of life affirmation; against that which seeks, for instance, to diminish some people's will to power through the immigration system (Home Office, 2025), office politics (Burton and Bowman, 2022), and other such mechanisms. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett, cited in Buchanan, 2026, p. 121; see also Thoburn, 2003), says the war machine.
We will not provide instructions on how to experience the норка. But we will tell you how we imagine it. Hopefully, you will not get the reference. Think of this as the bonus level in some video game. Bonus levels are usually hidden, concealed from the linear execution of the plot. You typically navigate through the matrix of the gameplay (i.e., the gaming experience) as imposed by algorithms and developers. However, they may have (more or less) intentionally left alternative (magical) objects or paths here and there – small anomalies that, often after repeating the game multiple times, could be discovered as difference. And when this happens, it is always a breakthrough – the new, the surprising other-world, opening up unexpected anti-main-plot side quests or outcomes enriching the ‘I’ of the game-player.
Sometimes, the possibility of such possibilities can only be discovered by talking to someone or stumbling upon an anonymous post on an online forum. We like to think of ourselves as that anonymous user, and of this installation as that bonus level – the anti-main plot of the 3rd-century Industrial Society, a gateway to nomadism, the affirmation of the (proto)academic minor (Braidotti, 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) – the blue dog in Zelda: Majora’s Mask (Zelda Wiki, 2025), destined to lose, yet capable of overcoming its structural design.
Just like in video games, we include a soundtrack. The music (i.e., ‘.exe’ – named after that file extension that desires to make changes to your computer) was composed during my PhD, and it speaks about that experience. It expresses it, including my suffering and nomadic desiring-production simultaneously. The infrastructure in which you will find it is the норка we built as a shelter in my rite of passage – a shelter we carry with us wherever we go.
Someone – perhaps someone of us – has given you a flyer with the text you are reading right now. Inside, you have found a QR code where you can anonymously submit the title (and artist) of a song you would like to share with us, expanding this норка-discourse. Maybe it is the music that has supported you during your own rite of passage – perhaps you are living through it right now. We will create a playlist from all your song suggestions, including those referenced in this text, so we can playlist our protoacademic desire together and initiate a bottom-up placemaking movement that produces ‘someplace else’ for – and through – all our nomadic (proto)academic ‘I’s.
Now that you have entered the норка, find the CD player, sit down, press play, and enjoy the music. The melted-CD simulacrum will remind us of the always-present bullying, reactionary threat of becoming a crystallised, obsolete object, yielding to the desire of becoming (happy) academics in a fleeting trajectory away from the 3rd-century Industrial Society
This is not music; it is the spontaneous artifice of someone who sees beyond the human. Little by little, it furnishes the void. ‘But you can’t furnish the void!’. Come on, doe-eyed, let me say my wizardly nonsense! (Uochi Toki, 2010a – translated by the authors).
i We prefer writing норка instead of ‘norka’ because we appreciate the poetic power of ambiguity in using symbols that are unreadable to some – including ourselves.