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Abstract
This paper is a theoretical effort to support but complicate critiques of disaster capitalism and neoliberal strategies to profit from public education. We put into conversation a discursive analysis following Michel Foucault and a spatial analysis following Henri Lefebvre that focus on monumentalized disasters. We argue that neoliberalism carries out its agenda of privatization through public spaces that are never fully dismantled. We draw on empirical research into spaces that exemplify the usefulness of our reading of neoliberal privatization, including aspects of post-Katrina New Orleans and a more thorough case study of a pre- and post-earthquake Haiti and its highly privatized education system.
Notes
1. This is especially true considering the post-1990 shift toward discourses of the importance of universal primary education to World-Bank-style development, for example, the 1990 Education for All coalition.
2. In general, we are following a Foucauldian understanding of the construction of subjectivity through discourses and practices, but we borrow the idea of hailing subjects from Althusser (Citation1971).
3. Indeed Friedman would likely have called himself a classical liberal.
4. The plans for replacing these buildings follow the pattern of ‘mixed-income housing,’ which Lipman (Citation2008) criticizes within the context of Chicago for its collusion with a ‘neoliberal urban agenda.’ Lupton and Tunstall (Citation2008) make a similar assessment of such policies in the UK.
5. Hardt and Negri (Citation2009) highlight neoliberalism’s ‘precarity,’ by which they mean ‘organizing all forms of labor according to the infinite modalities of market flexibility’ (Citation2009, 146). They argue that ‘global governance’ structures ‘do not need stability and regularity to rule, but instead are designed to manage crises and rule over exceptional conditions’ (Citation2009, 372). More recently, Gilles (Citation2011) traces a discursive intensification of flexibility in the form of ‘agility’ and the ‘agile’ self as an educational goal.
6. For this reason, we include several examples from free-market theory’s first ‘on the ground’ incarnation in Pinochet’s coup d’etat in Chile where martial law paradoxically married a theory of governmentless freedom.
7. CAI, Inc. (2011) http://www.creativeassociatesinternational.com.
8. Analogously, Osama Bin Laden’s assassination, which symbolically closed the case of the ‘ground zero’ crime scene, was followed by his anti-monumental, unlocalizable burial at sea.
9. One of the authors has visited this school and heard testimonies of its particaption in local efforts to rebuild the Ninth Ward along grassroots rather than neoliberal lines.
10. See also Whittinghill (Citation2009) and Ruth (Citation2011).
11. Even the spaces charter schools often occupy are mundane, as well as often privately owned, blending in with the surrounding businesses rather than being monumentally public-school-like.
12. Beiter (Citation2005) implies that the German constitution of 1849 is the first to deal explicitly with education (Citation2005, 23), but Haiti’s second constitution did so in 1805 (Salmi Citation2000, 164).
13. At the time of writing this article, Salmi was Education Sector Manager for the Latin American and Caribbean Region. He is currently coordinator of the World Bank’s network of tertiary education professionals.
14. El Salvador’s private secondary enrollment in 1995 was also out ahead of the western Hemisphere pack in this regard at over 60%, and Chile’s private primary enrollment is second at about 40% (Salmi Citation2000, 166), for neoliberal reasons traced by Pinkney Pastrana (Citation2007, Citation2009).
15. In the USA, the latest figures are that the top one percent owns from 35% of the wealth, and the top 20% owns 85% (Domhoff Citation2011). Salmi’s monumentalization of ‘third world’ inequality obscures how it is endemic to the spatial centers of capital as well.
16. Consistent with our previous analysis of the primary/secondary meets public/private, notice the emphasis on primary as a public good and by implication the private good of secondary and higher education.
17. We trace a similar pattern in the five headings USAID (Citation2011a) uses to describe its project for Haiti: Peace and Security, Governing Justly and Democractically, Investing in People, Economic Growth, and Humanitarian Assistance. These also appear to name the roles of a welfare state, though also drawing on discourses of ‘investing’ in human capital and idolizing growth.
18. Gillies (Citation2008) reads a similar phenomenon in the UK as the ‘discursive conflation’ of quality and equality that masks the broader patterns of inequality external to schooling and ‘risks entrenching social inequalities despite the appearance of egalitarian commitment’ (Citation2008, 685).