The idea that a certain amount of discomfort is needed for theoretical development and for pedagogical practice can be found in several arenas from philosophical argumentation to critical pedagogies, where unsettling common understandings are required for transformative and emancipatory purposes (Freire, 1972; Hooks, 2006; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007). Calls for 'pedagogies of discomfort' are raised in the teaching of social justice to facilitate the questioning of preconceptions and the positions of students in social structures (Boler, 1999); in decolonial perspectives on intercultural education to unsettle multiculturalist analyses of cultural confict (Martínez Martínez, 2014); in the teaching of immigration issues in non-migrant contexts to discuss the complicity of whiteness with the status quo (Blum et al., 2021) or of racial inequalities in highly divided and racialised contexts (Leibowitz et al., 2010).

A pedagogy of discomfort can be even 'enacted' by those who are positioned as 'others' due to race, gender, or nationality to discuss the multiple and contradictory positioning in the pedagogical feld (Lahiri-Roy et al., 2023). In all these examples, the ethical and political implications of using discomfort to raise some issues in the classroom are raised and dealt with the assumption that there is not a right or wrong way to do it, but the need for an ever-present discussion of and refection on its implications.

I can see discomfort in Low's chapter in several parts. It appears at frst when interrogating his own response to the student who raised her experience of class inequalities in the classroom. As he expressed, is our acknowledgment of others when they share painful experiences a way to express empathy with them or to give us an escape path for an unsettling moment that is diffcult to manage? He openly shares with the readers his personal and professional strategies to deal with such discomforting feelings and reminds us how much of our intellectual work is also a bodily work.

It is in fact in connection with the need to live with discomfort that Low introduces his interest in the work of Mouffe. Theory can be a model to explain social issues and a way to exorcise the problematic feelings we are left with when those issues are overwhelming and diffcult to manage. In our choosing of theories there is as much of an assessment of their explanatory potential as of their possibilities to manage our own anxieties. That is clear in Low's assessment of how helpful Mouffe's analysis of identity dynamics has been in understanding and processing how students bring the social outside to the inside of the classroom. The reference to encountering her during his doctoral studies should not be left on the side. Is not pursuing doctoral studies a moment in our academic careers in which discomfort helps us advance our theoretical development and at the same time an everyday experience we struggle with for our own survival?

I read in the concerns presented by Low's chapter a discussion on the ethical and political dilemmas of dealing with social (in)justice in pedagogical practices. As his initial vignette shows, those are not topics that show up suddenly when certain issues are included in a lesson or a module of the syllabus. They constitute the material and structural reality of the inside, the outside, and the in-between of formal and informal pedagogical spaces. Still, what are the effects and the implications of raising those topics in the classroom or in other pedagogical practices? If the 'unleashing' of those discussions can bring to the class an invigorating force as Low mentions, what is our responsibility in such an act? Once those forces are unleashed, what are we expecting to happen? Indeed, there are lots of theoretical value in using very challenging perspectives, such as Mouffe's agonist approach to politics. But when we position them as a political possibility to deal with political confict, is it just enough to name their place in certain theoretical debates as part of the lesson of the day? Those are core concerns in the pedagogies of discomfort that I would like to introduce in the conversation that I hope this response will open.

I entered in dialogue with the 'pedagogies of discomfort' in researching the politics and pedagogies of reconciliation in Colombia, Australia, and South Africa.1 I was interested in discussing how reconciliation is presented to deal with past and present injustices, for whom and for which purposes. Reconciliation is indeed a very discomforting call, especially for those who have been suffering the effect of protracted conficts and injustices. In exploring also if reconciliation can be taught and how, I encountered the work of education philosopher Michalinos Zembylas (2007, 2015, 2018). I was gripped by the side of his work that deals with issues of memory, history, and schooling in divided communities and the challenges of raising those topics in the classroom. In particular, I was confronted by his discussion about whether there is a certain kind of violence when creating discomfort for pedagogical purposes.

That idea resonates strongly with my own work. When I teach on gender, sexuality, and power or about sociopolitical violence in Colombia, I am often cautious about the examples I use, on the framing of the information I am presenting and on the purposes of doing it for the class objectives. I often explain that those topics may be not just data but the lived experience of some of the participants in the class, and therefore, we need to approach them with care, respect, and responsibility. Still, quite often such framing is not enough. Just recently, in class we were reading a chapter of the report of the Colombian Truth Commission (CEV, 2022). Some students were highly affected since what we were reading was very close to their own family stories. Sometimes, when discussing

1 I am referring to the research project *Políticas y pedagogías de la reconciliación*. This project started in 2017 thanks to a Thomas and Ethel Mary Ewing Postdoctoral Fellowship granted by The School of Education and Social Work of the University of Sydney. The fellowship facilitated the drafting of the project and some initial explorations of the topic in Australia and South Africa. It was also during that fellowship that I started conversations with the editors of this book, to whom I am deeply grateful. The project was updated and further developed in 2018 at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, with resources of *Fondo de Apoyo para Profesores Asistentes,* FAPA. The courses mentioned were supported by the *Instituto Colombo-Alemán para la Paz*, Capaz.

gender-based violence, I have had students who talk about their experiences as a way to raise consciousness with their peers. In doing that, they challenge the implicit protocols that evade talking about some personal experiences in the classroom. Ethics protocols and disclaimers in the syllabus or the pedagogical strategies we use to make the classroom a safe space can be useful, but not enough and problematic. As Dutta et al. (2016) argue, classroom safety strategies tend to be individualistic and put too much emphasis on students' own management resources, rather than on collective critical and responsible engagement with diffcult issues.

During 2021 and 2022 I have been leading with my research team three non-formal courses on politics and pedagogies of reconciliation for community leaders, public employees in charge of peacebuilding policies, international cooperation agents, and former guerrilla members participants in the implementation of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian Government and the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—*Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia*—*FARC*. We have opened conversations on the usefulness of an agonist perspective to confict management with very contradictory results. As much as moving from antagonist towards agonist politics can be attractive for the call for reconciliation, participants often remind us that such movement happens in specifc settings that give content to the call. Presenting a situation through a theoretical framework involves positions resulting from and constrained by the power relationships they intend to transform. Interestingly, the participants—that's the word I think is missing here—in the classes brought the need to overcome a model of contentious politics based on the dichotomies, wanting instead to focus more on the politics of solidarity and collective engagement to rebuild war-torn communities.

There is something implicit in Low's contribution that needs to be explicit and put on the table: as much as we need to take responsibility for unleashing forces that may lead to antagonism, or claim the need to move towards more agonist perspectives, it is also important to acknowledge the vulnerability it requires and causes. Low is right in interrogating his own fascination with Mouffe's call for acting in the political arena as adversaries (agonism) and not as enemies (antagonism), since it seems harder to apply than to explain in the classroom. We can make others vulnerable with our theoretical claims. Engaging with theory requires both the recognition of our vulnerabilities to transform our own perspectives and strategies to manage that unleashed force.

It is far from my reach in this response to engage with the work of Chantal Mouffe. There is extensive work for and against her ideas. Using the strategy of offering a different reading of the same author or theory would be an interesting way to enter in dialogue with Remy Low's chapter for testing the validity of his argument. I prefer to stay with his own reading to consider how, in the theoretical discussion of the utility of the dichotomy of antagonism/agonism and in the consideration of the ethical implications of the pedagogies of discomfort that we apply to teaching about social (in)justice, there is a common issue of interdependency and unequal power.

The classroom the Low describes at frst is based on implicit and explicit agreements of interdependence that facilitate the sharing of and different ways of relating to experiences of injustice. As he describes, some students may share similar situations, some may feel in solidarity even if what is described is alien to them, and others may just sit browsing their mobiles and laptops. In leading discussions towards how to be 'good teachers' or good professionals in general, we can facilitate a movement towards a common ground and certain consensus. However, this can be based on representing others as the 'bad' ones and the 'ones we don't want to be': maybe not enemies or adversaries, but those 'we do not want to be like'. In Mouffe's perspective, those who can engage in antagonist or agonist contentious politics have some resources that allow them to locate themselves in one or another possibilities. That is interdependence to maintain power imbalances.

As much as I can see discomfort as a permanent element in Low's discussion as a lived experience that helps refection, and as an analytical concept to expand the discussion and its ethics and politics, I need also to express my own discomfort with his last section. The pedagogies of discomfort are further invitations to deal with uneasy feelings, and using theory means using our feelings to advance and offer different perspectives on a similar issue. The last section of Low's contribution deserves consideration especially because today biological arguments are used once again: by anti-gender politics (Corrêa, 2018; David & Roman, 2018; Kuhar & Zobec, 2017) to reinforce dichotomic gender/sexual orders and by certain sectors of feminism to include and exclude some from the category of women.

There is a long history of suspicion about biological arguments in the study of gender and sexual politics and in their activisms. Biological arguments have been used to reinforce the idea of 'natural' gender and sexual orders, to cast some life experiences as 'unnatural', and to support the lack of any consideration of a possible life. Sometimes biology can also be used in opposite ways, to claim the right to be who you want to be, since fnally 'you were born this way'. In both cases, biological arguments have a power that overloads their own words and that gives any evidence coming from that feld a charge of reality that speaks for itself. Low is honest and clear in claiming that his reference to neuroscience and research on the oxytocin hormone does not intend to be the 'killer argument' against or in favour of Mouffe's theoretical proposal.

The inclusion of such information, even if we as readers agree or disagree with it, opens another conversation on what we consider as evidence and how we present it in an argument. This is the shortest section of the chapter, yet it is the one with the most references to support the analysis, as if the nature of what is considered relevant 'evidence' was different from the previous sections of writing. Indeed, calling to the materiality of bodies as part of our need to understand the social and the political is a powerful call, that much more when discussing the ways in which we develop our affliations and our senses of collectiveness, inclusion and exclusion even more in contemporary politics, in which 'polarisation' has become a more common phenomenon and an explanatory category. Still, what are our intentions when dropping certain evidence or information that carries heavy weight amid a debate? Why might some readers, myself included, feel more connected with the personal initial narrative and more uncomfortable with the starkness of the scientifc data?

Somehow, the same procedures involved in dealing with the passions that identity formation requires are present in our uses and support of one theory against other. Using theory is as much political as a political debate on the meanings of democracy. It also operates with similar procedures of passion, rationality, dispute, and tension. Theory work can create a sense of 'us' and 'them', just like identity politics. In the end, is not our relationship with theory and the way we use it a messy combination of antagonist and agonist politics?

# References

Blum, D., Davis, E. E., Gibson, K., Phillips, R. L., Jeyaraj, A. S. S., & Winters, B. (2021). "I've never cried with a stranger before": A pedagogy of discomfort, emotion and hope for immigrant justice. *International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 34*(8), 763–781. https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839 8.2021.1962564

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# The Foggy Window: Passive Empathy and the Fight for Testimonial Reading in Neoliberal Higher Education

# *Lauren Weber*

'Literature can be a window or a mirror', I tell my students. We are studying children's literature as part of their frst year of training to be primary and special education teachers. My students and I have freshly emerged in the world from two years of lockdowns and online learning. They tell me about their struggles with making time to read. The majority of my students do not consider themselves to 'be' readers. In class discussion, an outspoken student asks, 'What's the point of reading fction when I can look at reality?'. Even though my literature teacher refex is to rebut this claim, I understand this student's frustration with stories in our dishonest world. I ask him what he thinks fction is for—'entertainment?', he replies. I wonder what 'reality' my student looks at and whether or not most of this looking takes place on a screen. Another student responds, 'what about empathy?'. In my best teacher voice I ask, 'yes, what about it?'

