Abstract
This essay expands on the concept of educational life and builds on an autonomist Marxist framework that better allows us to understand neoliberalism’s parasitic operations. Following this, the last section will confront the limits of the progressive educational imaginary and offer up for consideration postschool imaginaries. Drawing on Kathi Weeks’ concept of postwork imaginaries, Bourassa considers how postschool imaginaries might be conducive for troubling particular operations that have become embedded in the grammar of schooling and, also, how they might cultivate alternative and affirmative forms of educational life both in the present and ‘after neoliberalism.’
Keywords
The stories we tell
The various stories told about capitalism matter. They matter because, in turn, they tell us something. At the very least, they serve as a gauge—a social and political barometer that indexes the sheer rage of those suffering and catching hell. Moreover, they register certain political sensibilities at a given moment and, of course, they also catalogue the measured or panicked distance of those arduously endorsing a system that violates and injures us while threatening the biodiversity of our entire planet. In addition, the stories told reveal hidden statements about social movements, anti-capitalist struggles, and the theoretical resources relied upon or developed in order to make sense of or discredit those movements and struggles. Perhaps most indicative, the stories that we tell about capitalism convey something about our social imagination, or what Haiven (2014) has called the radical imagination—‘a collective process of developing alternative modes of reproducing our selves as social beings,’ and that, in turn, ‘nourishes those efforts’ (p.19). In this sense, our stories and the ways we tell them might also nourish efforts to develop alternatives or, perhaps, foreclose such efforts.
Here is a story—a familiar one: capitalism is crushing us. To put it bluntly, an insidious form of neoliberal governmentality has pervaded all domains of social life. Moreover—and this is a really important part—there is no alternative. In fact, iterations of this story—the inevitability of capitalism—are found across the political spectrum. From the right, such stories are often accompanied by the inherently conservative question: ‘What would replace capitalism?’ From the left, we sometimes hear a more nuanced version: Despite our struggles against neoliberal capitalism, the commonsense logics of the market have prevailed (and will presumably continue to do so). As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983) tell us, ‘the more it breaks down…the better it works’ (p.151). In their view, ‘social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 151). ‘Capitalism,’ they share, ‘has learned this.’ Even as we resist, we soberly confront an eerie horizon of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2009). The odd thing, as Graeber (2011) tells us, is that it is ‘plain to everyone that capitalism doesn’t work, but it’s almost impossible for anyone to imagine anything else’ (p.113). In a future where we desire capitalism to be absent, it is somehow there. Thus, Slavoj Zizek’s (2011) familiar lament: ‘it is easier to imagine a total catastrophe which ends all life on Earth than it is to imagine a real change in capitalist relations—as if, even after a global cataclysm, capitalism will somehow continue’ (p.334).
Capitalist realism creates this sense of inevitability by wielding extraordinary violence, which also yields untold insecurity. This works to both foster a pervasive culture of fear, and to hamper the radical imagination. When the insecure seek ‘protection from their insecurity,’ according to Lorey (2015), the matrices of the neoliberal capitalist state ‘engender new historical forms of precarity, new insecurities, from which they are again supposed to provide protection’ (p.11). Even the desire and struggle for security is seemingly metabolized by capitalism and used to animate its plasticity. Moreover, the fear induced by neoliberal capitalism fragments what is otherwise a common subject—the precariat—ensuring that a collective and palpable sense of alternatives cannot flourish or proliferate (Standing, 2016). In fact, Graeber (2011) suggests that this is the very essence of neoliberal capitalism, that it is ‘not an economic project at all, but a political project, designed to devastate the imagination’ (pp.5–6). But is it not possible to invert the lesson of Graeber’s insight about the plainness or widespread recognition of neoliberal capitalism’s impotence? In other words, as Peter Fleming (2014) asks, ‘Is not the current mood characterized by an all-pervading capitalist unrealism, in which the unworkable truth of the corporate enterprise, labor market, and neoliberal state is obvious to everyone?’ (p.150).
So, here’s another story: Neoliberal capitalism is wounded. Times are fertile for an alternative, not just to neoliberalism but capitalism itself. ‘For the moment,’ Graeber (2011) asserts, ‘capitalism is no longer even thinking about its long-term viability’ (p.113). This is no small feat. As Wolfgang Streeck (2014) notes, ‘Capitalism,’ after an extended period of ill health, now ‘is in critical condition.’ (p.63) We might even say that this is capitalism’s long goodbye (see Mason, 2015; Streeck, 2014). This essay will start with a similar but slightly different premise: As an economic model, neoliberal capitalism has always been fragile. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009) point out that it ‘was never capable of being a program for capitalist production’ (p.266). This is in line with David Harvey’s (2007) suggestion that the primary achievement of neoliberalism ‘has been to redistribute, rather than generate, wealth and income’ (p.159). It does this primarily through the instruments of finance and rent—forms of capture and redistribution that are quite different from industrial forms of capital that produced profit. Though neoliberalism is woefully incapable of production on its own terms, it overcomes its inability to generate by redistributing through the strategy of austerity, attempting to commodify life itself, and enlisting sociality into its productive circuits. It is reliant on a social common that it must simultaneously expropriate and control. 1 In doing so, however, neoliberalism ‘takes on a self-destructive tone, since it conveys a built-in aggression to its own reliance on that which it must negate’ (Fleming, 2014: 32).
