Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia: Interrogating the Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory 9780367458546, 9781003025771

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In Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia, João M. Paraskeva offers a trenchant indictment of status-quo thinking in the curriculum field. The field as we know it, he maintains, has taken a precipitous, almost primordial, descent into necro-politics. This retrograde development is driven forward by the craven and parsimonious neoliberal restructuring of education processes toward wholly and mindlessly utilitarian and acquisitive ends, tout court. Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia serves, therefore, both as a warning and a manifesto preamble for the return of genuine and unfettered intellectual inquiry in curricular and pedagogical processes. Professor Paraskeva’s book could not have arrived at a more urgently needed time in education and society—a time in which it seems a pall of feral nationalism and Eurocentrism has begun to blanket all of our social institutions. In characteristically soaring and trenchant prose, Paraskeva offers an antidote to the current malaise as he heralds the return of a vibrant critical humanism and rigorous theoretical curriculum thinking that might cut into the taken-for-granted instrumentalism now warping the curriculum field and the society at large. I commend the author for his signal achievement in Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia. João Paraskeva has written an extraordinarily insightful, and very important, book which should be widely read by scholars and practitioners in the field and by the general public as well. With this book, João M. Paraskeva establishes himself as one of the most exceptional scholars writing in the curriculum field today. Cameron McCarthy, University Scholar and Former Director of the Global Studies in Education Division at the University of Illinois-Urbana, US One of the more difficult tasks of our contemporary conditions, often seemingly as intractable, is how to engage in the utopic progressive qualities of schooling but through unthinking the anticipatory logics of engineering the future. Paraskeva recognizes the politics of this anticipatory logic that excludes in pedagogical practices and its critical theories. Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia is an important, thoughtful and provocative contribution for challenging the doxa of curriculum studies through an alternative critical mode of thinking. Drawing on and connecting macro-political sociological literatures with a broad understanding of post-structural and post-coloniality scholarship, Paraskeva cuts into the political reason of contemporary critical pedagogical practices to shift attention to the in-between spaces of agency as a radically progressive critical approach to curriculum theory. Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin-Madison, US Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia exemplifies why Paraskeva is undeniably one of the most acclaimed curriculum theorists in the world today. The book is a formidable and bold effort to redefine cosmopolitan democratic education beyond Western imaginings in full terms and worth of its name. This magnificent book is in powerful contrast to Anglo-American neoliberal

measures with their faithful tandem with the “Learning Sciences” as the dominating and full-blown, current form of Eurocentrism, pervading the globe while the old Europe herself is seemingly exhausting its previous, centuries long resources and visions, vigor, potential and control. Modernization, traditionally, is to be understood through three, mutually intertwining and merging processes all of which are very pertinent to the history and present of education: differentiation, rationalization and commodification. The sheer linguistic characterization of modernization discloses its close affiliation with control and administration as the main drivers of modernist colonizing progress in education and curriculum. In the US, from the very outset at the turn and later during the 20th century, instead of conceiving education in any genuine way as an intellectual endeavor, curriculum studies were invented for the service of administration and economy. Contrary to the lip service for individuality and democracy in education, ‘there was no intention of accepting individuality or personal autonomy’ (Bowen 1981). The essence of the educational position was to produce an identity of outlook among the mass of population; the image of the industrial system demanding uniformity, interchangeability and disposability was and is dominant. Education as an academic discipline was conceived as a lower status, strictly gendered phenomenon, intellectually less demanding and inferior to the powerful masculine mindset assumedly embodied in the natural sciences. Due to the early low ranking in the academe, the proponents of education and curriculum research intellectually affiliated with the successful pragmatic criterion of natural science that had displayed its power in the study of nature herself and particularly in emerging technology with industrial, massscale applications. Educational psychology and learning theories, stripped of its ‘unnecessary’ metaphysics and epistemological issues, pointed the way for the science of psychology to deal with human ‘objects’ in the spirit of the pragmatic criterion. The natural-scientific prediction and control of the environment turned into an interest in psychological prediction and control of the human mind-body in the educational environment. This is the case since its quasi-intellectual and bureaucratic invention manifested now in the “Learning Sciences” with all its white male supremacy priorities, gendered and racialized, colonizing readings of options for flagrantly manipulating people’s lives and aspirations in the name of education and science. That detrimental theory of science hot spot manifested in neoliberal Learning Theories reverberates in the conceptions of American and Western democracy. The French social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville perceptively observed almost two hundred years ago in his book Democracy in America that an externally controlled identity of outlook as democracy with highly materialistic, quasispiritual cultural dominance and standardization may lead to the ‘tyranny of ignorant masses’; democracy may come to be displaced by democracy. Those sporadic associations were inspired while reading Paraskeva’s Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia that so passionately and with great intellectual accuracy

and vigor is streaming American and Western education with nuanced sense of irreducible diversity and variance in the world; how education is tainted by those detrimental and perverted conceptions where education is determined, signified and controlled by the lack of democracy, by the dominance of instrumental rationality and technology what Paraskeva names in his amazing flow of consciousness as toxic epistemologies, epistemicides and reversive epistemicides. Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia is not just about an innovative critical examination of the fascist turn we are facing today as a global society and its implication for the curriculum field. It is a courageous and ground-breaking critical analysis at the very core of the Eurocentric critical platform and its insufficiencies—despite great accomplishments—that drove the field into a dangerous theoretical deadlock. The volume pioneers a must needed critique that opens the veins of the very Eurocentric counter-hegemonic platform. Equipped with a unique scholarly rigorous creativity, and following his previous works, Paraskeva brings again to the field new voices—from within and beyond the Eurocentric matrix—a new language, a new semantic—such as curriculum involution, curriculum Occidentosis, curriculum isonomia, curriculum heterotopia, curriculum disquiet, curriculum mechanotics, hypertrophia theoricae, theoricide—pushing the curriculum debate into a totally different level, inviting one to pay close attention to the itinerant curriculum matrix. Paraskeva vividly opens vistas for new utopias, glaringly absent from the agendas of the momentist empiricism in curriculum studies and policies: what it means to learn and what it means to think epistemologically radically different: it is a new epistemological logic and educational language, one of excess so crucial to de-territorialize and delink, but above all to reignite—in a radical way—the utopia for a just world. To think of this far unthinkable, to open the mind for the colonization is an invitation also within the advanced north European (monarchic!) democracies and welfare states. To increase sensibilities to the pervading instances of subalternity and subjugation within advanced democracies themselves creates conditions and possibilities to identify options to the ally of political solidarity and psychological empathy toward those people for too long considered subhuman outside the affluent West. Paraskeva’s Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia is a crucial volume for those in education really concerned with the production of a just theory. Tero Autio, Professor of Education, Tampere University, Finland/Tallinn University, Estonia Paraskeva’s Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia builds upon his previous books that provide caveats about curriculum epistemicides through education perpetrated by corporate states as educational propaganda. Here, he offers sources of possibility for considering diverse utopias that can help us separate education from inimical clutches of control by conquering forces that disregard public interests, especially of the poor, colonized, and indigenous— the wretched of the Earth, to use Fanon’s telling phrase. As one who has explored utopian possibilities for many years, I am astounded by Paraskeva’s productivity,

scholarly imagination, and impressed by the use of sources too seldom tapped, and I am grateful for his examples, and theories (particularly from the Global South) that continue the quest to find education that liberates students, educators, and multitudes of publics from doing the bidding of ruling classes. A major task in the future is to actualize such educational potential on a larger scale. Paraskeva’s Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia offers much to ponder and to act upon. I urge educators to allow perspectives in this book to expand their outlooks. William H. Schubert, Professor Emeritus and former University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Lifetime Achievement Award in Curriculum Studies of the American Educational Research Association, US In Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia: Interrogating the Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory, Paraskeva illuminates critical curriculum praxis—its foundations, movements, and key concepts—and painfully and thoughtfully provides a coup de grace in order to advance critical praxis in a new historical epoch. Recognizing US curriculum’s past contributions in a way that very few scholars can in the present, Paraskeva reorganizes curriculum under a decolonizing epistemological constellation and engages a post-empistemicidal futurity of a supra-disciplinary critical theory. Differently organizing curriculum’s internationalization via decolonization, critical curriculum praxis is made new, revived, re-thought—all with the purpose of advancing curriculum’s relevance for the present. Reaching back through curriculum’s intellectual history to push forward toward new work, Paraskeva’s itinerant curriculum theory serves as the driver for conceptual-empirical work, remade, to fuel counter-hegemonic alternatives. Paraskeva’s contributions to historical context, shifting epoch, what’s worth remembering, and what our present decentered and decolonial task is—all serve to provide new critical curriculum praxes beyond the US- and Eurocentric ruptures of 1968, reconceptualist curriculum, or the re-runs of tepid post-reconceptualist smaller, less ambitious field of study. As a scholar coming up in the curriculum field, Paraskeva’s book makes me recall why I signed on in the first place, why I need stamina and renewed commitments, and why the field and its organizations are worth our investment. As Paraskeva frequently references Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. Our work then, is not over, it continues with even more necessity than ever. James C. Jupp, Professor and Chair Department of Teaching and Learning University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, US

Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia

As a follow-up to Towards a Just Curriculum Theory and Curriculum Epistemicide, this volume illuminates the challenges and contradictions which have prevented critical curriculum theory from establishing itself as an alternative to dominant Western Eurocentric epistemologies. Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia re-visits the work of leading progressive theorists and draws on a complex range of epistemological perspectives from the Middle East, Africa, Southern Europe, and Latin America. Paraskeva illustrates how counter-dominant narratives have been suppressed by neoliberal dynamics through an exploration of key issues including: itinerant curriculum theory, globalization and internationalization, as well as utopianism. Foregrounding critical curriculum theory as a vector of de-colonization and de-centralization, the text puts forth Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ITC) as an alternative form of anti-colonial, theoretical engagement. This work forms an important addition to the literature surrounding critical curriculum theory. It will be of interest to post-graduate scholars, researchers and academics in the fields of curriculum studies, curriculum theory, and critical educational research. João M. Paraskeva is Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Education Leadership and Program Director of the EdD PhD in Education Leadership and Policy Studies at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, MA, USA.

Routledge Research in Education

This series aims to present the latest research from right across the field of education. It is not confined to any particular area or school of thought and seeks to provide coverage of a broad range of topics, theories and issues from around the world. Recent titles in the series include: Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia Interrogating the Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory João M. Paraskeva Sport, Physical Education, and Social Justice Religious, Sociological, Psychological, and Capability Perspectives Edited by Nick J. Watson, Grant Jarvie and Andrew Parker Quality and Equity in Education Revisiting Theory and Research on Educational Effectiveness and Improvement Leonidas Kyriakides, Bert P.M. Creemers, Anastasia Panayiotou, & Evi Charalambous Creative Learning in Digital and Virtual Environments Opportunities and Challenges of Technology-Enabled Learning and Creativity Edited by Vlad P. Glăveanu, Ingunn Johanne Ness, and Constance de Saint Laurent Reconceptualizing the Role of Critical Dialogue in American Classrooms Promoting Equity through Dialogic Education Edited by Amanda Kibler, Guadalupe Valdés and Aída Walqui For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Education/book-series/SE0393

Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia Interrogating the Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory

João M. Paraskeva

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of João M. Paraskeva to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-45854-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02577-1 (ebk) Typeset in Baskerville by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Isabel and Camila

Contents

Acknowledgements The Generation of the Utopia: Foreword

xii xiv

AN TO N I A DA RD ER

1

2

3

Interrogating the Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory: The Need to Go Above and Beyond Neoliberal Rage Without Avoiding It

1

‘Retrogressive Anthropogenesis’ or the Great Regression

18

El Patron Colonial de Poder. Game Over!: To Resist Re-existing and/or Re-exist Resisting Colonialism

69

4

What Happens With Critical Curriculum Theory?

114

5

The Generation of the Utopia: ‘Don’t Shoot Them!’

174

6

Curriculum Involution. Severe Occidentosis

223

To Be Continued: ‘Don’t Shoot the Utopists.’ Decolonize It

283

Name Index Subject Index

309 314

Acknowledgements

Every book is indeed a collective process to whom any writer owes endlessly. This volume was written in a very particular time—a time most could not imagine as a possibility, a time that some of us, unfortunately, predicted as an irreversible reality. I remember vividly working with high school teachers in professional development courses and seminars in the north of Portugal, and how they reacted negatively—understandably, I would add—when alerted for the fact that neoliberal policies would drive societies to a great regression framed by sophisticated forms of eugenicism and authoritarianism. At that time, teachers saw the approach of some of us quite delusional, communistically informed, clearly serving an ideological radical left agenda. Even particular progressive and left segments saw our arguments as a bit off the rail. This was during the heyday of the Teachers Autonomy Act in Portugal, one of the most important legal archetypes of neoliberal educational and curriculum policies, so well unpacked by leading scholars in our field. Over two decades later, reality speaks for itself. I am deeply grateful to all the teachers and students with whom I had the privilege to interact as they helped me, among other things, to refine and complexify my approach. I have to express my sincere gratitude to Anthony Brown, Antonia Darder, Angela Valenzuela, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Bernadette Baker, Cameron McCarthy, Dwayne Huebner, James Jupp, Jurjo Torres Santome, Manuel Silva, Maria Alfredo Moreira, Maria Luiza Sussekind, Ines Oliveira, Nelson Maldonado Torres, Paget Henry, Peter McLaren, Ramon Grosfoguel, Richard Quantz, Thomas Popkewitz, William Schubert, Clyde Barrow, as they helped me to refine my arguments. My deep gratitude to Antonia Darder for accepting to produce the foreword of this volume. I owe Antonia and Dwayne more that I can ever say. A word of thanks to Cameron McCarthy, Thomas Popkewitz, Tero Autio, Bill Schubert, and James Jupp for their support in reading the manuscript and endorsing it. Also, I am grateful to my doctoral students in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. To Liz Janson, for whom I have no words to express my gratitude in reviewing the manuscript. To my brilliant and sharp Routledge editors, Elsbeth Wright and Jessica Cooke, for their patience and crucial insights related to the manuscript production, I also express my appreciation. My endless indebtedness to my

Acknowledgements

xiii

dear wife Isabel and my daughter Camila for walking with me knowing so well as Matsuo Bashō argues, that ‘every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.’ Also, a word of gratitude to my siblings Pandelis and Jorge, whose lives are vivid examples of the outcome of what was once a promised revolution. Last but not least, to my beloved parents, my very best friends, who sadly did not live enough to see so many of our conversations reflected in this book. While I confess such myriad of crucial mentors, for the record I must state that they are not related at all with the potential crimes produced in the manuscript.

The Generation of the Utopia: Foreword Antonia Darder

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. . . . See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. (Lorde, 1979)

The only place from which I can begin this preface to João M. Paraskeva’s Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia is by invoking these words from Audre Lorde’s “History Is a Weapon,” for the arguments fiercely and systematically articulated in this volume cannot but force us back to this inescapable truth: we cannot dismantle any form of oppression through the perverted cognitive logic that for centuries has preserved its existence. To engage this phenomenon, Paraskeva pointedly directed to the abyssal divide and the subsequent coloniality of power that relentlessly persists, despite vociferous Western proclamations of democracy, equality, and social justice. Moreover, diversity proclamations especially ring hollow within the academic and political arena of our times, where strident neoliberal policies, ruthless political authoritarianism, unabashed populist racism, and the inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants including their children being held in cages, all comingle in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Hence, it is in the very midst of such blatant inconsistencies and contradictions that Paraskeva launches a courageous frontal attack on the recurring and unabated epistemicidal traditions of the left, particularly within academic constructs of critical curriculum theory. His unrelenting arguments are in no way for the faint of heart, in that Paraskeva dives deeply into the tradition of critical theory in his effort to ruthlessly expose the insufficiencies of the field and the reprehensible inability of critical theorists in education and other fields to forge an effective political bloc for actualizing concrete structural and political change across schools, universities, and society. Rather than to contrived notions of innocent neglect or unconscious ignorance, Paraskeva astutely links decades of failure to strike a decisive blow to the juggler of academicism to

The Generation of the Utopia

xv

a comprehensive set of insufficiencies that have systematically perpetuated the illegitimate supremacy of Western thought on the global stage. The corrosive epistemological engine that has fueled this abyssal phenomenon has also simultaneously invisibilized and denied the authority of “the other” to name our own reality, summarily positioning subaltern populations as subhuman— according to the long-standing colonizing exclusionary matrix of humanity forged by Eurocentric delusions. In this important volume, Paraskeva again returns to his conceptual use of the river metaphor (drawn from Vincent Harding [1981]), as he theorizes the qualities of “the generation of utopia,” along the malaise of counter-hegemonic/ dominant Modern Western Eurocentric movements and intellectuals on the left. Here, he signals to the failure of radical intellectuals to recognize the existence and impact of persistent colonizing perversions reinforced by the very logic that undergirds their emancipatory assertions—a logic that silences all those at the margins of its legitimacy. True to the idea that the oppressive tools that created the problem cannot be the same tools used to launch a true emancipatory political project, Paraskeva goes into great detail to illustrate throughout the book how this is precisely what has been attempted; and, as such, abstract intellectualisms of the West have been incapable of eliminating or even successfully disrupting enduring formations of colonized oppression. Moreover, Paraskeva is persuasive in his sharp critique of the institutional mechanisms of careerism within the university and in making his case that efforts related to any political project of curricular emancipation must begin with uncompromising decolonial efforts to challenge the coloniality of power and create an expanded field of cognitive, pedagogical, and political engagement, integrating knowledges and ways of knowing that have been formerly prohibited. In the absence of such radical interventions among the left, Paraskeva’s arguments unequivocally condemn the manner in which subaltern scholars willing to push back against the limited worldview of Eurocentric scholarship have been repeatedly brutalized and betrayed by their supposed leftist allies—often leaving them hanging dry before a disciplinary firing squad, alone and abandoned, while these same radical intellectuals pursue their academic agendas, generally devoid of any real connection with the actual suffering of people on the streets.

In Search of Cognitive Justice Colonization is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grips and emptying the natives’ brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it! (Fanon, 1965)

Paraskeva rightly insists that genuine possibilities of emancipation require a lens outside the turf of Eurocentric cognitive frameworks—that is, a logic

xvi The Generation of the Utopia that does not subject the oppressed to an unrelenting politics of disposability, albeit framed more benignly within critical intellectual circles. This demands a decolonizing process of interrogation that deconstructs, uncompromisingly so, the Eurocentric objectifying fantasies of “the other” produced through a corrosive lens of coloniality. Such a decolonizing approach disrupts and shatters the dominant tradition of speaking for the other or the so-called voiceless. Here, the volume draws on Santos’s sociology of absences, to call forth the myriad forms of knowledges excluded by the West, including the silencing of indigenous spirituality, which has proven richly significant to not only the cosmologies of knowing within subaltern communities, but to their very survival. Similarly, Paraskeva asserts the continued need for a new language to shape how we understand and practice education, particularly with respect to the cultural dynamics of the Global South. A key example is the need to dismantle the monolithic concept of “the other” and instead, recognize that populations outside the West are steeped in as much multiplicity and difference as their dominant counterparts, necessitating what Santos (2018) calls “a different cultural grammar” (p. 175) for understanding the multidimensional dynamics that can mobilize our understanding of subaltern populations beyond simply one of resistance to domination. Devoid of this revolutionary reconceptualization, Paraskeva argues that critical theorists have proven incapable of producing a sociology of emergence—an emergence of difference key to the exercise of cognitive justice. Furthermore, Paraskeva contends that the left has, albeit unwittingly, fallen into the Eurocentric trap that has resulted in perpetuating a racially violent positivity, given their habitual tendency to essentialize and conflate their gaze of the other, despite great disparities and differences in histories, geographies, cosmologies, and contemporary conditions. In so doing, their one-dimensional positivity has bolstered a contemporaneity that strives to universalize historical differences and with this obscure the knowledges inherent in our multiplicity, leaving subaltern populations at the mercy of an imposed and objectifying definition, ascribed to them by the ruthless benefactors of a contemporary globalized economy, rooted in the colonial matrix of power. Paraskeva works across chapters to meticulously demonstrate the failure of critical theory to go beyond the limits of Eurocentric rationality, which he contends has led to gross misreadings and misrepresentations of the other—a phenomenon hidden behind allegiances to modernity’s epistemological superiority and its cultural and patriarchal chauvinism. With all this in mind, the volume boldly exposes the foibles of critical theory, calling forth a decolonial accountability that resolutely speaks to the colonizing configurations of modernity and the neoliberal project—a political economic project that Paraskeva considers to be simply an aspect of the current iteration of Western modernity. Further, arguments are carefully woven to show that even critical emancipatory notions within the context of Western Eurocentric Modernity have exhausted themselves. As such, Paraskeva ponders why, in the midst of so much strife and unrest in the world, have critical theorists of the generation of utopia not been able to forge a just path?

