Session Information
13 SES 03 B, Existential communication, thrownness, and Merleau-Ponty’s psychology of childhood
Paper Session
Contribution
Heidegger (1996) posits being in the world in relation to one’s thrownness, fallenness, and projection. We move through these with concern for the world and care for others, as shaped by the circumstances of our ready-to-hand and present-at-hand experiences. Heidegger claims that it is neither God nor some metaphysical sense of possibility that guides our inclinations for care; rather, he avers, it is the horizon of our inevitable deaths that gives shape to our encounters, choices, state-of-mind, and understanding. Our time is finite, and it is this finitude—as Dasein is thrown into a particular place at a particular time for a bounded horizon—that gives us both the primordial characteristic of Dasein (a being for whom the question of being is at stake) and the conditions for state of mind, understanding, and discourse. Heidegger also notes that “proximally and for the most part” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 210), the average everydayness of our encounters is what shapes most of our time in the world: we spend most days in conformity with the masses, engaged in the inauthentic and in idle talk.
Taking Heidegger’s existential analytic as a point of departure, in this paper, I seek to explore how the evolution of neoliberalism as a totalizing force of hegemony has implications for Dasein. I argue that the last fifty years of neoliberalism has had a profound effect on the possibilities and qualities that shape Dasein, the found conditions of thrownness, the average everydayness of our encounters, and thus, on the potentials of projection. Failures of interruption to the inauthentic, failures to have authentic moments, occur because, in the neoliberal era, the superficiality of idol talk is idealized; economic and consumerist ends are all that appear on the horizon to shape the conditions for care, concern, and mattering.
In a globalised world shaped by decades of neoliberal capitalism, the thereness in which we find ourselves is remarkably similar across the world. As Brown (2015, 2019) notes, neoliberalism’s greatest strength as an ideological force has been its ability to traverse boundaries, adapt and adopt customs and cultures, and inflect the central premise of individualism, competition, and capital creation into all manner of non-market spaces, including politics, healthcare, and education. The totality of neoliberalism increasingly furnishes a kind of taken-for-grantedness in these spaces and, over time, diminishes the possibilities for alternatives. In this paper, I argue that Heidegger’s existential analytic furnishes a useful framework for understanding the current conditions of our thrownness, the implications for fallenness, and—more pressingly—the limitations for projection.
The failure for Dasein to establish the clearing for authentic appearances in neoliberal ontologies is evident in three ways, discussed in detail below: First, I suggest that authentic moments are more difficult because of the impoverished conceptions of what it means to learn. Second, I contend that we have become preoccupied with a limited view of what it means to care or be concerned. Lastly, I argue that our existential anxiety has been heightened and redirected to wholly neoliberal ends of capital acquisition, provoking an unresolvable and lifelong tension as what we care about is always constructed as outside our reach. To conclude the paper, I outline the challenges of contemporary neoliberal Dasein through an educational lens, thinking about education as a system, curriculum as a mechanism of totality, and pedagogy as a tool of compliance.
Method
This paper employs a philosophical mode of inquiry, drawing on Heidegger’s (1996) rendering of Dasein in Being and Time to critique our dominant, contemporary neoliberal ways of being in the world, our neoliberal facticity. I begin by analyzing how expressions of neoliberalism are linked to goals of market efficiency, individualism, and the logics of production and consumption. I draw on literature from political theory (Brown, 2015, 2019), as well as education theorists, (Apple, 2006, 2017; Peters, 2011, 2012, 2021; Sardoč, 2022; Tašner & Gaber, 2022), to show how broader trends in neoliberalism have become a de facto way of being-in-the-world and being-with-others. I then furnish an overview of Heidegger’s existential analytic and show how his understanding of ontology helps illuminate our current moment of neoliberal angst. For the main analysis of the paper, I ask and aim to answer three questions: How does a neoliberal Dasein understand or learn? What does a neoliberal Dasein care about? What is the neoliberal state of mind or mood? To answer the first question, I suggest that authentic moments are rarer because of the impoverished conceptions of what it means to learn. I apply the Heideggerian existential analytic to explore how language (language not as imparted but as being with – for neoliberal ends, being with is shaped by competitiveness and by the desire to acquire). To answer the second question, what does a neoliberal Dasein care about?—I contend that we have become preoccupied with a limited view of what it means to care or be concerned. That is, even when released from work to become curious about the world, even the distant things we see are not free of neoliberal influence; the acts of bringing close reinforce rather than – so even the acts of bringing close do not interrupt the inauthentic. Lastly, and in response to the question about neoliberal Dasein’s state of mind, I argue that our existential anxiety has been heightened and redirected to wholly neoliberal ends of capital acquisition, provoking an unresolvable and lifelong tension as what we care about is always constructed as outside our reach. Here, I examine cynicism at the impossibility of social mobility, at the distance between what we are told is attainable in our youth, what is promised as a matter of merit after our academic achievements, and the hollowness of both the failure to “make it” and success.
Expected Outcomes
To conclude the paper, I outline the challenges of contemporary neoliberal Dasein for education. Here, I describe what it means to find ourselves amidst a neoliberal thrownness in the institution of schooling, as systems of education move toward marketization, effacing the possibilities of public education in increments across the globe. I explore how curriculum is construed as an ideological battleground, with the neoconservative encroachments of neoliberalism dictating what should be brought into the clearing for examination. I show how pedagogy can be designed for maximum compliance—not simply with the classroom rules and school environment—but with the larger efforts at neoliberal ontology. All this comes at a cost. The smooth congruence of neoliberal totality, the false interruptions that eventually fold back into the whole, are produced in education at the expense of better futures and better ways of being-in-the-world. These are futures we increasingly cannot envision—so bereft are the grounds, the thrownness, for projection. Our imaginations cannot help but to fail in the face of a seamless totality, presented in a unified rhetoric of commerce, proximally and for the most part, across the world. The true terror of the neoliberal ontology is not simply that it so completely vanquishes its historical ideological foes, but that its adaptability draws a long, obscuring curtain across the possibilities of the future. It is less likely today that a child thrown into the conditions of the neoliberal world will be able to imagine what lies beyond the totality of their era’s entities. It is unlikely that they will be able to cultivate the projection for non-neoliberal futures since the average everydayness—in school, at work, in entertainment, in the virtual world, and even in personal relationships, is subject to the singular rendering that inflects the totality of the involvements of being.
References
Apple, M. W. (2006). Understanding and interrupting neoliberalism and neoconservatism in education. Pedagogies, 1(1), 21-26. Apple, M. W. (2017). What is present and absent in critical analyses of neoliberalism in education. Peabody Journal of Education, 92(1), 148-153. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution. Zone Books. Brown, W. (2019). In the ruins of neoliberalism: The rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. Columbia UP. Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time: A translation of Sein und Zeit. SUNY Press. (Original work published in 1927) Peters, M.A. (2011) Neoliberalism and After? Education, social policy and the crisis of western capitalism. New York: Peter Lang. Peters, M. A. (2012). Neoliberalism, education and the crisis of western capitalism. Policy futures in Education, 10(2), 134-141. Peters, M. A. (2021). Neoliberalism as political discourse: the political arithmetic of homo oeconomicus. In M. Sardoč (Ed.), The impacts of neoliberal discourse and language in education (pp. 69-85). Routledge. Sardoč, M. (2022). The rebranding of neoliberalism. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54(11), 1727-1731. Tašner, V., & Gaber, S. (2022). Is it time for a new meritocracy?. Theory and Research in Education, 20(2), 182-192.
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