Education and the Discourse of Global Neoliberalism

John Gray, John P. O'Regan, Catherine Wallace, John Gray, John P. O'Regan, Catherine Wallace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000200652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book investigates neoliberalism in education and explains how it is a complex phenomenon which takes on local characteristics in diverse geopolitical, economic and cultural settings, while retaining a core commitment in all its manifestations to market fundamentalism.

Neoliberalism - that set of beliefs and practices which has become the economic orthodoxy of global preference since the 1980s - appears remarkably resilient despite the US financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent implementation of austerity in the massively indebted nations of the European Union. This book addresses the phenomenon of neoliberalism in education and focuses on school and higher education settings in Ireland, the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. Specifically, it addresses the role of language and semiosis in the reconfiguration of global educational practices along increasingly marketised lines. At the same time, the nature of the counter-hegemonic discourses also in circulation in these sectors is also considered. Collectively, the chapters in the book seek to shed light on the possibilities for resistance and the prospect of change from a variety of theoretical and (inter)cultural perspective.

The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Language and Intercultural Communication.

Mediatizing neoliberalism: the discursive construction of education's 'future'

Joseph Sung-Yul Park

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how the chronotopic nature of media representations serves as an important site for naturalizing a neoliberal vision of the future. Through an analysis of two media texts—first, the Korean television documentary series Myeonggyeon Manli, and second, a promotional video for a student career center at a Singaporean university—it shows how they both rely on a representation of the future as a time-space that radically breaks from the present, and how this distinct future chronotope works to rationalize neoliberal transformations of education that are taking place in the here and now.

이논문은미디어표상이갖는크로노토프적(시공간적)특성을살펴보고, 이것이 어떻게 미래에 대한 신자유주의적 비전을 정당화하는데 이용되는지 논의한다. 한국의 다큐멘터리 프로그램 ‘명견만리’와 한 싱가폴대학의학생취업센터가만든홍보비디오를분석함으로써,이 논문은 두 텍스트 모두 미래를 현재와 극명히 분리된 시간으로 묘사하고있음을보이고,이렇게구성된미래의시공간은어떻게지금 이곳에서벌어지는교육의신자유주의화를정당화하는지를논의한다.

Introduction

The dominance of neoliberalism is established through the exercise of political power, but the semiotic process through which the ideology of neoliberalism gets perpetuated and naturalized is also an important aspect of its reproduction. As Vološinov (1973) reminds us, the reproduction and contestation of ideologies is mediated through signs, and for this reason, the sign is a site of struggle. For instance, ideological contestation of social meaning through neoliberal keywords (Williams, 1985) is one mechanism through which the neoliberal social order is rationalized. This is demonstrated through Holborow’s (2015) analysis of how terms such as deregulation, human capital, and entrepreneur obscure the material interests that underlie neoliberalism and propagate neoliberal principles across multiple domains of society. The semiotic mediation of neoliberalism does not take place solely through words in the morphological sense, of course. It is also accomplished by broader discourses that contextualize and temporalize neoliberalism – that is, through talk about neoliberalism that roots it in particular space-times. Such discourses circulate through various domains ranging from public articulation of policies to everyday casual conversation by workers, reinforcing and questioning neoliberalism’s status as the new common sense (Chun, 2017). Moreover, such discourses not only occur through overt talk about the political economy, but also through the more general way the world around us is semiotically constituted and represented.

In this paper, I suggest that one important dimension of semiotic mediation of neoliberalism is that of time – in particular, how the ‘future’ is represented. Neoliberalism may be understood as an anticipatory regime (Adams, Murphy, & Clarke, 2009); that is, the relentless expansion of the logic of the market, as most saliently embodied by the global flow of speculative capital, valorizes anticipating the future and carefully managing our selves in the present to maximize the profit we can gain in the future. One of the places where this becomes prominent is the field of education. The logic of human capital development that undergirds neoliberal reforms of education that we are witnessing today, including the emphasis placed on competition, austerity, and commodification of skills and knowledge (Flubacher & Del Percio, 2017), demands investment in the potential of individual students today, whose future lives are supposed to bring maximized profit for both themselves and society (Park, 2016). The moral expectation that students should develop themselves as a bundle of skills relevant for the workplace (Urciuoli, 2008) requires that they constantly consider what kind of conditions will define the future job market and mold themselves accordingly to that prediction. Likewise, such pressure calls for educational institutions to constantly reframe themselves as service providers that dispense commodified knowledge relevant for the future, instead of remaining a bastion of academic research that is increasingly seen as bound to an outdated past.