The Generation of the Utopia

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In forging his response, Paraskeva presents a rigorous discussion of the involution or regression provoked by the struggles between hegemonic movements and critical radical intellectuals. He provides a brilliant analysis of the generation of utopia. Here, he focuses on the flagrant contradictions of those who embodied and embraced the dream of a just world, yet who themselves were epistemologically blind to flagrant contradictions. This underlying conflict resulted in what Paraskeva call a reversive epistemicide that prevented radical intellectuals from scaling the Eurocentric divide of the West—hence, betraying their own utopian quest. The consequence, of course, is that educational systems and, more specifically, the curriculum have remained steeped in a colonizing logic of the past, only now driven by the sophisticated neoliberal apparatus of epistemicidal production that perpetuates inequalities within schools and society. In his insightful discussion, Paraskeva also crafts his arguments against the backdrop of contemporary national and international issues. This device serves to contextualize national and global concerns within real conditions of climate change, the debt crisis, school dropouts, incarceration, poverty, and the prohibitive cost of university education today. In so doing, he shows that the hard turn back to right-wing nationalism and austerity policies is inextricably linked to state corruption and market-driven fundamentalism of the world capitalist economy, whether in the United States, England, India, Brazil, Hungary, Venezuela, or other countries. Alongside this fascistic turn, Paraskeva links xenophobic assaults on immigration as part of the continuing crisis of advanced capitalism and the contemptable unwillingness of nation-states of the North to justly address overarching political economic concerns related to borders, racism, national citizenship, and the movement of people from the Global South. Drawing from the works of Latin American philosopher Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and others, Paraskeva skillfully utilizes the coloniality of power or el patron colonial de poder as a central construct in his radical examination of the Modern Western Eurocentric system of domination. He correctly emphasizes that if we are to decolonize education and the curriculum, scholars will need to carefully rethink their praxis through an epistemology of decoloniality that carries the political will to push back against the colonial matrix of domination still at work in racialized and caste relations within schools and society today.

Decolonizing the Future Colonizing versions of research must be recalled and de-commissioned if we [are] to put history to rest, free ourselves from our own entrapment in [its] mythologies and open a future for all here and now. (Mbembe, 2015)

To decolonize the future demands nothing short of dismantling the cognitive empire that for so long has ruled our destinies. Paraskeva argues, moreover,

xviii The Generation of the Utopia that this requires a forthright confrontation and a complete decentering of Western articulations of what it means to be human—a deeply contentious research question, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) insists, particularly with respect to the experience of indigenous populations. It has been the privileging of a Western epistemology of knowledge construction that disables the ability to delve deeper into the human meanings and conditions that result in oppression and its disastrous consequence on oppressed populations. With this in mind, Paraskeva carefully shows how even the history of critical educational thought and research has reflected a fundamental inability to challenge the epistemicides that entrap and imprison, both literally and figuratively, the minds, hearts, and bodies of students from subaltern communities. Through institutionalization and mechanization of the coloniality of power, the capitalist world order has tirelessly policed subaltern sensibilities and deemed indigenous knowledge primitive, irrelevant, or dangerous to the evolution of knowledge and the safeguard of societies. As such, the West has powerfully asserted its colonizing agenda of masculine racialized conquest—epistemologically, economically, and politically—incapable of seeing human difference as legitimate forms of existence. With a keen eye toward deconstructing the foibles of critical theory, Paraskeva has also carefully crafted a powerful discussion related to the numerous insufficiencies of critical theory to contend with the epistemological limitations of the colonizing matrix of superiority that has historically animated Western or Occidental thought, even within the context of its emancipatory critical formations and counterhegemonic traditions. Paraskeva brings the entire project of this volume together by further engaging the promise of his itinerant curriculum theory, which aims toward creating an open field of cognitive justice, by deconstructing the illusory logic of the great epistemicide. Contemplating the cognitive requirements of a just future for all here and now, Paraskeva’s Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia proposes a ruthless reexamination of critical curriculum theory in the quest for those formerly rejected and unexplored cognitive forms that might effectively counter or de-commission the essentialization of Eurocentric reason, moving the field to genuinely confront the deeper meaning of cognitive justice and liberation. In this work, his most creative effort yet, Paraskeva urges us, without apology or reservation, to move valiantly beyond outdated notions of resistance, and instead embrace the fundamental task of establishing a decolonial liberation—a genuine emancipatory platform deeply grounded in our epistemic disobedience.

References Fanon, F. (1965) The Wretched of the Earth. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Harding, V. (1981) There Is a River: The Black Struggles for Freedom in America. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Lorde, A. (1979) History as a Weapon: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Retrieved from www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lordedismantle.html

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Mbembe, A. (2015) Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive. Lecture delivered at University of the Witwatersrand, June 9. Retrieved from https://wiser.wits. ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20 and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf Santos, de Sousa B. (2018) The End of the Cognitive Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, L. T. (2012) Indigenous Methodologies. London: Zed Books.

1

Interrogating the Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory The Need to Go Above and Beyond Neoliberal Rage Without Avoiding It

This is not just another book on critical theory; it is also an attempt to do critical theory (Kellner, 1989, p. 2)

In one of his lectures at Oxford Union Society, Slovenian public intellectual Slavov Žižek tells a story about three individuals in church pleading for God’s forgiveness. The first one, a merchant, said, “God, forgive me, but I am nobody, I am not worthy of your attention.” The second one, a very rich merchant, said, “Oh, my God. I am also nobody. I am not worthy of your attention; don’t consider me in your thoughts.” The third one, an extremely poor guy, also said, “God, I am also really nobody. I have nothing.” The rich merchant turned to the merchant and said, “Who is this guy that thinks that he can come here and also claim that he is nobody? Who does he think he is?” This little story from Žižek describes rather vividly the epistemological despotism that frames the Modern Western Eurocentric matrix, which not only eugenically produced and reproduces the ‘Other’ but, in doing so, concomitantly, denies his or her authority and legitimacy to define his or her condition. Despite the ‘Other’s’ authority of lived experience (hooks, 1994), such authority has been squashed and wrapped within a sub-humanity that has been defined by the epistemological term of those who actually created the ‘Other’s subhumanity.’ The ‘Other’ is obstructed from expressing their sub-existence—a subhuman existence mired in misery, poverty, and slavery, as deplorable incarnated categories. The sub-humanity of the ‘Other’ is not just physical but also metaphysical. The need and the right to dream, to wonder, to introspect, to be with oneself, to supplicate, to pray, to try to reach out to the transcendent, and to “work and be from within in” (Pinar, 1974) can only happen if previously legitimized by those who create the ‘Other’ and within a framework that paradoxically produces the ‘Other’s’ sub-humanity. The ‘Other’ could not even qualify to be ‘a son of a lesser God,’ in Kunderan terms. The ‘Other’s’ sub-humanity is a metamorphosis of ‘thingification,’ as Cesaire (2000) would put it, making it an empty subject, a pitiful it. The ‘Other,’ the oppressed, has no authority or legitimacy to even react against its own hetero-constructed imposed being—neither in physical nor in metaphysical terms.

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Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory

Despite Žižek’s (1998) concerns with the excesses of the anti-colonial movement and the struggle against Eurocentrism—as I will examine later on— Žižek provides an analysis that manifests a dangerous world that uses the very colors of a concrete epistemological despotism in which dominant groups and individuals have the audacity of drafting and digging a eugenic abyssal ditch— claiming what is ‘visible and invisible’, as Santos (2014) would put it—and, in so doing, interposing themselves as the censors between the ‘Other’s’ mundane and transcendent sub-existence. Modern Western epistemology is a despotic matrix, physically and metaphysically eugenically certified, through a “cartesian view of the human being in the world that is anything but straightforward and rational” (Autio, 2006, p. 41). The anecdote I began with from Žižek should ring many bells—perhaps, all the bells—in all of us radical critical progressive educators focused on social and cognitive justice (Santos, 2005) as such despotism, unfortunately, is not just a plague of dominant movements and individuals within the Modern Western Eurocentric platform. Unfortunately, it has been also the malaise eroding and corroding most of the radical critical progressive counter-hegemonic (dominant and nondominant) Modern Western Eurocentric movements and intellectuals working within a Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological framework. As such, it constitutes one of the vast and titanic challenges facing what I have called and examined elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011) the radical critical educational and curriculum river. Truth to be told, just like the modern social sciences, not only was radical critical progressive theory never able to recognize the existence of a eugenic epistemological abyssal line (Santos, 2018) but also never realized that radical critical progressive theory platform (re)produced this same abyssal line and thought, a reasoning that lives, participates, and fosters a pretentiously scientific extractive rationality (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018), which, paradoxically, such theory does not hesitate to criticize. Such rationality—abyssally produced—determines the very longitudinal and latitudinal limitedness of the real and the transcendent. As Santos (1999) so rightly argues, Eurocentrism lethally ignored that the reason that it is criticized cannot be the reason that emancipates. Marxism, and theories influenced by Marxist and neo-Marxist impulses, were heavily informed by the “spirit of emancipation yet necessarily did not question the logic of Western modernity” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 69) that irremeably blocked full blast emancipation. The tendency to speak for the ‘Other,’ which somehow has also made solid school within the Eurocentric counter-hegemonic field, is one of the clearest examples of the materialization of what I (Paraskeva, 2018; 2016) called reversive epistemicide, i.e. the epistemicide within the epistemicide, or an ‘epistemicidal’ replica, which ironically has been established through the noble struggle against epistemicide championed by counter-hegemonic movements and groups. In Shohat and Stam’s (2014) terms, “the ‘other’ is also the raw material for academic careerism in the West” (p. 365). In a way, somehow, as the Latino saying goes, perhaps so many of us have become world experts on a

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speck in the eye of the ‘other,’ yet one cannot see a tree before one’s very own eyes. This might be an overstatement, but I argue that it is something that I have learned regularly in my work in non-Eurocentric settings with African, Latin American, Asian, South Asian, and the Middle Eastern intellectuals. It seems that radical critical progressive theories—despite undeniable noteworthy accomplishments—in their struggle for social justice got lost in their countless attempts to examine and explain the ‘Other,’ which was persistently painted with the Eurocentric Western despotic brush and color, and, in doing so, we’re quite incapable of at least interrupting such a eugenic abyssal divide. BarataMoura (2013) insightfully states: To condemn morally does not comprehend the surrounding reality, upon which any effective change has to affect. Just as juxtaposed to the existing (repudiated) an (imagined) alternative is not to promote the changes that materially lead to societal functioning on a different basis, and with other horizons of breathing. (p. 233) The ‘Other’ is, in fact, the most investigated, dissected, dismembered social category in the social sciences (Smith, 1999) and certainly in the field of curriculum. Despite the fact that the ‘Other’ is the most excavated category in the academia, as Walsh and Mignolo (2018) would put it, it is undeniable that decolonizing praxis—that would do justice to the ‘Other’s’ visibility—is “often denied or hidden in academic settings which requires doctoral students and their advisors, as revolutionary partners, to push against the Eurocentric limitations of how we define research, in order to create an expanded field of engagement” (Darder, 2019, pp. 4–5). Despite such concern with the ‘Other,’ ‘its’ sub-humanity not only does not end but also worsens, as the conditions of ‘its humanity’ also became more aggravated. And, the ‘problem’ is that the ‘Other,’ in his or her irreversible majestic multitudinal plural, has now decided to challenge the abyssal ditch and confront the true source of her or his sub-humanity across such abyssal line. Without knocking at the door, the ‘Other’ has decided to enter and to confront the colonial matrix of power in its terrain. History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce, as Marx so strikingly said. ‘Inconveniently,’ the ‘Other’ is now breaking abyssal lines and coming by his or her foot . . . and will. Oppression triggers within the oppressed powerful avenues of imagination towards the utopia of perpetual freedom (Taïa, 2015). Hence, failing to break free from the chains of the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix, counter-hegemonic movements also ended up partaking in the epistemicide they were fighting. The radical critical progressive ground has always been unable to read the sub-humanity eugenically sheltered on the basis and beyond the matrix that has provoked its very existence. The ‘Other’ and the dynamics of segregation that produce the ‘Other’ have been embedded in a theoretical framework that could never justly explain

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the ‘Other,’ a theoretical framework that is at loss trying more to explain the ‘Other’ instead of emancipating it. The emancipation of the ‘Other’ could never—and will never—happen just within the turf of Eurocentric cognitive frameworks. The ‘Other’s’ turn and voice was usurped, his or her being and living has been portrayed as nonexistent, disposable, and in need of someone who speaks on his or her behalf, of someone crying his or her pain; the ‘Other’ was always denied the authority of its authorship, its subjectivity, but, more than anything, it was always denied a robust and unique cognitive grid, as capable as any other ‘cognitive matrix.’ In Mbembe’s (2014) terms, we are facing an “altericide” (p. 40), thus “constructing the other not as similar but as an intrinsically threatening object that must be protected, disposed of or simply destroyed because it cannot secure its full control” (p. 26). The ‘Other’ does not exist as such a ‘static’ it. It is produced “every day in a social bond of submission” (Mbembe, 2014, p. 40). The ‘Other’ was and is a eugenic construction that emerged right at the invasion of indigenous lands by Europeans and established the expansion of the colonial pattern of power (Quijano, 1992). As it has been extensively examined (Darder, 2019; Connell, 2007; Santos, 2018; Walsh and Mignolo, 2018; Teltumbde, 2018; Paraskeva, 2018; 2014; West, 1999; Smith, 1999; Mbembe, 2014; Hountondji, 1983), the ‘Other’ always served for what it has been created; that is to guarantee and justify the existence of a matrix of humanity only possible in the sub-humanity of the ‘Other’ (Santos, 2014). As Mbembe (2014) claims, “the fact that no blacks have freely reached the shores of the New World is precisely one of the irresolvable dilemmas of the West” (p. 147), speaking to the entire Modern Western Eurocentric reasoning and the construction of the ‘Other.’ The ‘Other,’ Žižek (2012) would argue, is the Modern Western monumental social construction that stood behind all social sagas, moral decay, and social unrest. Read, perceived, interpreted and constructed in a trivialized subhumanity, the ‘Other’ is thus the pillar of humanity in Modern Western Eurocentric humanist terms—a humanity that needs to be understood as an invasion, a segregated structure and not an event, as Wolfe (2007) would state. The ‘Other’ is expelled from what in reality has always been—an ‘it’—and of what it really is. The ‘Other’ is expelled from her/himself, from her or his ‘very self.’ The radical and critical platforms—by falling into the erudite error of speaking for the ‘Other’ and defining the ‘Other’s’ oppression and identity under the terms of the Eurocentric matrix that caused such oppression—would dissect the reason of the other on the basis of a Eurocentric despotic reason that created this very same ‘Other,’ and concomitantly all those who do not identify with the ‘Other.’ The ‘reason for the Other’ dissected by their own reason is not—and will never be—identical with the Eurocentric reason that justifies radical critical progressive theories. Hence, for example, the question of caste did not even become an anathema on the critical radical progressive board to be challenged and deconstructed (see Ambedkar, 2018; Teltumbde, 2014). The absence of caste on the board of the radical critical Eurocentric platform was

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so erroneously overshadowed by class in left Eurocentric terms (Teltumbde, 2018). The Marxist-based misconception of base-superstructure “left the caste victims, the ‘untouchables’ on their own” (Teltumbde, 2018, p. 20). While caste was not ignored in Horkheimer’s (1999, pp.  62–64) conceptual chessboard, wrapping it with a “cultural and religious” eugenic velvet, it is interesting to notice that such ‘velvet’ did not gain traction within the radical critical educational and curriculum theory. Such absence in the suite of subjects to be addressed by the radical critical progressive platform is quite structural in the sociology of absences, as Santos (2018) would put it. Thus, the sociology of absences (Santos, 2018) or the silences and invisibilities are not just related to the impulses of the Eurocentric dominant bloc. The same could be said, for example, about nationalism and spirituality. While in the case of the former, one finds a great deal of confusion (for example, the way of most radical criticals, especially in the United States, stand in relation to certain nationalisms on the European continent, such as the Galician, Basque, and Catalan cases, among many others)—in the latter, such silence is embarrassing. The complex field of spirituality, given its essence, is always the present absence and a noisy silence in our field. It is nevertheless extremely curious that the metaphysical dimension, even when raised by intellectuals from the Global North and within the framework of Western Eurocentric tools and matrixes, is always relegated to the cloud of the anodyne and peripheral as well as subjected to one of the most repugnant strategies of the academic tribes—silence. The examples of Paul Tillich, Dwayne Huebner, and James Macdonald leave no room for doubt as to how our field has not been and is still not receptive to incursions that attempt to understand the curriculum beyond what is thought to be seen. While Tillich (2014) advocates transcendence and spirituality “as an ethical reality, but [they are] rooted in the whole breadth of human existence and ultimately in the structure of being itself ” (p. 7), Macdonald (1986) placed transcendentalism as a crucial stage in human development, a crucial asset to explain how can we live together. In Macdonald’s (1977) terms, curriculum as a “study of how to have a world” involved an act of faith (p. 12), or, as Tillich (2014) would put it, an act of courage to be. Macdonald’s (1995) vision of a humane school requires an “epistemology that would come to grips with the so-called hard-knowledge of our culture” (p. 85). Again, Huebner (1966) continues to be very present—a quite avant la lettre intellectual as I keep reminding in my work—when he voiced the need for a new language over the way we think and debate education. In this particular, the silence and non-existence praxis about spirituality does not happen because it is a condition of the Global South, a condition of the ‘Other.’ However, a counter-hegemonic field that is not prepared to deal with the dynamics of spirituality with the metaphysical, which is not at least minimally prepared to understand curriculum theory and praxis as a prayerful act, is clearly not in a position to admit anything possible beyond what it thinks that it sees and feels towards the ‘Other.’ The inability to perceive the limitations of the Western Eurocentric epistemological modern matrix was the clock bomb thrown at radical critical progressive theory.

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It is thus impossible to understand the ‘Other’ only from and within a radical critical progressive Eurocentric theoretical filigree—however radical and sophisticated it might be—in which it omits and ‘ignores’ the existence of certain categories instrumental in the construction of the sub-humanity of the ‘Other,’ a sub-humanity that has been standardized. The ‘Other’ is not monolithic, the mirror of a specific dichotomy excavated by Western Eurocentric epistemological modernity. It never was, and it never will be. There are endless ‘Others’ and ‘Otherness’ within the ‘Other’ and ‘Other otherness’ and within the ‘spaces/times’ of the ‘Other,’ eugenically constructed by ‘non-Others and Others inclusively.’ There are ‘infinite-infinital’ ‘Others’ that multiply as the neoliberal project of capital rises and re-escalates. The sense and sensibility of the oppressed see, feel, and exist ‘in a totally different thing,’ since “they are trained in a different cultural grammar” (Santos, 2018, p.  175). Oppression and otherization—that is, the metamorphoses that constitute the ‘Other’ and make it ‘Other’ in comparison with the ‘non-other’—leads to ‘thingification’ (Cesaire, 2000) that cannot only be described and spread on the level of a cruel matrix that precisely caused such metamorphoses. The ‘Other’ cannot be rationalized through a reason that created it, and, unfortunately, that has been the case. If there is a field of studies in the social sciences within the framework of the Western European Eurocentric matrix which has shown an unwavering commitment to the struggle against the dynamics of oppression and systems of domination, such a field is undoubtedly that of the curriculum, through the excellent work carried out by a very dispersed group of radical critical progressive and post-critical progressive educators who constitute, as I have the opportunity to examine in another space (Paraskeva, 2016; 2014), the critical radical curriculum river. In this volume, I define this river as the ‘Generation of Utopia.’ In such a radical critical progressive generation—which is part of a historic tradition of struggles for a more just and relevant education that has its beginnings at the dawn of the twentieth century—we must recognize not only their fearless commitment with the struggles for a just society, education, curriculum, and pedagogy but also their achievements, defeats, and frustrations. To this generation of utopia, we owe so much. We owe them, for example, the possibility to be able to be in the educational and curriculum debate at the point where we are now. It is not possible to have a serious debate on the epistemicide (Santos, 2014) and reversive epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2018) without realizing and interpreting—I repeat—the advances, conquests, defeats, and frustrations of this generation of utopia that collectively built a radical critical and progressive curriculum river. The debate about epistemicide and reversive epistemicide does not arise in a vacuum. Critical theories are thus compromised before the curriculum epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2011; Santos, 2014) since they too—like dominant theories—produced their visibility and existence based on the invisibility and non-existence of what they concomitantly produced (Santos, 2014). It is in this context that Žižek’s opening excerpt gains ‘force of law’—or ‘outlaw’—within a theoretical

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field that produces visibilities and existences based on invisibilities and nonexistences. It does so from its dominant epistemological matrix and, therefore, silences what it is incapable of recognizing. The truth is that the other side of the abyssal line, the side of eugenically constructed absences, can never emerge in all its truth by grossly vilifying its epistemological identity, thus defining the ‘Other,’ including its pain, its oppression, its slavery, in terms of an epistemological matrix that was responsible for the sub-humanized construction of the ‘Other’ with its pain, its oppression, and its slavery. That is, critical modern theories have never been able to produce a sociology of emergences even when they have tried to react against the sociology of absences, as Santos (2018) would have put it. The Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix is the straitjacket of radical critical progressive theory. The inability to think of itself beyond the reason that it only allows it to be what it is has pushed critical theory into a problematic position, regardless of its innumerable achievements, which are important not to ignore or minimize. The Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological reason, in its hegemonic and counter-hegemonic lines, is the— curriculum—reason to be criticized, a criticism that must be built above and beyond critical theory itself. The logic of such reason is exhausted. It cannot in itself offer alternatives to the great challenges one faces, since it is also, in itself, the reason for the challenges we are going through. Hinkelammert (quoted in Santos, 2012, p.  118) argues that criticism never succeeded to break with the logic of “the West that has recurred in the illusion of trying to save humanity through the destruction of part of it” and, in this sense, did not avoid the mourning that crushed their own utopias. Needless to say, I am not saying that critical theory has come to an end, that it is passé. I am not saying that the work of such generation within a critical progressive curriculum river is over. What I do claim, is that a new ‘postabyssal’ logic (Santos, 2018) or, rather, non-abyssal (Paraskeva, 2016) approach is needed: one that will allow a non-derivative critical critic (Santos, 2018) to face and resolve her/his contradictions and frustrations, emanating from an epistemic matrix, which alone is always part of the problem and never part of the solution—not overshadowing or diminishing the achievements of the great historical struggle against the mechanisms of domination and oppression.

