The Pathology of Identity and Agency in Predatory Culture
Ron Scapp
… the adaptive person is person as object, adaptation representing at most a weak form of self-defense.
—Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness
There is not one of these aspects—not the least operation, the least industrial or financial mechanism—that does not reveal the insanity of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality: not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of this pathological state, this insanity …
—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
The rejuvenated relationship between education and the military and corporate sector of the United States has recently become more pronounced despite the Enron and WorldCom debacles and the lingering concerns over national security since September 11. Just consider the growing number of Americans putting stock in the revitalized practice of regarding military and corporate institutions as hallmarks of achievement and success, embracing them as welcomed models for guiding the transformation of the nation’s public schools. Evidence of this trend can be readily identified in: (1) the renewed popularity of Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC); (2) the expansion of the Edison project, the for-profit education company now running charter schools in over twenty states; (3) the widespread and enthusiastic support for President Bush’s national initiative to recruit military personnel and businesspeople to fill administrative and teaching posts at the elementary and secondary levels; and (4) the increasing number of “nonprofit” colleges and universities following the for-profit, University of Phoenix model of marketing a no-frills education specifically for consumers on the run. From preschool-K to graduate school, those in charge are turning with greater frequency to the values, strategies, and organizational structure of the military and corporations to rescue education and, in so doing, “leave no child [read consumer] behind.”
Politicians, administrators, teachers, parents, and students alike rightly seek better and safer teaching and learning environments. The question is, however, why have so many people turned to the military and corporate sector to improve schools? Why have discipline, order, accountability, efficiency, and cost cutting become the guideposts for transforming schools and not traditional democratic concerns such as interest in social justice, equality, and the fostering of a critically minded citizenry? In other words, why has education apparently been abandoned in favor of “taking command” of the lives of students and teachers as well as the schools they inhabit?
In what follows, I argue that the reason why taking command is so dependent on military and corporate perspectives and values is due to the existential circumstances arising from what Peter McLaren has identified as “predatory culture,” a culture that continues to flourish and dominate virtually every aspect of American public policy.
In his powerful indictment of both the militarization and the corporatization of public schools titled Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy, Kenneth J. Saltman persuasively argues that part of the reason for the current emphasis on education reform can be traced to the fact that in the United States today
[t]he omnipresent language and logic of the market works to redefine the public sphere as one more opportunity for profit. Within the current neoliberal order, business ideals of competition, accountability, and efficiency eclipse democratic concerns with the development of a critical citizenry and institutions that foster social justice and equality.1
With this kind of language and logic dominating the debate over the public sphere, including the debate over school reform, comes the recasting and the reproducing, if you will, of students, and citizens generally, as only consumers whose rights to consume must be safeguarded from any and all threats, including the very sort of “disruptive” questioning that genuine education engenders and encourages.
As Saltman goes on to note,
[t]he triumph of market language imposes a singular vision of the future and singular set of values—namely, faith in capitalism. When this happens there is nothing left to discuss. Authority becomes unquestionable, and dissent, the lifeblood of democracy, appears as disruption and threat. The only question is how to enforce this faith in the market. Education becomes a matter of enforcement.2 [emphasis added]
Efforts to transform schools in this context quickly become efforts to control and direct. Enforcement substitutes for administrating; managing and disciplining replace teaching. Saltman bluntly states that
[t]he emphasis on discipline includes tightened curricular constraints such as federally, state-, and locally mandated curriculum guidelines, and more standardized curricula geared toward the reduction of teaching as an intellectual endeavor. In the current climate, top-down constraints surpass even the most traditionally stifling, instrumentalizing controls on teacher work. We are beyond the era of Frederick Taylor and into a whole new realm of anti-critical, thought-squelching tactics.3
Education is abandoned in favor of law and order as defined by the language and logic of the market, that is, the continued smooth and repetitive flow of production and consumption. Inevitably, students and teachers find themselves being assaulted by the systematic dismantling and disciplining of—the taking command of—their lives resulting from privatization efforts to transform schools, namely efforts to downsize, if not destroy, government support of public education and public services generally. This assault becomes all the more immediate and concrete due to the subsequent militarization of the public sphere, which occurs, disingenuously, in the name of ensuring safety at destabilized schools—ensuring, one suspects, the safety of investments made in the newly established “education market,” and by extension the safety of capital at work anywhere around the globe.