The idea that literature can be a window or a mirror, particularly in relation to education, originates from the work of Rudine Sims Bishop in her

129

L. Weber (\*)

University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2024

R. Y. S. Low et al. (eds.), *Using Social Theory in Higher Education*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39817-9\_10

infuential article about children's literature, 'Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors' (1990). She argued that children need exposure to diverse texts so they can see themselves and others as they form their identities in relation to the stories they encounter at school. This practice of looking—looking at oneself, looking into something/somewhere new at others—is situated as a form of empathy. The reader is invited to look and then apply this new knowledge, gleaned from looking, to their understanding of the experience of themselves or others. In the popular imaginary, empathy and literature share a special bond (Zunshine 2006, 2022). Enabling this relationship in the classroom is seen to be a key component of education (see Nussbaum, 2010; Keen, 2007; Arnold, 2005).

Because of my professional purpose, I believe in this vision of literature. It is part of my cache of classroom catchphrases, and most of the time, I mean it. However, I know in practice that the complexity of empathy complicates this vision. The mirror may be smudged, producing an unclear refection of the self, or the window may be too foggy to see through, obscuring the reality of what takes place inside. The blurring of our vision when we read literature for empathy is a risk. While I see this risk as worth taking, I want to think through the work of Megan Boler to support a complication of the window/mirror argument. Her 1999 book, *Feeling Power: Emotions and Education*, tackles the assumptions regarding the empathic power of literature, particularly in relation to education and the overwhelming perception that the value of literature in a classroom is its altruistic potential through empathy. Boler's theorising emerged partly in response to the work of Martha Nussbaum and her popular philosophical arguments involving the pro-social and empathic power of studying literature.

In the pages to follow, I explore the argument for and against an empathic approach to literature in the classroom. To begin, I situate the 'for' argument within the context of Nussbaum's work. In the middle of the chapter, I discuss Boler's position on empathy and work through her defnitions of 'passive empathy' and 'testimonial reading' to help me think about the pitfalls and potential of empathy in the literary classroom. To conclude, I situate these arguments in the context of the contemporary neoliberal educational context and draw on Liam Semler's term, 'SysEd', which describes the current climate of education being shaped in the likeness of neoliberal systems. I argue that passive empathy is enabled by SysEd while the opportunity for testimonial reading is increasingly constrained. We need the time, space, and allowance for complex classroom conversations involving the empathic power of literature and the way texts invite us to refect on our understanding of ourselves and others. The outcome of testimonial reading is not easily measured by a standards authority, high-stakes external examination, or performance assessment. In the conclusion, I propose a vision for the mirror/window argument where testimonial reading and a refective knowledge of passive empathy are features of our classroom discourse, particularly in the education of preservice teachers at university.

# Thinking with Nussbaum

The philosophy of Martha Nussbaum is perhaps the most infuential when it comes to arguing a correlation between empathy, altruism, and literary reading. Her books, *Love's Knowledge* (1992), *Poetic Justice* (1995), *Upheavals of Thought* (2001) and *Not for Proft: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities* (2010), frame reading literature as crucial to the maintenance of civil democratic society where the interiority of individual life is imagined and appreciated as having worth and meaning. It is in the context of perspective taking that Nussbaum situates her defnition of empathy 'which involves an imaginative reconstruction of the experience of the sufferer' (2001, p. 327).

Nussbaum forms her belief in the ethical value of literature alongside Wayne Booth (1989). Both argue that an approach to ethical criticism does not need to have specifc motivations or means of infuence. They suggest the relationship between text and reader is like a friendship and thus an important part of the reader's life which informs and instructs them, allowing room for movement and change along the way (1990, pp. 250–256). Perspective taking and the evaluation of situations and others from the perspective of fctional characters are central to this notion. Importantly, Nussbaum distinguishes empathy from compassion, and she does not see empathy as a constant reliable means for securing compassionate change in others (2001, pp. 328–329). However, she does link the two. It does not always lead to compassion but may achieve it by drawing attention to suffering others or understanding the other through comparing their experiences with one's own. For her, 'empathy is a mental ability highly relevant to compassion, although it is itself both fallible and morally neutral' (2001, p. 333). That being said, she does concede that a society of 'empathyless' individuals is worse than a society that regularly practices empathy (2001, p. 334), a view widely accepted yet questionably applied in our world.

Nussbaum makes the case for the teaching of empathy and compassion through the reading of literary fction at school (2001, p. 426). She argues that 'public education at every level should cultivate the ability to imagine the experiences of others and to participate in their sufferings', citing Dickens's *Hard Times* as an example of the way students can 'see the human meaning of facts that might otherwise have seemed remote' (2001, p. 426). Nussbaum argues for the humanities to occupy a 'large place in education from elementary school on up, as children master more and more of the appropriate judgments and become able to extend their empathy to more people and types of people' (2001, p. 426). She emphasises the value of the 'realist social novel' for promoting empathy in students, citing Richard Wright's *Native Son* (1940) and John Steinbeck's *The Grapes of Wrath* (1939) as having the potential to 'inspire an empathy closely linked to reasonable judgments of seriousness and extended concern' (2001, p. 431). In her discussion of the value of the teaching and learning of literary texts, namely, social realist fction, Nussbaum argues for the altruistic potential of empathy rather than her original conception of empathy as neutral.

In *Not For Proft* Nussbaum further explores claims from *Upheavals* regarding empathy and literature. She sees the increasing marketisation of the university and the fnancial strain on the humanities as threats to our society's ability to empathise and push back against the systematic oppression of others in an increasingly divided world. As previously discussed in *Upheavals*, a pedagogy of compassion can be achieved through the teaching and reading of literary texts in Nussbaum's model. At the heart of this pedagogy is the question of who students are most and least likely to empathise with (see Maxwell, 2006). For Nussbaum, texts must be assigned according to the student cohort in order to broaden their horizons and encourage them to empathise with others from diverse backgrounds (2001, pp. 429–431). Her proposal echoes the window/mirror argument that if students are exposed to diverse texts, then they will broaden their empathic horizons through exposure. However, the assumption that this model results in altruism is challenged by Megan Boler.

# Thinking with Boler

While the defnition of empathy is contested across a range of felds (see Keen, 2007; Cuff et al., 2016), Megan Boler identifes empathy by its belonging 'to a class of "altruistic emotions" that go by different names' like 'pity' and 'compassion' (1999, p. 157). Her defnition responds to Nussbaum's coupling of empathy with altruism by way of 'fellow feeling', 'what I call empathy and Nussbaum calls compassion is probably best understood as our common-sense usage of sympathy' (1999, p. 158). However, Boler argues Nussbaum's argument for empathic reading is a naïve notion with potentially harmful effects. This is in part due to her argument that 'empathetic identifcation is more about me than you' in the way it requires an identifcation of the other in the self, as well as an approximation of experience and perspective taking (1999, pp. 158–159). She points out 'that the uninterrogated identifcation assumed by the faith in empathy is founded on a binary self/other that situates the self/reader unproblematically as judge' (1999, p. 159). This is problematic because it removes the complexity of power structures and social context from the empathetic equation and foregrounds assumptions about value. Empathy further requires our ability to know we are not the one who is actually having the experience. The window metaphor is problematised by Boler's reminder that as the readerly subject we are looking not experiencing:

In popular and philosophical conceptions, empathy requires identifcation. I take your perspective and claim that I can know your experience through mine. By defnition, empathy also recognises our difference—not profoundly, but enough to distinguish that I am not in fact the one suffering at this moment. (1999, p. 159)

For Boler, an awareness of one's difference is crucial in order to manage the risk of setting up a 'binary power relationship of self/other that threatens to consume and annihilate the very differences that permit empathy' (1999, p. 159). If the reader refrains from questioning their contextual relation to the empathic subject, a range of risks emerge. These risks relate to how the reader understands themselves in relation to the subject they are invited to empathise with. For example, a self/other binary may be validated by identifying with 'the oppressor or with more complicated protagonists' (1999, pp. 159–160).

# Passive Empathy

A risk of literary education is something Boler terms 'passive empathy'. Passive empathy refers to:

Those instances where our concern is directed to a fairly distant other, whom we cannot directly help. Some philosophers have it that in such cases the suffcient expression of concern is to wish the other well. I shall argue that passive empathy is not a suffcient educational practice. At stake is not only the ability to empathize with the very distant other, but to recognise oneself as implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront. (1999, p. 158)

Boler uses Art Spiegelman's graphic novel *MAUS* as a case study to discuss the problem of passive empathy and suggests a resolution to this problem. She cites written responses to *MAUS* from students detailing their enjoyment of reading the text without feeling anger about the horrors of the Holocaust and their belief in mastery over the subject matter following reading (1999, p. 161). In light of the students' commentary she asks 'What does it mean to experience a pleasurable read and be spared the emotions of rage, blame and guilt? In what ways is passive empathy related to the dehumanization strategies used to justify and represent war?' (1999, pp. 161–162). For Boler, the belief held by her students that they understand the experience of Holocaust survivors through reading supports her critique of Nussbaum. Boler locates the faw in believing all students will have a reliably nuanced understanding and compassionate response to others as a result of reading about them. In summation, her argument regarding passive empathy is that it 'absolves the reader through the denial of power relations. The confessional relationship relies on suffering that is not referred beyond the individual to the social' (1999, p. 162).

# Testimonial Reading

As an alternative to passive empathy Boler presents a pedagogical approach called 'testimonial reading' (1999). She argues the 'primary difference between passive empathy and testimonial reading is the responsibility borne by the reader' (1999, p. 162). For Boler, in order for students to move beyond the realm of passive empathy they must take on a 'collective educational responsibility' by evaluating and questioning their own responses to reading the text (1999, p. 162). She describes this process as being akin to 'listening' rather than imagining the experience for one's own gain (1999, pp. 163–164). Boler describes the process of testimonial reading as something that 'requires a self-refective participation: an awareness frst of myself as reader, positioned by the mediating text. Second, I recognize that reading potentially involves a task' requiring actively challenging one's 'own assumptions and world views' (1999, p. 165). Building on the theory of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992) regarding testimony and trauma Boler expands her theory of testimonial reading. Testimony acts as a challenge to the 'legal and historical claims to truth' as a process that evolves over time and place and 'has no self-transparency' (1999, pp. 165–166). The reader must also become an 'empathetic listener', an act where 'acute attention to the power relations guiding her response and judgements' while reading the text must be foregrounded (1999, p. 167). By acknowledging discomfort, irritation, anger, or rejection when reading, the reader becomes aware of her passive empathy and can navigate herself away from 'the annihilation of the text into an object of easy consumption' (1999, p. 168). There is also emphasis on embracing 'strangeness', 'ambiguity', and 'vulnerability' when reading and the acceptance of estrangement from the text while still empathising with characters through perspective taking. This is particularly important in relation to history where readers might feel like they 'know' a time and the plight of particular people because of reading. The complexity of how readers may come to 'know' a group through reading about them in a pedagogical setting is an issue I have problematised elsewhere, particularly in relation to texts that depict neurodiverse characters (Weber, 2020).