Putrid Silence: The Schizophrenic Frenzy of the Identical The times in which the other existed disappeared, that is the negativity of the other gives place to the positivity of the identical. (Han, 2018, p. 9)

Within the remarkable struggle against the epistemicides (Santos, 2014), radical critical progressive approaches were unable to avoid the magnitude of magma spewed from the neoliberal volcano—eruptions somehow predictable, such as

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the rise of viral ur-fascism (Eco, 2017) and its concomitant nullification of the ‘Other’ through the violence of the identical (Han, 2018) so connected with the cult of ‘presentism’ (Pinar, 2004), or ‘momentism’ (Paraskeva, 2018; 2016), as we will see later on. The ‘Other’—eugenically produced as well as passionately opposed—was always, in Han’s (2018) view, a “bulimic visualization” (p. 10). The way dominant and counter-dominant groups have approached the saga of the ‘Other’ has legitimized the ‘non-existence of the Other’ as in fact it is and exists and concomitantly the ‘existence of the other’ as in fact it is not and does not exist. The fact that there can only be an ‘Other’ in a Eurocentrically narcissistic way—be it dominant or counter-dominant—is one of the structuring factors of both the dominant epistemicide (Santos, 2014) and of reversive epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011) perpetrated by Western Eurocentric Modernity; it would smear the social terrain to germinate the fallacy of the “terror of the identical” (Han, 2018, p.  9). The production of the ‘Other’ as non-existent (Santos, 2014) was a cleansing approach, a eugenic way to fertilize an unimaginable ‘identical.’ That is, if Western modern thought is an abyssal thought (Santos, 2014), which consists of two well-demarcated lines between this side of the line—that which exists and is therefore legitimate—and the other side of it—that which does not exist and is therefore illegitimate—then fatally this side of the line has become the only side. Since the other side, the side of the ‘Other’ does not exist. Thus, this side of the line does not even need to be hegemonic, for it is totalitarian, the same for all, one side that rests on the creation of the ‘Other,’ not in the ‘sameness’ but the identical (Han, 2018). The violence of the identical, a racialized ideology (Leonardo, 2013), is the result of the dominant epistemicide (Santos, 2014) and the reversive epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011) that opened the floodgates to a spurt of impulses in which “the times in which the other existed disappeared, that is the negativity of the other gives place to the positivity of the identical” (Han, 2018, p. 9). The terrain of the identical—all of it amorphous and devoid of dialectical tension—means that “even when one travels one cannot get any experience, we know everything without knowing anything” (Han, 2018, p.  11). The identical “mirrors an ontic need” (Han, 2018, p. 13) in which “everything remains identical seen from close up and identical seen from afar” (Han, 2018, p.  15). To be within the identical is to “go through hell” (Han, 2018, p.  17), the hell of the aphotic, not of the panoptic. If the latter serves to discipline, the former “constructs an exclusive optic which identifies and excludes as such persons hostile to the system or unfit on its terms” (Han, 2018, p. 21). The identical is the ace of neoliberal globalization that arises “in a spoiled, perverse and corrupted diversity that opposes alterity” (Han, 2018, p.  22). There is an abysmal difference between “diversity, and alterity” (p. 30). Furthermore, What prevails today is not a uniformity of all others identical to that of all others that characterizes the ‘self impersonal’. This uniformity gives way to the diversity of opinions and options. Diversity only allows differences that

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conform to the system. It represents an alterity that has become consumable. At the same time, it makes the identical continue with more efficiency than uniformity, since thanks to an apparent and superficial plurality, we fail to realize the violence of the systemic of the identical. Plurality and choice simulate an alterity that does not exist. (Han, 2018, p. 38) The negativity of the “complete other surrenders to the positivity of the identical of the other that is identical” (Han, 2018, p. 31), which doesn’t exist because its side does not exist. The identical demands. One of the demands lies in the narcissistic devotion of “a subject who is bitter and self-sufocating” (Han, 2018, p. 9). This side of the line—the only side that becomes a single terrain because there is no other side, everything is identical—plunged into a militant and atrocious narcissism in which “the narcissistic subject does not perceive the world unless in the form of hues and oneself. The consequence is that, in this way, the other disappears fatally” (Han, 2018, p. 31). The yoke of the identical frames the immunological grid marked “by the disappearance of otherness and foreignness” (Han, 2015, p. 2). Otherness, Han (2015, p. 2) adds, “represents a fundamental category of immunology and every immunoreaction is a reaction to Otherness.” The ‘Other’ socially constructed as Alien gives a way to the exotic (Han, 2015, p. 2), yet threatens the ‘Own’: The immunologically Other is the negative that intrudes into the Own and seeks to negate it. The Own founders on the negativity of the Other when it proves incapable of negation in turn. The immunological self-assertion of the Own proceeds as the negation of negation. The Own asserts itself in—and against—the Other by negating its negativity. (Han, 2015, pp. 3–4) In this sense, the yoke of the identical triggers what Eagleton (2015) calls “the multiplicity of the not yets” (p. 99). The identical—and “the totalitarianism of the same” (Han, 2015, p. 4)—is everything and does everything, and, because it produces the other as non-existent (Santos, 2014), it not only never feels itself (Han, 2018, p. 34) but also promotes the cult of the contemporary (Gil, 2018). Produced in a space of distorted time, the dictatorship of the identical ‘I-self ’ is a zone of well-being ruled by the instability of the fatal and fallacious nonexistence of an ‘Other.’ The ‘I-self ’-identical dictatorship dances jokingly with the present but elevates it to its ultimate exponent by diluting past and future. Past and future are disparaging. The ‘I-self ’-identical stands in the “present of ubiquity, the present of contemporaneity” (Gil, 2018, p. 399). The ‘I-self ’identical imposes the contemporary as the “time of everyone in which we are all contemporaries of everything, for everything has become contemporary” (Gil, 2018, p. 404). The fearlessness and theoretical boldness to construct and identify the ‘Other’ as ‘non-existent’ and out of the non-Eurocentric matrix is one of the

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symptoms of the true malaise that infected the terrain of radical critical progressive theory, a clear insufficiency in its capacity to go beyond rationality and the reason it is criticizing. That is, critical theory was never able to criticize its reason, its inability to act, and to perceive itself beyond the modern Western Eurocentric matrix. Such a critical approach of autophagic impulses proved to be fatal and pushed the racial critical platform to a picture of misrepresented truncated and inaccurate representations of reality, despite its undeniable advances and achievements, as I have been examining in previous work (Paraskeva, 2018; 2016; 2014; 2011). Such representations have been challenged daily before the ‘chaos and rhythm’ (Gil, 2018) that frames contemporaneity, which is defined by a “great historical regression” (Geiselberger, 2017, p.  10) or “anthropogenic regression”—as Adorno would have put it (Honneth, 1991, p.  37). We are experiencing, Mbembe (2019, p.  92) claims, the heyday of the necropolitical, i.e. “forms of necropower blur the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.” Necropolitics or necropower, to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds, that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead. (Mbembe, 2019, p. 92) We live in an era that is defined by the consolidation of multiplying social wounds that have reached alarming rates. While on the one hand, society has never reached technological and developmental levels as high as ours, on the other hand, poverty, hunger, inequalities, segregation of class, race, ethnicity, gender, caste, and sexual orientation have never reached the thresholds we see today. Technological advances—or as Macdonald would put it, ‘today’s technologies, yesterday’s magic’—and the notion of development tied to Eurocentric Western Modernity implies an inverse movement regarding the elimination of inequality, poverty, and hunger. The record of such advances, which have enabled humanity to reach unprecedented levels of development, is reflected in alarming levels of sub-humanity defined by misery, hunger, genocide, and segregation. Humanity conceived in the epistemological stretcher of Eurocentric modernity is only possible (through and) in sub-humanity (Santos, 2018). However, although we are witnessing an unprecedented historical regression, where the natural social and human tragedy multiplies, the fact is that critical radical theories have never been able to impose themselves as hegemonic. That is, in a world completely shattered socially, economically, and culturally, in a world ‘where there is so much to criticize, why doesn’t critical theory impose itself as the dominant theory? Why is it difficult to build a critical theory’? (Santos, 1999). This book attempts to answer this question, which, incomprehensibly, in the field of education and curriculum, the overwhelming majority of critical and progressive educators—myself included—have never given such

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question a just centrality. This book examines some of the difficulties surrounding radical critical progressive theory that have prevented and continue to prevent it from being a/the new hegemonic cultural theory. It attempts to address a crucial question, which in itself reflects a crisis “that is much more profound and radical than is commonly acknowledged” (Balibar, 1988, p. 159). The historical record of Western Eurocentric modernity is not only marked by great achievements, such as the conquest of space and sharp advances in science and technology; it is also a record of global social, economic, cultural, and political pandemonium with ‘unproportional’ diverse apocalyptic consequences at the local level (Parenti, 2011; Bauman, 1997). Sub-humanity of the massive majority is the price of humanity defined in Western Eurocentric terms, where it is enjoyed by ‘the few.’ With the advent of neoliberalism, which has been consolidating over the last five decades, and with educational levels reaching great heights in the history of Western humanity (Baudelot and Establet, 1994), the fact remains that natural and social catastrophes have multiplied yet have been trivialized. The stubborn belief in the economy and the liberalization of the market—not only as of the engine for social development but, also, consequently, as a guarantee of equality and eradication of misery and poverty—corners modernity, especially modern contemporary societies, in a crisis of global magnitude. And the truth is that the arguments and solutions to save society from the crisis would not be better than those that led to the crisis. The neoliberal mechanisms designed to deal with the crisis—policies of cultural readjustment, austerity policies, fiscal waterboarding, and subjectification of debt—would not only push contemporary societies to unimaginable levels of historical regression and sub-humanity but also would pave the way for the emergence of viral fascism under full democratic splendor. This analysis frames the second chapter of this book. I argue, however, that this great historical regression, among many issues, scuttles and threatens el patron colonial de poder (Quijano, 1992), as it announces its end as the only matrix for humanity. That is, Eurocentrism or Eurotropism (Shohat and Stam, 2014) as the single orientation of a single ideal for humanity seems to be exhausted, collapsed. Eurotropism as a “turn to the West, as an ideal Platonic Sun, much as phototropic plants turn toward the literal sun for their sustenance” (Shohat and Stam, 2014, p. 364), has no answers to the problems it has created. The reason that produced and developed the crisis cannot be the reason that will help us to get out of the crisis. The Eurocentric Western Modern reason is the reason for the crisis, and, so, it is the crisis of the Western Eurocentric Modern reason. It is a reason that does not understand, does not accept, and does not surrender in the face of the evidence that it is necessary to find alternative reasons to the very alternatives that the lethal reason of modernity created. Radical critical reason contributed to the legitimization of a colonial(ity) zone, and it failed to provide an emancipatory reformulation of the conceptual or ideological interrelationships that exist between theoretical explanations and practical applications from a particular location within a specific field or area of

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Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory study. In light of this purpose, the development of theory (or a theorybuilding emphasis) must be understood here as primarily an integrative process either producing a new or reformulated decolonizing framework for consideration in some aspect of human phenomenon or demonstrate the ways in which existing theoretical constructs in the field do (or do not) coincide with decolonizing epistemological requirements or are in sync with other counter-hegemonic theoretical perspectives (i.e. critical, feminist, queer, etc.). (Darder, 2019, pp. 14–15)

There is even more reason beyond reason—reasons that reason doesn’t grasp. Modern Western Eurocentric epistemologies are “bastard epistemologies” (Ranciere, 2004, p. 37) used to define and grasp the ‘Other.’ The way Western Eurocentric Modernity has exhausted itself is the object of analysis of the third chapter of this volume. It is thus so crucial to come to grips with what has really happened to radical critical theories in order to better understand the reasons—in an age where there is so much to criticize (Santos, 1999) and where the Western European model of Western Modernity is depleted—they have never been able to impose themselves as dominant. The fourth chapter of this book dissects, albeit briefly, the genesis of the critical radical matrix, its different generations, and themes. In doing so, it examines and brings to light the reasons such a sophisticated radical intellectual critical army was not able to find the just path that would lead it to the construction of an epistemologically diverse hegemonic position based on endless processes of “Gandhian’s intercultural translation which is always interpolitical as well” (Santos, 2018, p. 210). Justice against the epistemicide, as this volume examines, cannot be achieved through the linear substitution of one dominant hegemony for another. While “the stage is set for critical reformulations to take the stage” (Barata-Moura, 2018, p.  231), since reality and history call for a critical intervention of the critical, what really happened to critical theory? Why did a sophisticated theoretical approach, unquestionably the most sophisticated for a long time in the struggle against systems of domination, fail even to disrupt such systems of domination? What has been wrong with what we have been doing? At what point do critical educators— progressives if they want to—begin to err? What is the role, course, of our field in this error? Where and why did the fight against curriculum epistemicide fail? As I have argued—along with Santos (2018; 2014)—among other issues, radical critical theory does not understand that the reason that criticizes can never be the reason that emancipates. Radical critical theory has always revealed an inability to navigate beyond Modern Western Eurocentric reasoning that criticized. The stubbornness in working also out of a Eurocentric-based discourse, both erudite and popular, resorted in many occasions “into processes of fabulation; that is by presenting as fact, certain or exact facts often invented, what it was trying to grasp could not apprehend” (Mbembe, 2014, p. 29).

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In seeking answers to this question, I dissect how the social construction of neoliberal policies is a very short blanket to explain ‘the real problems’ of theories and pedagogies. Neoliberalism, I argue, is just only one side of the coin. Critical approaches as Hall (1988) would put it “have failed to renovate [their] thinking to explain how modern capitalism remains in being and sustains its hegemonic position in industrialized societies” (p. 35). If they had done that, then they would conclude irremediably the task was not just to “recover a critical relationship to culture” (Moretti, 1988, p. 339), but—in an act of philosophical consciencism (Nkrumah, 1964) or conscientização (Freire, 1990)—to understand that the epistemological matrix in which they operate was a short quilt to provide a just interpretation of the real. There is in fact in the field of curriculum studies a powerful, radical, critical armada—which in other spaces I have called the radical critical curriculum (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011; 2007)—that, especially since the last decade of the twentieth century, has led the battle for a fair and relevant education, curriculum, and pedagogy. The fifth chapter focuses on the rich and important legacy of this river whose struggles must be historically contextualized in the great battles for a more just education, curriculum, and pedagogy since the late nineteenth century. Influenced by the novel of Pepetela, The Generation of the Utopia, I coined this group of intellectuals ‘the generation of utopia,’ as they embodied and embraced the dream of a just world and how to accomplish such a dream through education and curriculum. In examining the main theoretical waves promoted by this generation, I analyze the most flagrant contradictions and purges within their theoretical platform. I argue that in the struggle against curriculum epistemicides (Paraskeva, 2016; Santos, 2014), the generation of utopia was not only incapable of interrupting it but also triggered inadvertently what I call reversive epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2018; 2016). The inability of this generation to think about education, curriculum, and pedagogy beyond the margins of the epistemological matrix of Eurocentric Western Modernity would become the ‘mortal sin’ of the generation of utopia, calling into question its very own utopia. Let us be clear. Through the generation of utopia, we made enormous strides in the struggle for a more just and relevant education, curriculum, and pedagogy. If today we can enjoy certain rights—despite being perverted into privileges—and spaces, we owe much of this to the battles fought by this generation. Again, Santos (2018) teaches us a great deal here: Dissident Eurocentric thinkers who vehemently denounce the unjust suffering inflicted in European societies by capitalism and who show solidarity with the excluded groups within the European societies themselves can be advantageously studied and strategically interpreted with a view toward formulating a way of thinking that may contribute to anti-colonial liberation. (p. 228)

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However, the fact is that the battle between hegemonic movements and critical radicals against hegemonic ones provoked an involution, as Gil (2009) would say. That is, the struggle between dominant and counter-dominant educational and curriculum movements created an “involution” (Gil, 2009), a state of regression; the dominant models were unable to impose themselves as ‘unique’ and destroy the counter-dominant models, nor were the counter-dominant models able to impose themselves as dominants and dismantle the dominant ones. There was neither the emergence of a new human being nor the end of the old human being. There was no evolution in either direction. Somehow, as the book documents, we live a ‘theoricide,’ which is not necessarily an absence of theory. Such curriculum involution structures the first half of the sixth chapter. Critical and post-critical approaches, despite significant achievements, thus reveal clear shortcomings and insufciencies, in completely undermining and destroying the dominant model. These insufciencies—which frame the second part of this chapter—would be lethal in the fight against the great disease of the curriculum and its field of study, an acute Occidentosis that structures the ‘mechanicity’ of thinking and critically criticizes education and curriculum. The curriculum, as we will examine, is thus in the hands of ‘mechanotics’ (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984)—dominant and counter-dominant. I argue that the struggle against the epistemicides—both dominant and reversive—is to challenge this curriculum involution, and its severe Occidentosis—a theoretical boredom that the field goes through. Our task—examined in the second part of the concluding chapter is not to shoot the utopists of such generation, as Santos (2018; 1995) would put it, nor to undermine their utopias, but “utopian projects cannot be understood or criticized by abstracting from the moment, the conditions, the designs in which they were produced” (Barata-Moura, 2013, p. 232). Our task is to recognize ‘nonoccidentalist westernology’—so well unpacked by Gandhi—a deconstruction and reconstruction itinerant commitment with “centrifugal modernities and subaltern Wests, exploring centrifugal, countercultural Eurocentric conceptions of meeting points between colonizer and colonized, a kind of priceless complicity and solidarity capable of strengthening the anticolonial cause” (Santos, 2018, p. 227). In the first part of the final chapter, I claim the fundamental need to continue working within an Itinerant Curriculum Theory, ICT (Paraskeva, 2016), a theory committed to nonrelativistic dialogues between North-South and South-South, a theory that within its construction metamorphosizes, splitting with the utopian and theoretical logics of Western Eurocentric Modernity, and advances towards a heretopia—not utopia (Santos, 2018; 1995). ICT is the “cosmopolitan intercultural translation underlying the epistemologies of the South” (Santos, 2018, p.  227) that will pave the way for the end of the epistemological divide; it thinks of a wor(l)d beyond the matrix of Eurocentric Western Modernity. This alter-logic is the just respect for the whole suffering past of billions of human beings confined generation after generation into sub-humanity. It is a theoretical alter-logic that, although it “does not ignore

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doubt, passion and emotion” (Sartre, 1988, p. 34), works itinerantly towards a non-abyssal zone. As such, ICT is an itinerant interpolitical translation commitment (Santos, 2018), which doesn’t annihilate either the utopias of the past or ‘shoot the utopists’ (Santos, 1995), but rather restores the critical radical platforms towards a new logic of thinking, the radical critical. ICT is a rowdy, vagabond posture, an insolent commitment. ICT is the death of theory as we know it. It is the theory after such a theory. It is the best Huebnerian stage so far, that places one within an endless pluriverse. Our field, long ago, drowned in an open and unapologetic theoretical vandalism, which, I argue, is not necessarily a bad thing. This was a phenomenal drown, which I hope will persist, regardless of the heralds of tragedy. Are we becoming pawns of a lesser field? I don’t think so. We are a different field for sure, splintered yet not shattered. Some might feel such theoretical wreckage as hysterical. They are probably right in some sense—and if they are right, it is not necessarily a good thing, though. This book is not meant to be just another book on critical theory; it is an attempt to do critical theory, as Kellner (1989) would say. But it does so by looking for it not only in the reason that made it emerge and become ill but by proposing another logic that reacts against the reason that made it be an engineer of a reversive epistemicide in the fight against the epistemicide. This book exposes critical theory, stripping it, confronting it with reasons that, although many of them probably cannot explain, they also cannot be silenced, because critical theory can probably be explained by not being able to explain. In a world, Baudrillard (2001a) argues, that “is hardly compatible with the concept of the real we impose upon it, the function of theory is certainly not to reconcile, but on the contrary, to seduce, to wrest thing from their condition, to force them into an over-existence which is incompatible with the real, that is theory pays dearly for this in a prophetic autodestruction” (p. 129). As the real itself “is doubtless only a challenge to theory, the status of theory cannot be anything but a challenge to the real” (Baudrillard, 2001a, p. 129). We owe much to the generation of utopia.