Maintaining “this faith in the market,” as Saltman encapsulates it, demands the enforcement of what Henry A. Giroux identifies as “the ideology of corporate culture.” In short, transforming schools becomes part of the larger process of promoting and protecting American values, part of the defense against what the religious and political right claim is a two-pronged evil corrupting our nation: moral relativism and social welfare. One consequence of the enforcement and maintenance of this ideology is the proliferation of what Peter McLaren describes as “predatory culture.” He explains that
[i]n predatory culture identity is fashioned mainly and often violently around the excesses of marketing and consumption and the natural social relations of post-industrial capitalism…. Predatory culture is the left-over detritus of bourgeois culture stripped of its arrogant pretense to civility and cultural lyricism and replaced by a stark obsession with power fed by the voraciousness of capitalism’s global voyage.4
In such a culture, education finds itself engulfed by the desires and fears of those struggling to take command of the moral destiny of our nation, of those McLaren declares, to be obsessed “with power fed by the voraciousness of capitalism’s global voyage.” Under such conditions, education quickly becomes merely the enforcement of values dogmatically defined and defended by those who pledge allegiance, first and foremost, to profit and security—by those not necessarily committed to democracy.
One could further argue that predatory culture is in fact the birthchild of the “community” most committed to profit and security—the religious and political right—a community generously described as antagonistic toward the public sphere. As Herbert I. Schiller pointedly notes in his Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression,
[t]hough evident in many measures adopted by Congress before 1980, it was the Reagan administration’s policy to gut the public sector. The huge tax reductions in 1981–82, accompanied by the staggering increase in military expenditures, created the mountainous deficits of the 1980s—a trillion dollars of debt piled up in eight years. In the face of these unprecedented deficits, the deep cuts that were made in social and public expenditures were made to seem unavoidable. This, in fact, was the intention of the policy from its inception.5 [emphasis added]
The birth of predatory culture, then, is to be viewed as inextricably linked to policies promoted and sustained by the community who hoisted Reagan onto the presidential stage and onto a bully pulpit, aggressively and illegitimately (if not illegally) constricting government’s role in and support of public services such as health care and education, and substituting a rhetoric of national identity and pride for much-needed resources. Criticizing the initiation and enforcement of this nationalistic cultural identity, Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux argue in their Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism, that
[s]ince the second term of the Reagan administration, the debate on education has taken a new turn. Now, as before, the tone is principally set by the right, but its position has been radically altered. The importance of linking educational reform to the needs of big business has continued to influence the debate, while demands that schools provide the skills necessary for domestic production and expanding capital abroad have slowly given way to an overriding emphasis on schools as sites of cultural production. The emphasis on cultural production can be seen in current attempts to address the issue of cultural literacy, in the development of national curriculum boards, and in reform initiatives bent on providing students with the language, knowledge, and values necessary to preserve the essential traditions of Western civilization.6
With this turn people got pulled away from the concrete needs of students and teachers and pulled into the culture wars. The right was, and remains, able to claim a moral high ground by distorting the education debate, by distracting all involved with demands for “standards,” “accountability,” and a cultural literacy à la E. D. Hirsch.
The right’s new vision for America was Reagan’s dream of a brighter tomorrow, “a new morning” as it was framed. But it was a new day predicated on the necessity of a whole community buying into the dream and seeing itself as the only community with the appropriate values and abilities for envisioning and establishing a better day ahead. Those taking command of and participating in America’s moral and political destiny correctly saw themselves as “privileged” members of a right-minded community. In his insightful book, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, Zygmunt Bauman warns, however, that
[t]here is a price to be paid for the privilege of “being in a community”—and it is inoffensive or even invisible only as long as the community stays in the dream. The price is paid in the currency of freedom….7 [emphasis added]
Of course, Reagan and his community began to erode the public sphere in the very name of freedom (read free enterprise). Reagan’s mantra of deregulation and Congress’s implementation of it via a costly stimulation package to benefit private industry (namely, tax cutting to the nth degree) gave birth to predatory culture and its correlate: the desire for ever-greater security from the now “freed” and out-of-control market.