As a way of contributing to the theme of this special issue, where the intersection of education and the intercultural politics of neoliberalism is explored, in this paper I employ the perspective of mediatization (Agha, 2011; Androutsopoulos, 2016) to explore one possible semiotic foundation for that nexus. In particular, I focus on how the chronotopic nature of media representations (i.e. how they bring together and juxtapose differently construed time-spaces; Bakhtin, 1981; Park, 2010) serves as an important site for naturalizing a neoliberal vision of education, thereby functioning as a crucial venue for the rationalization of neoliberal educational reforms. Through an analysis of two media texts – first, a Korean television documentary series, in which celebrity academics report on future social trends, and second, a promotional video for a student career center at a Singaporean university – I show how they both rely on a representation of the future as a time–space that radically breaks from the present. I then discuss how such construction of the future works to justify the neoliberal imperative these texts promote, providing a particular ground upon which education comes to be reimagined as a neoliberal project of human capital development.

Neoliberal chronotopes

Capitalism as asystem is forward-looking, in the sense that it must continuouslyseek to reproduce conditions for accumulation of capital through new investments, new markets, new technologies, and new structures of management. Particularly in neoliberalism, which emerged as a response to the crisis of capital accumulation brought about by intensifying competition in the globalizing economy, anticipation of future market conditions and prospects for profit becomes a highly crucial element. Various managerial techniques, including just-in-time production, flexible deployment of labor, outsourcing, downsizing, and financialization, all point to a heightened sensitivity to shifting conditions of the market, which enables capital to project and execute strategies that can most efficiently respond to and profit from such conditions. The rise of speculative capital and its predatory expansion that monetizes all aspects of human life is perhaps the starkest illustration of this. Speculation is significant because it not merely represents an extension of rational calculation of profits along temporal lines but constitutes a particular kind of subjective orientation of selves in time. As Adams et al. (2009, p. 247) note, ‘speculative forecast…has been loosened from the virtue of certainty and redirected as an injunction to characterize and inhabit degrees and kinds of uncertainty’, which leads to the reframing of ‘anticipation as an affective state, an excited forward looking subjective condition’, through which we are expected to actively orient ourselves towards the future.

This is precisely the logic of human capital development that is valorized in neoliberalism. The notion of human capital extracts the natural and creative capacity of humans from its historical and social embedding, and recasts it in terms of an economic resource, as potential that everyone is endowed with regardless of one’s social provenance, as capital that can be mined, developed, and improved to yield economic and social profit in the future (Park, 2016). Thus, endless self-development, in which people are expected to continuously and willingly pick up new skills and competencies as away of marketing themselves in the world,become the ideal stat eo fbein gfo rneo-liberal subjects. In the volatile job market and under constantly changing demands of work, becoming an entrepreneur of the self (Foucault, 2008) through flexible and continuous rebranding is presented as a means of survival and success, as well as the most effective way of realizing one’s true sense of self, unencumbered by the social constraints that restrict our potential (Park, 2016). Therefore the logic of human capital development inherently presumes a particular orientation towards the future; it implies assessing one’s worth based on what one can make it become in the future,an dthu srequire scarefu lforecastin go ffutur econdition so fth emarke tan dstrategicall yposi-tioning oneself in the present based on those predictions. Such temporal orientation also quickly pick su p amora ldimension,fo rno tdevelopin gone’ shuma ncapita ltoda yamount st owastin gvalu-able capital that can bring not only self-realization but also self-sufficiency and great profit for the future society. Needless to say, the discourse of human capital obscures multiple inequalities, such as the fact that valorization of entrepreneurship rationalizes drastic precarization of work and the profit that capital derives from it, or the fact that who can benefit from such projects of self-development is heavily constrained by socioeconomic conditions of the present. Nonetheless, the moral and affective quality attributed to human capital development rationalizes its logic by presenting anticipation of the future as a fundamental responsibility and ethical outlook for neoliberal subjects.

