Subjectivities, Identities, and Education after Neoliberalism

Rising from the Rubble

Abraham P. DeLeon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351583893
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In this book, DeLeon presents a critique of neoliberalism and present times through a metaphor of social collapse and considers what remains once the dust has settled for a different kind of person to emerge. Engaging a variety of social, political and educational theories, along with pop culture and literature, DeLeon positions humanity at the edges of collapse and what will emerge after the fall. Engaging academic and fictional alternatives, he imagines future possibilities through a new kind of person that rises from the rubble. Questioning the foundations of empiricism, standardization and "reproducible" results that reject new forms of social and political projects from materializing, DeLeon discusses the potentials of the imagination and the ways in which it can produce alternative possibilities for our collective future when unleashed and combined with fictional narratives. Moving across multiple intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and historical traditions, he constructs a radical, interdisciplinary vision that challenges us to think about transforming our collective future(s), one in which we construct a new kind of person ready to tackle the challenges of a potentially liberatory future and what this might entail.

1
Neoliberal Fantasies and Current Predicaments

It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the future belongs to conservatives.

(Schlichter, 2017: np)

Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.… Money is the product of virtue… [and] to love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort best among men.

(Rand, 1943/2005: p. 412)

Is this the future, or is this the past?

—Anonymous Internet Post, 2017

To begin to tell the tale of neoliberalism and a conservative ethos that has animated spaces like the United States, we can begin with conservative fan fiction, imaginal ideas about our possible collective futures. Appearing on the right wing website Townhall, a bastion for conservative and alt-right antagonists, a columnist’s opinion piece begins with the imagination, interestingly, within catastrophe. WWIII comes with little to no forewarning (Schlichter, 2015). Although the fictional election of Hillary R. Clinton is the cause of the ultimate demise of the United States, not one citizen would have expected for it to lead to the social and political upheaval that it did. Primarily “Red” states (those based in conservative politics in the United States) abandon the Union when her election is finalized after the tally of votes. Other States soon follow, rekindling the old flames of the Civil War in which a new North and South are established.

Wounds that never healed from a society based within an ideological project of White supremacy (Gallagher, 1997) are reopened with a contentious national election. New and old lines are drawn and redrawn once again in a fictional future vision. Through this new secession, we discover that fiscally and socially conservative spaces produce models of social, political and economic efficiency. As Schlichter likes to claim over and over in his opinion pieces, the “normals” are the only people capable of rational, moral thought. These types of social and political skills/beliefs position conservatives with the skill sets in which to think objectively and rationally. A uniquely conservative ability to govern effectively is rooted in hard work and common sense. Simply put, “liberals” (in the ways that this term is used in U.S. political discourse in 2018) are unable to manage not only themselves and their desires but also their own state of affairs entirely because a lack of self-reliance and a steadfast commitment to normality.

Weak on morals, ambiguous about traditional gender roles or identities, obsessed with PC culture and the lack of ability to deploy a strong military in which to exert their will, the “hipster army” of Hillary Clinton withers and stagnates under the pressures of reality that only conservatives can navigate effectively. Without an ethos of hard work, self-sustainability and a moral code steeped in Christianity, the weight of reality crushes these newly imagined liberal spaces.

You guys turn around, go back to your dorm rooms and coffee houses, and it’s all good. But you come into our home with guns with intent to do violence and we will teach you and your little task force of whiny little hipsters, femboys and commies what killing really is.

(n.p.)

Through a use of direct and overt codes of physical, ideological and dis-cursive violence, conservatives are able to exert their will as Hillary Clinton shrinks back, “into the bowels of the White House” (n.p.). In the end of this dystopian conservative future, they demonstrate their sheer ability to rule and govern effectively, ultimately with threats, imagery of violence and through the barrels of guns. A conservative future secured within an ethos and discourse of personal and institutional violence.

It may puzzle my reader so far to begin this book (a radical departure from traditional types of accepted scholarship) steeped in a conservative imagination, especially one that defies immediate mental models of future thinking simply as only a politically progressive act, or one simply reduced to “utopian” thinking. Schlichter demonstrates that imaginal visions animate thinkers across the political and ideological spectrum. They all appear to exhibit longings regardless of their political positions, “even if it is in the direction of increasing the power of already powerful groups and further subordinating the powerless” (Levitas, 2000: p. 186). Levitas places these kinds of conservative visions within the same imaginative and ideologically productive space of more radical visions, as they too “encapsulate an image of a good society” (p. 187). But, as this chapter unfolds, the reader will begin to realize that conservative and liberal (to use the binary deployed in dominant political discourses in the United States in 2018) are both too steeped within past constructions of what a “good” or “ideal” society is, unable to envision a future apart from what they believe to be already prescribed in the present to ever escape from the reality of the now.