References Al-l-Ahmad, J. (1984) Occidentosis: A Plague from the West. Iran: Mizan Press. Ambedkar, B. R. (2018) The Annihilation of Caste. Triplicane, Chennai: MJ Publishers/ Moven Books. Autio, T. (2006) S+ubjectivity, Curriculum and Society: Beyond and Between German Didatkik and Anglo-American Curriculum. New York: Routledge. Balibar, E. (1988) The Vacillation of Ideology. In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Chicago, pp. 159–209. Barata-Moura, J. (2013) Da Utopia dos Mundos Sonhados a Transformacao Pratica das Realidades. In Karl Marx. Legado, Intervencao, Luta. Transformar o Mundo. Conferencia do PCP. Lisboa: Edicoes Avante, pp. 227–241.

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Barata-Moura, J. (2018) Da Utopia dos Mundos Sonhados a Transformacao Pratica das Realidades. In Karl Marx, Legado, Intervencao, Luta. Transformar o Mundo. Conferencia do PCP. Lisboa: Edicoes Avanre, pp. 227–243. Baudelot, Ch. and Establet, R. (1994) El Nivel Educativo Sube. Madrid: Morata. Baudrillard, J. (2001a) Why Theory? In C. Kraus and S. Lotinger (Eds.), Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 129–131. Bauman, Z. (1997) Globalization: The Human Consequences. London: Blackwell Publishers. Cesaire, A. (2000) Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press. Darder, A. (2019) Decolonizing Interpretative Research. New York: Routledge. Eagleton, T. (2015) Hope without Optimism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eco, U. (2017) Como reconhecer o Fascismo. Da Diferenca Entre Migracoes e Emigracoes. Lisboa: Antropos. Freire, P. (1990) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Geiselberger, H. (2017) O Grande Retrocesso. Um Debate International sobre as Grandes Questoes do Nosso Tempo. Lisboa: Objectiva. Gil, J. (2009) Em Busca da Idenitidade. O Desnorte. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água. Gil, J. (2018) Caos e Ritmo. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água. Habib, A. (2013) Suspended Revolution. Athens: Ohio University Press. Habib, A. (2019) Rebels and Rage. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers. Hall, S. (1988) The Toad in the garden: Thatcherism among theorists. In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 35–57. Han, B.-C. (2015) The Burnout Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Han, B.-C. (2018) A Expulsão do Outro. Lisboa: Relogio D’Agua. Honneth, A. (1991) The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hountondji, P. (1983) African Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, M. (1999) Critical Theory. New York: Continuum. Huebner, D. (1966) Curricular Language and Classroom Meanings. In J. Macdonald and R. Leeper (Eds.), Language and Meaning. Washington, DC: ASCD. Kellner, D. (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Leonardo, Z. (2013) Race Frameworks: A Multidimensional Theory of Racism and Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Macdonald, J. (1977) Values Bases and Issues for Curriculum. In A. Molnar and A. Zahorik (Eds.), Curriculum Theory. Washington: ASCD, pp. 10–21. Macdonald, J. (1986) The Domain of Curriculum. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 1(3), pp. 205–214. Macdonald. J. (1995) A Transcendental Developmental Ideology. In B. Macdonald (Ed.), Theory and a Prayerful Act: The Collected Essays of James B. Macdonald. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 69–98. Mbembe, A. (2014) Crítica da Razão Negra. Lisboa: Antigona. Mbembe, A. (2019) Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press. Moretti, F. (1988) The Spell of Indecision. In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 339–346.

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Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (2013) Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa. Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. Nkrumah, K. (1964) Consciencism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Paraskeva, J. (2007) Continuidades e Descontinuidades e Silêncios. Por uma Desterritorialização da Teoria Curricular. Caxambu, Brasil: Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação (ANPEd). Paraskeva, J. (2011) Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies. New York: Palgrave. Paraskeva, J. (2014) Conflicts Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies. New York: Palgrave (upgraded paperback edition). Paraskeva, J. (2016) Curriculum Epistemicides. New York: Routledge. Paraskeva, J. (2018) Towards a Just Curriculum Theory: The Epistemicide. New York: Routledge. Parenti, M. (2011) The Face of Imperialism. Boulder: Paradigm. Pinar, W. (1974) Autobiography. New York: Peter Lang. Pinar, W. (2004) What Is Curriculum Theory? Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Quijano, A. (1992) Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad. Perú Indígena, 29(1), pp. 11–21. Ranciere, J. (2004) The Philosopher and His Poor. Durham: Duke University Press. Santos, B. (1995) Towards a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge. Santos, B. (1999) Porque é tão difícil construir uma teoria crítica? Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociais, N 54, Junho, pp. 197–215. Santos, B. (2005) Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Cannon. London: Verso. Santos, B. (2012) Suicidio Colectivo. In B. Santos (Ed.), A Cor do Tempo. Coimbra: Almedina, pp. 118–121. Santos, B. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm. Santos, B. (2018) The End of the Cognitive Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Sartre, J. P. (1988) What is Literature? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (2014) Unthinking Eurocentrism. New York: Routledge. Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Taïa, A. (2015) Arabs Are No Longer Afraid. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Teltumbde, A. (2014) The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders & India s Hidden Apartheid. New Delhi: Navayana. Teltumbde, A. (2018) The Republic of Caste. New Delhi: Navayana. Tillich, P. (2014) The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press. Walsh, C. and Mignolo, W. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. West, C. (1999) The Cornel West Reader. Boston: Basic Books. Wolfe, N. (2007) The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. White River: Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Žižek, S. (1998) A Leftist Plea for “Eurocentrism.” Critical Inquiry, 24(4), pp. 988–1009. Žižek, S. (2012) The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. New York: Verso.

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I suggest that we learn to think about capitalism coming to an end without assuming responsibility for answering the question of what one proposes to put in its place. (Streeck, 2014, p. 44)

Once upon a time, a cook decided to gather all the birds in the world and asked the birds what kind of seasoning that they would like to be marinated in when they are cooked and eaten. The cook was all for democracy, so it was claimed. One of the chickens responded, “We, the birds, do not want to be eaten at all.” The cook replied, “That is out of the question.” Democracy doesn’t go that far. This little story describes rather well the metaphor of our globalized world. The world is organized in such a way that we just have the right to choose the flavoring for us to be marinated in before being consumed. And, this world has been sold to us as democratic, while, paradoxically, the sovereignty of each nation is an object of a museum. This little story, which was shared by Eduardo Galeano in an event in Latin America, is a vivid example of the sadism and brutality of late global capitalism, which has now slipped, and skirted into nationalist lapses of the worst kind that fertilize tribal populist impulses, as I will have the opportunity to unpack later on. Such populist impulses constitute the latest glaciar of capitalism, making democracy, equality, freedom, and justice mutually exclusive realities and thus a divisive social issue. Every day when I go to work, I have to go through residences, which, in light of exterior appearances of glamour and magnitude, belong certainly to very wealthy families or, as I have learned in Massachusetts, ‘people with old money.’ One of these residences was built in 1830. What is today three parking car garages was once “a prison where slaves who had tried to escape slavery, and, by misfortune, they had not succeeded, were trapped” (Rosbe, 2000). Needless to say, there are many of these homes scattered throughout the United States, and other places around the world. How much pain, suffering, tears, torture, beatings, rapes are locked in those garages? Unthinkable. Indescribable. Unforgivable. Unimaginable. In what was once a space and time of atrocious suffering of one of the most bloodthirsty moments of Western civilization, one sees today shining expensive cars that are not within the reach of the overwhelming majority of the population.

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Realities such as those I have described must force us, on the one hand, to never forget the past that brought us to this present—a present that, despite its indescribable and unforgivable past, cannot fail to continue to produce the same pain, suffering, tears, torture, beatings, and rapes in millions of individuals scattered throughout this world. Karl Marx said, “history repeats itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce.” Today, in Europe, for example, the social beast of oppression doesn’t need garages to lock its preys, as the ocean takes care of what could be disgustingly labeled as a ‘natural final solution.’ On the other hand, these realities should remind us, as educators concerned with a more just and equal society, of the relations between education, pedagogy, and societal sagas within a society whose history is based on genocide. Society cannot continue to be silenced, and it cannot continue to be produced through sophisticated apparatus and circuits of cultural production (Johnson, 1983), through which the epistemicide is produced and developed (Paraskeva, 2016; Santos, 2014). As educators, one cannot ignore the nexus between the sanguinary history confined in those ‘car garages’ and the educational system and society in which we situate ourselves, a system that appallingly was—and in a way still is—based in such sanguinary history. This sanguinary history persistently continues to be written with the ink from every drop of blood, sweat, and tears that falls from the oppressed yet with the handwriting of the oppressor. Let us pay attention to some alarming data that should make us stop to think about the reasons undergirding how the humanity we know has been conceived through a subhumanity (Santos, 2014). Between 1900 and 1999, the United States used 4,500 million tons of cement. Between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 6,500 million tons of cement. That is, in just three years China spent 50% more on cement than the United States consumed in the preceding century (Harvey, 2016). Such figures constitute a graphic example of an unbridled global-consumerism-triggered climate change making hurricanes a quasi routine, paving the way for new complex sensibilities—yet quite convenient, I would say—around pre-hurricane and post-hurricane economics. Such economic matrix creates the riverbed for a perpetual unbalanced economy and consumerism (Dolfman, Wasser, and Bergman, 2007), as well as an easy pass for a full blast privatizing mode of what used to be public rights, such as education (Klein, 2008). In the summer of 2017, in different states in the United States, for the first time in the history, a significant number of commercial planes were prevented from taking off due to high temperatures between 123 and 125 degrees Fahrenheit, at a time when President Trump is walking away from the Paris agreement. By August 2017 and 2018, humanity had already exhausted earth’s natural resources. Such ecological overspending is due to deforestation, collapsing fisheries, freshwater scarcity, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to climate change and more severe droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes (Global Footprint Network, 2018). That is, “in seven months, we emitted more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb in a year, we caught more fish, felled more trees, harvested more, and consumed more water than the Earth was able to produce in the same period”

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(Revesz, 2017). Extractivism is driving the planet to an unsustainable limit (Walsh, 2018; de La Cadena and Blaser, 2018) and constitutes the tone of the neocolonialism of the global village, as Nolan (2018) would put it. It seems that we are about to experience an ecological bomb (Virilio, 2012). The second half of the last century constituted the incubator of what would happen during the first decade of the twenty-first century, a decade that hosted what is arguably the most devastated global crisis in the world history. In June 2007, “two hedge funds needed to put $3.8 billion of obligation for sale. Within one minute, literally, one of the most important banks on Wall Street was compelled to sell itself to JP Morgan Chase at defeating prices, $2 per share, when only 48 hours before, it cost $30” (Marazzi, 2011, p. 9). In the United States as of October 28, 2018, public debt was $15.8 trillion and intragovernmental holdings were $5.8 trillion, with a total of $21.6 trillion. In 1990, the U.S. debt held by the public was $3.2 trillion and, in 2000, was $5.6 trillion. The last U.S. president who was able to reduce debt was Dwight David Eisenhower during his 1956 and 1957 terms. In the United States, a kid drops out of school every 41 seconds, and the racialized ‘school to prison pipeline’ became domesticated; the nation is responsible for 25% of the world’s prison inmates (Loury, 2008). The neoliberal incarceration system in the United States is one of “penal pornography punishing the poor” (Wacquant, 2009, p. xi), which unequivocally reveals a punitive turn taken by “penal policies establishing a new government of social insecurity” (Wacquant, 2009, p.  11). The social insecurity triggered by the welfarecide unleashed a war on so-called privilege and easy targets, i.e. the poor. Before such welfarecide, one witnesses the rolling back of the welfare state and the concomitant rolling out of the penal state (Wacquant, 2009). Public schools, once understood and defended as the great equalizers, are a crucial component of such a punitive turn. In the United States, 16 million children live below the poverty line and only 14% of children born in poverty will graduate from college within eight years of graduating high school. Student debt is skyrocketing (Williams,2006). In 2014, there were approximately $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loans in the United States that affected 44 million borrowers who had an average outstanding loan balance of $37,172—with over 7 million debtors in default. What is shocking is that, for much lower debt, “the European Union and IMF promptly tore Greece apart. For comparable or lower sums, recession, austerity measures, personal sacrifice, unemployment, and poverty are imposed on the millions of citizens of indebt countries” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 65). In Texas, one school district reinstated corporal punishment (Smith, 2017). Besty Devos, Donald Trump’s secretary of education is sponsoring federal funds to arm schools and teachers. In the United States, the top 0.1% has accumulated more wealth than the entire bottom 90%. With the advent of globalization, inequality becomes a global nightmare. Global inequality is much greater than inequality within any individual country. Globalization globalized the few and localized the rest (Bauman, 1997). While inequality is a social

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construction well in place before the empire (Muthu, 2003), it is undeniable that, with the emergence of capitalism pillared in slavery, exploitation, and genocide, inequality re-escalated and fabricated realities impossible to be imagined and accepted in human rational terms—yet humanity’s rationality was lost for the sake of profits. China has also decided to ‘play’ a new different role. From defeating Chiang Kai-Shek and his Koumintang army, through the Cultural Revolution and Long March, no one would have predicted that Mao Tse Tung’s China would irreversibly fall in a ferocious market-driven fundamentalism (Hung, 2011). China today, Starrs (2014) documents, “ranks in the global top five across twelve sectors; auto; truck and parts; banking; computer hardware and software; construction; forestry; metals and mining; heavy machinery; insurance; oil and gas; real estate; telecommunications; trading companies and transportation” (p. 89). Instead of “perceiving what goes on in today’s China as an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, one should see it as the repetition of the development of capitalism in Europe itself ” (Žižek, 2011, p. 103). Over the last thirty years, Hui (2011, p. 6) argues, “China, like the West has been caught within a current of depolitication.” Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping’s ‘Beijing consensus,’ (Economy, 2018) which “emphasized the need to uphold and develop a Marxian political economy for the twenty-first century, adapted to China’s needs and resources” (Enfu and Xiaoqin, 2017, p.  1), triggered a new miracle that pumped a new political economy, or as Touraine (1995) would put it, a “new politcal management of the economy” (p. 10). Such a ‘nouveau’ socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics (Enfu and Xiaoqin, 2017) was basically a desire to welcome and replicate a coloniality model of ‘human, nature and development’ (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018), which “reflects the damaging influence of Western neoliberalism” (Enfu and Xiaoqin, 2017, p. 2). The frenetic creed for a coloniality model of existence and development drove China to an unraveled matrix of over-production and over-consumption, playing a leading role in the current equation of global capital. The most recent events in Hong Kong speak volumes to how dissent has been mercilessly crushed by Beijing. In Brazil, after over a decade of hegemonic power, the Workers Party faced tough and unimaginable challenges with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, the appointment of neoconservative Michel Temer, and the arrest of leading intellectuals and political figures, such as José Dirceu and former President Lula da Silva, who were accused of corruption and incarcerated. Franco (2018) argues that Temer’s illegitimate, authoritarian, and conservative takeover unleashed a set of policies not only to reinforce the power of the elites but also to smash popular dissent relying on the “misleading narrative of the economic crisis as a cover for the roll-back of rights, leaving those in the favelas, especially poor black women, even more vulnerable to the violence of institutional racism that is deep in the social pores of Brazil” (p. 139).

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The social legacy of the Workers Party government for more than a decade led by Lula da Silva, reflected in programs such as Participatory Budget, Bolsa Familia, Higher Education for All as well as others, was not able to ‘avoid’ the political carnage. It looks like the masses have no memory. The workers party not only “surrendered to the Rome of the dollar” (Oliveira, 2006, p.  x) sinking into a swamp of corruption—allowing its detractors on the right and the left to viciously undermine its countless accomplishments—but also triggered a “novel combination of neo-populism and party statification shored up by social-liberal handouts, on the one hand, and government graft, on the other, which helped a new form of class in Brazil that could be characterized as ‘hegemony in reverse’” (Oliveira, 2006, p. 5). Hegemony in reverse, Oliveira (2006, p. 22) argues, grasps “a new phenomenon also visible in post-apartheid South Africa and Zimbabwe.” That is, contrary to previous forms of domination, this new formula twists the ‘consensus—coercion’ equation turning the terms of the “Gramscian equation ‘force + consent = hegemony’ upside down for it is no longer the dominated who consent to their own subordination” (Oliveira, 2006, p. 22). That is, “now [it] is the dominant who consent to being ostensibly ‘led’ by representatives of the dominated—on condition that they do not question the forms of capitalist relations” (Oliveira, 2006, p.  22). Force and consent, Oliveira (2006, p.  22) adds, are basically reconceptualized, “force has disappeared, and the direction of consent has been reversed.” Unfortunately, in what was defined for too many on the left—and on the right inclusively—as an extraordinary positive progressive praxis, “an epistemological revolution” (Oliveira, 2006, p.  22), one that the “the dominated dominate since they were able to provide moral direction” (Oliveira, 2006, p.  22) sunk irremediably, fatally paving the way for the most lethal phenomenon that any democracy could face: the construction of a dangerous commonsensical inevitable need, the need for a ‘Messiah’ that will re-set and reroute the dominated. Naturally, Brazil elected a radical right-wing xenophobic authoritarian populist, Jair Bolsonaro, for president. After a decade of a progressive matrix, Brazil did not choose a right turn, but a u-turn. The workers voted in Jair Bolsonaro, who then launched unprecedented and systematic attacks on their rights. Brazil is currently at odds between the frustration of the end of Lula’s new populism (Oliveira, 2006) and an announced nightmare before the antechamber of neo-fascism, or as we will see later on, pure and crude, ur-fascism (Eco, 2017). In India, ‘the Idea of India’ championed by the historic legacy of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Indira Gandhi, and others, has been swamped by Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in a striking far-right turn. In the words of Achin (2018), the failure of Congress developmentalism to lift mass living standards— the damning evidence of the Congress record on literacy and primacy healthcare in the villages, as well as water, sanitation, electrification, roads—and the step-by-step shift to increasingly neoliberal polices as a

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solution, produced major social tensions for which Congress could offer no persuasive hegemonic formula. (pp. 51–52) As Congress failed “to build a nation that by virtue of its size, population, resources and a past civilizational attainment beyond anything that the West had achieved deserves nothing less” (Vanaik, 2018, p. 40), Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party—“representing a far right force with undeniable neo-fascist characteristics” (Vanaik, 2018, p. 40)—with the promise of ‘making India strong again’ was able to win massive democratic support. In so doing, Modi unleashed “a belligerent nationalism of the Hindu rashtra (nation)” (Vanaik, 2018, p. 45), thus fueling “an extra overlay of hatred for Muslims and ramped up the Congress boats of ‘teaching Pakistan a lesson’” (Vanaik, 2018, p. 46). Modi was able to put in place a new hegemony in India, one that, despite some similarities with the previous Gandhi and Nehru’s Congress, exhibited striking diferences, diferences that went way beyond Nehruvian non-alignment commitment and Mody’s explicit protectionist policy against China, thus establishing a clear alingment with the United States and other Western allies. While Congrees fostered local social bonds in non-urban areas, the BJP was more focused on cadre mobilization, social media, and a lumpen-aspirational OBC social based. The use of religious ideology by Congress was latent; by the BJP, aggressive and overt. The main domestic enemy for Congress was communism; for BJP, Islam. (Vanaik, 2018, p. 51) In India—as well as in too many other places—rightist and far-rightist movements and groups took advantage of crippling liberal democracies under the yoke of neoliberalism, articulating “many aspects that have remained on the sidelines because of how modernity has institutionalized contemporary democracies” (Gudavarthy, 2018, p. 8). Rightist and far-rightist groups understood accurately that the need was “to listen to those voices without agreeing with them; those issues should be articulated without legitimizing them, and recognized without institutionalizing them” (Gudavarthy, 2018, p. 10). Patnaik (1993) unpacked the Hindutva movement as “fascist in its ideology, fascist in its class support, fascist in its methods, and fascist in its programme, that is, all the ingredients of a fascist ideology are presented in it: the attempt to unify the majority under a hegeminized concept, the Hindus” (p. 69). In Hungary, the scenario is also frightening. With Viktor Mihály Orbán’s farright democratic rise to power, one witnesses, at the very core of the European Union, an era in which “cultural classifications have been increasingly biologized and moralized” (Tamás, 2013, p. 26). With Viktor Mihály Orbán’s rise to power, one witnesses the developing of the ‘work-based society’ eugenic creed, which has unleashed a ferocious ethnic attack on ‘the deserving poor’ and on

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the welfare state, imposing low wages as a “proper” punishment for the workers moral imperfection (Tamás, 2013, p. 26). In Poland, “the conservative-nationalist ‘Prawo i Sprawiedliwos´c´’ (Law and Justice) party of Andrzej Duda won an absolute majority in the Sejm— an unprecedented result in Poland’s post-communist history” (Koczanowicz, 2016, p.  77), promising “a radical program of good change” (Koczanowicz, 2016, p.  77)—to face the general dismay triggered by consequences of the social frustrations of the post-communist era. Good change, in Andrzej Duda’s mind, “implied to transform Poland’s model of democracy to make it an instrument of the national community” (Koczanowicz, 2016, p. 78), which gave carte blanche to re-escalate tribal nationalist impulses, unleashing authoritarian populist policies. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez’s leadership, defeats, and conquests interrupted by his premature death are collapsing with Nicolas Maduro under constant attack both internally and externally, in an odd succession of events in which mainstream Western Eurocentric media paradoxically—yet not so surprisingly—has shown a shocking partiality (Santos, 2017). Despite Chavez’s “emphasis on diversifying the economy away from dependence on oil by stimulating the agricultural and manufacture sectors” (Buxton, 2016, p.  9), Venezuela could not and did not fulfill such desideratum. Although “Venezuela’s economic decline begun while Chavez was President” (Buxton, 2016, p.  12), and while his ambitions “were modest by European standards, the truth is that immediately ring the bells in Washington” (Buxton, 2016, p.  9). Venezuela, once another example of hope and possibility for the progressive forces of the world, faced heavy turbulence propelled by “an haemorrhage of resources from every pore of the state” (Buxton, 2016, p.  13) due to corruption deeply fueled by dominant groups. Such turbulance has been also fueled due to the destabilizing pressure mechanisms set up by the United States and its allies, undermining, among other issues, Chavez’s “new geometry of power built up around communal councils and cooperatives” (Buxton, 2016, p.  10), which was an attempt to create the conditions for a more just society for all. Today, Guaido’s and Maduro’s presidencies are tearing the nation apart. In the words of Venezuelain novelist Karina Sainz Borgo (2019, p. 27), Venezuela, looks like a “a toothless nation that beheads chickens.” In Madiba’s South Africa, xenophobia and inequality are reaching alarming figures. South African new political bourgeoisie suspended Mandela’s promised revolution (Habib, 2013), unleashing irreversible concerns within poor black communities and for students. Echoing Habib’s (2013) insightful examination of Wit’s student’s revolt, one would argue that particular segments of “the elites are haunted by the fear that they will not rise to the strategic challenged of our era.” It seems that Africa, “is still acting and struggling inside the belly of the beast of empire” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 225). Neocolonialism, which took over Africa, is “the worst form of imperialism, that is for those who practice it, it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress” (Nkrumah, 1965, p. xi).