The implications of temporality inherent in the logic of human capital development suggests that it can be helpful to consider the semiotic foundation of neoliberalism through Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. In Bakhtin’s (1981) framework, chronotopes refer to ideologically constituted distinctions in time–space that have implications for ourunderstanding of the nature of the characters, relations,andevents that inhabit such time–space.As neoliberalism presents the future not simply as a linear extension of the here-and-now but as a radically distinct time–space which calls for entirely different ways of being,we might argue that neoliberalism sets the future in chronotopic terms.That is, in neoliberalism, the future is not simply a set of projectable trends and forecasts but a distinct chronotope, defined through an ideological articulation of what type of people occupy the market-oriented time–space of the future, how they conduct themselves towards others, and what kind of affective and moral stances do they display. Thus the unpredictable and uncertain future is depicted as a time–space occupied by entrepreneurs o fself,who refuse to rely on traditional struc-tures of community and solidarity and instead willingly and responsibly engage in constant work of self-development, and through such work, successfully realize their full potential as creative human beings. This neoliberal chronotope, in turn, leads people to project back such future ways of being onto their present as guidance for their conduct in the here-and-now. Because this chronotope is presented as that of the future, distinct from the present yet inevitably converging with the present through the flow of time,chronotopic presentations of the future become extremely powerful semio-tic mechanisms that lead us to internalize the neoliberal regime of anticipation, telling us that we only ignore such visions of the future at our own peril.

Current developments in the study of metpragmaticsa llowust of ocuso nt hisf unctiono fc hron-otopes as a way of understanding the semiotic basis for neoliberalism’s temporal rationalization. In particular, recent theories of the process of mediatization (Agha, 2011; Androutsopoulos, 2016) can be a useful basis for investigating the interdiscursive chains created between the (imagined) future and the present to induce neoliberal anticipation within subjects of today. Mediatization may be understood as a process by which representational practices of institutions semiotically mediate andt husp articipatei nt hec irculationo fm eaningfuli magesa ndi nterpretationso ft hew orlda round us. It is not a process that is strictly determined by and confined within institutions of mass media, for what this concept highlights is how images of people, their practices, and the time-spaces they occupy expand in their meaning and uptake as they circulate throughout a web of interactional links that include institutional representations of those images. Instead, it foregrounds the semiotic effects media representations produce as people engage with them in interactions that go beyond passive reception of media content, adding and modulating meaning for those representations in a way that is grounded in their own here-and-now.

In this sense, mediatization offers a useful perspective for analyzing chronotopic construction of the future under neoliberalism. By tracing the specific ways in which the future chronotope is constructed in media texts, we are able to outline the process by which the imagined future is imbued with affective and moral meanings, forming a condition that subjects in the present must orient to. Through mediatization,the future is tr ansforme dfro m amer etempora lextrapolatio no fth epresent, to a distinct time–space that continuously speaks to us and presses us into action in the here-and-now, molding us into subjects that internalize the dictates of neoliberalism. Since media texts, by their ver ynature,work through spatiotemporal extension –that is, b ysemiotically juxtaposing mul-tipl echronotopes(e.g.tha to fth eviewer,o fther eporter,o fth ereporte devent,etc.;Park,2010)onto the viewer’s own time–space – investigating the mediatization of future chronotopes through media text so fneoliberalis mallow su st ocarr you t asemioti ccritiqu eo fth eneolibera llogi co fanticipation.

