The proletarianized professoriate: Digital narcissism and affective exhaustion on academic social networks

Abstract

Contemporary academic life is increasingly mediated by digital platforms that promise visibility, connection, and faster circulation of research. This article argues that the affective exhaustion associated with these conditions should not be treated only as a problem of individual resilience or workload management. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s account of proletarianization, symbolic misery, and the pharmakon, it reads scholarly exhaustion as a symptom of the technological mediation of academic labour. Academic social networking sites, with ResearchGate as the main example, are examined as infrastructures that convert recognition into metric feedback and thereby reorganize the conditions under which scholars understand their work. Digital narcissism is used here to describe a fragile dependence on algorithmic validation, rather than a simple problem of vanity or self-promotion. Such dependence can redirect sustained intellectual desire toward repeated acts of checking, comparison, and profile maintenance. On this basis, a pharmacological account of care shows how the same digital infrastructures that intensify metric culture can be reorganized through institutional resistance to reductive assessment and collective practices of scholarly solidarity. From Stiegler’s neganthropic perspective, this task involves preserving the conditions for attention, judgment, and collective knowledge.