I realize there is still much to be done in terms of analyzing the ways in which power and other hegemonic realities sneak their way into institutional realities. But, it is more than just realizing more critical analysis of our collective present is necessary; it also means abandoning those old mental models of what we think we meant when we once imagined a future outside the practices and logics of the present we feel trapped within. Marx (1988) reminds us, as Derrida analyzed, that a specter of Communism haunted European social, political and economic thought (p. 54). It was this specter of communism that he believed to be a power unto itself in future social and intellectual circles. Marx saw in Communism a chance at human redemption, a chance to equalize and alleviate social class suffering by negating the philosophical concepts and economic formations known as capitalist accumulations. By giving workers power over their conditions, by analyzing capitalism with a lens through which to understand the evolution towards a Communist society, by agitating towards a worldwide Communist revolution and by exposing the revolutionary potential of the global proletariat, he theorized potentials in new forms of social and economic organization.

However, Derrida (1994) saw something in Marx’s vision that needed a deeper and more nuanced analysis. He saw ghost-like apparitions appear in the works of Marx, even though they might not have been intended. Derrida wanted to write about ghosts because they were those who were no longer with us, those passed whose energy left a pointing to something that might yet to be formulated, “generations, generations of ghosts” (p. xviii) that leave behind a tracing of what once was. With Derrida’s keen eyes towards deconstruction, he saw these specters especially in terms of our limited conceptions of justice, the pointing towards that some-thing outside what he called the revenge principle. He yearned for “a justice that one day, a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance. Better than removed: infinitely foreign” (p. 25). Derrida was willing to recognize that our conceptions of justice, with its past specters, would not allow us to escape the ideological inscriptions that language has already provided for that concept of what justice is. Taking this further, he theorized that this applied to more than just justice, but also to economic, social, educational and political formulations as well.

Marx failed to realize that ghosts haunt our linguistic constructions, remaining tied to past failures and lessons already learned. If we do not put to rest the past and learn from it when pointing to the future, the same tired practices will seep their way back into what we may think to be acceptable political/social/cultural/epistemological repertoires. Marx did not wish to confront the hauntings of our language because he was too trapped by a desire to outline/map the way (in a singular incantation) in which to achieve economic, social and political liberation. This trap is also found within the Russian Revolution that saw political violence as an acceptable way in which to deal with political differences.

When it comes to their programme for social reconstruction, to the economic order of the future society, the socialists-communists have changed not at all; they just have not bothered. As a matter of fact, the term communism covers their old authoritarian, collectivist programme which still lingers on—having in the background, the far distant background, a vision of the disappearance of the state that is put before the masses on solemn occasions to distract their attention from a new domination, one that the communist dictators would like to yoke them to in the not so distant future.

(Bukharin in Meltzer, 2017: p. 25)

Anarchists have been keen in their critiques of the problematic assumptions that Marxists bring to their political actions, ultimately proclaiming that Marxism reverts to the same, tired political violence found within capitalism and its State actors, making it no different from the hierarchical, disciplinary practices that most hierarchical, capitalistic States engender (Amster, DeLeon, Fernandez, Nocella & Shannon, 2009).

Do we keep repeating the same practices over and over, tied to those past errors, or do we move on, pointing in multiple directions to a future yet unwritten? (When I point, I model the rhizomatic roots underground yet unseen but still in existence that point to everywhere but nowhere all at the same time.) The dominant perception is that capitalism is a pinnacle of human development, never in need of moral redemption, as “it is the greatest creator of value in the world. This is what make business ethical and what makes it beautiful. It is fundamentally good” and is “not inherently flawed and sinful or in need of redemption” (Mackey & Sisodia, 2014: p. 263). These kinds of specters (bodily, epistemological and ideological) must be exorcized as Father Karras and Father Merrin battled with the Devil in The Exorcist. When I point towards the future in the rest of this book, I want to begin with a fresh kind of creation. My imagination breaks free when Karras ultimately makes his sacrifice; I do not want to remain tethered within the historical formation known as any type of “utopian thinking”, just as Karras could not live with the innocence of Reagan being tainted by the malice of a satanic force. Exorcisms were performed through the auspices of a malevolent spirit consuming a host, “open to invasion by an outside entity, or several such entities” (Ebon, 1974: p. 6). Like an exorcism, we are freeing visions of the future from the collective body of Romantic visions.

Future visions must find intellectually, theoretically and imaginatively different directions in which to point, putting to rest any semblance of a Romantic project that sought a unified whole: an idealized space that sought to replace one reality with another. “After all, if a true utopia had ever really existed, it would still exist today and we would be reading travelogues instead of fictions” (Rabkin, 1983: p. 1). The endless mimetic production of utopia that captivated those European dreamers with promises of escape or redemption endlessly reproduced the same logics that were at the roots of the European Romantic project: the illusion of a whole that could/would be established with just the right social formula, tinkering of data, or an economic paradigm that would place humanity in new relationships with its collective future. This obsession with a center, however, is not what this project intends to do.

I seek to leave the mental models of utopian thinking behind and let it sleep its final slumber. The exorcist has expunged Legion and when Jesus drove the demon out, what then? “Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ ‘My name is Legion’, he replied, ‘for we are many’” (Mark 5:9, emphasis added). Legion is/are multiplicities: deterritorialized lines of the rhizomes that are flights out; the understanding that the multitudes are an affective force of endless creative production(s); mycelium underfoot that connects the natural world like an unseen network of nodes and assemblages. This gives us an interesting framework to escape the marginalized notions of future thinking. A new formation is beginning to assemble, and I want to add to its tale. Do not call this a utopian project in any sense of the way(s) in which we have understood that to be. Instead, think of this as a new kind of future formation, an academic-fictional tale of what happens when destruction presents itself with fundamentally new opportunities to create once again. Imagined and inspired by what might already be found in an archive of past and present moments.