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Aleppo, Baghdad, Benghazi, Harare, and other African cities, Lampedusa, Lesbos, the U.S. southern border, as well as the overt disgusting open hunting season on the ‘Other,’ just to mention a few examples, reinforce a ‘subjectivity’ that should never have been constructed: immigrant, refugees. Massive waves of human beings have the right to freedom and to escape war and hunger under the crumbling ‘welfare’ of the West. The migrants trailing from Africa to Europe and marching in caravans from Honduras to the United States demonstrate the failure of both Western dominant and counter-dominant human rights (Santos, 2015). In a way, the multitude of adults and children marching announces the re-configuration of a concrete utopia. The utopia of being in a more just world can only be obtained by moving toward the Global North and confronting the beast in the eyes. Like any human being in world, they too have the supreme right to fight for their own lives and existence. Appallingly, as in Europe, U.S. dominant groups reveal a eugenic praxis by either undermining the social saga and reinforcing ‘the wall’ of philosophical paranoia or vociferate words loaded with hate, disrespect, and insensibility for human suffering. The oppressed decided to confront eye-to-eye the beast for its responsibility in the oppressed’s suffering on the beast’s own turf. As a crude consequence of the Western Modern Eurocentric matrix, a massive multitude of human beings is announcing ahead of time that it has no intention to knock at the Empire’s door, but to get in. They are done with Modern Western Eurocentric neoliberal solidarity based on the eugenicism of “how can I help you to help us?” (Han, 2018, p. 17). Interestingly, with the advent of globalization, the “elimination of the distance did not generate more proximity, but destroy[ed] it” (Han, 2018, p. 15). Xenophobic masses, vehemently reject “North Africans, but then they enjoy vacation in their countries” (Han, 2018, p.  23). It cannot be ignored though how dominant forces before such fearless migration movements throughout the world were able to transform and trivialize violence, torture, and death as commodities in a profitable business (Valencia, 2018). In fact, as Alliez and Lazzarato (2016) claim, by naming and signaling without any euphemisms the other, dominant forces unleash a full-blast war of subjectivities establishing a war against the other as a philosophy of existing. New York, Washington, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Cairo, Ramallah—bit by bit, the spectrum of ‘abnormality’ becomes domesticated. Today, we inhabit a ‘theatre of cruelty,’ and a terrorist attack may still make the headlines of major newspapers but sadly barely constitutes a surprise. Welcome to what Clastres (2010) would call the the archeology of violence, that is, the return of the war machine as the riverbed of the social machine. As Baudrillard (2001) argues, “terrorism, killers, hostages, leaders, spectators, and public opinion, there is no innocence in a system which has no meaning” (p. 52). Such theatre blurred the borders between the spectacle and the symbolic with a media that propels a “paralysis of meaning” (Baudrillard, 2001, p.  52). The force of such theatre of cruelty comes precisely from its lack of logic, and that is why it is winning theatre (Baudrillard, 2001). Such paralysis is

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responsible for a global “controversial shift from human rights to anti-terrorism as the dominant ideological form” (Balakrishnan, 2005, p. 9). Of all of the people in the world without access to safe water, almost 40% live in Africa; 589 million sub-Saharan Africans live without electricity and cook by burning whatever they can find. The expansion of West Bank settlements under every Israeli government became the ‘norm.’ Israel is probably the only nation in the world without fixed borders, with the shameful complacency of the Western world, its allies and regional powers, such as the United States, the European Union, and China, to interrupt this colonial eugenic approach. To throw more ashes onto the fire, the U.S. president Donald Trump cavalierly recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The United Kingdom ‘bravely’ decided on ‘Brexit.’ They are done with the ‘Other.’ What they ignore is that we all know that they have the privilege to ‘Brexit.’ As usual, the ‘Other’ is disposable. Under slogans such as “let’s take back control” (Gillingham, 2018, p.  7), the Brexit campaign “has only shown how easily the veneer of civility and conviviality can be peeled back to reveal the virulence of racism and xenophobia seething under the skin of British social life” (Khalili, 2018). Brexit—the way it erupted and the way it has been addressed—is indeed, among other issues, a clear symptom of neoliberal austerity politics. Neoliberal austerity polices—as I will examine later on—asphyxiate society to an unsustainable point (Hallward, 2018), triggering a lethal convergence of anti-immigrant and Islamaphobic impulses within the working class. Consequently, this logic is “blaming emigrants for threatening their rights, taking their place in houses and schools, placing a burden on the public health system and weakening the working class” (Khalili, 2018, p.  19). Such revolt of the middle and working classes—showing an overt eugenic cult towards the ‘Other’—was “a remarkable political blow and worked at all levels from the macroeconomic to the psychoanalytic. That is, the promise had less to do with economics or politics, but rather with the psychological fascination of autonomy and self-esteem” (Davies, 2018, p.  11). What is appalling is that Brexit campaign “was made without any plans for an exit” (Khalili, 2018, p.  23). Moreover, “many people believed that Brexit was not going to change much, but they still wanted to go ahead guided by the information given and not by facts” (Davies, 2018, p.  13). However, Brexit, while just another symptom of a continuing organic crisis of capitalism produced by the same enzymes that created the organic condition for the rise of Thatcherism and the robust rise of neoliberalism (Jessop, 2017), is a prime example of a gradually shredded Europe and the incapacitation of Eurocentric humanism to sustain, interrupt, and terminate a eugenic commonsense that has fueled civil society and has been exacerbated before a great regression (Porta, 2018). Brexit, Appadurai (2018, p. 25) states, introduces another chapter of a debate that “is as old as the idea of Europe itself ”; a debate “about what Europe is and what it means” that has been framed around issues such as “borders, identity and mission that were never resolved” (Appadurai, 2018, p. 25). She adds:

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Is Europe a project of Western Christianity? Is Europe the daughter of Roman law and Empire? Or of the Greek rationality and its democratic values? Or of the humanism and secularism of the Renaissance? Or of the universalism and cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment? (Appadurai, 2018, p. 25) Two years after, the ‘exit’ was not closed with ultra-conservative prime minister Boris Johnson facing a nightmare in parliament to see a final plan approved. Johnson crushed Labor’s Jeremy Corbyn in the last election conquering ‘the’ needed easy pass to see Brexit a reality on January 31, 2020—with Ireland and Scotland yet another issue. Welcome to the balkanization of the West (Rupnik, 2019). It seems that Jean Monet and Jacques Delors’s European utopia failed in understanding the challenges of a Union pumped by a single currency that could not survive without a state (Feldstein, 1997). The challenges faced by Europe as a Union “are a good illustration of the impasse created by globalization through market mechanisms” (Amin, 2014, p. 7). It seems that both the right and the left of the political realm failed miserably. While the former has reduced Europe “to pure mercantilist proportions, the latter sooner or later simply ofered its support without imposing any conditions” (Amin, 2014, p. 7). That is, they both “can only imagine solutions to their problems that are at the expense of others, and they don’t even have efective tools for achieving those” (Amin, 2014, p. 7). However, Brexit also mirrors a form through which the fearsome and upset masses duel with liberal democracy, which is blamed for the social chaos. This duel would also occur in other ways in nations, such as the United States and Brazil, in which the elections of wannabe dictators were clear votes to exit liberal democracy (Appadurai, 2018). We will return to this issue, later on. To add more ashes to the Western fire, in Cataluña, people clearly voted for independence from Spain, and, in Andaluzia, the far-right Vox, for the first time, grabbed twelve seats in parliament. As we finalize this volume, Cataluña is in turmoil with pro-independence groups reacting violently in the streets. Paris is in flames with the Yellow Vests revolt, an inorganic movement that demands quasi everything, yet somehow in contradicatory ways (Žižek, 2018). Macron, while the best today’s establishment can offer, met his limitations (Žižek, 2018). One “cannot win the nationalists by being better nationalists than they are” (Klein, 2017, p.  1). It seems that Europe has rediscovered its tragic sense of history and could no longer get out of it. The myth of prosperity is over. Geopolitics has returned. The Europeanization of the peripheries turned into feeders of instability. Some democracies have regressed. North, South, East and West battle to find and edify a common goal, and the decline is inevitable (Rupnik, 2019). Chaos today, in Mbembe’s (2019, pp. 42–43) terms, determined and is determined by a eugenic master-desire (for an enemy, for apartheid)—“at once comprising the field of immanence and a force of composed multiplicities—invariably has one or several objects as its fixation point.”

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That is, “yesterday ‘Negro’ and ‘Jew’ were the favored names of such objects. Today, Negroes and Jews are known by other names: Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few” (Mbembe, 2019, pp. 42–43). In the West, and beyond the second decade of the twenty-first century is creating the path for a far-right agenda to succeed as we can see in the United States, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, India, Poland, and Brazil with Parties, such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the National Front in France, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and individuals, such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Jean Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and others. This triggers popular support by “stoking anti-immigrant sentiment [with a] fake-populist plutocratic agenda with a toxic brew of hyper-militarism, immigrant-bashing nativism, law-and-order racism, sexism, and anti-intellectualism” (Street, 2017, p.  3), a vivid example of the return of fascism under contemporary neoliberal capitalism (Amin, 2014). Unquestionably mixed in such stream of appalling events one sees the real embryo of a fascist desire, move, and reality. The state of affairs is so chaotic that “if the heart could think, it would have stopped” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 31). As if the eugenic cocktail was not appallingly devastating and deplorable enough, U.S. president Donald Trump cavalierly shut down the government until Congress approved the budget for the Wall, since ‘the other side’ is infested with sub-humans that cannot contaminate ‘the sacred land.’ Following the same belligerent actions, he “delivered another blow to struggling workers by signing an executive order that froze the pay of around two million public employees in 2019 leaving hundreds of thousands of federal employees currently furloughed or working without pay due to the ongoing government shutdown” (Johnson, 2018, p.  1). Leverage with a past outside of the political terrain, a ‘fabricated self made male,’ and taking advantage of the intricate avenues of tabloidism, Donald Trump (as well as other far-right leaders) “launched a vigorous attack on globalist American elites who had spent billions helping other countries— notably China—get rich” (Riley, 2018, p.  21). Acting crassly ‘unpresidential,’ Trump unleashed an attack on globalization, advocating instead for a full-blast nationalism, putting forward that “protectionist tariffs, a border wall, and a massive infrastructure programme would make America great again” (Riley, 2018, p.  21). His eugenic and cultural nationalist agenda gained popular support as “it rested on workers and middle-class layers who had suffered from the offshoring of jobs and who feared competition from immigrants in employment, rather than welcoming them as a cheap source of labour” (Riley, 2018, p. 21). Welcome to the real colours of the epistemicide. The fact that individuals with populist, authoritarian, and fascist claims have been able to win the majority support (not in spite of, but precisely because they unleash an unprecedented attack on immigrants, minorities, people of color, and women) shows not just how democracy is in a critical stage, but actually the entire consulate of modernity. We are facing the normalization of shock and chaos as well as the cynicism of a full-blast blatant fascism and

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authoritarianism, which is peppered with sublime irony. As I will examine later on, not only is one witnessing a great regression, but also one has been subjectified by such regression. Voting in a healthy, just democracy should always be centered on the social and material consequences of ideology. Democracy is being used to kill democracy (Wolf, 2007). The return of this right-wing nationalism in the West is “not worse, from a decolonial perspective, than the continuation of neoliberal globalism” (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018, p.  5), though. Our society is a victim of the problems that it created, a society that “woke up to a world full of social novelties, and that with joy moved foward towards conquering a freedom that did not know what it was, and a progress it had never defined” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 164). However, although the bloody fury against the traditional and hegmonic models has a long history, the fact is that we are also experiencing a time of total disillusionment as well as a deep disenchantment with the failure of counter-hegemonic political projects towards social emancipation. This is what we saw in Paris with the inorganic movement of the yellow vests, which paradoxically ended up showing a slippery approach with populist impules (Žižek, 2018). Ditactorships “rely on the social neurotic” (Gil, 2009, p. 17). As Santos (2018a, p. 367) adamantly argues, When democracy concludes that it is not compatible with this type of capitalism and decides to resist it, it may be too late. However, capitalism may have already concluded that democracy is not compatible with it. To further aggravate the messy stage of contemporaneity, in the fall of 2019, the world saw the emergence of COVID 19 in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization took awhile to react and in early 2020 declared, Urbe et Orbi, that the world was facing a pandemic of unimaginable proportions (it will be necessary to go back to the beginning of the twentieth century [1918] with the Spanish flu—that is estimated to have afected 500 million people and killed between 20 and 50 million, devastating Europe, the United States, and parts of the Asian continent—to find a parallel). Quite soon, lockdown policies and a consequent state of war—against an enemy that has been built as ‘invisible’—became an inevitable global reality. The pandemic unleashed a chain of interesting reactions between “philosophers who view anti-contagion measures—curfews, closed borders, restrictions on public gatherings—as a sinister control mechanism and the rulers who fear the lockdowns will loosen their control” (D’Eramo, 2020, p. 23). An interesting reaction would erupt from within the left spectrum though, triggered by a clear-cut take from Agamben (2020a; 2020b), who claimed the pandemic to be una invenzione; such a sharp statement ignited a vigorous chainreaction from colleagues and close allies—such as Žižek (2020), Badiou (2020), Nancy (2020), D’Eramo (2020), and others. While I argue, on one hand, that Agamben (2020) would probably have achieved his goal had he avoided falling in a kind of political ‘hyperbolization’ of the political, on the other hand, it is a dangerous mistake to undermine what has been paved ‘because of the virus’. By this I mean that one should not get lost on

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Agamben’s endless cloud of political ‘hyperbolization’ of the political—which I concur with Žižek (2020, n. p.) which pushes us towards a “social interpretation that doesn’t make the reality of the threat disappear”—and in doing so ignores precisely what I would call Agamben’s (2020) Barthesian punctum; that is, COVID 19, far from being neutral, has been used to establish not just an atmosphere of threat (Žižek, 2020)—humanity is quasi connected to the respirator— but also the concomitant radical awkward measures to address such threat. While on one hand, the pandemic threatens the health of all individuals— although oppressed populations and minorities are undeniably more vulnerable and that the pandemic sways the rich and poor nations differently, something that might get lost in Agamben’s (2020a; 2020b) arguments—on the other, the pandemic spreads throughout the political economy of global capitalism, accelerating the post-2008 crisis. Such a crisis never really ended; it moved into different forms, it traveled from one nation to another, it has all been with us. The world never went back to some kind of equilibrium after 2008. When COVID 19 arrived on the scene, it found global capitalism that was sitting in a gigantic bubble of private debt. What the current pandemic has done, is it has deepened and accelerated a never-ending and non-stop crisis that started in 2008 (Varoufakis, 2020). Thus, COVID 19 has been used not only to fabricate “justifiable frenetic concerns with the economy” and the necessary quick measures to address economic pandemonium but also to trigger what could be termed cultural politics of fear so convenient to help to pave exceptional necessary conditions such as the institutionalization of a biopolitical discipline through a biopolitical state of war (Agamben, 2020), as well as to legitimize an attack on what constitutes the truth. Drawing on his insightful matrix of “the state of exception” and on Carl Schmitt’s moto “necessity makes the law”, Agamben (2020a, n. p.) argues that together with COVID 19 came “a state of fear, which, in recent years, has diffused into individual consciousnesses and which translates into a real need for states of collective panic, for which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext.” In his (2020b, n. p.) terms “fear causes many things to appear that one pretends not to see.” While Agamben’s (2020a; 2020b) approach has been framed as “drastically wrong and somewhat right since domination is not one-dimensional” (D’Eramo, 2020, pp. 25–26), it would be naïve to ignore the attempts to unleash an  Orwellian  wave. One of the symptoms of such a wave is the open war on truth, which colonized the commonsense. As I will examine later on, with such a pandemic we witness the opening of a hunting season on truth. It looks like truth and science have commonsensically started antagonistic journeys as evidenced by a recent kpress conference by President Trump, who advocated for the possibility of injecting disinfectant, before an embarrassed epidemiologist—clearly shows. Both the virus and the reaction to it expose the real ugly colors of the current neoliberal ethos. As a social construction—not only Agamben (2020) was not that wrong, and it would be important to emphasize that he is “not the first to argue that one of the goals of social domination is to atomize the dominated” (D’Eramo, 2020, p. 26).

