Symptoms of the 'post-political'

I recently attended two international conferences — one in Brisbane, Australia, on Stem (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in education, and the other in Osaka, Japan, called ACE, or the Asian Conference on Education in the Age of Globalisation. What interested me about these conferences was their focus on (mainly, but not only, tertiary) education, especially the tension, in the first, between technology and “education” in the etymological sense of the word, and the conceptualisation of education in relation to globalisation, in the second.

Most people today would probably not see a tension between technology and education, but it is undeniably there: “education” literally means “leading” (in a morally and cognitively desirable direction, designated as “maturity”). Technology, on the other hand, is a combination of techné and logos — literally a discourse on, or rationale of a kind of knowing, but in practice the technical development, based on natural scientific and mathematical knowledge, of various kinds of apparatus.

As such, technology is in principle incapable of infusing anyone’s life with desirable ends for personal moral and cognitive development, although it could be a means for furthering the latter. By itself, that is, technology is only capable of developing a set of “skills” that can be put in the service of the so-called “free society”, or (what increasingly amounts to the same thing) the “totally administered society” — apart from, as Heidegger so convincingly argued, inculcating in people a mindset which construes the world as being a “standing-reserve”, which is exclusively there for humans’ use, without any intrinsic worth of its own.

My own paper at the technology and education conference was therefore, understandably, on the need to create a space for the humanities at institutions where technological subjects are taught, to be able to provide a conceptual and historical context within which technology can be situated and comprehended. Lacking such a context would mean, as Allan Bloom already argued in the 1980s, that people would be trained in the development and use of sophisticated technical equipment without necessarily having an inkling of its historical and scientific provenance, so that, in the end, more and more people would be technologically savvy, but educationally empty.

As far as the conference on education in a time of globalisation is concerned, what attracted me here was the question, whether, at a time when reciprocal “flows” between countries at various levels have been optimally facilitated (culturally, educationally, technologically), one could legitimately speak of equal justice being done internationally regarding the needs and rights of migrating students from different countries. One might expect that the hegemonic position of certain nations and languages (foremost among them “American” English) would place some of them in a disadvantageous position from the outset.

This was one of the questions that I addressed in my paper, the other question (which has to be seen in conjunction with the first) being the one concerning the relevance, for tertiary education, of the “globalisation” of rapidly changing ecological conditions (something that happens unavoidably, given the interconnectedness of everything in the earth’s encompassing ecosystem).

I mention all of this, because I fail to see how anyone can be oblivious of these issues when “higher education” is addressed in the context of globalisation. Firstly, it is a salient fact that international students from certain culturally, politically and economically powerful nations are in a very different position to those from more fragile cultures and economies, the language(s) they speak being symptomatic of this difference. Secondly, it is inconceivable that any “educated”, informed person, today, should not be aware of the looming ecological crisis, even if they believe it to be less serious than some claim, and it does not take much effort to realise that climate change will unavoidably affect education.

And yet, none of the papers I attended at either of these two conferences on (chiefly) tertiary education even broached these questions. Either they focused on the technical minutiae of testing students’ language proficiency (usually, tellingly, English), or they provided endless comparative statistical lists of student enrolment figures in certain disciplines, in order to demonstrate either the growth, or waning of interest in these (for example engineering), or — most commonly — they measured some or other “performance” on the part of students (not surprising at a time when the optimalisation of “performativity” is one of the key drivers of “development”, which ensures that the political status quo remains intact). While one could certainly draw some inferences from this information, and relate them to broader trends worldwide, presenters generally appeared to avoid this, being content with merely presenting their findings.

Even the supposed “keynote addresses” I attended, presented at plenary sessions, failed to rise above the “business as usual” level. Are my expectations too high, when I anticipate in a keynote address something that succeeds in “taking the pulse” of current conditions in a specific intellectual or cultural domain, or at least approximates the present state of affairs in such a sphere? Perhaps they are, but whatever the case may be, the so-called keynote addresses I attended (which were admittedly not all of them) were hugely disappointing.

