Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public Pedagogy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism

As the Right wages a frontal assault against all remnants of the democratic state and its welfare provisions, the progressive Left is in disarray. Theoretical and political impoverishment feed off each other as hope of a revolutionary project capable of challenging the existing forces of domination appears remote. Militarism increasingly engulfs the entire social order as matters of "war and national security" become "consuming anxieties" that provide the "memories, models, and metaphors that shape broad areas of national life" as well as drive American foreign policy (Sherry 1995:xi). As U.S. military action expands its reach into Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly Iran and Syria, under the guise of an unlimited war against terrorism, public spaces on the domestic front are increasingly being organized around values supporting a bellicose, patriarchal, and jingoistic culture that is undermining "centuries of democratic gains" (Buck-Morss 2003:33). As politics is separated from economic power, the state surrenders its obligation to contain the power of corporations and financial capital, reducing its role to matters of surveillance, disciplinary control, and order. Market fundamentalism and the militarization of public life mutually reinforce each other to displace the promise, if not the very idea, of the Great Society-with its emphasis on the common good, basic social provisions for all, social justice, and economic mobility. Fuelled by dreams of empire as well as the desire to mask the shape political power is taking in a period of economic and social decline, militarism and neoliberalism cloak themselves in the discourse of democracy in order to hide the barbarism being reproduced in the torture prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the spread of wage slavery in the interest of capital accumulation, and in the carceral surveillance and disciplinary measures being imposed on the nation's public schools. Democratic political projects appear remote and give rise to either cynicism, solipsism, or reductionistic ideologies on the part of many progressives within and outside of the academy. The crucial task of theorizing a politics suitable for the twenty-first century has fallen on hard times. Economistic theories return to dominate much of the Left, reducing politics to a reflection of economic forces, interests, and measures. Within the university, critically engaged intellectuals appear in short supply as most academics, especially in the humanities and social sciences, bid a hasty retreat to arcane discourses, retrograde notions of professionalism, or irrelevant academic specialities Rather than reinventing and rethinking the challenge of an oppositional politics within a global public sphere, the academic Left appears to be withdrawing from the demands of civic engagement by retreating into what Susan Buck-Morss (2003) calls "theory-world," a space where the "academic freedom of critical theorists coincides with our lack of influence in public and political debate"(p. 68). Hope, once embodied in the politics of persuasion, the drive for instituting critical education in a diverse number of public spheres, collective efforts to organize struggles within major institutions, and the attempt to build international social movements seems, at best, a nostalgic remnant of the 1960s. The naturalness and commonsense appeal of the neoliberal economic order produces a crisis of political and historical imagination, on the one hand, and an educational crisis on the other. It is in opposition to the current turn away from matters of history, culture, and politics that I begin with a quote from Susan George, a powerful critic of neoliberalism and a leading voice in the anti-globalization movement.