It appears that neoliberalism is full of contradictions that render it extraordinarily fragile. In its attempts to manage and capture surplus value from the common, it risks posing ‘obstacles to the production process itself’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 270). Its redistributive strategy of austerity relies on a tenuous form of governmentality that manages precarization, ensuring that it does ‘not pass a certain threshold such that it seriously endangers the existing order: in particular, it must not lead to insurrection’ (Lorey, 2015: 2). There is much to suggest that this threshold has been exceeded, and that we are experiencing—and on the verge of many more—‘gravediggers’ events (Marx, 1976: 930). This is to say that the vast production of surplus populations aids the assemblage of an emerging ‘political monster’ (Negri, 2008). 2 And yet, at the very moment that ‘neoliberal thought is crashing and burning around us, its discursive influence is becoming ever more pervasive’ (Fleming, 2014: 152). This admission, however, is not simply a reprise of the logics of capitalist realism. Rather it is a recognition that the internal contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, alone, are not going to propel us beyond it. At the very moment it is foundering as an economic model, neoliberalism’s dominance as an ‘order of reason and governance’ is unprecedented (Brown, 2015: 10). What is needed now, and ‘after neoliberalism,’ is a robust radical imagination that stretches the collective limits of our current imaginary. This radical imagination—fueled by creativity and desire—must be one that is both nourished by, and enabling of, alternatives, abetting processes whereby we collectively eschew neoliberal subjection and, instead, practice autonomous and alternative modes of reproducing ourselves as social beings. 3
This essay is one attempt at such a project. I will proceed with an autonomist Marxist perspective that reads neoliberalism as an excessively parasitic phase of capitalism. 4 This framework suggests that capitalism is predatory and resistant. It is secondary with respect to living labor and the common, which, as Hardt and Negri (2009) note, ‘are the locus of social innovation, whereas power can only react by attempting to capture or control their force’ (p.374). Neoliberal capitalism needs to expropriate living labor and autonomously produced common wealth. While it requires and frequently saps living labor and the extra-capitalist attributes of the common, neither are totally captured by neoliberalism nor completely exhausted in these processes (see Fleming, 2014; Hardt and Negri, 2009). 5 In other words, the common has a surplus that ‘can never be exploited by capital…precisely because this surplus is other than capital’—something capable of engendering ‘revolutionary forms of subjectivity’ (Casarino, 2008: 21). Thus, a simple and familiar insight: Neoliberal capitalism needs our living labor and common wealth; we do not need capitalism. The key question, then, is, ‘what does it mean to appropriate our wealth?’ This essay considers this question in the context of the struggle for educational life.
Given the ways in which capital increasingly relies on the exploitation and expropriation of knowledge, affect, and the circulation of ideas (Means, 2013a), schools are increasingly viewed as promissory sites where these attributes are harvested and extracted (Pierce, 2013). Thus schools are a key site of struggle, particularly for the production and management of specific types of educational life. While neoliberal capitalism attempts to cultivate a particular type of educational life and enlist sociality into its productive circuits, the very category of educational life is ‘up for grabs,’ so to speak. That is, educational theorists are attempting to imagine and valorize affirmative forms of educational life that could portend new possibilities and alternative arrangements of being (Lewis, 2006; Lewis and Kahn, 2010; Pierce, 2013). This essay contributes to such projects by considering what it might entail to both affirm and cultivate forms of educational life that violate the aims and precepts of neoliberal capitalism, expanding the horizon of possibility for a different future. In other words, I consider what it might mean to ‘begin a process of subjectivations independent and autonomous of capitalism’s hold on subjectivity, its modalities of production and forms of life’ (Lazzarato, 2014: 14).
While early elaborations of schooling proposed that schools serve the ‘interests of society,’ namely industry and the economy (Mann, 1891: 233), it is readily apparent today that schools not only continue to serve the economy, but that schooling has become an industry in and of itself (Cleaver, 2004; EduFactory Collective, 2009; Roggero, 2011). In this process, substantive education is sacrificed for ‘credentials,’ ‘certificates,’ and the accumulation of ‘human capital,’ which ostensibly enhances ‘employability.’ Students are imagined as consumers, or economic subjects—homo economici—who should internalize costs and risks while making the proper ‘investments’ to buttress their market value. As Wendy Brown (2015) explains, ‘neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities’ with the intent of configuring every decision in one’s life as either mitigating or enhancing human capital (p.31). Schooling is not immune to this process. In fact, the school is increasingly understood both as a commodity to be invested in and exchanged, and as an important site of subjection. Gigi Roggero (2011) suggests that the school ‘not only is a structure for the “reproduction of relations of production” but also becomes a space that is immediately productive of surplus value precisely to the degree that it is a space for the production of subjectivity’ (p.69). Thus, as Haiven (2014) puts it, the school ‘doesn’t merely follow these transformations, it helps drive them’ (p.135). Moreover, the argument to follow builds on an understanding that the pattern Brown describes is indicative of a larger shift in our contemporary moment whereby ‘the key tension is not just between capital and labor but also between capital and life’ (Fleming, 2014: 26). Taking into account the ways in which neoliberal capitalism has conscripted the school to fabricate ‘new figures of subjectivity,’ and the ways in which schooling has become a ubiquitous and seemingly never ending aspect of our lives, part of the challenge today involves thinking about postcapitalist political subjectivations and the postschool imaginaries necessary to affirm and nudge these along (Hardt and Negri, 2012: 9).
