By EDNEI OF GENARO*
Individual mechanisms of evaluation and self-blame are key to managing, preserving and disclaiming responsibility for the institutional order.
In 2009, Mark Fisher published a seminal book — Capitalist realism: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism — for the understanding and updating, in the context of the 1991st century, of the “cultural logic of late capitalism”, as Fredric Jameson advocated, in XNUMX, in Postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism.
Mark Fisher was a professor in public schools in England, teaching at universities and in “continuing education” programs (future education), offered to anyone over the age of 16 who wishes to take various courses to improve their skills or acquire new work skills; in other words, in most cases, a specialization and retraining program for the country's working class. In his aforementioned work, such experiences as an education professional mobilize diverse and emblematic examples of contemporary culture.
Taking this into account, I will seek here to recover the fertility and sophistication of Mark Fisher's responses on the realistic capitalist psychosocial state, taking into account, in particular, the questions and problems related to public schools, where it seems easier to imagine the end of public schools than the end of the managerialism of self-blame within them.
Regarding the various processes of neoliberalization and commodification of education, who still tries to think about this? Otherwise, how can we unravel this “unnameable thing”, without any transcendent law, without limits, infinitely plastic, which is capitalism? Questions in a rhetorical tone, in the first instance, to recall the current situation of disengagement and the depressive deflation resulting from the normalization of crises — having in Mark Fisher the dystopian literary work children of hope, by PD James ([1992] 2013), and the film adaptation of the same name, by Alfonso Cuarón, as iconic of the rise of ultra-authoritarianism and ultra-capitalism, of the massive destruction of public spaces, something already present among us, but with consummation in the near future.
A situation, in short, that is metamorphosed above all into nihilistic hedonistic world positions, writes Mark Fisher, so that the learning of political convictions and attitudes is replaced by disengagement and voyeuristic observation of the world (Fisher, 2020, p. 13). Capitalist realism is “[…] analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive, who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion” (Idem, p. 14).
By absorbing every opposition, by usurping free time and by nullifying any alternative and independent attitude, contemporary capitalism functions “without an outside”. From rock to hip hop, passing through the current ideal gangster — to cite Fisher’s striking cultural examples — the search is for authenticity and… conformity to the Hobbesian war of all against all, conditioning the production of culture, education and work. “Getting real” today means building skills and coldness for cynical distancing, thus far from criticism and destined for praxis. Anti-capitalist irony, now present even in Disney films, “[…] feeds rather than threatens capitalist realism” (Idem, p. 25-6).
It is precisely in these positions that capitalist ideological forms are revived. About this, here is an excerpt from the work They know not what they do: the sublime object of ideology, by Slavoj Žižek (1992), as quoted by Mark Fisher: “Cynical detachment is just a way […] of closing our eyes to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even when we don’t take things seriously, even when we maintain an ironic detachment, we keep doing them” (Žižek apud Fisher, 2020, p. 26).
The cynical ideological fantasy is complemented by the impossibility of performing a moral critique of capitalism, rendered innocuous, since “poverty, hunger and war can be presented as unavoidable aspects of reality” (Fisher, 2020, p. 35), only reinforce capitalist realism, so that the reactivation of critique/praxis, proposes Mark Fisher, requires an inflection, making explicit the bureaucracy, which “instead of disappearing, changed its form” (p. 38) and the resulting mental health problem, that is, “the paradigmatic case of how realistic capitalism operates” (Idem, p. 36-7), while the two aporias, par excellence, of contemporary capitalism, which give rise to disorders and annoyances in the general population, and in the working hours of public schools, in a very representative way.
The abolition of otium and the transformation of the school into spaces that constitute and are integrated into the business is a problem rooted in the very genesis of public schools in modernity. A fact that highlighted the paradox of its origin in the same act of destruction of its authentic meaning, that is, of the school (scholé) as a place of free time, of retreat, of rest; in other words, of time available for intellectual occupation, for various scientific studies, for philosophy and politics. The dimension of business in the school environment it was transformed and worsened by the neoliberal model internalized at the psychosocial level of experiences and public relations.