With deregulation Americans were charged with the excitement of unlimited consumption and the responsibility of making it on their own. This double charge resulted in a schizo-culture: Americans were now driven by the desire for what they did not have, but also were filled with anxiety concerning their future, what they did not know. In deregulated America one was promised freedom, but, in fact, forced to submit to the dynamics of a volatile and unpredictable market. The future was open-ended and unclear, and an uneasiness settled in just as the government-sponsored free-for-all began. And “[a]midst uncertainty and insecurity,” Bauman observes, “discipline (or rather, submission to the ‘there is no alternative’ condition) is self-propelling and self-reproducing and needs no foreman or corporals to supervise its constantly replenished supplies.”8 The deregulatory policies liberating and enabling capital to be invested, moved, and removed from the market with speed and little, if any, supervision engendered not a self-disciplining corporate and military milieu but rather an out-of-control predatory culture. Our culture became driven by forces too tempting for too many people not to dream about or desire: the freedom to consume beyond our means. Nevertheless, it also became a culture paradoxically obsessed with and worried about wealth and security, a culture desperately submitting to the dynamics of propelling and reproducing itself based on the uncertainty and insecurity of a “free market.”
At a moment in U.S. history when those elected to government were busy dismantling it, more Americans than not were busy buying into the dream. Down came the barriers to doing business, down came the Berlin Wall, but down too came the quality of life for the average citizen, who like the government itself, was charging her or his way through the dream. And as the debilitating debt grew, so too did the fallacious domain of predatory culture. This, McLaren claims, is because
[p]redatory culture is the great deceiver. It marks the ascendancy of the dehydrated imagination that has lost its capacity to dream otherwise. It is the culture of eroticized victims and decaffeinated revolutionaries. We are all its sons and daughters. The capitalist fear that fuels predatory culture is made to function at the world level through the installation of necessary crises, both monetary and social. Computers have become the new entrepreneurs of history while their users have been reduced to scraps of figurative machinery, partial subjects in the rag-and-bone shop of predatory culture, manichean allegories of “us” against “them,” of “self” against “other.” The social, the cultural and the human has been subsumed within capital.9 [emphasis added]
The turmoil, the “necessary” monetary and social crises encountered because of dreaming only this way and not otherwise, as McLaren laments, fuels the construction of subjectivities that appear unwilling or unable to pull themselves out from the alienating spiral set in motion by the gyrating forces of greed and fear. Yet it is from within this whirlwind of predatory confusion, desire, and anxiety that all too many Americans today seek to reorder and reform their lives, such as they have come to hope their lives might have been (the lure of winning the lottery, or cashing in on Wall Street continue to self-propel and self-reproduce).
As complicated or even contradictory as it may sound, predatory culture is simultaneously deregulating itself in a state of maniacal exuberance while frantically seeking to control its own excesses—now becomes a time of placing and removing limits and restrictions on fragmented and overdrawn lives, lives contemporaneously moving closer to and further away from dearly held “core values.” This is the psycho-socioeconomic suction propelling the transformation of everything, including education. Everything is beyond overextended and is hyperextended, and now is the moment to reconstitute, reconstruct, and reclaim the order of things. And who better to take command than the very sources of the maintenance of the dream of riches and protection? Who better to turn to in order to save us from our enemies, from ourselves? Who better than the military and corporations that rendered us predatory in the first place? Who better than those who created and defended dreaming beyond our means? The turn, therefore, is reflexive. It is, in fact, as Deleuze and Guattari unironically suggest, a pathologically rational return!
The result is that today we find ourselves in the midst of a reform movement pathologically seeking the input of those who have sent so many spiraling out of control. Many in this pathology “rationally” return to the military because of its reputation for preparing for crises with discipline, integrity, and courage. Many similarly return to corporations for their expertise regarding competitiveness, (fiscal) responsibility, and quality (control). Understandably, but wrongly, many return to both because of their “proven” track records of success and their histories of “excellence.” They return to them, so their argument goes, because only the military and corporations can transform education, only they can bring back discipline, accountability, and efficiency, only they can save us (from what they have created: predatory culture).