The section to follow will expand on the concept of educational life and build on an autonomist Marxist framework that better allows us to understand neoliberalism’s parasitic operations. Following this, the last section will confront the limits of the progressive educational imaginary and offer up for consideration postschool imaginaries. Drawing on Weeks’ (2011) concept of postwork imaginaries, I consider how postschool imaginaries might be conducive for troubling particular operations that have become embedded in the grammar of schooling and, also, how they might cultivate alternative and affirmative forms of educational life both in the present and ‘after neoliberalism.’
Between compositional states of strength and fragility: the struggle for educational life
As indicated above, neoliberal capitalism is plagued with contradictions. It depends on the very thing that threatens it—currents of living labor and autonomously produced common wealth, which are both outside of its reach and beyond its rationality (Fleming, 2014; Hardt and Negri, 2009). This parasitic tendency suggests that neoliberal capitalism fluctuates between compositional states of strength and fragility. 6 As I have noted elsewhere, neoliberalism ‘precariously occupies a liminal status between that of inordinate durability and immanent vulnerability’ (Bourassa, 2011: 6). The same can be said about living labor. It is extraordinarily powerful, and, for this reason, it is vulnerable as a target to be eradicated, controlled, or exploited by capital. However, from an autonomist Marxist perspective, the relation between living labor and capital is neither even nor reciprocal. Moreover, it does not necessarily need to be understood in dialectical terms. An autonomist Marxist perspective inverts the conventional reading of capital over and against living labor and, instead, assumes the primacy of a powerful collective social ontology, which capital is continuously chasing and lagging behind. As Fleming (2014) notes, capitalism and its apparatuses of capture have ‘a strong reactive element. They function as a kind of parasitical ossification defined more by rent and the capture of prior value in the living community,’ and thus they ‘qualitatively follow’ the constitutive externality of living labor (p.45). From this autonomist Marxist perspective, living labor is the constitutive motor to which capital responds.
This insight alone may not provide much consolation, and it surely does not shield anyone from the violence of capital. Sure, we can suggest that living labor is the primary constitutive motor that autonomously produces common wealth. In turn, capital is reliant on this ‘aggregate living labor, which lies outside the algorithms of dead labor’ and capitalism itself (Fleming, 2014: 14). According to this perspective, capitalism cannot reproduce itself on its own terms and is thus fundamentally reliant on what it is not, on the extra-capitalist commons or social aggregation of living labor, which it transforms into dead labor or dead knowledge. While capital exploits and expropriates (and in many instances, attempts to eradicate) this aggregate living labor, the latter is inexhaustible because it can never be reduced to mere dead or objectified labor. Again, this, in and of itself, is not a reassuring scenario given that this indefatigable quality of living labor is what allows capital to persist. In this way, our ‘movement and sociality, our creation of a common world—our world—that is rich with reciprocal social relations, networks of co-operation and mutual aid,’ forms the ‘ironic communist underbelly of capitalism’ (Cederström and Fleming, 2012: 11).
This has always been apparent in theories tracing the various permutations of capital. In fact, we could say that capital has always been both pitted against and reliant on forms of vitality; it ‘accumulates numerical value by subtracting social value’ (Cederström and Fleming, 2012: 11). This is evident in Karl Marx’s (1976) description of primitive accumulation, in which he suggests that producers became wage-laborers ‘only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production’ (p.875). As Harvey (2005) has suggested, this ‘accumulation by dispossession’ is an ongoing and invariant feature of capitalism that is central to its development. Today, however, technological developments have accelerated this process and stoked the antagonism between capital and life, so much so that it makes sense to suggest that ‘a new economic space has been delineated—the bioeconomy—and a new form of capital—biocapital’ (Rose, 2007: 6). In the age of biocapitalism, these expropriations and enclosures increasingly target life itself, and thus intellectual property rights and the patenting of genetic material come to characterize a new era of colonialism (Cooper, 2008; Shiva, 1997; and Rajan, 2006). In addition to mining raw materials and life forms, biocapitalism clearly aims to shape ‘individual and collective subjectivities and citizenships’ as part of the quest to enhance and extract biovalue (Rajan, 2006: 78). In this way, ‘biopolitics has become inextricably intertwined with bioeconomics’ (Rose, 2007: 7). Foucault (2003) endeavored to characterize these tendencies in his concept of biopower—a power that attempts to manage and seize all aspects of life, shaping and controlling the production of subjectivity. 7
Given these tendencies—capitalism’s unvarying reliance on what it is not, coupled with this phase of neoliberal capitalism’s turn to life itself—the very category of educational life takes on new significance. After all, if the logics of biocapitalism and the pursuit of biovalue reduce living processes to a source of value (Rose, 2007), all aspects of life become subject to forms of control and management. Thus, in a context where capital seeks to squeeze the vitality out of every domain of life, educational life emerges as an increasingly important site of extraction. It is not simply a site of possibility where life can be controlled or harnessed to specific capitalist ends. More fundamentally, it is a necessary site for the reproduction and maintenance of neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, following the insights of Graeber, who suggests that neoliberalism is a political project designed to devastate the imagination, we should also point to the ways in which some forms of educational life are deliberately arrested or preemptively enclosed given their subversive potentiality (Bourassa, 2017a, 2017b; Bourassa and Margonis, 2017). What’s more, this negation of life must be recognized as a fundamental feature of what schools do, and always have done (Woodson, 2008).
