Abstract
ABSTRACT Debates in WhatsApp groups often seem meaningless when the participants make ghostly, ghastly, and free-floating arguments outside established norms, yet meaning in such a genre of post-truth can be read through a grammar suitable for interpreting the meaninglessness of the unconscious. This study extends the grammar of phantasmagoria, the functioning of pre-cinema apparatuses, to read the unconscious in WhatsApp debates that seem irrational. Through this approach, the study gives meaning to chats on predatory publishing by university lecturers to show that both justification and condemnation of what is obviously an objectionable publication style reveal struggles at the unconscious level in the era of corporatized universities and alternative facts. It is argued that predatory publishing is, on the one hand, open academic fraud, but on the other, part of the unintended consequences that symbolise the failure of the neoliberal university.
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