A paradoxical academic identity: fate, utopia and critical hope

Abstract

Using a dialectical mode of exposition, I offer a reflexive sociological theorisation of the paradox that characterises my academic identity: a fatalistic disenchantment concerning the colonisation of Higher Education (HE) by neoliberalism co-exists with a utopianism concerning HE's emancipatory possibilities. I begin with a discussion of Weber's contention that disenchantment is the fate of bureaucratised modernity. This is followed by a consideration of Freire's conception of hope as a universal ontological need and Bloch's conceptualisation of the objective and subjective dimensions of hope. The significance these authors attribute to dreaming in the development of the utopian imagination is also addressed. Next, I argue that the tensions in my identity, generated by the paradox of fatalism and utopianism, are partially resolved in the practice of a pedagogy of critical hope. I conclude by suggesting that this pedagogy can only be interstitial, existing within the gaps in bureaucratised, neoliberal higher educational institutions.

Keywords:

• identity
• fate
• utopia
• pedagogy
• hope

Notes

1. The dance metaphor underpins not only the dialectical method but also my approach to academic argument. See also Lakoff and Johnson (2003, 5–6):

Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently.

2. But as Ball (2003, 217) argues, the state has not relinquished control, rather it exercises new form of ‘less visible regulation, a more “hands off”, self-regulating regulation’.

3. Freire has taken the concept of necrophily from the work of Marxist psychoanalytic thinker Eric Fromm. Fromm (1964, 41) argues: ‘The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. All living processes, feelings, and thoughts are turned into things’. Nechrophily is the product of consumer capitalism and bureaucracy.