Therefore, when situating educational life as a unit of analysis, it is necessary to recognize it as a fundamentally contested terrain. In one sense, educational life can be thought of as an emerging construct of neoliberalism—a specific normative archetype of the ideal student-subject in and for biocapitalism. 8 In another sense, educational life is wild, vast, and—like living labor—brimming with undetermined potentiality. Because it is radically non-indexed to capital, it is essentially an unframeable remainder that is ill-suited for schools, and vice versa. For this reason, this latter form of educational life, what I would call constituent bíos, is often regarded as a potent threat that must be arrested, eradicated, or contained, and thus its form may appear to vacillate between compositional states of strength and fragility. 9 While the concept of educational life is contested and has different meanings across time and space, what we are confronting in schools today is a racially charged political economy in which ‘some lives and forms of life are made more or less valuable than others’ (Means, 2013b: 18). This is acutely experienced by students of color. As Hardt and Negri (2004) note, ‘the logic of exploitation…is not by any means the same for everyone’ and thus ‘we should recognize that this implies divisions of labor that correspond to geographical, racial, and gender hierarchies’ (p.151). These divisions of labor pervade the landscape of the bioeconomy and configure differing forms of expropriation, capture, and extraction in schools.
This asymmetrical ‘topography of exploitation’ is perhaps best understood by distilling capital’s dual relationship with educational life (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 151). Namely, educational life—like living labor—is both a source and a threat for capital, which must cultivate, prospect, and tap forms of vitality and sociality that are conducive to neoliberal capitalism while warding off those forms that are threatening. Clayton Pierce (2013) depicts this process with the concept of extractive schooling, which describes the transformation of ‘educational settings into zones where value is extracted and optimized, rendering life in schools as a type of vitality to be invested in and shaped by market forces’ (p.68). Here, educational life is conceived as a mineable good. As Roggero (2011) notes, regarding this process of exploitation, it ‘is at once an investment in risk upstream and in capture downstream’ (p.78). Educational life is cultivated with the aim of expropriating its productivity—a process, it should be noted, that ‘must continually reduce living knowledge to abstract knowledge' (Roggero, 2011: 78). Moreover, as Pierce (2013) suggests, if educational life is ‘understood as a minable and controllable resource to be efficiently extracted,’ then ‘non-useful material from the process of value maximization is discarded’ (p.68). Put differently, the process of exalting an archetypal form of life for value-optimization produces a remainder—a surplus population with surplus knowledge that requires ‘surplus regulation’ in the form of the school to prison pipeline, for instance (Fleming, 2014: 37). While this surplus regulation typically functions in an instrumental fashion, the dual meaning of the term ‘surplus’ could also connote a type of regulation that exceeds the logics of calculation, pointing to a ‘logic of injury’ and ‘a system of violence that includes but exceeds the effects of a political or economic strategy’ (De Lissovoy, 2015: 63).
Considering this, the political economy of educational life typically circulates in this fashion: There is a nominal investment in the instrumental cultivation of the educational life of some youth while those ‘dangerous classes from the perspective of the forces of order’ frequently encounter experiences in which their educational life is negated or enclosed (Hardt and Negri, 2012: 23). The ostensible investment in the educational life of youth who embody particular privileged characteristics of class, race, and gender, among other traits, is a rather safe endeavor for constituted power because the critical capacities these students develop are likely to be put to use to rationalize and reproduce the constituted order as opposed to challenging it or calling it into question (Anyon, 1981). Of course, with an increasing number of highly credentialed graduates now unemployed, underemployed, or working jobs for which they are over-qualified (Means, 2017), a growing number of the privileged class are also beginning to call into question the ‘efficacy of schooling—the notion that academic performance is the crucial link to economic success’ (MacLeod, 1987: 97). And for those who are already thoroughly disillusioned with the promissory logics of schooling—and especially those prematurely cast as part of a disposable surplus population—the very suggestion of the efficacy of schooling seems like a cruel joke. While white and affluent youth are routinely enchanted by the promissory logics of the efficacy of schooling—whether it is substantive or hollow—there are rarely similar attempts to coax poor youth of color, even with hollow promises. Instead, there is a notable absence of any promissory logic whatsoever. As one student puts it, ‘You’re not expected to leave school and go to college. You’re not expected to do anything’ (Quoted in Thompson, 2011: 26). Poor youth of color have routinely been subject to policies and practices of eradication, overcrowded and inadequately funded schools, scripted curricula, intense surveillance, and zero-tolerance discipline—all of which have the cumulative effect of arresting and enclosing forms of educational life which constituted power deems to be too unwieldy (Alonso et al., 2009). Even the prospect of schooling for menial employment—Willis’ (1977) notion of ‘learning to labor’—has been put aside. According to Rios (2011), poor youth of color no longer ‘“learn to labor’ but instead ‘prepare for prison’” (p.29).