For such analysis of chronotopes,figures of person hoo dandinteractiona lregime sca nserv ea suse-ful resources. Figures of personhood refer to socially recognizable person types that are linked with particular signs of behavior, demeanor, character, and practice (Agha, 2007), while interactional regimes refer to expectations about normative conditions for social interaction, such as typical pat-tern so flanguag euse,structure so finteraction,o rculturall ydominan tpractices(Blommaert,Collins, & Slembrouck, 2005). Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope was ultimately a way of accounting for the different person types and their socially grounded behavior that characterize distinct genres, rather than a mere depiction of time and space. The hero of Greek romances, for instance, navigates time and space in a different way from the fool in medieval folktales, and it is such typified characters, complete with their moral, behavioral, and affective traits, as well as their patterns of interaction with other characters, that constitute the unique nature of how time–space is organized in the Greek romance as opposed to that of medieval folklore. Our analysis, then, can focus on studying figures of personhood and interactional regimes that a given media text attributes to the time– space of the future, and based on this observation, identify the nature of the contrast the text attempts to generate with the present. For instance, how is the ideal student of the future depicted in a media text? What kind of activities does she engage in, what kind of things does she value, how does she interact with other people, what are the social structures that she must work against, and what kind of affectsfill her mind? Such chronotopic characterizations necessarily have implications fo rho ww eunderstand th estudent o ftoday,whic hca ni nturn serv ea s abasi sfo rther eimagination o feducationa s asit efo rhuma ncapita ldevelopment.I nth eres to fthi spaper, Idemonstratesuchan analysis, focusing on two instances of media texts produced in the context of neoliberal transformations of educational institutions.

Myeonggyeon Manli: insights for the future

The first example that I discuss comes from the Korean television program Myeonggyeon Manli,a show aired by South Korea’s public broadcaster, KBS. While my discussion below focuses on two particular episodes on the topic of education(‘The future of education:Will the university disappear’ and‘The future of education 2: How to develop the power of thinking’,airedon 26 and 27 November 2015,respectively),the show is a good illustration of how vision of the future serves as anideological basis for neoliberal reforms. As this title (‘clear vision of 10,000 miles’) implies, the program reports on various future trends that will impact Korean society, and suggests various responses. It adopts a unique format which the show calls a ‘lecturementary’,a hybrid between a ‘lecture’anda ‘documen-tary’, both of which are common genres on Korean television. On each episode of the show, a host, who is usually a celebrity academic, but sometimes an author, entrepreneur, or some type of expert, speaks to a live audience about one issue that will have a significant impact on Korea’s future. This ‘lecture’ segment is then interspersed with filmed documentary segments introduced by the host, which report on evidence of that impact across various sectors of Korean society as well as abroad. Between these segments,the host also has discussions with audience participants. From March 2015 to late 2017(the time of writing),over 60 55-minutes episodes have been aired,covering a wide range of areas such as the economy, technology, environment, population, labor, and global relations.

In several ways, the show’sformat and content reflects thetrends of neoliberalism that havebeen dominating Korean society since the 1990s. During these past two decades, South Korea underwent significantne oliberalization,as the government pushed for increasingly greater liberalization of mar-ket and labor relations,resulting inprivatization of state enterprises,financialization of the economy, and heightened competition and precarity in the job market. Another outcome of this transformation was how knowledge came to be commodified. Intensified competition in the labor market led to increased emphasis on transferable soft skills, including that of communication skills, human relation skills, and most relevant to our discussion, critical thinking skills. Along with the boom in the market for self-help literature (Seo, 2009; Yi, 2013), there was a big surge of interest in popularized forms of knowledge in the humanities, which was considered to be the philosophical and rational foundation for critically addressing real-world problems. Thus, while humanities as a discipline withered under the overwhelming investment in the STEM(science,technology,engineer-ing, mathematics) fields, books and lectures on humanities-related subjects targeting the general publicmet an unprecedented boom(Gang, 2013). Inparticular,the lecture format, aided by the ico-nic popularity of Steve Jobs-type presentations and TED talks,became highly popular,with ‘starlec-turers’ like Choi Jingi and Gang Sinju emerging as highly-sought celebrities with frequent appearances on tele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Education and the discourse of global neoliberalism
• 1 Mediatizing neoliberalism: the discursive construction of education’s ‘future’
• 2 Language, neoliberalism, and the commodification of pedagogy
• 3 Neoliberal fetishism: the language learner as homo œconomicus
• 4 Language skills as human capital? Challenging the neoliberal frame
• 5 The bureaucratic distortion of academic work: a transdisciplinary analysis of the UK Research Excellence Framework in the age of neoliberalism
• 6 Being an English academic: a social domains account
• 7 ‘Even the dead will not be safe’: the long war over school English
• 8 Some thoughts on education and the discourse of global neoliberalism
• Index