Boler argues history is strange and should feel unknowable, which makes way for her claim that, 'at minimum testimonial reading will call on us to analyse the historical genealogy of emotional consciousness as part of the structure that forms and accounts for the other's testimony' (1999, p. 168). The reader must close read their own feelings and thoughts to fully empathise with the text. Empathy is still important to the reading practice because it is 'necessary to the comprehension of trauma, and necessary to extend cognition to its limits through historical consciousness' (1999, p. 168). Boler describes the potential operations of the metareading practice she advocates to include identifying the 'history of a particular emotion' and unpacking the social, historical, and economic contexts that infuence the reader's personal environment (1999, p. 169). For her, 'Testimonial reading pushes us to recognize that a novel or biography refects not merely a distant other, but analogous social relations in our own environment, in which our economic and social positions are implicated' (1999, p. 169). Refecting on one's relationship to texts in this emotionally historical way methodologically offers a way forward for English pedagogy. Testimonial reading requires the teacher and the student to achieve awareness of one's own emotional relationship to textuality. This awareness may provide an opportunity to explore the real relation between empathy and altruism.

What becomes clear through Boler's provocations is that an *unquestioned* and *unrefective* belief in the empathic power of literature is limiting. It is limiting for the individual student, who may not have a window or a mirror to look into, and for harmful power relations to be perpetuated and established. The teacher is limited by being denied the opportunity for discussion, critical engagement, and questioning. If we accept Boler's problematisation of the empathic value of a literary education to be an expansion of the window/mirror argument, then we have learned that the goal is to aim for limitlessness through deep self-refection and contextual awareness. This refective work is something teachers encourage by virtue of being present in the classroom with students and allowing the time and space for them to question and refect their contexts and associated assumptions. However, in the following section, I explore how testimonial reading faces constrains due to the pressures of systematised education.

# SysEd and the Threat to Testimonial Reading

I know what context my students are entering. At the time of writing this, Australia, and much of the Global North, is experiencing a teacher shortage. My students are being offered jobs while they are still on their practicums to fll gaps, and teachers who have been in the profession are leaving or questioning their contributions due to system pressures. The reasons for these problems are complex, too complex for me to address in full here, but one way of describing the wicked nature of our contemporary education system is to say it has been overrun by 'SysEd'. SysEd is a term coined by Liam Semler to explain 'the increasingly systematized nature of the education sector and professional labour within it', which 'is a sector-wide symptom of the market-integrated and technology-driven transformation of all professional life in the developed world' (2017, p. 9). SysEd is a symptom of the larger impact of neoliberalism on the education sector which is focused on driving 'ever-increasing productivity, marketisation, competitiveness, responsibilisation and acquisition of personal wealth' (2017, p. 9). SysEd threatens the potential for testimonial reading for a few reasons: (1) testimonial reading requires time required for students to accept the invitation to witness and to refect on their contexts; (2) testimonial reading is not standardisable, it requires deep contextual understanding for every student and learning environment in relation to each unique work of literary art; (3) testimonial reading invites critique of neoliberalism by way of witness to its failings. Testimonial reading is an act of questioning—of the context in which we are an agent, of ourselves as individuals within this context, and of the work of literature we are faced with. This process is antithetical to SysEd because of the requirement of nuance, time, and respect of the educator to manage and mediate this process.

# Conclusion: Where to from Here?

I have argued that SysEd threatens education and the potential for real empathic altruism to result from reading literature in classrooms. While I believe this argument to be strong, I am hopeful for the future. I am hopeful that the teacher shortage crisis will bring change, and with change will come a rebuke of SysEd because it clearly isn't working. I am hopeful that teachers' voices will be heard and the testimonial reading practices they currently employ will be given time and space to fourish. I am hopeful that my students will remember our discussions and take the time in their future classrooms to investigate their own positioning of the window/mirror theory and invite their students into the act of testimonial reading. While the perceived divide between theory and practice undoubtedly prevails (just look at recent comments by politicians around the globe regarding initial teacher education), I hope that this chapter has shown the value of theory. Passive empathy, while often accidental, does not speak to the potential of literary studies. While testimonial reading may not be a foolproof approach to altruism through empathy, it offers *potential*, a sign that there is hope on the horizon.

# References

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Performing Empathy with Neoliberalism, or Kendall Jenner on the Streets, Thomas Gradgrind in the Sheets: A Response to Lauren Weber

# *Pat Norman*

# Introduction

How can we carve out space for the imagination—moral or otherwise when we are so busy playing the games of neoliberalism? Lauren Weber has argued that we play the neoliberal game when we suggest that 'studying literature' can build empathy and empathic capability. English can't teach empathy in a way that can be measured to the satisfaction of neoliberalism. Or, as Lauren said in conversation with me, 'reading Anna Karenina can't make you a good person'. My own research explores the way professional ethics and identity are constituted, so I fnd the implications of the literary imagination—and the ethical consequences of such a notion for the development of personal ethics—really fascinating.

P. Norman (\*)

University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2024

R. Y. S. Low et al. (eds.), *Using Social Theory in Higher Education*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39817-9\_11

Weber traces the lines of agreement and distinction between Martha Nussbaum and Megan Boler, before turning to the matter of neoliberalism and the classroom. How does empathy or critique work in that environment? I want to take that concept of empathy out of the classroom and consider the public pedagogy of neoliberalism: specifcally, how it contends with and activates the idea of empathy and critique. These ideas are incompatible with the neoliberal project: as scholars such as Clarke (2012) and Durán Del Fierro (2022) have argued, neoliberalism seeks to standardise and depoliticise, technicising and removing the political from the social sphere. So how exactly *does* neoliberalism assimilate explicitly political notions?

To answer this question, I want to argue that neoliberalism posits an alternative 'reading' of the world. This neoliberal imagination appropriates ideas like empathy and social movements that seek to address injustice, turning them into commodifed, thinned out shadows of themselves. This happens in the social sphere through processes of governmentality and suggestion, the prime conduit for which is consumerism. Advertising is the most visible and explicit way that neoliberalism enacts this public pedagogy, and I will discuss the way the appropriation of moral practices like protest can be seen in the 'Live for Now' Pepsi campaign. Finally, I make the argument that affective, empathic, and uncanny pedagogical practices—such as those advocated by Boler and Nussbaum—can create intellectual space for 'thinking differently' to the dominant neoliberal imaginary.

# The Public Pedagogy of Neoliberalism: Don't Be Political!

Boler and Nussbaum articulate competing, though not antagonistic, approaches to the social good. Nussbaum's conception of empathy draws on the Aristotelian sense of *pity*, though she uses the word *compassion* to set aside the negative connotations implied by pity (Nussbaum, 1996). Nussbaum argues from a Rawlsian perspective that self-interest ultimately leads to a growing care for the other: 'there but for the grace of God go I', from which follows the idea that compassion is a necessary but insuffcient condition for justice (Nussbaum, 1996). However, where she differs from Boler is in her belief that compassion—and the empathy involved in the literary imagination—can lead to a more expansive sense of social and moral justice. In *Love's Knowledge*, Nussbaum (1990) posits that 'practical reasoning unaccompanied by emotion is not suffcient for practical wisdom' (p. 40). Emotions and imagination have a rationality that leavens pure reason—a truth of which Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian Superintendent in Dickens' *Hard Times*, eventually becomes aware.

Nussbaum builds a case—by discussing the fgure of Gradgrind—for forms of character and virtue that are sympathetic to others and that enrich life with meaning and substance. This character is counter to the instrumental logic of neoliberalism which 'reaches into the social' (Brown, 2005), seeking to reduce our social position to that of consumer and worker. This is too thin for the kind of virtuous character Nussbaum advocates: she supports a certain cosmopolitanism, an orientation towards wider humanity.

As Weber has noted, Boler (1997b) makes her case for testimonial reading by challenging the 'passive empathy' of Nussbaum in *Poetic Justice* (Nussbaum, 1995). Boler situates her critique at sites of injustice—like the holocaust—or in spaces where *affective* pedagogies might help students to position themselves in relation to these traumatic events. MacDonald and Kidman (2021) describe a similar strategy of 'uncanny pedagogies' that take place at sites of colonial violence. These uncanny moments create a felt, embodied experience of historical trauma. This kind of 'reading', like testimonial reading, calls attention to complicity and inspires a sense of action towards justice.

Boler (1997a) has expressed concern that the role of schools under the liberal model advocated by Nussbaum fails to 'alter social inequities' and instead seeks to 'adapt the individuals to the existing system' (p. 211). Testimonial reading is anchored in a view of the world that places less stock in the individual than does liberalism. The sense that an empathic faculty can lead to an active concern for the wellbeing of others is unconvincing to Boler. Rather than being 'concerned with emotions as a site of social control', Boler (1997a) argues that the disciplining of emotion is a technique deployed within capitalism to attenuate the gap between unfulflled needs and desires the system produces in the self.

Neoliberalism is a project which operates smoothest when it appears apolitical. In part this strategy happens through a process of 'depoliticisation', where policies are put in place that seek to standardise and conform human processes for consistency's sake. Durán Del Fierro (2022) has noted the way this operates in higher education, where principles of institutional diversity and autonomy are subtly circumscribed to keep confict out of the equation:

the market needs to impose seemingly objective and neutral regulations in order to prevent political disagreements that might give rise to new normative principles and policy frameworks. (p. 3)

Standards and frameworks like these are familiar to many who work in education: Weber notes the way Systematised Education voraciously 'eats up data'. Consumption is the default condition of neoliberalism, and it achieves this through its depoliticised, commoditised, and quantifed logics: a Gradgrind of the socio-economic imagination. The 'Gradgrind Mind', argues Nussbaum (1995), is one bent on calculation and utility, and *Hard Times* opens with the philosophy of the Gradgrind school: 'in this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!' (Dickens, 1961). Nussbaum (1995) suggests that the economist's way of thinking cannot do justice to the 'inner moral life' of the human being (p. 24).

So, what does that inner moral life look like under neoliberalism? The formation of a virtuous character associated with Aristotelian empathy might be broadly compatible with neoliberalism if we forget the full sweep of Nussbaum's work. The capabilities approach, for example, describes forms of human functioning the development of which, she argues, ought to be the ethical goal of a society (Nussbaum, 2011a, 2011b). These capabilities cannot be produced by individuals alone: they are a product of community. This renders them incompatible with the most extreme versions of neoliberalism which collapse rich identity positions into the singular role of consumer.

Nussbaum thus argues for a sophisticated and ethical mode of subjectivity which might resist the demands of neoliberalism. Boler's argument for testimonial reading—extending empathy to 'the limits of historical consciousness'—stems from the notion of collective responsibility for injustices of the past (Boler, 1997b). Testimonial reading produces a personal sense of the 'unimaginability' of trauma and a proactive duty to engage with and rectify injustice. But that alone is insuffcient for the formation of character and a rich human identity. The two approaches complement each other: Aristotelian empathy serves as a moral foundation that extends virtuous character to concerns outside of the self, and testimonial reading situates that self within the specifc contexts and histories that constitute sites of trauma, injustice, and inequality.

Nussbaum and Boler's complementary approaches to reading and to the narrative imagination are shattered under neoliberalism: cosmopolitanism is replaced with the economic logic of globalisation; social justice is co-opted by brands as another expression of consumer identity. What neoliberalism cannot assimilate, despite its efforts, are 'thick' concepts like virtue and justice: doing so would undermine the pro-corporate assumptions that underpin neoliberal ideology. The gap between our desires and their fulflment, the sense of injustice that emerges from our moral imagination, each produces perverse effects under neoliberalism. I want to turn now to one such effect.