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As a social construction, I argue that COVID-19 begs the Latourian question between the ‘microbes and Pasteur’: Who came first to whom? Was it the virus that discovered humans, or was it the humans who discovered the virus? Addressing such a question might allow one to have a better understanding of what is crucial and marginal within the left disputes, sine qua non condition to help win the battle over commonsense. Santos (2020) did not undermine the political angle advocated by Agamben, Zizek and others, yet he pushed the debate into a different angle, one that is so crucial for the present future of the curriculum field though. As is, the pandemic urges one to distinguish “not only between a democratic state and a state of exception, but also between a state of democratic exception and a state of anti exceptiondemocratic” (Santos, 2020, p. 9). The mercilessly murder of George Floyd by four police officers speaks volumes not just about the banality of police brutality, but also about real inequality in the deep social and economic structures of society as well about the real colors of brutal institutional racism racialized structures that became aggravated under the current ‘viva death leadership’ (Chomsky, 2020). As if such pandemonium is not enough, much of the political and educational left persists by clinging to an archaic board, embarking sometimes on ‘theoretical timesharing,’ which helps the radical right to enjoy a prolonged and fat sabbatical. The perilous balance of our society, Galeano (1997) claims, “depends on the perpetuation of injustice. The deprivation of the majority is necessary so that the waste of a few is possible” (p. 215). Our society, “incapable of fighting poverty . . . fights the poor, while the dominant culture, a militarized culture, worships the violence of power” (Galeano, 1997, p.  216). Shockingly people focus more “on the end of the world than the end of capitalism, even before ecological catastrophe” (Žižek, 2012a, p. 1)—or a ‘global pandemic.’ Capitalism “is war, capitalism is at war against all of humanity, against all of the planet, that is, war is the medicine that capitalism administers to the world to cure it of the ills that capitalism imposes, which is not just an economic war” (Walsh, 2018, p. 46). It seems that “humanity belongs to those who do not feel” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 279). One is facing a “profound historical crisis, a structural crisis of capital, which is a much more serious problem than the crisis of capitalism” (Mészáros, 1996, p.  57), a crisis in which the oppressed are not spectators, but real actors (Mariategui, 1998). Gros (2017) has touched the right buttons when he stated that in era dominated by experts whose decisions are proud to be the result of anonymous and cold statistics, disobeying is a declaration of humanity. The issues that I have been dissecting—and that are quite structural in the current social havoc—constitute an enzyme of the leitmotiv of this volume. In the face of such a succession of tragic events, which have brought drastic changes in public education and schools, how come critical theory has not been able to impose itself as dominant? What has been lacking in this theory to help break up the dominant hegemonic bloc and to impose itself as dominant? Is critical theory the ideal answer to the crisis that we have experienced? Does critical theory have the accurate answers necessary to at least mitigate the crisis? If it has, why can’t it be hegemonic? Why haven’t all of us, who are so unquestionably committed with critical theory and pedagogies, been able to smash once and for all an

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educational and curriculum system that perpetrates epistemicides (Paraskeva, 2011; Santos, 2005)? Why is critical theory a non-reality for over two-thirds of the planet’s population? How do we empower the oppressed without recognizing their epistemological existence and their autonomous right of empowering themselves? Re-framing Morrow and Torres’s (1995, p. 3) question: “the time is right for asking. Whatever happened to critical social theories in education? Needless to say, the myriad of successive events—that became normalcy—is the unequivocal footprint of neoliberal policies. It is a consequence of Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological creed, which is materialized within a neoliberal philosophy of praxis. It is a creed that believes there is only one humanity possible: a humanity for the few at the expense of a sub-humanity for the massive majority. However, and precisely because of such a eugenic cult, why have critical theory and pedagogies been unable to at least interrupt the triumphalism of the neoliberal movement that currently steams fascist impulses? This question drives this volume. The current havoc reveals a sort of “Polanyic mechanic” (Geiselberger, 2017, p.  12) unleashed by a global neoliberal ideological matrix that drove society to what has been defined as the inevitable way forward regardless of its lethal consequences. The “administration of fear” has been institutionalized, pushing “States to create policies for the orchestration and management of fear” (Virilio, 2012, p. 15). Notwithstanding the deadly consequences—some of those we have been flagging—appallingly, and in a moment that we are witnessing, “the remarkable resurgence of ideological movements throughout the world, somewhere in the [Western] left bank it is announced that the concept of ideology is now obsolete” (Eagleton, 1991, p.  xi). The claim that we live in a non-ideological momentum is indeed an ideological claim (Paraskeva and Torres Santomé, 2012). In fact, “it took the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 to expose the naïveté of [the] premature hopes for a de-ideologized world” (Steger, 2009, p.  3). After 9/11, ‘Islamic radicalism’ replaced ‘Communism’ as the next great enemy of the West, ‘the evil new other’ that had to be defeated by whatever means necessary. It unleashed not only a permanent political economy of war—fueled by a eugenic hysteria against the ‘Other’ as the source of ‘terror’—but also awakened ferocious white supremacist nationalisms, paving the way for the emergence of authoritarian tribal populist fascism that has seized power using the democratic mechanisms. Under the current social phenomena, which we will examine later on, fascism became viral. The fear of the ‘Other’ saturated the commonsense, fertilized the topology of the identic(al) (Han, 2018), and gave carte blanche to embark on the neo-crusade against the ‘new Other.’ These were a must for the stabilization of what I would best call the ‘fourth hegemonic’ phase of capitalism, neoliberal tribal populism. Žižek (2008) nailed it when he argued that “Huntington’s clash of civilizations was politics at Fukuyama’s end of history” (p.  2), unleashing an ideological “anthropology of sacrifice” (Lazzarato, 2015, p.  79) that frames our societies that are facing “the crisis of crises, a crisis that has a long story and, in all likelihood, a long future, a violent crisis of a violent finance” (Marazzi,

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2011, p.  10), one that was triggered by the “neoliberal hegemony of finance capital” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 109). At the very root of such ‘crisis of crises,’ paced by the current authoritarianpopulist-nationalist pandemic, lies the social, economic, cultural, and spiritual puzzle created by the neoliberal current and its consequent nefarious social reconfigurations, especially within the state itself and the market and relations between them, triggering new subjectivities, ways of thinking and being. With the advent of right-wing impulses within neoliberal globalization’s tenure, one witnesses the expulsion of the ‘Other,’ as Han (2018) would put it. As Derrida (1994) felitiously put it, it looks like our time is a time out of joint.

Neoliberalism: An Attempt at a Brief Sketch The state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form. (Agamben, 2005, p. 1)

The staggering economic experiences in post-Allende Chile, the great contemporary revolution in the People’s Republic of China, and the elections of Thatcher and Reagan in the United Kingdom and in the United States, respectively, resulted in the emergence and development of a “new world economic configuration—often subsumed under the term [neoliberal] globalization” (Harvey, 2005, p.  2). Neoliberal globalization needs to be understood within a complex ideological framework that hegemonically was able to unleash a venomous attack on the State, asphyxiate public institutions, radically change the very social mission of such institutions, quasi fully deregulate the markets, introduce new language and meanings that dramatically transform civil society (i.e. education, health care, justice), fabricate a new commonsense in which public is bad and private is good by definition, overemphasize the peregrine cult on individual rights, and impose democratically a new habitus anchored on what some scholars call low-density democracy or no democracy at all. In doing so, neoliberalism was also able to win the battle over commonsense that, among other issues, marginalizes, undermines, fades, and blurs both left and right spheres of the political spectrum, thus stabilizing a (new) radical center (Paraskeva, 2008) and paving the way for a new conception and praxis for the State naturalizing the economic crisis and the subjectification of debt—a radical center that is the very root of the viral fascist impulses one currently faces As Harvey (2005) claims, neoliberalism is a creative destruction “not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers, but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart” (p. 3). The survival of capitalism relies in its capacity to perpetually maintain imbalance and excess. Žižek (1989) is quite insightful here: Far from constricting capitalism limits is the very impetus of its development. Herein lies the paradox proper to capitalism, its last resort: capitalism

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Echoing Marx, Karatani (2016, p. 187) states that “the true barrier is capital itself applies to the capitalist economy after Capital. Capitalism cannot exist but globally.” Such pretentious limitedness fuels a very concrete political, economic, cultural, and spiritual battle(s) that is the very DNA of what Santos (2008) calls globalizations, transforming into a new financialization of capital (Foster, 2008). That is an intricate, multifarious social terrain in which nonmonolithic hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces—or insurgent cosmopolitanisms (Santos, 2008)—collide vividly before, among other issues, social and cognitive justice, equality, freedom, democracy, human rights, and common good. Whereas the first is usually understood as “neoliberal, top-down globalization or globalization from above” (Santos, 2008, p. 396), the latter consists of “the transnationally organized resistance against unequal exchanges produced or intensified by globalized localisms and localized globalisms” (Santos, 2008, p. 397). Neoliberalism unleashed a new global order imposed throughout the world “from the main capitalist countries of the center to the less developed countries of the periphery” (Duménil and Lévy, 2011, p. 9). Beyond economic violence, such order establishes a web of international relations based “on corruption, subversion and war helping establishing imperial-friendly local governments” (Duménil and Lévy, 2011, p. 9). Under such matrix, humanity is at the mercy of the invisible hands of faceless non-democratic institutions such as NATO, IMF, WB, and WTO (Duménil and Lévy, 2011). In its multiple forms, neoliberal globalization did not happen, and is not happening, in a social vacuum. Actually, “it is precisely in its oppression of non-market forces that we see how neoliberalism operates not only as an economic system, but as a political and cultural system as well” (McChesney, 1999, p.  7; Olssen, 2004), which creates endless intricate tensions between homogenization and heterogenization of cultural forms (Appadurai, 1996) and a lack of historical consciousness. Such lack of historical consciousness is one of the enzymes of the great authoritarianpopulist-nationalist wave, an enzyme that started leavening back with Reagan and Thatcher, accelerating during Blair’s and Clinton’s consulates. In analyzing the metamorphosis of New Rightist impulses, Mouffe (2000) stresses that both Blair and Clinton were able to construct a “radical center” (p.  108). Unlike traditional political groupings, the “radical center” is a new coalition that “transcends the traditional left/right division by articulating themes and values from both sides in a new synthesis” (Mouffe, 2000 p.  108).

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However, unlike Mouffe (2000), Fairclough (2000) stresses that the “radical center” strategy does not consist only in “bringing together elements from these [left and right] political discourses” but, also, in its ability to “reconcile themes which have been seen as irreconcilable beyond such contrary themes, transcending them” (pp. 44–45). Additionally, Fairclough (2000) argues the “radical center” achieved consent within the governed sphere “not through political [democratic] dialogue, but through managerial methods of promotion and forms of consultation with the public; [that is to say] the government tends to act like a corporation treating the public as its consumers rather than citizens” (Fairclough, 2000, p. 129). While such radical centrism targets the state, it is actually the state that has been paving the way for the market (Sommers, 2001; Paraskeva, 2003; 2009). The bailouts to banks, insurance companies, and the car industry testify to such claims. Such a state actually fosters “new privatized legal regimes [and it is] a state that has itself undergone transformation and participated in legitimizing a new doctrine about the role of the state in the economy” (Sassen, 2000, p. 59). State sovereignty has never been in jeopardy within the contemporary global economy and cultural flows (Appadurai, 1996). In fact, such radical centrism, while searching for the dissolution of old contradictions between “right” and “left” (Fergusson, 2001), was able to lay the solid foundation for the gradual emergence of a new concept of the state, especially with regard to its role, anchored in a need to modernize government at almost any cost. Democratic forces have been colonized by managerial insights in such a way that governments end up being weak executives of a Res plc (Ball, 2007), which operates with the blessing of an anemic popular vote (Fergusson, 2001). For neoliberals, there is no such thing as public and private institutions; there are good and bad institutions. I argue that such mercantilist neofundamentalism has paved the way for what Agamben (2005) called a “State of exception”—the embryo of what I have called neoradical centrism. While radical centrism claims to offer a broad managerial concept for the public good by showing new managerial dynamics in and of itself (Newman, 2001, p. 46), neoradical centrism actually refines the entire commonsense cartography edified and drawn by radical centrism (Hall, 1988). What is at stake for the neoradical centrists is not the rapacious need for modernizing forms of governments but precisely the unbalanced tension between force and law. In short, paradoxically, force transcends law in the so-called democratic nations. Neoliberal globalization “is having pronounced effects on the exclusive territoriality of the nation state, that is its effects are not on territory as such but on its institutional encasements” (Sassen, 2000, p. 50). Under the auspices of neoradical centrism, the issue goes well beyond the creation of mixed economies of welfare, or the emergence of a new public management that transforms citizens into consumers, or even the emergence of forms of entrepreneurial government (Clarke, Gewirtz, and McLaughlin, 2001); it goes beyond the tension(s) of welfare without a state (Clarke and Newman, 1997). In the midst of welfarecide—orchestrated and paved by the so-called radical centrism policies—neoradical centrism emerges as an answer to a complex framework of needs that resulted from welfarecide. While radical centrism cannot

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be seen as a crisis but an answer to the crises (Apple, 2000), neoradical centrism cannot be seen as a need but the only answer to address ever more pressing needs. Echoing Schmitt (1985), Agamben (2005) argues that “the necessities transcend the law” (p. 1). In this way, neoradical centrism is able to overcome the multifarious tensions prompted by “state of exception vs. state sovereignty” and edifies a “point of imbalance between public law and political fact” (Agamben, 2005, p.  1). In fact, the state of exception “appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form” (Agamben, 2005, p.  1). Neoradical centrism as “‘he new neoliberalism”’(Davies, 2016) is “ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political” in its layout, making it conveniently well situated in coded no-man’s-land and quite juicy for marketers (Agamben, 2005, pp. 1–2). The state of exception reinforces the conditions that anchor societal development to a pale economic equation. In fact, “the state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); [quite conversely] it is a suspension (in our understanding ad eternum) of the juridical order itself ” (Agamben, 2005, p. 4; Todorov, 2003). The state of exception, Davies (2014) argues, is a zone of indifference in which justifications are neither required nor possible because there is no general grammar or classificatory system through which the exception can be proved or subsumed. The declaration of exception rests on a purely political judgment of necessity, which lacks any preconditions beyond itself. The fact the exception is recognized as a formal possibility does not mean that it is somehow ‘within’ the rule of law, any more than a lack of formal recognition renders it ‘external’ to the rule of law. Exception is consistent with the logic of law, without being strictly legal or illegal. It is impossible to conceive of a law that does not imply the possibility of exception, even though legal rationality itself cannot entirely articulate what the juridical status of exception actually is. (p. 174) It is this ‘exceptional condition’ of the state of exception that allows the state to resign from its social mission and be co-opted by a new geometry of an economic state, which marks “the turn from ordoliberalism to neoliberalism” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 101); that is, neoliberalism pushed the ‘vitalpolitik’—already introduced by ordoliberalism—into a totally diferent level of “finance and industrial corporations” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 108). That is, neoliberalism relies on the corporate reason as the riverbed “through which one analyzes and measures social relations including relation with the self ” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 108). The great leap between ordoliberalism and neoliberalism, Lazzarato (2015) argues, “occurred in the transition from the hegemony of ‘industrial capital’ to the hegemony of ‘financial capital’ in which state intervention in society is not challenged, but expanded. What changes is the nature of the intervention, something the crisis has demonstrated” (p. 109).

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In this context, “it is crucial that a state of exception can only arise with a sovereign decision, that is, it must be backed up with sufficient violence (or its threat) to be realized” (Davies, 2014, p.  174). A declaration of exception is a “form of violent anti-crisis, in which judgment is debarred or delayed, for fear that it would be otherwise destroyed” (Davies, 2014, p. 175). The discourse that promotes neoliberalism is the discourse of the single path. It is the anti-ideological discourse that seeks to emanate from the evidence of the real, of the things themselves; it is the discourse of transparency and of the permanent movement, transforming and making disappear the intermediate degrees between the ‘boss’ (power) and the citizens; it is the discourse of competence and the reduction of subjectivity to numerical proficiency profiles. It is the discourse that denies the difference between left and right, considering it obsolete. The subject no longer has the right to error. Learning becomes a technique to which subjectivity must adapt, under penalty of automatic social exclusion. (Gil, 2009, p. 25) Why then, despite almost six decades of distressing efects on society and attacks on the even more localized rest (Bauman, 1997), does a hegemonic bloc continue to dominate? Why were critical approaches—that undeniably accomplished so many goals—unable to mitigate such neoliberal ferocious triumphalism? We will return to this issue later on. As Jessop, Bonnett, Bromley, and Ling (1984) and Apple (2000) remind us, one must question, “how is such an ideological vision legitimated and accepted?” ( Jessop et al., 1984, p. 23). It is undeniable that neoradical centrism is not exactly a pure detour from the orthodoxies laid out by the radical centrism. It is actually a moment of complexities, and, in some ways, it is a platform that, as Hall (1992) would put it, goes toward radical centrism by taking advantage of particular kinds of contradictions within the very marrow of neoliberal globalization. Neoradical centrism should be seen as a capitalist metamorphosis of righting the left.1 Such aim cannot be detached from the politics of the commonsense and the role that the media plays in building a particular yarn of meanings. Such a state of exception (Agamben, 2005) and the need to marketize everything (Harvey, 2005) are two sides of the same coin, a devastating currency for sectors such as public education, a currency that pushes societies to a state of permanent economic emergency, paving the way for the emergence of what was about to arise i.e. authoritarian-populist-nationalist impulses in their worst forms. I argue that both radical centrism and neoradical centrism in their indomitable market cult have gradually eroded the power and function of the State as guarantor of equality and social justice. In so doing, they paved the way for a quasi deregulated market in its various dynamics, which has forced contemporary societies to levels of over-production and over-consumption never before achieved and

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promoted a drastic reconfiguration of old political geographies of ‘right-left’ and conceptual divisions out of history, all of this seething lethally and daily at the level of commonsense. It was at the level of commonsense that radical centrism and neoradical centrism imposed a new economic and cultural social geography, all of it in a state of perpetual excesses, which could only lead to an unprecedented crisis. Yet, dangerously, both the causes and the solutions found for the crisis are treated in the same inner logic. That is, from a philosophy based on the perpetual excess ‘of and in everything’ led by the needs of a market whose survival relies in its own excess, ‘the’ solution advanced to exit to the crisis—the crisis of the crisis—is a set of ruthless austerity measures. The solution to the market crisis is more ‘crisis,’ that is, more market. This hysterical global mire—with scattered and diverse local consequences—thirsty for ‘more present,’ orphan of clear territorialities and arrogantly moving forward away from a solid historical consciousness, would also fertilize what was about to happen, the emergence of authoritarian impulses. Before a lost and bewildered multitude, the emergence of a Messiah is a pure matter of time, a time that is all of them. Let me now turn my attention to the cultural politics of austerity.

Making the Economy Scream: Cultural Politics of Austerity The power of ideology is so strong that history is easily fabricated. (Mazzucato, 2015, p. 23)

Neoliberal globalization, as the practice of corporate populism, carries in itself an ideological scaffold: neoliberal globalism (Kaplinsky, 2005; Rapley, 2004; Conversi, 2010). No one has unmasked in a better way the ideological backbone of neoliberal globalization than Harvey (2005): [Neoliberal globalization] is particularly assiduous in seeking privatization of assets. The absence of clear property rights . . . is seen as one of the greatest of all institutional barriers to economic development and the improvement of human welfare. Enclosure and the assignment of private property rights is considered the best to protect against the so called tragedy of the commons. Sectors formerly run or regulated by the state must be turned over to the private sphere and be deregulated. Competition— between individuals, between firms, between territorial entities—is held to be a primary virtue. Privatization and deregulation, combined with competition, it is claimed, eliminate bureaucratic red tape, increase efficiency and productivity, improve quality, and reduce costs both directly to the consumer through cheaper commodities and services and indirectly through reduction of the tax burden. (p. 65)

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Privatization and deregulation policies paved the way for the crisis and for the answer to the crisis in the form of austerity politics, and, in so doing, they yeast a state of bewilderment and rusty perplexity gradually normalizing debt as a new form of cultural politics. The 2007/8 global recession leaves little doubt about the excesses of late capitalism. Such crises “raise numerous questions about neoliberal ideas and practices, not the least of which is whether neoliberalism can survive it” (Fraser, Murphy, and Kelly, 2013, p. 38). Such crisis also demonstrated that “it is impossible to define neoliberalism purely theoretically” (Saad-Filho and Johnston, 2005, p. 1). Harvey (2005) states: Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. . . . Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to secondguess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit. (p. 2) In viewing the world “as a market and governed as if it were a market” (Davies, 2014, p. 20), neoliberalism saturates civil society with an economic reasoning, in which the “authority and legitimacy of institutions without any relationships with the market, calculation or individual choice, become the most crucial object of economic critique” (Davies, 2014, p. 20). Needless to say, neoliberalism cannot “simply abolish all of these institutions, or replace all of them with markets” (Davies, 2014, p. 22). However, for example, the target with “trade unions, guilds, cultural critics, families, artists, democratic procedures, laws, traditions and professions which all make claims to authority and justification by appealing to tacit and/or incalculable notions of what counts as justice or the common good” (Davies, 2014, p. 22) is “to replace normative, critical evaluation with economic, technical evaluation” (Davies, 2014, p. 22). If there is an arena in which such economic technical evaluation rationale became the norm, it is education, framing the daily life of teachers and students, a very real bit of neoliberal pedagogy (Paraskeva and Macrine, 2015). Austerity policies and practices play within the very core of the wrangle Fordism-post-fordismneoliberalism; they are cause and consequence. The world capitalist economy “is facing the threat of long-run economic stagnation, sometimes referred to as the problem of ‘lost decades’” (Foster and McChesney, 2012, p. 1). Thus, the emphasis should be put on the swamp

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propelled by the stagnation of the capitalist economy and not ‘just’ on the financial crisis or recession. The “defining characteristic of economic depressions was not negative economic growth, in the trough of the business cycle, but rather protracted slow growth once economic recovery had commenced” (Foster and McChesney, 2012, p. 2). One of the reasons for such a puzzled state is the “systematic neglect of history” (Foster and McChesney, 2012, p.  4). Such cultural politics of denial are intertwined with the re-configuration of ‘old’ geographies and concepts framing very concrete realities. Such re-configuration goes well beyond bulldozing left and right (un)common denominators though. For example, in our own educational field one experiences the re-tooling of certain key categories and dynamics such as oppressed, urban, multicultural, just to mention a few. Undeniably, it is “the slow growth or stagnation that has been festering for decades which explains not only financialization, manifested in a string of financial bubbles, but also the deep economic malaise that has set in during the period of financial deleveraging. A realistic analysis today thus requires close examination of the dangerous feedback loops between stagnation and financialization” (Foster and McChesney, 2012, p.  5). Notwithstanding such a crumbling economic framework, a red flag was raised in a number of different venues, not just by dissenting voices but also by mainstream economists and above all by the daily state of the real(ity). Echoing Sweeny’s rationale, Foster and McChesney (2012) argue that new conundrums such as globalization(s), stagnation (which does not necessarily mean negative growth), and financialization have become the new normalcy and inaugurate a totally different historical phase that they refer to as “monopoly-finance capital.” Such historical phase is framed by ambiguity in global competition forced by “a slowing down of growth due to overaccumulation” (p. 7), which pushed dangerous envelopes to address a complex wrangle between the needs of an ever-demanding market and the crude reality of a pallid economy. The current monopoly-financial capitalism is imposing everdemanding yet unsustainable changes within the civil archeology that puts the system in a kind of self-destructive mode since it is incapable of finding the right formula to address its own unsuitable demands (Amin (2013). The system is exhausted because it exhausted its very own social matrix, with nature at odds with it as well. Needless to say, the impact of such a conflictive state has serious implications on education. Education and educators are under the gun to come up with answers for a problem that is beyond their jurisdiction. Education and educators are in a permanent ‘torture’ to maintain and revitalize an economy that shows daily signs of unsustainability. More than ever before, education is playing a crucial part in the new equation of the current political economy (Lipman, 2011). The best way to address such crisis is to unravel the rampage of austerity politics. Disconcertedly, the idea is to rescue the system, not the people. Education and other social public spheres, such as health care, have