In short, the control of educational life is central to the reproduction and maintenance of neoliberal capitalism. In the political economy of educational life briefly described above, this means that some forms of educational life are harnessed and sapped, and others enclosed and arrested. Both sets of practices are troubling, and in each case the formula is based on a one-dimensional archetype of educational life that ‘has deeply entangled the education of subjects with both crisis management techniques of capital and neoliberal conceptions of the individual as an investable and manageable body’ (Pierce, 2013: 4). In the first case, the obsession with optimization and extraction thwarts substantive education while promoting the anxious subjects of neoliberalism, who are responsible for optimizing their own human capital (De Lissovoy, 2018). The ostensible promise of wealth through STEM subjects, in particular, leads to practices where ‘learning is being delinked from the social implications of these technical subjects’ (Saltman, 2014: 57). Such approaches ‘leave us with the burn-out remains’: ‘tired bodies, permanently anxious people, and numb personalities’ (Fleming, 2014: 3–4). In the second case, where indeterminate educational life is viewed as a ‘dangerous substratum of self-determination that require[s] discipline,’ youth are left vulnerable to innumerable forms of social violence (Fleming, 2014: 55). After all, the indeterminacy of constituent bíos is dangerous for constituted power, and so schooling becomes an important mechanism for managing surplus populations, either through ‘disciplined integration or violent exclusion’ (Srnicek and Williams, 2015: 103). Both scenarios work to elevate limited forms of constituted bíos—a life that reinforces, and is substantiated by, the constituted or established order—at the expense of constituent bíos. It is in this way that schools operate to forfeit an alternative future. They attempt to prevent youth from being the protagonists who invent the future.
And yet, there is always a surplus of educational life that cannot be exhausted, and it is always larger and richer than the reductive form that ascends and passes through institutions. Thus, Following Fleming (2014), we could ask: ‘might not this surplus intelligence that flourishes despite the capitalist enterprise also be the fulcrum of a new emancipatory movement?’ (Fleming, 2014: 3). In fact, Rios, too, suggests that biopower’s attempts to control and arrest life are not absolute; they are replete with tensions. While the administration of life creates ‘blocked opportunities’ for youth, it also ignites ‘social consciousness and develop[s] worldviews and identities diametrically opposed to the youth control complex’ (Rios, 2011: xv). Biopower stands over life, but it is futile against this remainder: the excess ‘in the affects, in the bodies crisscrossed by knowledge, in the intelligence of the mind, and in the sheer power to act’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 365–366). From the autonomist Marxist perspective outlined above, the (so-called) crisis of education is the inability of schools to control this excess, which poses a threat to the constituted order. 10 Understood in slightly different terms borrowed from Marx, schools have historically sought to cultivate narrow forms of educational life while suppressing forms of educational life-for-itself. Thus, the questions posed earlier: What does it mean to appropriate our wealth and experiment with alternative forms of educational life that are conducive to the flourishing of human and non-human life? What would it mean to break away from capital’s school-work nexus and its hold on subjectivity and forms of life?
Postschool imaginaries: beyond the school-work nexus
In her book The Problem with Work, Weeks challenges the very idea that work is inherently a social and political good. She denaturalizes work as a taken for granted activity and shows how, in a ‘work society,’ it has problematically become the primary instrument for income distribution. As a result, an extraordinary amount of our time is devoted to work, either performing it, preparing for it, recovering from it, traveling for it, or trying to attain it. Moreover, the enforcement of work becomes a key operation of the state, and its expansive reach encroaches nearly every aspect of life, so much so that schools seemingly exist to ‘make people “work ready”’ (Weeks, 2011: 7). In response to the ubiquity of work, the liberal imagination has presented a logical fallacy, deepening its attachment to work: ‘Are we working to live, or living to work?’ Of course, either is troubling, for as Weeks points out, work ‘is a social convention and disciplinary apparatus rather than an economic necessity’ (Weeks, 2011: 7–8). Furthermore, there is something callous in the suggestion that our survival should be linked to our ability to work in a world where ‘over half the global population eligible for work are currently unemployed’ (Fleming, 2015: 2). Couple this with the fact that ‘almost half of working people are economically insecure in Western capitalist societies’ and it should be readily apparent that ‘working to live’ is an untenable option (Fleming, 2015: 4). To be clear, more work is not the answer. Many people work multiple jobs and still cannot make ends meet. In fact, as Fleming (2015) notes of such proposals to produce more work, ‘the proliferation of shitty jobs allows the neoliberal state to claim that unemployment is dropping, when it is in fact simply being carved-up and hived out in precarious roles that pay almost nothing’ (p.18). And, as Graeber (2013) puts it, many of the jobs that do offer a living wage are in fact ‘bullshit jobs’—jobs that ‘are, effectively, pointless’ and help to maintain a system of dependency, preventing collective efforts to forge a more just and sustainable future.
This is the context for Weeks’ exploration of postwork imaginaries. As Weeks (2011) notes, the concept of postwork imaginaries is ‘offered as a placeholder for something yet to come’ (p.16). The term does not ‘anticipate an alternative so much as point toward a horizon of possibility (Weeks, 2011: 30). It holds ‘the space of a different future open’ by offering an invitation to imagine a collective life beyond work, and beyond the confines of the present (Weeks, 2011: 30). Postwork imaginaries is not intended to categorically deny the value of work, nor is it a critique of workers. It is however, as Srnicek and Williams (2015) might put it, a recognition that ‘the future isn’t working’ (p.85). Moreover, postwork imaginaries are fueled by an acknowledgement that work occupies too much of our time, preventing us from collectively putting forth and realizing visions of a better future. Needless to say, it is not a haphazard defense of laziness but an embrace of ‘inoperative thresholds—that is, collective forms of life that are no more productive than they need to be’ (Fleming, 2014: 129). In this way, postwork imaginaries are tied to a project ‘both deconstructive and reconstructive, deploying at once negation and affirmation, simultaneously critical and utopian, generating estrangement from the present and provoking a different future’ (Weeks, 2011: 233).