#### *Empathy and Politics Under Neoliberalism*

Thomas Gradgrind would be a good neoliberal: he is a Malthusian character, existing a century before the rise of massifed consumer culture which defned the twentieth century. His philosophy is utilitarian, oriented towards facts and economic productivity. I think this highlights a social tension that exists in education today and one that Nussbaum calls attention to in *Cultivating Humanity* (Nussbaum, 1997). The impulse towards utilitarianism occurs in a context where everything is counted—reduced to a *telos* of consumption or productivity. Neoliberalism doesn't only demand productivity from us. Where capitalism collapses our social and productive identity into the position of worker, or 'human capital', neoliberalism emphasises social relations slightly differently: recognising the *consumer* frst, with other forms of identity functioning as commodifed subordinates. Neoliberalism is tolerant of a wide spectrum of liberal human rights positions because it co-opts them into this consumerist logic.

Consider the example of the Pepsi's 'Live for Now' advertisement, featuring Kendall Jenner.1 Released in 2017 and capitalising on the Black Lives Matter movement, the ad features a large group of protestors marching down a street with ambiguous signs pleading for others to 'join the conversation' (Victor, 2017). Kendall Jenner—a member of the famousfor-being-famous Kardashian family—is modelling nearby and feels compelled to join. She offers a Pepsi to the stern policemen surveilling this 'protest', leading to a Pepsi-fuelled street party.

The ad itself is profoundly banal, but it reveals much about the way neoliberalism understands social justice movements. There is no rage, not even a trace of anger, in the crowd that is mobilised on the street. When the police offcer accepts the offer of a Pepsi from the fantastically wealthy

1Pepsi has removed the ad, however users have uploaded it to YouTube for viewing: https://youtu.be/tJCcnkqnjqU

Jenner, the crowd bursts out into cheers of joy and applause. In reality, Black Lives Matter protests in the United States were violently policed cries for racial justice—they were not joyous occasions. The neoliberal interpretation of these protests is that they express some desire to 'be together', to 'join the conversation', to submit to a hedonic social impulse. It misses the point entirely. The way Pepsi responded to the backlash is also instructive. In a public statement, the company explained:

Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark and apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are pulling the content and halting any further rollout. (Victor, 2017)

This marketing guff is the kind of empathy that Boler (1997b) critiques: it is a call to recognise the 'other' but hollowed out of even the most basic empathic content. It is worse than performative. This kind of participation carries a similar risk to that of passive empathy which Boler (1997b) describes: 'the annihilation of the text into an object of easy consumption' (p. 266). This consumption safely depoliticises confict, stripping it of its intensity and historical situatedness, rendering it neither 'strange' nor 'uncanny' (Boler, 1997b, p. 266). In a similar collapse of confict and context, Boler and Zembylas (2003) describe a number of 'reductive conceptions of difference' that are expressed as part of American liberal individualism: the idea that 'everyone is different so we should respect and honour everyone's difference equally', that 'we are all the same underneath the skin, so let's not pay so much attention to difference', and that 'some fears of difference are innate and therefore natural' (pp. 109–110). The thinness of Pepsi's ethical position is obvious in its call for a message of 'unity, peace and understanding'—empty moral concepts with no substantial concept of justice. A counter to this moral emptiness are rich pedagogies that engage the emotions, which can be used to introduce politics back into our narrative imagination.

# Pedagogies That Add the Human Back into Humanity

The tradition of pedagogy drawing on empathy and affect is rich and varied. Zembylas (2007, 2013, 2020), who has written with Boler, has discussed ways to incorporate affective practice and use emotions in the classroom—particularly when dealing with the political. In a recent paper, MacDonald and Kidman (2021) describe pedagogies of uncanniness, where sites of trauma can be used to educate through feelings of unease and tension. In the context of teaching students about the New Zealand Wars and violent episodes in that country's colonial history, MacDonald and Kidman (2021) describe 'uncanny pedagogies': an affective practice that draws on embodied, emotional, and uncomfortable learning experiences to stimulate and inspire thinking around history:

A deep sense of respect emanates from the crowd. The objects give presence to the dead and the uncanny is quietly activated through a personal connection to historic fgures. (MacDonald & Kidman, 2021, p. 6)

This is the kind of connection and historical situatedness which Boler (1997b) advocates as a consequence of testimonial reading. The trauma and excess of these experiences is precisely the point, since it 'raises the question: what are the forces that brought about this crisis of truth?' (Boler, 1997b, p. 264). That excess achieves an inner transformation—a sense of the unimaginable—which has powerful pedagogical implications:

The challenge for educators who work with uncanny pedagogies at sites of colonial violence is to sustain the embodied, intellectual and affective transformations outside the crypt, so that the disturbed feelings and the trouble that ghosts represent do not go away. (MacDonald & Kidman, 2021, p. 11)

The literary imagination, therefore, reveals the very limit of neoliberalism: an excessive social dimension—an 'inner life'—that can resist the subjectifying neoliberal gaze.

I fnd it signifcant that Nussbaum's humanism and reverence for empathy is grounded in an Aristotelian ethic. The cosmopolitan ideal—of an expansive circle of concern gifted through narrative imagination—is one way to build practical wisdom and personal virtue. Boler builds on these foundational capabilities to invite us not only to expand our moral imaginations, but to do so in a way that demands action which might correct injustice. Testimonial reading is a political act, it reintroduces critique and confict to the narrative imagination. Nussbaum herself is attuned to the inadequacy of the literary imagination to which Boler and Weber refer. In *Poetic Justice* she explains:

People cannot learn everything they need to learn as citizens simply by reading works set in a distant place and time, no matter how universally applicable those insights may be. Reading Dickens shows us many things about compassion; it does not show us the very particular ways in which our society inhibits our compassion for people of different race, gender, or sexuality. (Nussbaum, 1995, p. 11)

Nussbaum refers to novel-reading as a 'bridge' to a vision of justice and the capacity to enact that vision, but not something suffcient for a notion of social justice. That bridge can be made sturdier through testimonial reading, uncanny pedagogies, and other such rich approaches that embody notions of restorative justice and normative moral deliberation.

However we choose to teach matters relating to social justice, we usually wind up taking a stand against the public pedagogy of neoliberalism. Such approaches challenge neoliberalism by re-embedding the political. They require that we weigh up questions of value, ethics, and sociality in a manner that is incompatible with neoliberal standardisation. In so doing we *repoliticise*, introducing 'confictivity' in the way Durán Del Fierro (2022) suggests: 'contestation, opposition, disagreement, division, debate, dispute and dissent', and the 'active critique and refusal of power relations derived from a given regime of truth' (p. 9).

Even for higher education, facts are not all that there is: we should not be Gradgrinds. Weber argues that empathic reading requires time and cannot be reduced to a tick box under regimes of neoliberal accountability. There is also a signifcant political role that emotion can play in learning and research. Whether that emotion is foundational like empathy or complex and embodied like uncanniness, these forms of pedagogy lift our moral horizons, add texture to our inner worlds, and lend substance to a self that is embedded in the social world of others.

# References

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# Understanding Higher Education Enrolment Through Michel Foucault's Biopolitics

# *Ren-Hao Xu*

Since the 1980s, the idea that 'we live in a knowledge economy' has become ubiquitous in both public and private spheres at all scales (Robertson, 2005, p. 152). The idea of a knowledge-based economy holds that the university system can play a key part in economic transitions: a university can generate innovative knowledge and upskill younger generations, in turn contributing to new economic activities fuelled by knowledge (Bell, 1973). Since the 1980s, this master narrative has dominated policy talk. Governments around the world have increased the number of university places, with the goal of gaining more 'knowledgeable' workers to enhance their national competitiveness (Lauder et al., 2012).

This political rhetoric remains powerful in the current terrain of higher education. On a global scale, international organisations have consistently highlighted the importance of higher education enrolment for the development of a knowledge-based economy. For instance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in its annual report *Education at a Glance*, has not merely stressed the beneft of a widened university system but, more importantly, has ranked the member

R.-H. Xu (\*)

University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
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countries by cohorts with degree-level education to indicate how educational attainment has led to economic growth (OECD, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). These OECD reports, with their idea of expanded higher education systems as economic growth engines, have infuenced higher education policies in many countries. One such example is Australia's Demand-Driven Funding System, commenced in 2012 after having been recommended by the Bradley Review of 2008. At that time, the Australian government claimed:

The Australian Government's goal is for this country to be amongst the most highly educated and skilled on earth, and in the top group of OECD nations for university research and knowledge diffusion. (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relationships, 2009, p. 7)

Funding that meets student demand… is the only way Australia can meet the knowledge and skills challenges it faces. Thus the government is proposing a phased 10-year reform agenda for higher education and research to boost national productivity and performance as a knowledge-based economy. (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relationships, 2009, p. 5)

With the Demand-Driven Funding System, Australian universities were free to enrol as many undergraduate students as they wished. This billiondollar scheme was cancelled in 2017 after growth in higher education enrolment met the goal that 40% of the Australian population have at least a bachelor's degree. Australia is not unique in believing that increased higher education enrolment could boost economic growth and make for a stronger country. Today many governments, including but not limited to France (Carpentier, 2018), Germany (Ertl, 2005), Hong Kong (Wan, 2011), Japan (Reiko, 2001), Taiwan (Wang, 2003), and Türkiye (Özoǧlua et al., 2016), have achieved greater—or more specifc—student participation, thereby making their populations as a whole, and especially those historically underrepresented in higher education, more productive in a globally knowledge-based economy. Enhancing national competitiveness by means of widened student participation in higher education systems has seemingly become an idea expressed across the world.

I have interrogated this phenomenon in my doctoral project since 2018. The reason why I chose it as my research focus was because I felt its connection to my experience: I was born at a time when the higher education system was rapidly expanding in Taiwan. I was the frst person in my family to attend university. My parents and my older brother had little experience of this world to share with me. Despite this, from a young age I knew that one day I would graduate from my high school and step into a university lecture hall. The idea stayed in my mind for years, probably from my school days when our teachers often reminded us to think about our university major as early as possible. The idea could have also stemmed from my community, where I saw some of my neighbours moving to other cities to pursue their studies. Over time, as I refected on my education background and thought about the global phenomenon of higher education expansion, I became increasingly interested in the 'individual-national-global nexus' that not only drove governments like Australia and international organisations like the OECD to invest a billion dollars in providing more university places, but also led individuals like me to dream of walking into a tutorial room to receive knowledge I had not yet learnt, knowledge no one in my family had ever accessed.

Bringing this individual-national-global nexus into my project, I began to review the literature. Numerous studies have clearly investigated the effectiveness of varied higher education policies that aimed to suffce the demand of a knowledge-based economy in different countries. In addition, other studies have thoroughly discussed how expanded higher education systems have supported national competitiveness in a global economy (Lauder et al., 2012; Marginson, 1997; Mok et al., 2013). Apart from the macro-level perspective, research has also considered how the competencies of an individual could be changed after receiving a university qualifcation, exploring the correlation of such a qualifcation with individual employability in the job market. Yet scarcely any attention has been paid to the assumption that higher education should be expanded to support economic development in local and global contexts; namely, how the individual-national-global nexus is built. At this point, I realised I needed a theory to allow me to specifcally unpack this pre-existing policy assumption, so that I could understand how university degrees are shaped as *a dual obligation*, to both widen university provision to respond to growing student demand and to enhance their competitiveness, for the OECD, the Australian government, and beyond.