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been subjugated to severe cuts to feed the so-called structural adjustment plans imposed on governments (Roy, 2014). Žižek (2010) presents somehow a similar position when he describes the current crisis as ‘a permanent economic emergency.’ Relying on the Eurozone as plus que parfait scenario to examine austerity politics, Žižek (2010) argues that the draconian measures imposed on nations such as Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal deepened the unfathomable abyss between two complex perspectives. The first is the self-proclaimed neutral mainstream that “proposes a de-politicized naturalization of the crisis [that is] the regulatory measures are presented not as decisions grounded in political choices, but as the imperatives of a neutral financial logic—if we want our economies to stabilize, [then] we simply have to swallow the bitter pill” (Žižek, 2010, p. 85); and the second is the position led by social groups, such as “protesting workers, students and pensioners, [that] see the austerity measures as yet another attempt by international financial capital to dismantle the last remainders of the welfare state” (Žižek, 2010, p.  85). According to Žižek (2010), both perspectives are mired with elements of both truths and fallacies. Under austerity measures, nations have been thrown into a permanent state of debt in order to address debt. These nations are forced to play the ‘debt game,’ even though they know full well that the equation of ‘debt to pay debt’ is an unresolvable equation. Nevertheless, the IMF is quite comfortable with such restructuring, since they benefit directly from the interests already banked and indirectly from the outcomes of rushed austerity driven privatizations of state assets. Blyth and Willis (2013) define public debt as a great scam, that puts the debtor in a financial choke. You are the state and I am the capitalist. And I want my property protected. But I also want to be able to control you in some way. So, I’ve got this thing called a debt instrument. I will give you money and you will use [it] to protect me. Odd as it might be, public debt has become a crippling global crisis—a crisis that in two years metamorphosed from “bailouts of banks, insurance companies, financial institutions and entire industrial sectors, to the so-called crisis of sovereign debt” (Marazzi, 2011, p. 97). That is, the fiscal chaos perpetrated by uncontrolled markets has paved the way for stricter and stricter austerity measures that impose fiscal consolidations as well as spartan economic policies that have broader efects at all levels, including the State level. Shockingly, and despite the devastated impact of austerity measures, dominant groups claim that there is nothing wrong with such adjustment policies and measures—such as correcting public accounts and heavy fiscal policies that burden taxpayers. The real problem is that they came too late, though (Smaghi, 2013). Austerity politics, Mazzucato (2015) argues, exemplifies how “the power of ideology is so strong that history is easily fabricated” (p. 23), placing the focus on wrong side

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of the equation, which is the public spending, and unleashing a ferocious attack on public institutions: A remarkable aspect of the financial crises that began in 2007 was that even though it was blatantly caused by excessive private debt, many people were later led to believe that the chief culprit was public debt. But it can hardly be argued that the financial crisis was caused by the public debt. The key issue was not the amount of public sector spending, but the type of spending. Indeed, one of the reasons why Italy’s growth rate has been so slow for the last 15 years is not that it has been spending too much, but that it has not been spending enough in areas like education and human capital. (Mazzucato, 2015, p. 23) In Blyth’s (2013) mind, the state had little stake in such crisis. The mess that we are facing, he (2013) claims, is not the result of a “sovereign debt crisis generated by excessive spending. That we call it a sovereign debt crisis, suggests a very interesting politics of bait and switch at play” (Blyth, 2013, p. 5) The crisis was fundamentally generated within the private sector, but “is being paid by the public sector” (Blyth, 2013, p. 23), which begs the question: If the crisis was generated within the private sector as well as due to the type of spending done in the public sphere, why do “so many people blame the state and see cuts to state spending as the way out of the private sector mess?” (Blyth, 2013, p. 23); and, moreover how come people accept such a state of afairs? If Blyth’s (2013) analysis is accurate, and we do believe it is, and “if austerity is not reducing the debt and producing growth” (Blyth, 2013, p. 23), why and how did it end up being implemented as the solution to address the crises? Wisely, Blyth (2013, p. 13) adds, “we have turned the politics of debt into a morality play, one that has shifted the blame from the banks to the state.” In a crisis, which was intentionally “overexplained and overdetermined” (Blyth, 2013, p. 22) and was fabricated to camouflage a banking system in disarray, it goes without saying that bailing out the massive majority sufering from such crisis was never part of the equation. Austerity was “not just the price of saving banks, it was the price that banks want someone else to pay” (Blyth, 2013, p. 7). Austerity measures thus accomplished what they were designed for: to rescue the financial archeology of capitalism and inject the virus of “low growth which leads to more debt” (Blyth, 2013, p. 11), a towering issue in the way capitalism builds and glues social relations, stripping subjects from any impulse of autonomy. That is why, despite being dangerous, it was implemented as a solution to address the crisis. In education, such austerity reasoning has paved the way for an even more aggressive set of neoliberal reforms, not only at the very core of curriculum and pedagogy through high-stakes testing, standards, Common Core, charters, innovation schools but also imposing a new financial cartography on public schools (Hursh, 2016).

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Austerity politics paved the way to rapidly unleash draconian cuts in social programs that protected disenfranchised communities—once a hallmark of capitalist liberal democracies—and channeled, instead, all financial fluids to the veins of the economy. Take Portugal and Greece as an example. While members of the Union, both nations were not immune to such crisis. And the solution found to take such nations out of the abyss was precisely the same one that Portugal faced three decades before when it was not a member of the European Union, and it needed to be rescued by the IMF—dramatic reduction of state intervention and bailout of the banks—reinforcing the arguments surrounding the ‘Eurosceptics.’ As the “IMF enforced structural adjustments and arm-twisted governments into cutting back on public spending on health, education, child care, development, the NGO’s moved in. [That is] the privatization of everything has also meant the NGO-ization of everything” (Roy, 2014, p. 32). The truth of the matter is that the very reality of “everything” is very selective. The market is only targeting educational apparatuses capable of producing profits. Not surprisingly, the creed of a Europe in crisis, which needs more Europe to overcome such crisis, percolates the commonsense, even if one or more crises need to emerge “to convince people and their governments that the exercise of power at the local level is inadequate and that greater integration is needed” (Smaghi, 2014, p. 9). That is, “without a crisis, change doesn’t occur, and yet crisis is often not the best time to change the institutional framework” (Smaghi, 2014, p. 56). Moreover, the permanent crisis, Santos (2018b) argues, “is a new type of crisis, one which instead of demanding to be explained and calling for its overthrow, it explains everything and justifies the current state of affairs as the only possible one, even if it involves the imposition of the most grotesque and unjust forms of human suffering that were supposed to be thrown into the dustbin of history by the progress of civilization” (p. ix). It is a “systemic crisis, that doesn’t come from the past, but from the future, a crisis of the government of the market” (Fumagalli, 2010, p. 61). Also, it is a crisis of a generation confronted with “the felt loss of a future” (Williams, 1989, p. 103). We are facing a paradox; that is, all of this is happening within the so-called laudable democratic societies under the auspices of an overtly non-democratic structure that is the IMF. The West is imposing democracies all over the world, even at the cost of human lives. It is actually here that one of the cruxes of the current crises resides (Žižek’s, 2012b). As stagnation (Foster and McChesney, 2012), or permanent economic emergency (Žižek, 2010) keeps growing, or as we would say, instability stabilizes, democracy keeps shrinking to a point that, for instance, in the case of Europe, “the true message of the Eurozone crisis is that not only the Euro, but the project of the united Europe itself is dead” (Žižek, 2010, p.  86). While identity is at stake here, such challenges need to be seen as an opportunity for new utopias, or, as Santos (2006) would argue, alternative ways to build more coherent and sustainable alternatives that would “re-politicize Europe, through a shared emancipatory project” (Žižek, 2010, p. 86). More than ever, the reply to every crisis “should be more internationalist

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and universalist than the universality of global capital” (Žižek, 2010, p.  86). This is the best way to address the new period facing dominant and counterdominant trenches. After decades of the welfare state, where cutbacks were relatively limited and came with the promise that things would soon return to normal, we are now entering a state of economic emergency, which is becoming a permanent way of life. It brings with it the threat of far more savage austerity measures, cuts in benefits, diminishing health and education services, and more precarious unemployment. The left faces the difficult task of emphasizing the fact that we are dealing with a political economy that mirrors a “series of political decisions” (Žižek, 2010, p.  86) and that there is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘neutral’ in such a crisis. The cynical goal explicit or implied “is to regulate capitalism—through the pressure of the media, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations—but never to question the liberal-democratic institutional mechanisms of the bourgeois state of law this remains the ‘sacred cow’” (Žižek, 2010, p. 87). In fact while challenging the excesses of a threadbare market and the need to mercilessly regulate the markets, too many counter-dominant intellectuals and movements refuse to put their finger in the pie and destroy the very social mechanisms that maintain such state of affairs (Foster and McChesney, 2012). There is obviously a reason for such refusal. To challenge the very mechanisms that maintain a kind of market socialism, or capitalism with a human face, implies the disruption of the relations and conditions of production, thus promoting “transformative social relations of production” (Žižek, 2010, p. 88). The idea that the economy is the zone of non-ideology is one of the most ferocious ideological claims. With that said, “the economy needs to be seen as ideology” (Žižek, 2010, p. 90). Education is the terrain that proves the irrefutability of such statement. Education and educators have no other option; either they assume to be the accelerator of this new economic momentum, or they will be left with ‘no voice or social place.’ Hence, education and educators have been victims of a system that was designed to fail any challenge towards more social and cognitive justice (Santos, 2014), and they are now mercilessly cornered and cynically charged with the responsibility of eliminating the social malaises. That education was a crucial device within the political economic matrix was always defended, not just by Marxists, neo-Marxists, and progressive intellectuals—who were not without intense criticism sometimes unfairly yet expectedly sarcastic even from within the very left platform—but also by center, center-right, right, and farright intellectuals. Ball (2008) addresses such issues from its very roots by highlighting Blair’s (2005) assertion that the role of education in neoliberal times “is our best economic policy. Education is now at the center of economic policy making for the future” (as cited in Ball, 2008, p. 14). The attacks “on teachers unions, closing of schools in minority and poor communities, students being erratically pushed to a kind of permanent transferred position, meaningless public participation, gentrification of African American and Latino/a working class neighborhoods, and families pushed farther out of the city” (Lipman,

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2011, p.  2) leave little doubt about the nefarious consequences of how education has been positioned to catalyze the new political economy. Neoliberalism unleashed a “global project to gear education to [the so-called] economic competitiveness thus imposing a market discipline in all aspects of schooling” (Lipman, 2011, p. 3). Education is thus the perfect arena, the perfect neoliberal lab to put in place a multitude of policies and actions that showed the real colors of its creative destruction (Harvey, 2005). One of such policies and actions was undeniably the financial strangulation of public education. Austerity policies are a form of violence perpetrated by a policy of cruelty and humiliation hiding “an insulting generosity” (Giroux, 2011, p.  14). These new forms of educational management trigger “dynamic and very immediate changes that have a national and global significance in relation to educational policy, education reforms, democracy, social opportunity and equity and the meaning and practice of education” (Ball, 2012, p.  1; Saltman, 2010). The nexus of education and philanthropy, expectedly, is profoundly promiscuous (Ball, 2012, p. 4), as financial speculators predatorily target education, schools, teachers, and students, as they target any other commodity. The financial profitability completely supersedes any social and cultural impulse. As Karatani (2014) insighfully alerts, it is crucial to refocus the examination of the capitalist matrix not just on the modes and conditions of production, but also on the modes of exchange. With venture philanthropy, the language of education changed dramatically as the language of the field increasingly reflects a very concrete orientation: investments, (rather than grants), value-chain, scaling up, impact, branding, performance, metrics, bottom-line, measurable outcomes, theory of change, entrepreneurship, logic model, market, segment, benchmarkimg, reengineering, and similar terms drawn from the scientific and business world. (Sievers, 2010, p. 387) Finance, Marazzi (2011) argues, “has its own language, and moreover a rather esoteric own language, and many Anglo-Saxon terms are untranslatable into other languages, and above all, designate complex processes not always accessible to the uninitiated, which is to say, to almost everyone” (p. 123). Such vocabulary colonized not just the educational debate but also the very pedagogical and curriculum policies and practices. As I had the opportunity to analyze elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2013), policies and praxis of meticulous financial asphixiation of public education needed to be contextualized as towering devices to rescue a group of corporations and billionares globally that are suffering in the current economic crisis, a strategy that helps capitalism to be back on its track and ensures that no philanthropic superman is left behind, and it is also a severe attack on intellectual freedom and democracy. (p. 706)

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Philanthropism is the institutionalization of “a collective suicide whose victims will include not only education, but democracy itself ” (Giroux, 2011, p. 26). Philanthropism is just one symptom of austerity measures and structural adjustment policies. Another dangerous indicator is how such financial strangulation of public institutions, such as schools, is the incubator of the subjectification of debt, solidifying the making of an in-debt subject—so priceless within the neoliberal cartography.

Fiscal Waterbording: The Subjectification of Debt Everyone is a debtor. (Lazzarato (2011, p. x)

Despite the devastating impact of neoliberalism, neoliberals do not give up in fabricating ‘creative solutions’ to save what they define as the world’s most successful idea and its praxis (Emmott, 2017), regardless of the very meaning of such ‘idea,’ which is the continuation of the unbridled multiplication of wealth for a small minority and the rampant multiplication of levels of poverty, exploration, and segregation for the overwhelming majority. Neoliberalism needs more neoliberalism to suruvive. Welcome thus to neo-neo-liberalism that will restore normalcy as well as redefine equality and justice away from progressive desires of recognition and redistribution (Emmott, 2017). Austerity and adjustment policies not only have triggered a unique possible way of existing, which is through individual surrender to their own indebtedness and indebtedness that is perpetual because it has been subjectified, but also concomitantly created the conditions for unimaginable and appalling levels of civilizational regression that saturates our society. Painfully, neoliberal austerity politics ended up being the last drop in a glass already full of pain, despair, and oppression, perpetrated by more than five decades of brutal cultural politics of economic determinism and imperialism (Davies, 2014). Such callousness not only gradually fermented the lethal condiments of a barbarous, animalistic, and eugenic instinct of survival instigating hate feelings towards the other—that needs to be eliminated at all costs—but also constituted the incubator that preserved the most dangerous predicates of an authoritarianism based on nationalism and tribal populism that emerges as a viral fascism. It looks like that “the populist cat is out the bag and won’t sink away” (Fraser, 2019, p. 28). Under the auspicies of the neoliberal hydra, capitalism “remains a formidable desiring machine, as well as fascism that has assumed the social desires including the desire of repression and death, capitalism has been tied from birth to a savage repressiveness” (Guattari, 2001, p. 219). Lazzarato’s (2011) approach helps us understand neoliberal economy as a process of subjectification. Neoliberal economy is a “subjective economy” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 37) framed within the wrangle “creditor-debtor,” a wrangle that relies at the very core of social relations. Such relation(ships) objectively

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subjectifies “everyone as a debtor” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 7) within a finance matrix increasingly dominated by the totalitarianism of the concubinage creditordebtor. Lazzarato (2011) states: Viewing debt as the archetype of social relations means two things. On one hand it means conceiving economy and society on the basis of an asymmetry of power and not on that of a commercial exchange that implies and presupposes equality. On the other hand, debt means immediately making the economy subjective, since debt is an economic relation, which in order to exist, implies the molding and control of subjectivity such that labor becomes indistinguishable from work in the self. (p. 33) Such wrangle ‘creditor-debtor’ is a power relation—or fuels, and is fueled by power relations—“one of the most important and universal wrangles of modern-day capitalism” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 30), which intensifies “the mechanisms of exploitation and domination at every level of society” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 7). The neoliberal economy is not a finance economy, but a debt economy. To be more precise, within the complex neoliberal global mantra, “what we call finance is indicative of the increasing force of the relation creditor-debitor relation” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 22). The subjectification of debt is cultivated daily, and it is ultimately an ideological position, framing the economy as a process of subjectification, which propels a debt economy. The debt economy, “is an economy of time and subjectification in a specific sense, an economy turned towards the future, since finance is a promise of future wealth, and consequently incommensurable with actual wealth” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 46). Debt “bridges the present and future, it anticipates and preempts the future” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 70). In fact, [d]ebt is not an impediment to growth. Indeed, it represents the economic and subjective engine of the modern-day economy. Debt creation, that is the creation and development of the power relation between creditors and debtors, has been conceived and programmed as the strategic heart of neoliberal politics. (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 25) Lazzarato (2011) further explains that neoliberalism, since its emergence has been founded on a logic of debt, which “not only makes the economy subjective, since debt is an economic relation” (p. 33), but also, before a series of deep financial crises, “it is rather the ‘indebt man’ who appears instead to embody the subjective figure of modern-day capitalism” (p. 38). Basically, as I argue previously, there is no existence out of debt. Debt implies “subjectivication, a self torture” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 42); it constitutes “a new technique of power, and the power to control and constrain debtors does not come from outside, as in disciplinary societies, but from debtors themselves, as they become their own

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managers” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 69). Thus, debt “is power that leaves you free and it encourages and pushes you to act in such as way that you able to honor your debts” (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 31) with more debt. That is, neoliberalism manipulates the relation to the self (the production of the subject, of the individual) as it pushes the relation to its paroxysm. The epitome of this is ‘human capital’ (the entrepreneur of the self), the purpose of subjectification. By making the person capital, the latter exarcebates individualism while it compels him to be evaluated and calibrated according to the logic of losses and gains, supply and demand, investment (in education, individual insurance, etc) and profitability. (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 185) In this context, the financial crisis is also “subjectively produced” (Lazzarato, 2015, pp. 41–42); and, debt “is comfortably infinite.” Through the imposing of a very specific way of governing by debt, neoliberalism unleashed all the necessary requisites to fabricate an indebt human being. The production of such subjectivity has relied on “two diferent mechanisms which weaved together the individual subject (social subjection) and its apparent opposite, desubjectivation” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 183). One of the social apparatuses so responsible for such framework was education, through its pedagogical and curriculum form and content. Needless to say, such debt panopticon afects diferent subjects diferently. Debt is a racialized predatory pandemic, the enzyme of neoliberal political economy—militarization of the police force, fines, punitive judicial system—which lethally devastates communities of minorities and people of color, normalizing carceral capitalism (Wang, 2018). Neoliberalism is carceral capitalism, and carcerality becomes commonsensically commonsense (Wang, 2018). Such subjectification is the fertilizer of a neoliberal society, which is more and more an “achievment society than a disciplinary society run by achievement subjects and not disciplinary subjects” (Han, 2015, p. 8). The subjectivity of debt nulifies the negativity of the ‘should subject,’ paving the way for the positivity of the ‘can subject’ (Han, 2015, p. 9). The “social consciousness switches from should to can with an achievmenet subject that is faster and more productive than the obedient subject” (Han, 2017a, p. 9; 2017b). The absence of dominance is a fallacy, though, as “it doesn’t entail freedom at all, instead it makes freedom and constraint coincide” (Han, 2015, p. 9). Such managerial reason that frames our educational system unleashed a neoliberal public pedagogy that frames a “culture of corporate public pedagogy producing market identities, values and practices” (Giroux, 2008, p.  113). My claim is that such neoliberal public pedagogy is a pedagogy of debt (Paraskeva and Macrine, 2015), which is not just a financial framework that pushes people to a quasi-irremediable oppressed position; it is also the pedagogical fiber that permeates the daily lives of the oppressed. It is not a discursive matter—quite the opposite; it institutionalizes a concrete space and time that imposes on the

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oppressed a subjectivity that is systematically defined by its deficits. The fact that almost 90% of American students had at least one credit card (Lazzarato, 2015) not only speaks volumes of the accelerating indebtedness of average [U.S.] families (Williams, 2006), but also is an indicator of the consequences of the de-funding of public education. The chirurgical defunding of public higher education establishes a “principle that citizens should pay more directly for public services, and public services should be administered less through the state and more through private enterprise” (Williams, 2006). While this is a disquieting reality, it is just one side of the coin. The other side of the coin, as we have examined, is that it opens the door for the private model of management and philanthropic impulses. Student loan debts have eclipsed both auto loans and credit cards, making student loan debt the largest form of consumer debt outside of mortgages. Neoliberalism has parked in a dangerous neoradical centrism and its creed in the market is the sole engine of economic development, which completely thwarted the democratic fabric and the social contract. Neoliberalism solved its incompatibility with democracy by drastically reducing the space of democracy and its praxis as much as possible by promoting a ‘low-density democracy,’ and sometimes in some cases—if needed—eliminating it altogether. Democracy, in many cases—even representative—turned to be ‘a used to be’ phenomena. The absence of a truly just participatory democratic culture—a major obstacle to the neoliberal model—coupled with an unprecedented stubborn economic crisis and more than predictable migratory flows, a State in shambles, and relentless austerity measures would constitute some of the essential features and fertilizers for what was predictably about to erupt: that is, authoritarianism, populism, and fascism. Such neoradical centrism paved the way for the gradual emergence of fascist and eugenicist waves and impulses both in the United States and in too many other nations, epitomized by individuals such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Jean Marie Le Pen, Viktor Mihály Orbán, Andrzej Duda, among others, that saturated civil society with a eugenic plethora that dug an even greater gap in the racial, class, and gender divisions and inequalities in society, exacerbating the narrative of how danger is a very specific other, and concomitantly providing the solution, triggering a ferocious tribal white populist nationalism. Even though the neoliberal movement has consolidated itself on the basis of conservative arguments (such as defense of a state that would preserve the values and family morals, a return to the historical past), the fact is that the populist sphere was never dominant within the hegemonic bloc. Today, the divisions between left and right, Krastev (2017) argues, “have been replaced by a conflict between internationalists and nativists” (p.  131). The world is facing the ferocious return of patriotic nationalist discourses, politics, and polices that not so long ago drove human society to a verge of final destruction, which culminated with genocide, atomic bombs, and starvation. Fascism became viral. Fascist patriotic movements and individuals today, as in the past, co-opted the political arena at all levels and spheres, emptying