More recently, several theorists have stretched postwork imaginaries by critically exploring the mythology of work (Fleming, 2015), the crisis of work (Srnicek and Williams, 2015), the resistance to, and refusal of, work (Fleming, 2014; Frayne, 2015), the morality of work (Tokumitsu, 2015), the emotional and affective dimensions of work (Cederström and Fleming, 2012), the ubiquity or 24/7 temporality of work (Crary, 2014), and the possibilities of a future with less work (Bregman, 2017; Livingston, 2016). I want to suggest that this literature—which says remarkably little about education—is a powerful resource for any critical theory of schooling. 11 If work is a taken for granted activity that is assumed to be natural, economically necessary, and morally good, then schooling has acquired a similar irreproachable status. In fact, schooling and work are hardly isolable; they form a symbiotic relationship. The school-work nexus is the foundation of the ideological functioning of the American Dream, as both are imagined as the principal mechanisms for economic security and social status (Johnson, 2005; MacLeod, 1987). Moreover, as Bowles and Gintis (2011) observe, schooling is regarded as a precondition for work, not just in a technical sense but also because it functions to ‘create and reinforce patterns of social class, racial and sexual identification among students which allow them to relate “properly” to their eventual standing in the hierarchy of authority and status in the production process’ (p.11).
While Weeks (2011) acknowledges this school-work nexus, she nevertheless pinpoints ‘work’ as the primary mechanism that ‘produces not just economic goods and services but also social and political subjects…disciplined individuals, governable subjects, [and] worthy citizens’ (p.8). In this way, Weeks, like many others outside of critical educational theory, neglects to acknowledge that schooling plays a central role in cultivating these traits prior to admission into the formal work structure. When this function of schooling is acknowledged—even by critical educators—it is almost invariably tempered by reiterations that schooling is an inherently good and socially necessary foundation stone in a democratic society. This argument hinges on the idea that the ‘egalitarian’ nature of schooling can somehow compensate for and overcome the ailments that result from the onslaught of capitalism—a set of social relations which requires that obscene wealth be accompanied by obscene poverty.
This fetishization of schools is in no small part the result of collective storytelling about the democratic origins of public schooling and its capacity as a Great Equalizer. These stories continue to this day and are updated by politicians who eagerly advise that ‘education [institutionalized] is the key to success.’ There are, however, other stories that we might consider regarding the origins of schooling in the US. Carter G. Woodson (2008) suggested in 1933 that schools, up until that point, had ‘justified slavery, peonage, segregation, and lynching’ (p.5). They are not vehicles for social or economic equality and they never have been. What’s more, Woodson (2008) considered the ‘educational system as it has developed both in Europe and America an antiquated process which does not hit the mark even in the case of the needs of the white man himself’ (p.5). Though this latter insight should in no way overshadow the first, it is not surprising that this is the consideration that resonates today, especially as formal institutions neglect to hold up their end of the achievement ideology, even for relatively privileged students. For instance, one in three college graduates are unable to get college-level jobs (Metzgar, 2014)—a staggering number that indicates an increasingly common and shared experience of iatrogenic vulnerability. This coincides with more students than ever before enrolling in post-secondary institutions which, as Haiven (2014) suggests, has drastic consequences: Not only has the university become central to overproducing knowledge workers, it has become key to ensuring that the workers who do emerge are saddled with massive levels of debt. This debt, in turn, renders these would-be workers desperate for employment and, hence, less willing to take the risk of demanding better wages, security, benefits and working conditions, let alone having the time and inclination to focus on broader questions of social inequality and oppression through activism. Indeed, we might even say that the primary function of the university is no longer to educate. After all, the vast majority of graduates are overeducated for the sorts of work they eventually find, and even the most specialized and highly refined forms of knowledge work typically depend on competencies learned on the job, not in school. The primary function of the university is to make debt compulsory. (p.141)
For these reasons, we rarely question the ubiquity of schooling, though in recent years a number of theorists have sought to critique the emergence of ‘lifelong learning’ in a ‘learning society’ (Edwards, 2002), the governmentalization of learning (Simons and Masschelein, 2008), and the unhelpful omnipresence of ‘learning’ in the field of education (Biesta, 2013). The problem with the dominant embrace of learning, as these analyses forefront, relates to the ways in which learning is regarded ‘as a kind of capital, as something for which the learner him- or herself is responsible, as something that can and should be managed (and is an object of expertise), as something that is employable’ (Simons and Masschelein, 2008: 402). Viewed in this way, schooling is but one dimension of a larger ‘learning apparatus.’ Schools are constantly recalibrating to and through the logics of learning, but the learning apparatus also functions beyond the school walls to the extent that our entire society has become a site of ‘learnification’ (Biesta, 2013).
