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 commodity?’37 – is too broad to be covered here. That said, casting aside liberal humanism’s ascribed democratic function, no matter how often the rhetoric of impact and use is foisted upon these disciplines, there are frequent discussions on whether the humanities hold materialist utility.38

Such efforts to disclaim economic or material utility appear somewhat fantastical because, in addition to the intangible beneﬁts, it is clear that humanities research has exchange-value that is enmeshed in capital (a form of use-value where the only use is to generate surplus value). In other words, academic research, even that produced in the humanities, has an economic function.39 This can be seen most prominently in the way in which the contemporary university uses research material for teaching, for which there is now often a charge to students.40 This is the ‘dominant narrative that conceives universities as educational “marketplaces” where faculty produce learning and student-consumers purchase a deﬁned quantum of knowledge in the form of a degree’.41 It can be seen wherever employers proﬁt from the skills that their employees learned in a humanities degree. It can also be seen in publisher proﬁts. It can be seen in the ticket prices for exhibitions at galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs). All of these sites extract surplus value over the academic labour that was necessary for the production of the research-commodity, even when the form looks as though it has no material value. Interestingly, though, under an open-access system, this research becomes even more adept at hiding its inherent labour – after all, for this object, nothing was paid by those directly acquiring the commodity.

It is important to emphasise this because many theorisations of university economics and commercial publication practices are masked behind the rhetoric of agency theory. Agency theories work on assumptions of calculated risk and bounded, rationally selfinterested agents. For scholarship, as Raymond Hogler and Michael A. Gross set out in an important article, this means that:

First, the agency model demands that scholarship be commodiﬁed so as to play its part in the marketplace. . . Second, agency theory posits that the exchange of commodities – publications for money – takes place under competitive market conditions akin to those in a commercial enterprise. . . Third, the agency model features an idealized and discrete contractual bargain between a single faculty member and the university and necessarily