This entry treats the politics of mental health as a context for drawing links between the cognitive or libidinal impulses of digital capitalism and the affective structures of the neoliberal university. It approaches mental health genealogically, crossing disciplinary structures into decentralized control, stretching in parallel to a historical shift, in broad strokes, from misery to boredom to anxiety in the fabric of public infrastructures of feeling during the past couple of centuries in the West. Using a post-Marxist approach via Donna Haraway and Mark Fisher, the essay develops an approach that feeds on the experience of the Fisher function as a para-academic platform for training a collective intelligence capable of mourning. It reworks Fisher’s take on acceleration in his posthumously published essay “Accelerate Management” as a critical diagnosis of the contemporary genres of stress management, while proposing a posthuman agenda for navigating the public psychic space of cognitive capitalism.
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