With these highlighted research interests in mind, I now turn my focus to how I sought a theory to probe the global phenomenon of higher education expansion. I encountered Michel Foucault's concept of *biopolitics* during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, one week after I fnished my feldwork in Taiwan and few back to Sydney in preparation for interview sessions as part of my Australian feldwork, the Australian government closed its international borders due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Since then, many cities of Australia have intermittently experienced lockdowns. During the pandemic, my colleagues and I were heavily affected by the restrictions, so we planned to do something together to distract our attention away from the uncertainty of the situation. It did not take much time to get everyone on the same page reading Foucault's *Birth of Biopolitics*, which was recommended by my colleague, Remy Low, who is also the responder to this chapter. I was fascinated by Foucault's outline on the frst day of the 1979 biopolitics seminar. He said:

This year, I would like to… retrace the history of what could be called the art of government. You recall the strict sense in which I understood 'art of government' since in using the word 'to govern' I left out the thousand and one different modalities and possible ways that exist for guiding men, directing their conduct, constraining their actions and reactions, and so on. (2008, pp. 1–2)

The term 'to govern' opened up a perfect entry point for engaging with my question of how an individual like me has been shaped to believe that a university education is something necessary to pursue and how populations in many societies like Australia were guided to aspire to higher education, eventually resulting in a massifcation of student enrolment. That was how I encountered Foucault's work on biopolitics, leading me to approach the individual-national-global nexus in the domain of the higher education system. Before continuing to explain how I found the concept of biopolitics useful in my studies of higher education enrolment, I frst overview its theoretical foundation.

Derived from his lectures *Society Must Be Defended*, *Security* (2003), *Territory, Population* (2007), *The Birth of Biopolitics* (2008) at the Collège de France, and one of his most infuential publications, *The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge* (1978), Foucault's concept of biopolitics addresses an historical phenomenon and a contemporary problem: how population is governed by the political forms of rationality. Put straightforwardly, the term biopolitics refers to how the legitimacy of sovereignty can be secured while managing a population in a territory. So, what do 'an historical phenomenon' and 'a contemporary problem' mean in Foucault's concept of biopolitics? First, Foucault's conception of population in the political domain (2007) did not exist prior to the sixteenth century. At that time, individuals had to subordinate themselves to the divine, and they were told what was permitted and forbidden through a matrix of coercion, control, and direction. Yet, when a town grew, new populations arose. This demographic increase fundamentally changed ideas of how to govern. Sovereignty by directly ordering and restricting hundreds of people was no longer feasible (Foucault, 2007). The growth in population and attendant pressures related to food, criminality, public health, and education also challenged the legitimacy of sovereignty (Foucault, 2007). Second, the principles of state became immanent in the state itself, which now needed not merely to prevent invasion from other countries, but also to secure its legitimacy through effectively managing the population. In this fashion, the strength of the state was reformulated: the idea that the survival of a state relies heavily on its military and diplomatic power has been redefned since the seventeenth century by the added notion of the productivity of the population. With this in mind, the governing ends of state turned to maximising the amount in the treasury by enhancing the productivity of each and all (Foucault, 2020).

Foucault's concept of biopolitics is not well defned, but it remains a helpful approach to understanding the co-evolution of modern statehood and the subjectivities of a population. It concerns how the emergence of the modern nation-state corresponds with the need to shape the subjectivity of those that inhabit its territory (Foucault, 1991; Gordon, 1991; Simons, 2006). Following this argument, population is understood as the centre of political concerns; specifcally, the enhancement of productivity on both individual and societal scales. As Foucault (2008, p. 317) elaborates, 'rationalised problems posed to governmental actions that are based on the demographic characteristics, such as health, hygiene, race, and education' represent population management that in its depths and details aims to secure the *raison d'être* of statehood: to sustain productivity for the survival of state.

What Foucault tries to stress here is that exercised sovereign power must cohere with biological existence (Lemke, 2011), refecting two main principles in the concept of biopolitics: population and governing knowledge. For Foucault, population is not simply understood as a sum of subjects who inhabit a territory, but rather a combination of variables dependent on different factors (e.g., gender, income, and age) and things (i.e., resources, means of subsistence, and the territory with its specifc qualities) (Foucault, 2007). It shapes the idea of government as disposing and arranging things with the aim of addressing emerging problems regarding the lives of people. Population management, for Foucault (2008), relies on a specifc type of knowledge to address emerging problems. Foucault argues that the historical evolution of population management in Western European countries is entangled in an idea of household administration requiring individuals within a family to direct their goods and wealth towards the pursuit of fortune and power (Foucault, 2008). In this framework it is not possible to govern a population through listing allowed or prohibited actions. As such, effective population management now refers to the introduction of the economy into the political domain (Danaher et al., 2000; Foucault, 2008). That is to say, the modern state now aims to ensure its survival by using a form of biological-economic knowledge to effectively govern its population by both enhancing collective productivity and preventing risk from emerging problems. In sum, Foucault uses the concept of biopolitics to mark the historical transformation of the exercise of power: away from divinely appointed sovereignty towards a focus on the conduct of subjects' behaviour with the knowledge of political economy. The notion of policy in this vein refers to the specifc set of practices by which a government in the framework of the state is able to govern so that individuals can be productive citizens (Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2020).

Now I return to the individual-national-global nexus to probe the alternative understanding of higher education enrolment. As noted above, the policies of many governments as well as the OECD have tied the social meaning of higher education enrolment at the national-global level to manifestations of national competitiveness, widely promoting messages that university education upskills individuals and makes them more productive, and that at the societal level, an increase in the degree-holding population amounts to an augmented capacity for collective productivity. When I read this economic-oriented narrative, I noticed how it was often based upon a differentiation between age groups. Here I give an example from the OECD's report:

[I]n almost all countries, 25 to 34-year-olds having higher HE attainment levels than the generation about to leave the labour market (55 to 64-yearolds)… over time provide a complementary picture of the progress of human capital available to the economy and society… the trends in education attainment in the adult population (25 to 64-year-olds)… offer good overall assessment of the skill distribution and how this distribution has evolved over time. (OECD, 2009, pp. 29–31)

Here, the OECD refers to those aged 25–64 and 55–64 as, respectively, the 'skilled adult' and 'nearly-retired' cohorts in the labour market, arguably implying that 25- to 34-year-olds were a newly joined division of human capital in the workforce. In other words, the classifcation of 25- to 34-year-olds presents a type of political-economic basis for institutions like the OECD to 'know' the 'latest human capital' of a country through the index of education attainment and refects 'the necessity of understanding the characteristics, structures and trends of [a] population in order to manage them or to compensate for what they could not control' (Taylor, 2014, p. 46). To date, the 25- to 34-year-old population having at least a bachelor's degree has been one of the most common indicators for measuring the change in higher education attainment between different generations or countries. As Foucault (2003) argues, the age of the population was the main concern of modern state because it allows state to foresee a sapping of the populations strength, a shortening of the working week, wasted energy, and monetary costs (pp. 244). This creation of demographic groups and populational characteristics, as Popkewitz and Lindblad (2020) note, is a way to think about and plan to rectify 'harmful' social and economic conditions. Using Foucault's concept of biopolitics, we can see how a population can be managed according to different vectors based on these characteristics—demographic classifcation based on economic knowledge of human capital is not only used for optimising collective productivity, but also to foresee the change in the strength of the state through the index of education attainment in the name of a knowledge-based economy.

This age classifcation also represents a power/knowledge regime in which individuals attach themselves to a specifc *ethos* in order to become self-governing and productive citizens capable of acting with freedom (Rose, 1999). The term biopolitics, for Foucault (1980), is about regulation and discipline, with 'two types of power linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations' (p. 139). As Lemke (2011) explains, it is a 'distinctive art of government that historically emerges with liberal forms of social regulation and individual self-governance' (p. 34). In other words, biopolitics is concerned with how to achieve an equilibrium between population and sovereign power and between individual and self (Foucault, 2003). As such, in this case, the classifcation constituted by the concept of human capital is about both demographic division by age group and the categorisation of a population into workforce and nonworkforce. Individuals, through recognising and attaching themselves to a category, shape their own conduct in particular ways through subjectifcation, where behaviours are *moralised* into the permitted and forbidden. This understanding of the relations between self and others does not suggest that an authority controls the mindset of individuals. It rather highlights how social structures and relationships underpinned by a power/knowledge regime create what Foucault (2003, p. 242) calls 'human-being-as-species'. That is, subjects are not only regulated by the sovereign power, but are also situated within power networks in which individuals govern their own social bodies. With this conceptualisation of power relations in mind, the categorisations of workforce/non-workforce and university-educated/non-university-educated produce a set of norms that limits what it is possible to think, write, and speak in a society. For instance, both the OECD (2009) and Australia's Demand-Driven Funding System (2009) specifed that individuals should aspire to university education because a bachelor's degree could increase their employability in the job market. This understanding of the relations between individuals, population, and nation involves how lives and worlds are governed by specifc kinds of classifcation.

Two lines of relations come to intersect here. Higher education enrolment represents, on the one hand, a specifc domain in which population and state have been entangled in the name of a knowledge-based economy. On the other hand, individuals have been divided on the basis of various backgrounds depending on economic-biological knowledge (e.g., age and labour condition) and further shaped into different subjects (e.g., upskilled and highly productive groups). Rather than testing whether higher educational attainment made labour more productive or increased national competitiveness, it is important to understand how a governing modality of population was formed based on the confguration of biological, economic, and political knowledges. With the biopolitical perspective, higher education enrolment is not only about an individual student's pursuit of better employability in the job market, but also a guarantee of social order and prosperity at the level of the population, illustrating how the life of individuals and the population comes to be correlated with the legitimacy of sovereignty.

However, the cases of the OECD reports and Australia's Demand-Driven Funding System do not imply that higher education enrolment can only be perceived according to one approach, like the conception of knowledge-based economy, nor do they suggest that biopolitics means an economisation of the higher education system. Instead, Foucault's work on biopolitics raises the question of 'how to govern' in the sense of biological existence, arguing that governing knowledge is not fxed but evolves over time. Here, I want to draw upon historical higher education enrolment policies in Australia as another case to demonstrate the changing relations between individuals, population, and state. One of the most infuential higher education polies in Australia was the Murray Report published by the Menzies Liberal-Country government (1949–66) in 1957. At that time, university was described as 'a preparation for a vigorous life in a free society' (Committee on Australian Universities, 1957, p. 9), with the aim being to 'educate a liberal spirit' (p. 7). The Murray Report further explained:

It should be said that what the university gives in this way should 'not' be regarded in purely technical terms; The technical and specialist requirements are without doubt in themselves no less than a matter of life and death to the nation; but they are not the end of the affair. It is the function of the university to offer not merely a technical or specialist training but a full and true education, beftting a free man and the citizen of a free country. (p. 8)

The idea of university education in 1957 encompassed not only skill advancement, but also non-material betterment (which is less mentioned in more recent higher education policy documents of the OECD and Australia). The Martin Report (1964), another impactful higher education document also published by the Menzies government, stated that:

Education is as important for the community as for the individual in nonmaterial as well as material aspects. The modern state requires a welleducated population capable of making reasoned judgments against a background of change… [P]rovide talented young people with opportunities to develop their innate abilities to the maximum. (Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education in Australia, 1964, p. 6)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the aim of higher education in Australia was notably not framed as 'job preparation'. Rather, higher education was construed as part of a social welfare system that ensured particular sections of the population (mainly young men but also some affuent women) were suffciently educated for industry and commerce, while also providing individuals with opportunities to develop their abilities. The meaning of university education in Australia during the Cold War era centred on the cultivation of freedom and democracy for the society (Forsyth, 2017). In this modality, which classifed the population in terms of a 'liberal spirit', and, by extension, a non-liberal spirit, the government sought to legitimise its sovereignty by increasing a 'well-educated population capable of making reasoned judgements'. What can be seen here is that the university was given meaning as the cornerstone of a democracy and civil society. This is very different from the current narrative of a knowledge-based economy, in which the university is merely a site for producing well-skilled labour. By showing these two historical enrolment policies, I want to highlight how variance in the meanings of university education creates different relations between individuals, population, and the state and, more importantly, that the everyday life of individuals is shaped by the way relations are formed in the domain of the higher education system.