I stake no claim in a parcel of land (the island of Utopia containeth in breadth in the middle part of it two hundred miles” [More, 1963: p. 63]); I do not build a boat to travel to it (“between those two corners the sea runneth in… and there surmounteth into a large and wide sea” (p. 63)); I do not grow a garden in which to produce food (“they have in the country, in all parts of the shire, houses or farms builded” [p. 65]); I do not build a home to stay fixed and permanent within its confines (“houses… well appointed and furnished with all sorts of instruments” [p. 65]). Although my mind seeks to expand my consciousness, (“they embrace chiefly the pleasures of the mind” [p. 107]), I do not try to map out what those academic/mental activities might even become. I cannot prescribe a future blueprint, only what may emerge from a wild and decentered imaginative production. I want to build from the imaginations of theorists, dreamers, magicians and artists a new kind of reality that might be possible. I want to rise from the rubble reborn and ready to begin the difficult and challenging imaginative work of thinking of what might come to us in the future.

The trap of many past future-forward projects has been mired in current foundational principles, “a philosophical or sociological idea which forms its deep structure” (Toker, 1996: p. 219). Future imaginations have been plagued with these types of particular mappings, following “a specific path towards an expected improvement of the social order” (p. 220). These specifics is where the European Romantic project rears itself in its academic forms, tracing exactly who/what/where/when, instead of the multiplicities emerging on their own through wild and creatively free rhizomes. Trying to map out a future only demonstrates the limitations of our present and this project is not utopian. It might be imagined, if we need to think of a reference already made, as what Barthes (2010) might have called atopian: encompassing “a drifting habitation” and works against a utopian frame that is, “reactive, tactical, literary, it proceeds from meaning and governs it” (p. 49). This moves us beyond the historical baggage of that former literary and imaginative construction and points us in new and thrilling directions.

I recognize the importance of Romantic and utopian works that once animated a diverse group of thinkers, poets, artists and academics. At one point these might have served an important purpose that allowed those past thinkers to exhibit their own forms of future longings. These possessed a sense of creativity that demonstrated dissatisfaction with their everyday lives and pushed them towards giving birth to something different. They wanted to create something anew, but still did not know how or reflect upon disassociating oneself from their present. I want to escape from the grasp and allure of traditional research and imagine a future apart from what is sold to us through hegemonic discourses and practices. Fisher (2012) describes loss through electronic music, in which it no longer possessed its ability to produce a “futuristic” sound apart from its historical present.

What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate. The futures that have been lost were more than a matter of musical style. More broadly, and more troublingly, the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.

(p. 16; emphasis added)

What Fisher comes to realize is that the artistic forms of the moment produce the conditions that regulate us to a static telos of the here and now; the ghosts keep watch on the present to remind us that the future apart from the now is an impossibility.

Art assumes new forms and possibilities when thinking of escaping the limitations of our collective present. It becomes that moment of escape because it allows us to conjure a different kind of thinking and doing. The creative potentials (always in multiplicity) explode into new kinds of renderings that escape the ordering and logics of the present tenses that keep us trapped within its deathly grips. Art recognizes death because once the very thing is created, it leaves our hands and becomes null to its creator(s). But it experiences rebirth in its many ways, being seen and interpreted in other times and spaces. Our collective end is always a certainty within a dead Western culture, but that death does not produce the conditions in which to breathe life into the here and now. It misses the rebirth that art provides the work itself. The “now” is too mired in the hauntologies of our linguistic present. Although there have been future-pointing theorists who have dreamt of escaping death through technological innovations, literally downloading our brains into a computer, we suspect that future possibilities will not be garnered through a brain “ensconced in a computer” (Jastrow, 1981: p. 166). Instead this book exists as a testament to a living piece of art that will die once it leaves my hands, but will exist in a future yet still to be determined. It needs to be dissected, disemboweled, cut up, excised, amputated and then reassembled into something new once again. Like a Golem created from the magic of others, this book points to a different future possibility, “alive, vital, sexual, and willful [and] I have no idea where or when this will end” (Abrahamsson, 2018: p. 202).

The exorcisms must commence of that old world, purging old formations known as “utopian thinking” and move towards a future imagining that escapes dated linguistic, literary, artistic and imaginal creations. The artistic production is alive, ready to be deconstructed in a future not yet understood. Can we embrace the lure of the demonic, recognizing a new creative vision of the future that lies in the many that is Legion? The multitudes speak through the creation of a new spirit that animates a different future apart from merely destruction. New formations are evoked when an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Neoliberal Fantasies and Current Predicaments
• 2 Intermezzo—Destruction
• 3 Outside the Margins of Reality
• 4 Symbolism
• 5 Awakening the Imagination
• Afterword: Waking Up to a New World
• Bibliography
• Index