Here is Mark Fisher’s response to the myth of decentralization as the end of bureaucracy, prescribing the very definition of the neoliberal model of school management: “The fact that bureaucratic measures have intensified under neoliberal governments that present themselves as anti-bureaucratic and anti-Stalinist may, at first, seem a mystery. However, in practice, we have seen the proliferation of a new form of bureaucracy — a bureaucracy of ‘objectives,’ of ‘expected results,’ of ‘statements of principle’ — at the same time that neoliberal rhetoric about the end of vertical and centralized command is gaining strength. It may seem that this return of bureaucracy is something like a return of the repressed, ironically reemerging at the heart of a system that swore to destroy it. But its triumph under neoliberalism is much more than an atavism or an anomaly” (Fisher, 2020, p. 72).
Neither atavism nor social anomaly, but rather an established order: “market Stalinism”. In a subtle way, bureaucracy re-emerges with new techniques and intensifies. “Periodic evaluation gives way to permanent and omnipresent evaluation, which cannot fail to generate perpetual anxiety” (Idem, p. 87), by imposing “[…] by force the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure diverts” (Idem, p. 116).
Thus, the symbolic metabolization of social classes manifests itself: responsibility falls on the tasks and processes of individuals, regardless of the social structure or institution, thus altering the very logic of visibility and structuring of social roles, based on two dominant clichés: blaming the structure is just an excuse invoked by the weak — the “cry of the weak”; each individual must do their best to become what they aspire to be — “magical voluntarism”, these clichés being, as Fisher writes, “[…] the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society […]” (Idem, p. 140), which shape the capitalist mentality.
Individual assessment and self-blame mechanisms are the key to managing, preserving and exempting the institutional order from responsibility, maintaining its vices and defects, including in “leisure and free time spaces”, schools. Everything is preserved, swallowing everyone up in the epidemic of the culture of internal and external audits, through rankings, classifications and endless productivity qualifications, fed by data, information and composite processes and inserted into the systems as the core of educational work. Bureaucratic psychological delirium is both an act of violence against the mental health of education professionals and the destruction of collective and deliberative spaces, such as boards of education institutions, which are transformed into meetings of Feedback, and training spaces, which become training.
Self-blame managerialism is the loss of the sense of collective management. Decentralization and competition among peers are means of controlling and disempowering the subordinate collective. The precariousness of educators, through temporary contracts and work overload, completes the condition of causal informality and silent authoritarianism that hangs over the heads of workers.
In short, a scam. “Goals quickly cease to be a means of evaluation and become the end in themselves” (Idem, p. 77), so that the quantitative universe of “valuing symbols of results, to the detriment of the actual result” (p. 76) is continually repeated. Fallacious logic that is in keeping with the spirit of financial capitalism and influence on social networks, since the value generated in the stock market and monetization depends less on what a profile or a company “really does” and much more on perceptions, visualizations and future performance expectations (Idem, p. 77).
The illusion of many who enter management roles with high hopes is precisely that they, the individuals, can change things, that they will not repeat what their managers did, that things will be different this time. But one only has to pay attention to anyone who has been promoted to a management position to realize that it does not take long for the gray petrification of power to begin to swallow them up. This is where the structure is palpable: one can practically see it absorbing and taking over people, hear the dying/mortifying judgments of the structure being vocalized through them. (Ibid., p. 115-6).
Ontological uncertainty and the fallacious logic of self-blame managerialism are strategies for adapting and ruining the mental health of educators. In Deleuzian and Kafkaesque terms, that is, in the current conditions of cybernetic and distributed power in control societies, collective afflictions, problems and dilemmas, treated as individual matters, are subjected to an “indefinite postponement”: the process drags on endlessly; afflictions, problems and dilemmas are never resolved; on the contrary, they are protected by “internal policing” and exhausting tasks, which are now taken home.
An experience of dominant power that liquidates the idea of a central point of command. A system that wants to be without a “central operator”, as predicted by Kafka (2005), in The process. Ultimately, in the event of a dispute over power and responsibility, the general procedure is to deny and announce a “big other”: “the superior who takes care of this, excuses”. At most, the responsibility will fall on “[…] the pathological individuals, those who 'abused the system', and not the system itself” (Idem, p. 116).
Furthermore, writes Mark Fisher, “teachers today find themselves under the intolerable pressure of mediating the post-literate subjectivity of the consumer in late capitalism and the demands of the disciplinary regime (passing exams and the like)” (Idem, p. 49). As if they were one of the last representatives of the panoptic power, teachers, between walls, desks and chairs, derive their audience, composed of “rootless” and flexible, impatient and scattered people, restless due to the absence and permissive hedonism of their parents, and from a very early age yearning to be like their famous “online entrepreneurs” of culture, seen and commented on by social networks.