My viewpoint is that biopolitics offers a critical lens to (re)examine the social phenomenon of higher education expansion, thereby allowing an exploration of the ways in which individuals, population, and the state have been interlinked in a specifc temporal-spatial condition. When a society encourages an individual to take part in a higher education system—because an increased proportion of a population having a bachelor's degree is assumed to enhance national competitiveness—it engages that individual in a classifcation that produces biopolitical effect. The construction of, for instance, a 25- to 34-year-old cohort involves the entanglement of biology (i.e., age), economy (i.e., human capital and knowledge-based economy), and demography (birth rate), exemplifying how the notion of higher education enrolment can be thought of in the sense of population management.

It is important not to forget 'historical roots' when drawing on the concept of biopolitics. Nowadays, a growing number of studies of the changing landscape of school and higher education systems, specifcally inspired by Foucault's biopolitics, argue that economisation emerges at all societal scales (Peters, 2007; Simons, 2006). Indeed, when Foucault elaborates upon the evolving relationships between individual subjectivity and statehood, he highlights how principles of governance have shifted from coercion and force towards the economic management of government and population. Nevertheless, biopolitics, for Foucault, is a perspective that focusses on how problems concerning population and the legitimacy of sovereignty can be addressed. As such, it is not just about dealing with economic issues, but also with how the political life is formed; namely, how people in a given territory can live with a sense of wellbeing so that the governing regime of state can be sustained. Although economic discourses built around concepts such as human capital and a knowledgebased economy indeed hold hegemonic power in our public sphere today, the Murray and Martin reports provide historical examples of how other governing knowledges have shaped the everyday life of individuals in the domain of higher education.

Building on these arguments, how can we understand higher education enrolment through biopolitics? To date, the worldwide gross enrolment ratio has reached 40%, with more than 370 million students enrolled at various types of universities (OECD, 2022; UNESCO, 2022). A growing proportion of the global population is involved in the higher education system, where their everyday life is being shaped by a specifc type of knowledge regime. Populational categories give direction to what constitutes the problems, causes, and solutions regarding social issues (e.g., a shortfall of highly skilled workers) (Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2020). For me, the use of biopolitics in the feld of higher education has provided fertile terrain to carve out the complex relations between population and state policies and has enabled me to ask critical questions about education politics and historical-contemporary contexts. Although biopolitics is not as well defned as many other theories or theoretical perspectives, it is one that can beneft research on higher education with critical interrogation of student participation across different backgrounds, academic recruitment, and campus and facility design. As higher education is increasingly interlinked with our life, biopolitics also helps to open up a space for reimagining the emerging challenges in the higher education system.

# References

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# Students, Biopolitics, and State Racism: A Response to Ren-Hao Xu

*Remy Y. S. Low*

Ren-Hao Xu has offered us a carefully considered chapter on Michel Foucault's concept of 'biopolitics' and its usefulness for understanding the OECD and the Australian Government's push for raising enrolments in higher education. The urgency of this push domestically has been driven by the political narrative of preparing citizens to be competitive and productive in the globalised 'knowledge economy', which, as Xu deftly demonstrates, is intimately tied up with the competitiveness and productiveness of the nation. I use the word 'intimately' because as Xu has also pointed out, the concept of biopolitics alerts us to how we have come to relate to our very selves—body and mind—in a unique way at the nexus of economics and biology: 'optimised' citizens who do our productive part for the national economy because of our educational attainment. If biopolitics can be summed up by the series 'population-biological processesregulatory mechanisms-State' (Foucault, 2003, p. 250), then what Xu has done is show how something like the way national higher education enrolment policies are engineered (e.g., targeting particular age groups,

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identifying productive and unproductive labour) can be interestingly interpreted as a part of that series.

What I offer here is less a response per se than a brief addendum to Xu's chapter. And I will do this by joining together two seemingly unrelated points he raised: the frst is personal, where he mentions reading Foucault on biopolitics in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of Australia's international borders, and the second is his key argument that higher education enrolment can be linked not only to individual employability, but also to the larger purpose of underwriting the social order and prosperity at the level of the population, thus legitimating sovereignty. For me as a teacher in higher education, I am a part of that biopolitical machinery. A question that arises for me as I refect on my work is this: Who is this 'population' that is to be educated, whose productivity is accounted for within the calculus of national competitiveness, whose life is to be fostered for the sake of securing the nation's future, and who is *not* a part of this?

Raising this question brings us to another aspect of Foucault's conceptualisation of biopolitics: the operation of 'racism' as a principle for determining the dividing line between those who are part of the population that the state intervenes in biologically and economically to 'make live' (e.g., through health programmes, widening participation in higher education) and those who are not part of that population that it can just 'let die':

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the feld of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. (Foucault, 2003, pp. 254–255)

What does all this scary sounding business of 'what must live and what must die' and the drawing of biological lines between races have to do with students enrolling in higher education? Here is where COVID-19 offers a telling case. For through it, we can see how not all enrolments were regarded as equally tied up with the biopolitical calculus of national health and wealth and hence how within the student population 'a break into the domain of life that is under power's control' was established.

In early 2020, as COVID-19 was in its early stages of gaining a foothold in Australia, the Australian Government launched a series of unprecedented fscal measures to buttress the health system and economy from the fallout of the pandemic, which would total \$343 billion within a year (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022). These measures included a supplement to unemployment benefts known as 'Jobseeker' by \$550 per fortnight (a survival rate long argued for by welfare advocates; see Davidson, 2022), a \$1500 per fortnight wage subsidy paid through employers known as 'Jobkeeper' (Frydenberg & Morrison, 2020)—and a \$1.1 billion expansion of health services such as pathology testing, respiratory clinics, and telehealth (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020), plus an additional \$48.1 million for mental health services (Hunt, 2020). There was a notable exception to all these public support measures: international students.

About a fortnight after Australian borders were closed to non-residents, and within days of announcing many of the abovementioned support packages, the then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison was asked about whether any of it extended to the international students who had collectively injected \$37.4 billion to the Australian economy in the year prior (Ferguson & Spinks, 2021). He told the press conference: 'They're obviously not held here compulsorily… If they're not in a position to support themselves, then there is the alternative for them to return to their home countries' (cited in Ross, 2020). He went on to advise that while it was 'lovely to have visitors to Australia in good times', international students should 'make your way home' to 'ensure that you can receive the supports that are available… in your home countries' (cited in Ross, 2020). What was the rationale behind his curt advice? 'At this time, Australia must focus on its citizens. Our focus and our priority is on supporting Australians and Australian residents with the economic supports that are available' (cited in Ross, 2020).

In one exchange with the media at a critical moment in history, the former Australian Prime Minister illustrated just what Foucault means when he says that biopolitics always involves some distinction to be made between those in the population for whom the state intervenes 'in order to improve life by eliminating accidents, the random element, and defciencies' (Foucault, 2003, p. 248) and those it chooses to 'let die'. And racism is the principle of this distinction in modern nation-states, according to him. To be sure, when referring to the state 'letting die' or even 'killing' certain people, Foucault is aware that this might sound so dramatically malevolent that it can be dismissed as being only relevant to extreme cases (e.g., Nazism). So, he qualifes this:

When I say 'killing,' I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. (Foucault, 2003, p. 256)

With this qualifcation, Foucault attunes us to the 'grey zone' of how state racism operates through biopolitics. This grey zone can be understood spatially and temporally. In the frst instance, biopolitics can be seen to create a spectrum—or more precisely, a hierarchy—within a given population that runs from access to all that 'makes live' (e.g., enrolment in the best schools and universities, insured with the highest quality health care) to all that 'makes die' (e.g., lack of access to family support and adequate nutrition, under resourced schooling and hospitals, confnement to living in areas of neglect and over policing). 'Biopolitics is always a politics of differential vulnerability', as Lorenzini (2021, pp. 43–44) points out:

Far from being a politics that erases social and racial inequalities by reminding us of our common belonging to the same biological species, it is a politics that structurally relies on the establishment of hierarchies in the value of lives, producing and multiplying vulnerability as a means of governing people. (Lorenzini, 2021, pp. 43–44)

For the international students who remained in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic—not being able to take the then-Prime Minister's advice for fnancial, relationship, and/or material reasons (Doherty, 2020)—it became very apparent that their enrolment status factored little in the political calculations for the nation's future. As one international university student put it with acuity:

In this current pandemic the Australian government has made it more clear that they don't really care about the [international] students. I don't know why is that. It's pretty much heartbreaking considering the input of them in the Australian economy. (cited in Morris et al., 2020)

Just as the grey zone of biopolitics can be seen as producing a spatial effect because it creates a spectrum and hierarchy of value, determining who is 'in' the population whose lives matter for the prosperity of the nation and who is 'out', so it also produces a temporal effect insofar as this making of inclusion/exclusion, valuation/devaluation, and life/death is ongoing. 'The specifcity of modern racism, or what gives it its specifcity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power', Foucault (2003, p. 258) argues. By this he means that racism is better seen not simply as 'bad ideas' about certain groups of people. Rather, through technologies of power like border security and immigration controls that protect the passage of some and condemns others to detention (Perera & Pugliese, 2020), pandemic control measures like differential policing (Ryan et al., 2022), systemic disparities in exposure to health risks (Karácsonyi et al., 2021), and so on, racism is part and parcel of how modern nation-states operate. As such, it involves an ongoing process of enacting 'dividing practices' within a population (Foucault, 2000, p. 327). As Lemke et al. (2011, pp. 43–44) summarise:

According to Foucault, racism is an expression of a schism within society that is provoked by the biopolitical idea of an ongoing and always incomplete cleansing of the social body. Racism is not defned by individual action. Rather, it structures social felds of action, guides political practices, and is realized through state apparatuses.