The fact that many Americans, too many, are still blinded by the bright promise of the dream—of a better tomorrow predicated upon a better yesteryear—is perhaps part of the explanation. America evidently still longs for a past it never had, for a present that does not exist and for a future that, at best, is unlikely to come to fruition unless something radical takes place. McLaren dramatically summarizes this state of affairs in the following way:
Now we are living in the future anterior in which we are discovering that we have a profound nostalgia for a moment that has yet to take place, even in the imagination. We have arrived at the cusp of an absent present era of unspeakable horrors and unnameable pleasures. Democracy is becoming less the motor force in our daily lives, its pedigree of innocence having long been exposed as the posture of the shameless knave. We have given up the search for an all-embracing, undifferentiated and transcendental conception of democratic justice. We now desire not justice but accessibility. We demand that everything be made accessible to us, including the past, present and future—at a single moment’s notice. Humanism has failed to restrict the bourgeois citizen’s desire for power. Power disguised as liberation has become deputized by the logic of exploitation that drives market forces. Imperialism is the name of this power.10 [emphasis added]
In such a state of longing and desire, of wanting, here and now, what has been produced and consumed by others, many find themselves turning away from the hope and promise driven by genuine democratic reverie, and instead moving toward that which is there to be had (cell phones, SUVs, PalmPilots, among the many other products that are and represent power)—if only one could gain access to all of it. Access to the things themselves becomes as important, if not more important, than the things themselves. After all, the things themselves come and go, are in and out of vogue, but access to that which is there to be had, whatever it might have been, is and will someday be, becomes the quintessential index of power itself, of being and identity in predatory culture: access is agency.
Too many Americans want a share in what is there to be had—to be shareholders. Thus they turn themselves back toward the mechanism that began the repetitive process of production and consumption, of consumption and more consumption, of consumption and identification, of inevitably becoming what Giroux calls “consuming subjects.” Their desire becomes not just to have that which is there to be had, but to become that which is there to be had because their mode of being in the world has become confused and distorted—“pathologically rational.” They understand themselves to be only what they have, what they own, what they have access to; this is what their existential value becomes in predatory culture. This is the reason for the continuous acts of consumption and the insatiable desire for accessibility. In predatory culture, identity is as fleeting as the things consumed, and so is one’s agency along with it. One’s value, therefore, is more than merely tied to the objects one consumes, in predatory culture without them one is nothing. Without them one becomes unrecognizable, nonexistent, and inert, as it were, because one’s identity and agency are perversely integrated and enmeshed in the very things one consumes (one is identified and gains agency, and, in turn, identifies and acknowledges the agency of others by a system of signifiers synonymous with contemporary social status: Nike, Gap, Armani, Rolex, and so on; you are what you have access to).
Assessing the existential import of such subjectivity Saltman wonders,
[i]s this the culmination and limit of consumerism when individuals do not merely desire commodities but desire to be desired as commodities? We don’t just want these sacred things. We want to be them. We want to be desired as they are desired, consumed as they are consumed, coveted, sought after, prized, elevated, and endlessly reproduced such that we approach the interminable infinity of the almighty (God/commodity). This is the central problem of consumer culture. It produces desire in the service of assimilation, homogeneity, the abandonment of individual uniqueness; it tends toward massification, undifferentiation, brutal acriticality, and docility.11 [emphasis added]
This is why so many pathologically return to the military and corporations for support and guidance. These are the systems, the forces behind establishing, securing and enforcing the very consumerism that is now a globalizing enterprise—a totalizing enterprise—an enterprise that has thus far controlled and directed school reform as part of, what McLaren calls, “the voraciousness of capitalism’s global voyage.” Thus the desire to take command of schools is part of the pathology of predatory culture because such desire is merely reactionary, adaptive as Freire claims and “at most a weak form of self-defense.”
The current popular approach to school reform is one generated from within the confusing and disorienting existential fog of predatory culture, a haze that distorts one’s identity and agency, one’s democratic sense of self, and one’s ability to enact Freire’s call to embrace “education as the practice of freedom.” We must move beyond the pathology of identity and agency as determined by predatory culture and beyond the consequent “pedagogy of pathology” taking command of school reform. We must continue looking toward the “pedagogy of hope” that Paulo Freire, Henry A. Giroux, and Donaldo Macedo offer as a strategy for reclaiming education as a meaningful process facilitating critical consciousness, a process that allows for the possibility of values not controlled by “market forces” alone to reemerge. As bell hooks urges, we must
open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, [we must] celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.12
We must continue the movement beyond the boundaries of predatory culture, toward justice, democracy and freedom. We must continue to move with faith in education and hope for the future. We must continue the movement “against and beyond” the boundaries of those taking command.
1 Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy (New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), ix.
2 Ibid., x.
3 Ibid., 80.
4 Peter McLaren, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 2.
5 Herbert I. Schiller, Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 66.
6 Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 24.
7 Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 4.
8 Ibid., 42.
9 McLaren, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture, 2.
10 Ibid., 172.
11 Saltman, Collateral Damage, 69.
12 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 12.