Reading as communal luxury: On the formation of a resistant subject group

This provocation argues for the importance of reading groups, and for reading books, as a mode of resistance against the instrumentalisation and individualisation of academic labour in today’s neo-liberalised universities. Against the dominant ‘information processing’ paradigm of reading, we argue that reading groups function as invaluable moments of social reproduction in the ‘undercommons’ of contemporary higher education. Combining Harney and Moten’s concept of the undercommons with Ross’ analysis of communal luxury, we argue that reading groups can articulate a radical, performative demand for the right to collective cultural creativity. Reading groups can steal back a small degree of academic autonomy, not over academic labour, but over the social reproduction that makes such labour possible in the first place. This argument is interspersed with intermezzo reflections on our collective experiences as members of a ‘viral reading group’, meeting since the start of Covid. We conclude our provocation with a manifesto for reading groups as a way of contesting the hegemony of instrumental rationality in management learning and education, for academics and for students, and as a place where the two can meet to plan and study, within and beyond the institutional limits of contemporary higher education.