Rethinking the Curricular Imagination: Curriculum and Biopolitics in the Age of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Giroux, H. (2009). Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lewis, T. (2008). Defining the Political Ontology of the Classroom: Toward a Multitudinous Education. Teaching Education 19(4), 249–260.

Lewis, T. (2009). Biopower, Play, and Experience in Education. In D. Kellner, T. Lewis, C. Pierce, & K. D. Cho (Eds.), Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (pp. 45–57). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Lewis, T. (2009). Understanding the Logic of Educational Encampment: From Illich to Agamben. The International Journal of Illich Studies 1(1), 28–36.

Notes

1 This essay attempts to foreground neoliberalism as a multidimensional “constructivist project” which “carries a social analysis, that, when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen‐subject to education policy to practices of empire. Neoliberal rationality, while foregrounding the market is not only or even primarily focused on the economy; it involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player” (Brown, 2005, pp. 39–40). In addition, I also wish to present a rhizomatic vision of neoliberalism that emphasizes the role of deterritorialized knowledge societies in disseminating the values of the market into every domain of social existence (see Ruffolo, 2008).

2 Absolute democracy refers not to a formal political structure of constitutionally limited democracy, but rather to collective modes of relating, producing, and collaborating. Absolute democracy as a way of life is the social basis upon which new democratic projects emerge (see Hardt & Negri, 2004). John Dewey’s (1927) notion of democracy as experimental and always in motion captures the essence of absolute democracy and foregrounds collective processes over fixed formal structures. For Dewey, “the experiment must always be retried; the State must always be rediscovered” (p. 34). Yet for robust absolute democracy to flourish, democratic subjectivities must be cultivated.

3 As Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri (2008) explain, the English word power is expressed through two distinctive terms in Italian (potenza and potere) and French (puissance and pouvoir). “Potenza[and puissance] resonates often with implications of potentiality as well as with decentralized or mass conceptions of force and strength. Potere[and pouvoir], on the other hand, refers more typically to the might or authority of an already structured and centralized capacity, often an institutional apparatus such as the state” (p. 274).

4 Through the lens of biopower, a focus on a curriculum of schooling is attentive to the ways in which populations, through the technology of modern schooling, are encountered and configured as a “political problem” (Foucault, 2003, p. 245) and thus subject to mechanisms which seek to establish a determined state of equilibrium which satisfies the current configurations of power. On the contrary, a school curriculum generally seeks to compensate for dissymmetries, often in conceptually non‐relational ways that fail to address the multifaceted relational economies of biopower. As a result, many proposed curricular solutions lack a critique of contemporary logics of domination, and thus the very solutions advanced often work in conjunction with the prevailing logics that buttress the established order.