To bring it back to international students in higher education, they have for now been welcomed back to Australia. This is not on account of their future productive potential as part of the population, but because they 'are worth some \$40 billion to our economy' (Frydenberg, cited in Henderson & Stayner, 2021) and can help to plug 'current workforce shortages' (Hawke & Frydenberg, 2022). Historically, their welcome has always been conditional and subject to rounds of suspicion about their status in the student body. Consider, for instance, that whether it is about 'contract cheating' in universities (Shepherd, 2022) or the lowering of academic standards to let 'seriously failing' students pass (Baker, 2022), there are the twin dynamics of biopolitics at play in these recurrent bouts of public alarm: one, the important educational function of universities to secure the future of the economy and nation, as Xu points out in his chapter; and two, the racialising logics that frame some students as threats to their integrity and purpose (Saltmarsh, 2005). For us as teachers in higher education, these are what Foucault's concept of biopolitics should at minimum attune us to.

# References

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Wrestling with Monsters: Critique, Climate Change, and Comets

*Pat Norman*

# Introduction

It's a cliché to begin a chapter with 'as I write this paragraph', but at the tail-end (supposedly) of the COVID-19 pandemic, with tensions rising between China and the United States over Taiwan, with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Australia having had its wettest year on record due to a record third La Niña event, and even with Sriracha production under threat due to extended drought in the Western United States… this selection of unprecedented things suggest that I am writing this paragraph in interesting times. That observation is signifcant for me because Slavoj Žižek tells of a supposed Chinese proverb, explaining that "if you really hate someone, the curse you address them with is 'may you live in interesting times!'" (Žižek, 2012). I don't believe that I have been cursed, but these material crises—these monsters that stalk our times present challenges for thinking theoretically. Žižek is one thinker much suited to 'interesting times'.

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I frst encountered Slavoj Žižek at Sydney's *Festival of Dangerous Ideas* when he gave a talk titled "Let us be realists and demand the impossible: communism".1 Over the course of an hour, Žižek roamed the theoretical landscape, tracing the way ideology structures our lives, drawing on everyday matters from Kinder Surprise to Starbucks. Žižek is entertaining. He is as comfortable ruminating on his philosophical inspirations—Hegelian dialectical materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis—as he is criticising pop culture. Žižek argues that pop culture reveals much about the ideology that underpins contemporary capitalist society, which is why he spends so much time exploring it. Pop culture, like a binge on *Netfix*, is a mask that obscures and mystifes cultural-political tensions. But Žižek suggests that the masks *themselves* reveal more than they obscure: the form and content of these masks, the pleasure we take in them, speak to an unconscious social texture. How do we access this deeper layer of understanding? By taking the time to *think* and to challenge our taken-for-granted logics.

In an interview, Žižek noted that the Chinese proverb about interesting times is likely to be a Western projection: everyone he has spoken to in China says that they have only ever heard it attributed to them by Europeans (Žižek, 2013, p. 16). Žižek's work is compelling because of the way he challenges us to think about problems differently. He invites us to include into our understanding of a structure—such as capitalism—the contradictions and resistances that we see as outside of it. In doing so, Žižek proposes that we shift our understanding of contradiction 'from the distortion of a notion to a distortion *constitutive* of a notion…to see distortions as integral parts of a system' (Žižek, 2011b). Such thinking can help break through conceptual walls because it reveals the habits, assumptions, and ideologies that govern the way we discuss political issues in our world. This chapter seeks to use Žižek's theorising as a lens for exploring two cultural moments in the climate change debate. After frst introducing elements of Žižek's theoretical approach, this chapter takes the Netfix flm *Don't Look Up* as an instance of a consumerist 'response' to climate change. It then turns to the school strike movement—an activist project undertaken by students around the world demanding action on climate change. This chapter poses the question: what are the social logics crystallised in this moment? And perhaps more importantly, how can we use Žižek to re-articulate these problems? Working with Žižek's theory in this way leads us to a hopeful conclusion: that there are other possibilities for dealing with the troubles of our 'interesting' times.

1A re-posting of this talk can be found on youtube: https://youtu.be/QARALafdWUI

# Fantasies, Masks, and Hegemony

Before I turn to the case of climate change, it is necessary to trace some of the core concepts that underpin Žižek's work. Fantasy plays a central role in the theoretical thinking of Žižek. Rooted in the work of Jacques Lacan, Žižek's notion of fantasy refers to a structuring logic that helps us to organise our worlds and to accommodate for a 'lack' (Žižek, 2008). Žižek draws on Lacan's triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real: three registers of existence that structure our subjectivity and identity. The *imaginary* refers to an early sense of identifcation: a kind of fctional wholeness where we identify with parental fgures before we are inducted into the culture of language. The *symbolic* refers to the order of language itself: a pre-existing 'big Other' of meaning that structures the way we come to understand the world. In our move into the symbolic order, our imaginary identifcations are lost, giving rise to the sense of 'lack' which is the root cause of desire. Filling in the void of this lack, we construct complex stories to make the world cohere, which is understood in Lacanian terms as *fantasy*. The order of the *Real* refers to the material substrate of reality over which the fantasy of the symbolic order is laid. However, because language is always an approximation of the Real—it can never fully describe, it is always a representation—a kernel of unrepresentable *excess* exists, around which desire circulates. This excess is known as the *objet petit a* (the small object a), something that speaks to 'the in-eliminable gap between discourse and the social reality is purports to capture' (Clarke, 2012). In the discourse of the political, fantasy takes the form of *hegemony*: the dominant ideological form that orders our social world. In the world today, the dominant ideology is neoliberal capitalism: the form of capitalism that sees the logic of the market reach into social relations (Brown, 2005), positioning us all as consumers.

In order for these hegemonic ideologies to operate effectively, power must mask itself—to 'depoliticise' the political (Clarke, 2012). The example Žižek often gives is the demand made by capitalism—consume and obey—despite our perceived freedom. Consider the way we are repositioned as consumers, subjectifed as such: on public transport in New South Wales, we are no longer 'passengers' but 'customers'. Welfare services run by Australian governments now refer to 'customers' not 'clients' or 'citizens'. And yet, as my housemate recently noted to me, holders of American Express cards are referred to as 'members'. The ideological power of neoliberal capitalism rests in the way it transforms social relations: it must be *disguised* so that in places where it most obviously exists—the credit economy, for example—it is masked as membership in a club, and places where its logic might be challenged—public services provided by government—are rearticulated through consumerist language.

If this language sounds infammatory and anti-capitalist, it is because Žižek's project is explicitly couched in such terms. The challenge with supposedly 'infammatory' critical theoretical language is that those of us who engage in critique seem either utopian or curmudgeonly, and it is diffcult to move beyond this 'negative' frame. Critical theories should not be content just to describe the world as it is, but ought to outline the way that it should be, a project Zembylas (2020) calls 'affrmative critique'. The reach of the capitalist imaginary, and its fortifed contemporary model of neoliberalism, is necessarily a focus of much critical work today. Žižek is concerned with the way the logic of the market, of competition, of 'economy' is "progressively imposing itself as a hegemonic ideology" (Žižek, 2012, p. 34). We should also be aware of the way the domain of education is being reshaped to suit the neoliberal agenda. Žižek references the Bologna Process in the European Union, which sought to repurpose higher education for increased economic productivity—a trend that has echoes in Australian education policy over recent decades:

The reduction of higher education to the task of producing socially useful knowledge is the paradigmatic form of the 'private use of reason' in today's global capitalism. (Žižek, 2012, p. 33)

'Practical' university research and schooling that prepares students for the workforce in and of themselves are not bad things, of course. It is sensible that universities turn their attention to the problems of society and that students are given the opportunity and skills necessary for life in a capitalist society. However, there is a social cost associated with this kind of instrumental, utilitarian approach: the logic that this economic fantasy sustains undermines other, democratic purposes for education (Clarke, 2012). Žižek's point is salient: "what disappears here is the true task of thinking: not only to offer solutions to problems posed by 'society' (state and capital), but to refect on the very form of these 'problems', to reformulate them, to discern a problem in the very way we perceive a problem" (Žižek, 2012, p. 33). If the basic idea that we can take from Žižek—or any critical theorist, really—is that the way we see the problem is part of the problem, then perhaps the best thing is to try and articulate these problems in a different way. Theories give us lenses through which we can look at the world, and in doing so they help us to see our problems differently. But they also give us training in imagining differently. For Žižek, the 'mask' is often only hiding the truth that there is more truth in the mask itself than in the thing that it is masking. The *form* the mask takes, following from Freud's interpretation of dreams, is indicative of a repressed or hidden 'truth'. Applied to a structuring fantasy like neoliberalism, such a perspective allows us to *re-articulate* the components that comprise ideological hegemony (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). In the spirit of re-articulation, let us turn to the signifcant long-term problem of our time: climate change.

# Climate Change and School Strikes

In the 2021 Netfix flm *Don't Look Up*, Jennifer Lawrence plays a PhD student who has discovered a comet heading towards the earth. As she and her doctoral supervisor, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, warn the world of impending doom, she becomes frustrated by the lack of concern shown by those in power—notably Cate Blanchett's sunny breakfast show host and Meryl Streep's president, who cares only about re-election and good relations with powerful industrialists. The flm is an allegory about climate change: the title 'don't look up' references people choosing to look *away* from the comet, even when it is right in their faces.

But what about those groups who *are* looking up, who are fully aware of the approaching comet and are shouting wildly about it? Lawrence and DiCaprio's exasperated scientists spend much of the flm fghting so the public understands the threat of the comet, yet they are continually trapped within the circuit of consumerism. DiCaprio becomes a celebrity 'good-looking scientist', appearing on breakfast television and eventually having an affair with Blanchett's host. Most of the supporting characters in the flm refuse to change their lifestyles—everyone is seeking fame or money. An interesting running gag punctuates the movie, capturing this hyper-neoliberal society. Early in the flm, while Lawrence and DiCaprio wait to meet the President, a three-star general asks if anybody would like some snacks. He returns with a bag of chips and a bottle of water for Lawrence, telling her that they cost \$10. Later, Lawrence walks into the kitchen from which the snacks came and discovers that they were free, setting off a spiral throughout the flm as she questions what could have motivated the General to charge her for these snacks. Did the General just want some extra cash? Lawrence muses: "He knew eventually I'd fnd out the snacks were free, so it was just, like, a power play?"

While *Don't Look Up* is an obvious allegory (ironically hosted on a consumerist platform like Netfix), the symbolic function of this general charging for the snacks is twofold. First, and most obviously, he represents a degraded society where even those in positions of great responsibility are compelled to hustle on the side. But a second, paradoxical reading of this general—an authority fgure who ought to know better—reveals something about our own response to climate change: aren't our leaders acting as though the snacks *are* free? That there can be a relatively painless transition to a zero-carbon economy or that we can continue with minimal changes to our rapacious consumption of energy? The notion that the global order as it currently exists can be sustained without disruptive change is an example of *fantasy*, a product of the symbolic order meant to mask the unsettling truth. In fact, Žižek would argue that this fantasy exists *precisely* to mask the intrusion of the traumatic Real of climate change: a physical process that is a product of the very system it now threatens. This is why passionate young activists, to whom this chapter now turns, are probably musing like Lawrence's character: "they know eventually we'll fnd out the snacks *are not free*, so why aren't they acting to stop climate change? Is it just a power play?"