Instead of articulating something that addressed the present situation in higher education in a conceptually illuminating manner, together with an evaluation and a prognosis of sorts, these merely reported on student enrolment numbers in the disciplines concerned, alluded to high expectations at the prospect of new syllabi, and generally assured tertiary educators that their efforts were needed as well as appreciated. In other words, the mechanics of the educational system(s) may require attention to some degree, but a fundamental reflection on the rationale behind this system is assumed to be superfluous.

To be fair, in one such keynote address (at the ACE conference in Japan) the presenter elaborated in an interesting manner on students’ experiential learning outside the classroom (“after-class activities”), and on what lecturers could, in turn, learn from this. But nowhere did I encounter anything remotely visionary, that spoke of true leadership in the field of education.

In fact, it struck me that what I was witnessing at the time was symptomatic of what Zizek and other thinkers refer to as “post-politics”, or the kind of managerialism practised today, from state departments to universities (through “audits”, among other mechanisms of control), because of the general acceptance that “politics” (as the never-ending search for the conditions of social organisation that are conducive to optimal “freedom” as emancipated self-determination) is no longer necessary or possible, and that all that remains, is to re-arrange the deckchairs and put out the occasional fire in the kitchen. In Violence (2009, p34), Zizek describes “post-political bio-politics” as follows:

“Today’s predominant mode of politics is ‘post-political bio-politics’ — an awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: ‘post-political’ is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management and administration, while ‘bio-politics’ designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal. It is clear how these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains is only the efficient administration of life … ALMOST only that. That is to say, with the depoliticised, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilise people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. For this reason, bio-politics is ultimately a politics of fear, it focuses on defence from potential victimisation or harassment.”

Zizek does not leave it at this; he continues as follows, in the process providing an explanation of the reasons for what I have referred to as the “lack of vision” in the keynote addresses concerned: without spelling it out, they implicitly moved within the ambit of the “post-political bio-politics” of fear, because it was safe, or, in other words, “politically correct” to do so (pp. 34-35):

“This is what separates a radical emancipatory politics from our political status quo. We’re talking here not about the difference between two visions, or sets of axioms, but about the difference between politics based on a set of universal axioms and a politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political, since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilising principle: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state itself, with its burden of high taxation, fear of ecological catastrophe, fear of harassment. Political correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear. Such a (post-) politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid ‘ochlos’ or multitude: it is the frightening rallying of frightened people.”

The situation characterised here by Zizek formed the tacit backdrop to the two conferences I have just attended — it was noticeable how, whenever anyone asked questions which required a “political” — as opposed to a “post-political” — answer, presenters avoided the political dimension altogether in their answers. This happened, for instance, when a young woman from Singapore was asked whether Singapore was a democracy, and the suggestion was made that, if it is not, it might help explain some of her findings about signs of being “at-risk” (read: “alienation”) among the subjects of her study. She was eventually pressured into refusing outright to discuss the question of Singapore’s political status.

A caveat is called for here: readers might respond, as people usually do when Singapore enters a discussion, by either thinking to themselves that, “of course”, Singapore is a dictatorial city-state (which explains the presenter’s discomfort), or that Singapore is an exemplary city-state, given its success in controlling crime, etc (which would resonate with Zizek’s allusion to a “politics of fear’). But one should be careful not to posit too much of a difference between Singapore and other, so-called democratic states, here — there is no democracy on the planet today which does not practice the post-politics of fear, by combining the mobilisation of the masses around something to be feared with a valorisation of efficient administration (which is one of the things Singapore seems to be known for).

In other words, lacking an emancipatory politics, all the people living in the countries of the globe are subject to the expectations of “political correctness” as manifestation of what undergirds such a “safe” (but unprincipled) stance: post-political bio-politics. I encounter this even among my supposed philosophical colleagues. The question is: can a genuine politics be rekindled among these circumstances? Everything seems to argue against it, but then — history has a strange way of unpredictably pulling a rare rabbit from the hat …