The “hedonic lethargy” present in young people today designates the maximum point of dissolution of culture in the cybernetic economy, of automatic controls over cognition and work/leisure environments. Ultimately, the massive programming of asynchronous distance education models marks the end of school institutions.
The suffering and psychic paralysis of teachers are deliberately cultivated and treated as “natural” and private facts. The deterioration of the psyche, culture, education and work obviously has its reasons for existing: to allow the fatalistic submission of people. Now, privatized discontent, the luck of at least having a job and the acceptance that things will get worse are deliberate and historically explain the destruction of the “welfare state” from the rise of neoliberal discourse against the working class.
In England, the country where the first neoliberal political experiments originated, one of the inaugural measures was the abolition of milk in public schools in 1971, when Margaret Thatcher was Secretary of Education… However, neoliberalism today is nothing more than a zombie.
Neoliberalism has lost the initiative and persists inertly, undead, like a zombie. We can now see that, although neoliberalism was necessarily “capitalist realism,” capitalist realism need not be neoliberal. To save itself, capitalism could either return to a social-democratic model or to an authoritarianism of the kind seen in the film. Children of hope. Without a credible and coherent alternative to capitalism, capitalist realism will continue to govern the political-economic unconscious. (Idem, p. 130).
From 2009 to 2024, fascist and neoreactionary authoritarianisms developed throughout the world, including in Brazil, including within public schools, with civic-military projects, delivering a moribund complexion to democracies and the most violent faces of the neoliberal zombie, by exposing the subordination of the State to capital and by maintaining monopolies and oligopolies as anti-markets and spaces for fascist articulation… After all, Mark Fisher asks, how can we develop political strategies to kill this zombie? How can we “[…] develop alternatives to existing policies, keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable”? (p. 142).
A new anti-capitalism, “[…] not necessarily linked to old traditions and languages […]” (Idem, p. 130), is possible, first of all, by rejecting strategies that do not work, for example: horizontalist strategies, of direct action without indirect actions, must be rejected. “Only the horizontalist left believes in the rhetoric of the obsolescence of the State” (Idem, p. 148), which, when you think about it, delights capital with its popularity and harmlessness, since they appear as “[…] carnivalesque noises for capitalist realism” (Idem, p. 27). In turn, “in the case of teachers, perhaps the tactic of strikes should be abandoned, because they only harm students and members of the community” (Idem, p. 131-2).
Where to start, then? Here is an excerpt from Mark Fisher’s answer: “If neoliberalism has succeeded in incorporating the desires of the post-1968 working class, a new left could begin by acting on the desires that neoliberalism generated but failed to satisfy. For example, the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy. What is needed is a new battle over work and its control; an assertion of worker autonomy (as opposed to managerial control) coupled with a rejection of certain kinds of work (with the excessive auditing that has become such a central feature of post-Fordist work). This is a fight that can be won—but only through the construction of a new political subject.”
This new subject will not emerge, therefore, without a focus on the structural elements and flaws that produce the negative effects of neoliberalism, something that would sensitize and mobilize the populations again for left-wing agendas, so that parliamentary strategies, within the State, result in structural changes to the situation. Nevertheless, in the current Brazilian situation, in the last decade, such sensitization and mobilization have been successful due to the coordination of groups, resources and desires for (extreme) right-wing agendas, based on the massive use of solipsistic online communities — “interpassive networks of like-minded people that confirm, rather than challenge, each person’s assumptions and prejudices” (Idem, p. 126).
In the “cultural war” that has become contemporary politics, the future of public schools — and educational institutions in general — depends immensely on changing strategies and new trends in politics. In Brazil, the precariousness of work, the self-blaming managerialism and the civic-military model, which silence and devastate the mental health of teachers and students, are priorities in the progressive political struggle in public schools.
*Ednei de Genaro is a professor of education at the State University of Mato Grosso (UNEMAT), Tangará da Serra Campus.
References
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. São Paulo: Literary Autonomy, 2020.
James, P.D. Children of hope. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Jameson, Fredric. postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism. Sao Paulo: Attica, 1997.
Kafka, Franz. The process🇧🇷 São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2005.
Žizek, Slavoj. They don't know what they're doing: the sublime object of ideology. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1992.
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