Perhaps the most incisive commentary on the ubiquity of a schooled society, however, remains Deleuze’s analysis in ‘Postscript on Control Societies.’ Deleuze (1995) sought to describe the emergence of a new series of control technologies, and he pinpointed ‘education’ as a mechanism of ‘continuous control’: One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another enclosed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of work-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling. (p.175)
With this shift it appears that the lines between life and school have been dissolved, and we are encouraged to imagine our every move as ‘an individuated practice of investment and entrepreneurial acumen’ in order to enhance our human capital, productive potential, and employability (Pierce, 2013: 13). Or, put differently, as Fleming (2014) characterizes, ‘neoliberalism now sees us constantly concerned with its problems, integrating them into our life problems in order to get things done’ (p.5). With the advancement of the control society, as described by Deleuze, not only is the form of educational life that is propagated through schooling corroded but the forms of educational life outside of schools are more vulnerable to the toxic logics of capital than ever before. This illuminates a central tension: ‘how does one resist a mode of regulation that puts life itself to work?’ (Fleming, 2014: 125).
This is the context for the proposal of postschool imaginaries. The first point to emphasize is that postschool imaginaries involves a reduction in the amount of time that we spend ‘schooling.’ In contrast to calls from both the right and the left for more schooling, and particularly more ‘efficient’ schooling, postschool imaginaries is an argument for less schooling. Resisting the school-work nexus (or life-school-work nexus) ‘not only means countering the concrete time it steals from us. It also means disrupting the fantasy of its never-ending ubiquity’ (Fleming, 2014: 41). Considering this, postschool imaginaries is not merely about trying to wrest away educational life from schooling. It is equally concerned with detaching educational life from the broader ‘disimagination machine’ of neoliberal subjection (Giroux, 2013).
Second, and related to this, postschool imaginaries is a long-term political project for educational life. It is not a proposal to abolish schools immediately. As Illich (1973) put it, ‘school cannot be simply and rashly eliminated’ (p.9). In fact, fermenting postschool imaginaries does not preclude defending public schools in the present moment from assaults leveled by the forces of privatization. So while ‘deschooling makes strange bedfellows’ (Illich, 1973: 20), what I am proposing is something like what Hardt and Negri (2012) call a ‘double struggle, for and against the public’ (p.80). One side of the double struggle of postschool imaginaries entails defending public schools from the violent logics of neoliberalism that seek to dismantle or privatize it. The other side, however, involves a struggle against the subordination of our lives to the school-work nexus. This requires a collective divestment from the idea that school is intrinsically good for us. Moreover, it necessitates a ‘commitment toward social transformation and a break with the comforting illusions that the ways in which our societies and their educational apparatuses are organized currently can lead to social justice’ (Apple, 2016: xii).
We have experienced at least 50 years of school reform that has supposedly sought to liberate schooling, or as William Pinar (2012) puts it, make ‘the present system “work”’ (p.233). However, as Kantor and Lowe (2006) point out, educational reform, which ostensibly promotes equality and educational opportunity, has functioned to ‘stigmatize both the schools attended by children of the poor and the children themselves’ (p.475). This is especially the case with recent educational reform policies, ‘even though the conception of equal opportunity that has informed them has actually grown more robust over time as policy has shifted from a focus on teaching specific vocational skills to a focus on equipping all students—rich and poor alike—with the cognitive skills that a more fluid, knowledge-based economy presumably requires’ (Kantor and Lowe, 2011: 16). These recent reform policies are informed by the same distorted logic going back to A Nation at Risk—and even going back to the 1840s and the U.S. ‘architects of public education' (Finkelstein, 1991). In presupposing that schools should be, and are, an engine for economic growth and prosperity, these approaches subordinate education to the aims of work and management. In short, there is much to suggest that school reform will not and cannot liberate educational life. This reinforces the need for long-term thinking, strategic goals, orientations, and practices that will keep open the horizon for a postcapitalist future. Thus postschool imaginaries are at odds with the contemporary logics of educational reform and the prevailing emergency-crisis thinking that concedes to these logics, abandons principles, and forecloses an alternative horizon by attempting to make schooling work.
While I have suggested that postschool imaginaries is a long-term political project, we should also realize that it is here and now. Just as the current mood is increasingly characterized by an all-pervading capitalist unrealism, we might also say that youths’ collective rejection of the achievement ideology has thrown the project of schooling into an organic crisis (Bourassa, 2017a). Youth are calling into question the legitimacy of the idea that credentials lead to socioeconomic success and, indeed, whether the very idea of economic security awaits. Such questions about the efficacy of the link between schooling and work invariably prompt not only larger questions about the meaning, purpose, content, possibilities, and futures of education, but also the processes and practices which will determine these. Many youth, through the forms in which they attend to such questions, are already modeling postschool imaginaries and providing prefigurative methodologies which offer glimpses of alternative educational logics. Such questions and the possibilities they portend are foreclosed, however, in efforts to quickly ‘resolve the crisis’ and make schools work. As Negri (1991) puts it, ‘To want to consider the crisis as a sickness to treat and cure is…to betray the revolutionary moment’ (p.11). Postschool imaginaries keep such pertinent questions about education alive by collectively cultivating practices of long-term thinking and orientations to next steps that are responsive to, and guided by, the revolutionary moment. They hold the space of a different future open by confronting neoliberal capitalism directly and attempting to both evade and abolish the profound control that a schooled society imposes on our educational life. The third point, then, is that in addition to forms of resistance and confrontation, postschool imaginaries must put forth an affirmative project that emerges from collective explorations of those larger questions about what it is that we desire and value: What do we want to do once we disrupt the social relations of schooling and seize the conditions of production and reproduction of our own lives? What do we want the future to look like, how do we want to spend our time, and how do we want to treat and take care of each other? We need to abolish the social relations of capital, and postschool and postwork imaginaries are vital to this project.