Climate change looms as humanity's most signifcant long-term challenge. Naomi Klein has argued that the economic transformation required is of a scale not seen since the abolition of slavery in the southern states of America (Klein, 2014). Governments are under pressure to enact targets and policies designed to constrain carbon emissions and cap rising temperatures. Even with these targets, we seem to be headed towards irreversible change, and the question now is the degree of change with which we are comfortable. Of course, it is not 'we', a generation of adults with the power to vote and make decisions, who need to be comfortable—except in a moral sense—because 'we' will not have to live with the consequences. And this is the basis of this school strike movement in Australia, known as *Fridays for Future* in Europe. Sparked in 2018 by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the movement involves students absenting themselves from school—going on strike—to protest the lack of signifcant action from governments. The school strike movement built pace globally, and throughout 2019, until schools were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, many strikes took place around Australia.

Australian media representations of the strikes were mixed, with Mayes and Hartup (2021) noting four dominant characterisations of participants: ignorant zealots, anxious pawns, rebellious truants, and extraordinary heroes. Students were criticised by then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, for being out of class (Ward, 2019). In my research, I spoke with teachers who expressed their frustration at being unable to join their students on the strikes. They saw these activist practices as 'teachable moments' and as deeply connected with their own ethical understanding of teacher professionalism. But they were prohibited from attending the strikes by government policy, refecting a bureaucratic concern about media representations associated with teachers' presence at a political rally. Paradoxically, many of their counterparts in private schools, often attended by conservativevoting families, were allowed to join their students at the strikes, ensuring that students were safe, and the experience was an educative one. Despite the varying media narratives generated around the school strikes, students themselves were clear about their purpose. Student Varsha Yajman explained to the *Sydney Morning Herald*: "there's no point having a good education without a good future to use it in" (Ward, 2019).

Why is this a problem worthy of re-articulation? These students are showing collective action—a form of social life that we see less of today. The school strikes represent a generation of students who seek to politicise the terrain of the commons. They recognise a problem that demands not just individual action, but one which requires the full resources of the global community. There are examples of new forms of participatory and collaborative action that have arisen from the school strikes. For example, White et al. (2022) write about their group collaboration: two student school strikers and two environmental education academics engaging in 'research *for* education'. In that paper, they bring students into the research and publishing process as equal partners, re-articulating the research enterprise from one that seeks to understand or explain, to one that gives agency, power, and leadership to students. They call for a 'reimagining of education' by 'daring to think differently' (White et al., 2022, p. 36). That call to think differently is signifcant, because it is exactly this process that allows us to re-articulate those social problems. It calls to attention the fundamental contradictions in the neoliberal fantasy sustained by the symbolic order—the fantasy which masks the *Real*: the problem of climate change. To put it in Žižek's terms, it is necessary to discern how the way we understand and frame these problems—the questions we ask and the solutions we propose—might be a part of the problem itself.

# Re-articulating the Problem: Which Climate Is in Crisis?

The challenge is not simply that we are burning fossil fuels. The challenge is also that the very form of our social life depends on unsustainable consumption: we are atomised individuals, we want our nice things but cannot conceive of the cost. Wendy Brown (2005) notes the way neoliberalism—in its various guises—comes to focus its attention on the individual as a consumer. This is the way people come to be 'governed' under neoliberalism. We are constituted as neoliberal subjects, an ideological fantasy that is rendered into reality by this dominant discourse (Foucault, 1982). Žižek can help us to think through an inherent contradiction in this state of affairs: how can it be that vast problems of the commons might be solved through acts of *individual* responsibility? When we are invited to consider our personal carbon footprint, to buy an offset when we take a fight, to eat less meat, or god forbid to buy a Tesla, we are still operating within the domain of consumption that fuels unsustainable production. Even when we watch *Don't Look Up* on Netfix, we are still acting in the role of consumer! Perhaps more signifcantly, even if we *are* to change our consumer habits, these small practices won't compensate for the emissions generated by vast heavy industry around the world. The problem cannot be solved by individuals. As Žižek argues, "the only way to break out of this deadlock is to propose and fght for a positive universal project shared by all participants" (Žižek, 2012, p. 39). Universalism is a recurring theme for Žižek, particularly when writing about these social struggles. And universalism is a central message that emerges from the school strike movement: these students are advocating to preserve a good future for *all* of humanity. Žižek argues:

The key to actual freedom rather resides in the 'apolitical' network of social relations, from the market to the family, in which the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform but a change in the 'apolitical' social relations of production – *which means* revolutionary class struggle, not democratic elections or other political measures in the narrow sense of the term. (Žižek, 2012, p. 37)

Perhaps I put more faith in democracy than Žižek does, but it is not my view that *revolutionary class struggle* is the only escape from political deadlock. There are particular class struggles that infect the debate, such as state capture by companies that make their money from fossil fuels, but the economic and social tide is turning on those organisations. Similarly, the issue here is not one of extending democracy further or by ensuring one side of politics (progressive left) emerges as dominant over the other (conservative/reactionary right). Rather it is to ensure the universal problem of climate change is recognised by *all* sides as a struggle. The problem—today refracted through the lens of 'ideology' despite not being ideological—is a *common* one and should be elevated beyond the plane of democratic antagonism.

But there is also a tension here: our pedagogical structures do not lend themselves to this form of resistance. The act of teaching—in an industrial model, as Ken Robinson might have said—is also bound up in the logic of a system that gave rise to the crisis. Rather than simply turning the school strikes into a 'teachable moment' for students, perhaps the real opportunity is for the school strikes to become a teachable moment for ourselves. The strikes are effective in bringing this conversation into public focus, but are they effective at encouraging leaders to act? Leaders argue that the transition to net zero emissions must be gradual so as not to cause great economic harm. But what greater harm is there than the degradation of the climate? How do we break the climate deadlock of scientists and 'progressives' advocating for change that will involve a cost borne more aggressively by the working class? Here again we can learn from the students: by recognising that the issues cut across generational and class divides, that the changes required are not just matters of physics and engineering, but also involve social and economic adjustment. Finkel (2021) has argued that—for Australia—a shift to electrifcation for as many industries and modes of transport as possible, with solar, wind, and—in the interim—coal and gas simply requires public investment and patience. Achieving political consensus for such vast changes requires the emergence of what Žižek calls a new 'we': the universal subject of the human species (Žižek, 2011a, p. 332). However, argues Žižek, the struggle here is not only to resolve the problem facing the Earth's ecology, but frst to resolve the deadlock of ever-expanding economic growth as a dominant hegemonic paradigm.

Transforming the political relations surrounding climate change may also go some way to addressing the 'impossibility' of signifcant reform. As Žižek explains:

Today, impossible and possible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into an excess. On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientifc technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are told)…on the other hand, [our era has] accepted the constraints of reality (read: the capitalist socioeconomic reality) with all its impossibilities. *You cannot* engage in large collective acts…Political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity. (Žižek, 2012, p. 35)

Returning to the example of *Don't Look Up*, Meryl Streep's US President explains that defecting the comet just is not possible while there is still the opportunity to make money by mining it. She genufects to the burlesqued caricature of an industrialist—a kind of hybrid Elon Musk-Jeff Bezos fgure—who explains how much value, in the form of jobs and energy, can be created if we simply allow the comet to get dangerously close to the Earth. However, earlier in the flm, the President exclaims that it is impossible to say with 100% certainty that the comet will hit the Earth (the public will be too alarmed, let's just say 70%) and that electoral realities prevent her from taking early and swift action to protect the planet.

This allegory rings true because we have seen these arguments rehearsed by political leaders time and again. The risks of economic damage, of energy insecurity, and of course, losing elections, mean that taking bold action is *impossible*. And yet when COVID-19 threatened the global economy, hundreds of billions of dollars was invested by governments to develop an effective vaccine in under two years. Clearly, we have the technical capability and the capital to solve global problems, but these solutions are 'impossible' until they prevent an immediate threat to the ongoing capitalist system. The radical intervention by governments in response to COVID-19 shows that another world is possible, even if we did not take that particular crisis as an opportunity to 'walk through the portal' to that world 'without our baggage' (Roy, 2020). We know that we can offer new possibilities, argues Žižek: "something is wrong with the world where it is possible to become immortal but impossible to spend a little bit more for education" (Žižek, 2012, p. 35).

# Conclusion

Tracing the contours of political struggles today, Žižek quotes Gramsci: "the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to come forth. Now is the time of monsters" (p. 43). The time of monsters is a liminal political zone, caught between one world and the next. This gives rise to diffcult spectres, for instance, that we might not be able to transition from coalfred energy to renewables without a transitional fuel like gas (Finkel, 2021). The industrial needs of our advanced global economy are complex, and as such give rise to contradictions, unexpected paradoxes, and diffcult compromises. But amidst these spectres, there are also possibilities for hope: the notion of 'learning from young people' (Verlie & Flynn, 2022), for example, and learning to reappraise the baggage and habits of the old world. While the immediate problem of carbon dioxide pollution heating the atmosphere is one—perhaps *the*—brutal monster of our time, the school strike movement it inspired suggests another: the problem of our common social life. Thinking like Žižek and *re-articulating* the phenomenon, we recognise that there is something revealed in the 'mask' of the climate change debate:

Communism is today not the name of a solution, but the name of a *problem*: the problem of commons in all its dimensions.…Whatever the solution, it will have to solve *this* problem. (Žižek, 2012, p. 44)

Our social life itself has been undermined by neoliberalism. We are atomised, and our creative capacity to respond to problems suffers for it. The transformation demanded by climate change is not just one of economy and energy, it is also *social*.

I think the most basic and the most powerful theoretical insight I have taken from Žižek is precisely that the way we perceive a problem is often part of the problem. He argues that we need to slow down, to recognise the value of intellectual work that—at frst—may seem to have 'no practical use' (Žižek, 2012, p. 33). Sometimes we must resist the temptation to rush to action, even if the problems we face are urgent. The case may be that those problems are misrepresentations of the *real* problems, the problems of commons, the universal struggles in education and society that would allow us to properly imagine a better world. Fighting monsters is never easy, and in some instances—as in great narratives—perhaps the monster is not what we thought it was: perhaps the monsters are waypoints to the new world, creatures that sharpen our theoretical tools as we plunge onwards into the uncertainty of the new. Crucially, this demands that we who do 'knowledge work' or who are animated by the task of critique press back on the instrumentalization of education—what Žižek calls 'the private use of reason' (Žižek, 2013). Education—in schools, in universities, at school strikes—should be a process that brings forth new possibilities for hope. We should therefore heed Žižek's call to do theory: don't just act, think!

# References

Žižek, S. (2013). *Demanding the impossible*. Polity Press.

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# Still Wrestling with Monsters: A Response to Pat Norman

# *Christine Grice*

'Interesting' is a word replete with connotations, used by the polite to indicate a pretence of agreement alongside hidden respectful disagreement. Something can taste 'interesting', which does not mean delicious, look 'interesting', which does not mean attractive, or sound 'interesting', which does not mean tuneful. Žižek (2012) connects 'interesting' with crisis, where our 'interesting' irrational, fast, and often contradictory solutions are, as Norman notes, potentially destroying the planet. Is the role of curriculum to envisage the Anthropocene as the end? How can educators grapple with truth and crisis and reclaim genuinely interesting and creative solutions to global problems, as Norman suggests, with hope and possibility in a world of inequity and degradation?

We teach and lead education and pedagogy in interesting times. Most recently, interesting times in education might be considered as contradictory, such as opening up physical classroom walls alongside the boundarying and boxing of online learning or providing the necessary focus on wellbeing following COVID isolation, but narrowing being well to

C. Grice (\*)

University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2024

R. Y. S. Low et al. (eds.), *Using Social Theory in Higher Education*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39817-9\_15