Without fueling the most egregious neoliberal assaults on public schools, it may be time to question some of the long-standing and infrequently questioned conventional wisdom about schools and their propensity for fostering a just and equitable society. Postschool imaginaries is a demand for the ‘structures, relations, values, experience, and meaning’ of education to be substantially transfigured (Weeks, 2011: 146). The aim here is not merely to liberate schooling but for educational life to be liberated from the life-school-work nexus in order to, again, ‘begin a process of subjectivations independent and autonomous of capitalism’s hold on subjectivity, its modalities of production and forms of life’ (Lazzarato, 2014: 14). Hardt and Negri (2012) suggest that the process of subjectivations begins with refusal (a negation of the present), and what is necessary now is a collective refusal of the school-work nexus and its stranglehold on educational life and social relations—a refusal that affirms our collective autonomy, common wealth, and aggregate power.
Haunting the progressive educational imaginary: ghost stories for new imaginaries
If the stories that we tell about capitalism matter—if they nourish efforts to develop alternatives—then we not only need a new set of stories but also new takes on familiar stories in order to stretch our collective imaginary. And yet, it might not be enough to simply stretch the imagination in this way. The task before us might also call for haunting the progressive educational imaginary and establishing a ‘break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things’ (Marcuse, 1969: 6). As is the case with postwork imaginaries, making the familiar strange is a key component to postschool imaginaries. In both cases, these seemingly ‘basic social institutions lose their appearance of normality and inevitability; they take on the air of increasing irrationality and dispensability’ (Bowles and Gintis, 2011: 15).
Thus, a final story: a specter is haunting the progressive educational imaginary—the specter of Marx! In this take on a familiar event, Marx is a ghostly presence—an absent-presence—that haunts the very construction of the progressive educational imaginary. 14 In his ‘Report for 1848’—written in the same year Marx and Engels penned the Communist Manifesto—Horace Mann (1891) takes a jab at the ‘revolutionizers’ who suggest that ‘some people are poor because others are rich’ (p.252). This, according to Mann (1891), is nothing more than ‘stupendous folly’ (p.260). He proceeds to offer us his position, which conveniently obscures the ways in which the accumulation of extraordinary wealth is accompanied by the accumulation of extraordinary poverty, misery, exploitation, violence, and dispossession. Mann (1891) writes, ‘For the creation of wealth, then—for the existence of a wealthy people and a wealthy nation—intelligence is the grand condition’ (Mann, 1891: 259). Mann’s story—which conspires with domination and depends on the banishing of Marx—has long been at the center of the progressive educational imaginary, serving as a pillar that helps to depoliticize antagonistic relations of the production process, and thus perpetuates the most lethal social, political, and economic conditions of neoliberal capitalism. In short, Mann (1891) developed three founding myths about US schools: (1) There is a set relationship between schools and society, namely that schools are to serve the greater interests of the economy. (2) Schools are great equalizers. (3) Intelligence is the grand condition of wealth.
These myths persist today and inform the logic that is at the center of the achievement ideology. For instance, we can recognize these myths in Obama’s (2010) pronouncements that education is a matter of economic and national security—that in a global economy, the prosperity of the US depends on ‘our ability to provide our citizens with the education that they need to succeed, while attracting the premier human capital for our workforce’ (Obama, 2010: 29). In proposing that investments in STEM education will strengthen ‘human capital’ and fortify national prosperity and security, Obama propagates Mann’s intelligence myth and similarly obscures processes of domination through his facile suggestion that students—as consumers—merely make the right investment in the commodity of education and it will yield rewards. In essence, Obama encourages students to think of themselves as the subjects of neoliberalism par excellence, and to embrace the governing logics of homo economicus. Certainly, Obama is not unique in this regard, for as Bowles and Gintis (2011) suggested, historically ‘movements for educational reform have faltered through refusing to call into question the basic structure of property and power in economic life' (p.14). This is nothing new, but it does show the persistence of these founding myths in the progressive educational imaginary.
The myths suggest that individuals create wealth through intelligence, concealing both our common faculty to act together to generate wealth, and also veiling processes of domination that expropriate our common wealth. Where the progressive educational imaginary attempts to banish Marx, we must let him disturb, haunt, and unsettle. Just as an autonomist Marxist perspective is central to the unsettling of work, it is also indispensable to the unsettling of schooling. A work society needs us. We do not collectively need work. The autonomist inversion here ‘transforms our vision of the corporation from something that creates value to something that encloses it’ (Cederström and Fleming, 2012: 17). Similarly, a schooled society needs us. We do not collectively need a schooled society. Rather than viewing schools as sites that gift us with education, perhaps we might better understand how they enclose and foreclose educational life by, among other things, claiming a monopoly over our biopolitical production, common wealth, and communicative capacities to produce and share knowledge. In a very real sense, a schooled society, like a work society, ‘may, in fact, be antithetical to the requirements of collective survival’ (Fleming, 2014: 59). Postschool imaginaries is a call to wrest educational life away from schooling, or in Illich’s terms, shatter the ‘radical monopoly’ that a schooled society claims over educational life, and thus the radical social imagination. The refusal of the life-school-work nexus may be our best hope to construct another world—one that is fueled by our collective and autonomous desires.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.