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spaces on the right, at the center, and on the left, colonizing commonsensically the commonsense by saturating it with the inevitability ‘of making the Westus great again,’ thus domesticating and naturalizing all the means towards such a eugenic end. Whereas before, the secret of the neoliberal recipe lay in its ability to situate the political phenomena beyond the left and the right, building a new center radicalism, nowadays such centrism is annihilated and completely meaningless through an authoritarian populism of eugenic genesis. We are facing ‘an anything can go’ philosophy of praxis without any scientific basis, as carte blanche to re-erecting the economy to save not the West itself, but the Caucasians and Whites of the West, the Westus deeply articulated within a eugenic Eurocentric matrix. This profitable battle has no price, thus no budget (Klein, 2008), creating a new political economy even if it puts society in a process of painful regression. Under such shameful neoliberal upgrade (i.e. authoritarian tribal national populism), one witnesses the re-escalation of a vertiginous cult on the economy as the base to overcome the challenges faced by modern Western Eurocentric social matrix. After more than a century of severe criticism on Marx’s and its Marxist reductive ‘base-superstructure class’ analysis, it is quite a paradox that precisely those who championed and still championed the belligerent attacks on Marx’s reductionism are probably, perhaps unconsciously, the best Marxists alive, as they rally for the economy as the fundamental terrain to sustain more capitalism, a terrain that needs to be mercilessly squeezed to its own unthinkable limits, as capitalism needs more capitalism to survive at any cost. Appallingly, as Greenspan and Woodridge’s (2018) theorem justifies, such social pandemonium is related with an anemic growth and due to the fact that late capitalism lost its appetite for creative destruction. The way forward out of such regression was a leech approach, sucking as much as possible from the economy. The tribal authoritarian nationalism underpinning current fascism is a predictable direct consequence triggered by austerity measures and policies of structural adjustment imposed to rescue capitalism, not humanity. Needless to say, we are not here subscribing any kind of social and cultural reproductionist platform. However, within late capitalism, there is no existence out of debt. The neoliberal pedagogy of debt teaches individuals their place, their roles, and their responsibilities as economic pawns in this global financial chess game. However, the current neoliberal globalization is much more than economics, though; it is also epistemological; it is also about the perpetuation of epistemological cleansing; it is the consolidation of epistemological privilege and fascism; it is a form of cultural politics that produces greater cultural and economic rewards (Mennell, 2009; Strange, 1996) for the globalized few (Bauman, 1997). Globalization is about “the hell of the identical” (Han, 2018, p.  18); it is inherent in globalization, Han (2018) claims, “a violence that makes all interchangeable, compable, and thus identical” (p. 19). Neoliberalism “constructs an apotic, a construction based on an exclusive optic that identifies as undesirable and excludes the enemies of the system or unsuitable for such system;

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while the panopticon disciplines, the apotic takes care of security” (Han, 2018, p.  21). In a world paced by the cult of the identical, “perception is a bulimic vision” (Han, 2018, p. 10). It would be unreasonable to suggest that these economic, cultural, epistemological, and social transformations would not interfere with educational policies and politics. Indeed, education has been used to support one of the key arguments of neoliberal global impulses—especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall—which is the fading of the “iron curtain of ideology and the vigorous emergence of the velvet curtain of culture” (Žižek, 2008, p. 661). Subsumed within such new managerial forms and frames lies the desperate need to save Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological views of the world, to rescue the Westus, a dominant Eurocentric humanity that needs more sub-humanity to prevail, as it did since its emergence. Clearly, the current viral fascism is the lava of the capitalist neoliberal volcano, its very own magma. It is the result of a social symptom perpetually ignored throughout the centuries, and it needs to be seen as the continuous materialization of ‘the’ eugenic framework that festers modernity, and solidifies Modern Western Eurocentrism; in a word, the Empire. Welcome to the return of fascism—ur-fascism (Eco, 2017) in a refined tribal populist dimension— the entrée of the neoliberal current hegemonic eugenic momentum one that solidifies ‘the epistemicide’ (Santos, 2014), and what I called education and curriculum epistemicide and reversive epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2011; 2014; 2016). This momentum welds a new nexus between education and political economy and takes it into a different level by kneeling public education and educators into newer exploitive capitalist modes of production and consequently new conditions of class, gender, race, ethnic, sexual exploitation, inequality, and segregation required by market desires. There is no capitalism without perpetual dynamics of exploitation, inequality, and segregation. Capitalism and a just society and democracy are a blunt oxymoron. Shockingly, it seems that elections are unable or not allowed to change economic policy (Varoufakis, 2018). Neoliberalism and its Washington Consensus, Mignolo (2018) claims, “displaced the compromise of development and modernization and replaced it with development and globalization, which displaced and subsumed the liberal connotation of progress, modernity, civilization and development” (p.  111). The loss of hegemony of industrial labor in the late twentieth century was gradually replaced by immaterial labor, which brought about new nuances within the modes and conditions of production (Hardt and Negri, 2000). We are thus faced with a new biopolitics that is associated with immaterial work and that overthrows old economic frontiers penetrating, like never before, in the cultural, social, and political domains (Gil, 2009). The immaterial work gives a new logic to neoliberalism, a logic—much more individualistic—“in which the force of labor is not measurable by working hours” (Gil, 2009, p. 41). Immateriality creates a new beast—or upgrades the old industrial beast—and we are faced with a “body-culture, not a species-body” (Gil, 2009, p. 41). In a world facing the lethal consequences of a senseless and unraveled greedy market, it is no surprise that we are faced with attacks on job security,

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wages, and social security; the annihilation of basic rights, such as education and heath care; constant assault on democracy, freedom, and equality; viral disrespect of basic human rights; the creation and domestication of terror; and the eugenic construction of the ‘Other.’ Fear about the present and future, Han (2018, p. 21) claims, transforms on xenophobia, which is a juicy condiment of fascist impulses, exacerbating terrorism That is why nationalists and terrorists share a common genealogy (Han, 2018). Fear triggers hate, and “societies of fear and of hate promoted themselves mutually” (Han, 2018, p. 21). The ‘Other’ is a cargo; that is, “the times in which the other existed passed; the other as mystery, the other as seduction, the other as eros, the other as desire, the other as hell, the other as pain are disappearing” (Han, 2018, p.  21). In fact, “crisis situtaions are also so many opportunities for the restructuring of dominance” (The Invisible Committee, 2009, p. 13). In relying on the (n)eugenic creed of saving humanity with more sub-humanity (Santos, 2014) and forcing the world’s massive dominated masses to kneel before chaos, austerity measures have rung the bells within Modern Western Eurocentric turf, awakening the survival of the fittest cult, thus making xenophobic, misogynist, racial, and eugenic feelings viral. Such feelings were the seeds of the violent eruption of tribal authoritarian nationalisms, the riverbed of the return of pure and crude fascism, or the emergence of ur-fascism (Eco, 2017). I argue that, contrary to a recent past, under such ur-fascist consulate, one is witnessing an overt re-escalation of the eugenic dimension of the educational system reinforcing through the curriculum apparatuses the promotion and legitimation of a Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix pillared on a particular coloniality of being, power, knowledge, and labor (Quijano, 1992; Mignolo, 2000; 2012; Maldonado-Torres, 2003; 2008; Grosfoguel, 2011; 2010). To be more precise, neoliberalism re-escalates the epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2017; Santos, 2014). Regrettably, in the needed struggle to defy neoliberalism, the overwhelming majority of Modern Western Eurocentric counter-hegemonic movements undermined or ignored what I called elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2017) ‘an educational and curriculum epistemicide,’ which is quite towering to the neoliberal phenomena. While dead—in its traditional formulations—neoliberalim is still dominant (Davies, 2016). In fact, today’s neoliberal colors are slightly different from those that were present when it emerged at the end of the 1970s, and different again from that which held sway from the 1990s, in the long boom preceding 2008 (Davies, 2016, p. 123). What has emerged, Davies (2016, p.  123) claims, “is not simply another ‘post’ but a new phase of neoliberalism, which is organized around an ethos of punishment. This is not the type of punishment conceived by Bentham and historicized by Foucault, namely a measured science of displeasure.” That is, punishment has been pushed into a refined masochist level by the so-called invisible hands of marketers. As Davies (2016, p. 123) argues, today’s neoliberal colors portray a “relentless form that acts in place of reasoned discourse, replacing the need for

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hegemonic consensus formation. It is this that provokes shock and incredulity in response, captured in the notion of ‘fiscal waterboarding.’” Why even before such multitude of chaotic chaos were critical counter-dominant movements unable to pull the trigger and at least interrupt the epistemicide (Santos, 2014)? What else it was/is needed? What was/is missing? That society arrived at the beginning of the twenty-first century facing appalling regressive realities is beyond any doubt. Neoliberal attempts—even by force if needed—created a conservative modernization, which saturated the commonsense for decades and allowed dominant groups to conquer power, driving society to a quasi-irremediable regressive condition.

A ‘Retrogressive Anthropogenesis’ Our society has become an asylum sometimes imperceptible, guided by the delirium of the nondelirium, and the aspiration to the violence of the silence in which the individual unconsciousness moves into a collective unconsciousness. (Gil, 2009, p. 17)

As I have been arguing, neoliberalism expectedly drove society into an alarming regressive momentum. As I have argued before, neoliberalism has showed different metamorphoses since its emergence at the end of 1970s. While for example Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Reagan in the United States “rallied towards power with the promise of a better future, which never materialized except for an elite minority with access to education and capital assets. The contemporary populist promises of making England or America great again is not done in the same way.” In this sense, Davies (2018, p.  13) adds, one is not before “a compromise or a political platform.” This is so irrefutable, Davies (2018, p.  13) claims, that “when performed by people like Boris Johnson, one does not even know if it is to be taken seriously, or if it is a collective hallucination in real time that can be satisfied as a video game.” From a conservative restoration anchored on a eugenic philosophy of praxis, the neoliberal hegemonic bloc and its fallacy of no other alternative to a better world ended up cornering society into a remarkable chaotic condition locally and globally and sinking society in an astonishing great regression and a great fertilizer of dangerous nationalisms peppered with tribal populist impulses. Needless to say, neoliberal pundits have been marketing such havoc as a natural component of the capitalist system, framing the current crisis as another wave of turbulence, needed to move capitalism to the next level, restoring the economic ‘order.’ The mere fact that the crisis has been socially fabricated as perfectly natural, i.e. as an integral part of the processes of development of capitalism, makes it possible to understand and absorb the consequences of  such crisis as perfectly natural as well, even if that means the promotion of genocide and extermination of populations throughout the world. This is

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the creepy paradox promoted by the advocates of capitalism. Quite naturally, neoliberalism does not hesitate for a second in framing the solutions for the resolution of crises, for example, in inequality, exploitation, and even genocide and slaughter. Appallingly, one is confronted with the new moral and political question to face the crisis, which, for example, oscillates today between two alarming questions. The first places the unavoidability of genocide “for the organization of human society” (Joxe, 2001, p.  84). For example, pro-Serbian European defenders of appeasement have a clear, straightforward answer for such a question, as they “seem to think, those who dragged their feet so that ethnic cleansing would simplify the landscape” (Joxe, 2001, p.  84). The second—equality brutal—assumes the possibility of everything being controlled by means of targeted, ubiquitous threats in real time, accompanied by a moral discourse, made possible by a few technically spectacular missile attacks—Iraq and Kosovo, like the futurist computer—satellite experts of the revolution in military affairs in the United States seems to think (Joxe, 2001, p. 84). For neoliberals, “inequality is not only a natural state of market economies from a neoliberal perspective but is actually one of the strongest motor forces of progress” (Mirowski, 2014, p. 63). That is, what would rationally be immoral became moral, a morality that is not even immoral, but rather is simply a new moral that under the seal of commonsense pushes the dangerous survival of the fittest eugenic cult beyond its own limit. Carnage is moralized, and the new morality oscillates between chaos and chaos, between tragedy and tragedy, placing the subjects on a perpetual trapeze of chaos. Under the creed ‘never let a crisis to go to waste,’ neoliberals actually see the crisis as “the perfect field of action, since it offers more latitude for introduction of bold experimental ‘reforms’ that only precipitate further crises down the road” (Mirowski, 2014, p.  61; Klein, 2008). There are features and impulses triggered by the current crisis that have no historical precedent though. Streeck (2014, p. 38) questions if “what appears to be, a vicious circle of harmful trends could continue forever.” That is, “are there counterforces that might break it—and what will happen if they fail to materialize, as they have for almost four decades now?” (Streeck, 2014, p. 38). Historians, he (2014, p. 38) adds, have showed us “that crises are nothing new under capitalism, and may in fact be required for its longer term health. But what they are talking about are cyclical movements or random shocks, after which capitalist economies can move into a new equilibrium, at least temporarily.” However, in his (2014, p. 38) critical terms, today one experienes a totally different real(ity). In fact, what we see today, “appears in retrospect to be a continuous process of gradual decay, protracted but apparently all the more inexorable. Recovery from the occasional Reinigungskrise is one thing; interrupting a concatenation of intertwined, longterm trends quite another.” Thus, “assuming that ever lower growth, ever higher inequality and ever rising debt are not indefinitely sustainable, and may together issue in a crisis that is systemic in nature—one whose character we have difficulty imagining—can we see signs of an impending reversal?” (Streeck, 2014, p. 38).

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In a crisis that “reveals the excess of supply over demand, there is no mechanism of market regulation that alone could reestablish the conditions to overcome the crisis” (Marazzi, 2011, p.  75). As I have examined previously, what is new is that neoliberalism dried both the central right and central left political options, stimulating a major transformation on the right political specter (Porta, 2018, p.  73), a specter that feeds and embraces a “dangerous populist wave whose lethal feature relies not in its nationalistic conservative impulse, but in its eugenic reactionary creed” (Krastev, 2017, p.  130). We are facing, in Berardi’s (2012) words, a collapse, which is not simply related with economic and cultural factors; it is also related with “a crisis of social imagination about the future” (p. 8), that is “the imagination of the end is being corrupted by the end of imagination” (Santos, 2018b, p.  ix). What we are facing is indeed the reboot of humankind’s ideological revolution, one that frames the current Modern Western Eurocentric time, which is a paradoxical time: On the one hand our current time is marked by huge developments and thespian changes, an era that is referred to as the electronic revolution of communications, information, genetics and the biotechnological. On the other hand, it is a time of disquieting regressions, a return of the social evils that appeared to have been or about to be overcome. The return of slavery and slavish work; the return of high vulnerability to old sicknesses that seemed to have been eradicated and appear now linked to new pandemics like HIV/AIDS: the return of the revolting social inequalities that gave their name to the social question at the end of the nineteenth century; in sum, the return of the specter of war, perhaps now more than ever a world war, although whether cold or not is as yet undecidable. (Santos, 2005, p. vii) Santos echoes Berman’s (1983) critique of socio-economic modernization, a “paradoxal unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual desintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish” (p. 15). And, “to be more modern is to be part of a universe in which as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’” (Berman, 1983, p. 15). Neoliberal answers to the current fabricated global crisis “put even Lenin’s post 1927 exploits to shame” (Varoufakis, 2011, p. 2). We are living a collective aporia—that is, a state of intense puzzlement in which we find ourselves when our certainties fall to pieces; when suddenly we get caught in an impasse, at a loss to explain what our eyes can see, our fingers can touch, our ears can hear. At those rare moments, as our reasons valiantly struggle to fathom what the senses are reporting, our aporia humbles us and readies the prepared mind for previously unbearable truths. (Varoufakis, 2011, p. 1)

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The world today, Pessoa (2002) would certainly put it, “belongs only to the insensitive and agitated. The right to live and to triumph is achieved today almost by the same processes of those that define the internment in a mental hospital—incapacity to think, immorality, and hyperexcitation” (p. 164). Our society has become an “asylum sometimes imperceptible, guided by the delirium of the non-delirium, and the aspiration to violence of the silence in which the individual unconsciousness moves into a collective unconsciousness” (Gil, 2009, p. 17). We are witnessing an era of “random regression symptoms” (Geiselberger, 2017, p.  10). Such paradox graphically reveals how modernity and the totalitarian cult of Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological framework are outdated. In a tribute to Marx and Engels (2012), one would claim that “a [new] spectre is haunting Modern Western Eurocentrism—the spectre of otherness [and] all powers of Modernity [United States, China, Russia, European Union] entered in a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre” (p.  x). As ‘history repeats itself first as a tragedy, second as farce,’ it would be quite crucial to not forget that under German fascism “the progress of civilization was exposed as the concealed process of human regression” (Honneth, 1991, p. 37). Social normalcy was what Adorno termed as retrogressive anthropogenesis, that is, “social cultural evolution which on the testimony of cumulative growth in productive forces gives the impression of progress, turns out to be the extended act of regression in the history of the species” (Honneth, 1991, p. 37). Such great regression is the vivid symptom of a financial crisis that looks like a long-term crisis, a crisis paired with the credit crunch, banking bankruptcies, continuous interventions by monetary authorities not able to structurally influence the crisis; there are costly actions of economic revival, risks of insolvency of individual countries, deflationary pressures and possible violent returns of inflation, unemployment increases and income reduction. (Marazzi, 2011, p. 65) Perhaps this is the moment to dare “to learn to think about capitalism coming to an end without assuming responsibility for answering the question of what one proposes to put in its place” (Streeck, 2014, p. 44). Dangerously, we are not facing a normal crisis, that is, one is not facing “an interregnum, but rather a destitute process that at the moment has no option” (Balibar, 2018, p. 69). The political earthquakes of our era—“whether Donald Trump’s triumph or the electoral apotheosis in India and the Philippines of dictators accused of mass murder, or the widespread acclaim in Russia and Turkey of implacable dictatorships and imperialists like Putin and Tayyip—have revealed enormous repressed energy” (Mishra, 2017, p. 171). Furthermore, one witnesses “the world rejection of liberal democracy which has been substituted by an overt authoritarian populism” (Appadurai, 2017, p. 17). Examples of such ‘regression’ are quite visible, as I have examined previously, in the “U.S. with Trump,

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in Russia with Putin, in India with Modi, in Turkey with Erdoğan, not ignoring the cases of Austria, Poland, and Hungary” (Appadurai, 2017, p. 17), and France, where Le Pen’s far right is becoming powerful and, more recently, Brazil with the election of Jair Bolsonaro. The election of far-right-wing leaders “became examples of how to walk away from democracy” (Appadurai, 2017, p. 24) democratically, and vivid symptoms of such regression. More than a third of the world—the entire population of such nations—“voted in such leaders and against democracy” (Appadurai, 2017, p. 24). It is a “vote to exit” (Appadurai, 2017, p. 24) liberal democracy, which constitutes a horrifying regression. Let me pause here a bit to clarify an important matter. There is a tendency— understandable I would say—to ‘single-figurizing authoritarianism.’ In my doctoral seminars here at UMass Dartmouth, vibrant—and sometimes hurtful— discussions erupted on such matter, as I tiressly try to dialogue with students so that one could avoid such dogmatic and precipitated analysis. Trump and others are a symptomalogy of what Fraser (2019, p.  19) calls “an hegemonic gap.” That is, with a political “menu saturated yet limited to progressive and reactionary neoliberalism(s), there was no force to oppose the decimation of working class and midle class standards of leaving which left a huge segment of the electorate a natural politcal home” (Fraser, 2019, pp. 18–19). With such placeness “it was only a matter of time before someone would fill the gap” (Fraser, 2019, p. 19). Unpacking the empire is above all to dissect its socially constructed mechanisms of power, as “the empire is not an enemy that confronts us head-on; it is a rhythm that imposes itself a way of dispensing and dispersing reality” (The Invisible Committee, 2009, p.  13). Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Erdoğan, Orbán, Duda, and others did not ‘invent’ the horror we are facing today, yet they are the faces of such eugenic rhythm. Such obsession is both erroneous and dangerous and drives one way away from the fundamental issues that actually allowed the rise of viral fascism. Roy (2017) makes no euphemisms on the issue as well. People spend so much time mocking Trump or waiting for him to be impeached. And the danger with that kind of obsession with a single person is that you don’t see the system that produced him. You don’t see that, obviously, there was something about those eight years of Obama’s presidency that created Trump and if we just keep obsessing about this one person without seeing what would happen. . . . [W]hat would happen if he wasn’t there tomorrow and Mike Pence came? Would it be better? You know? The kind of havoc that has been created in the world when I think about it now, between Europe and America increasingly, the simple truth is that these economies can only function by selling the weapons that they manufacture. Weapons which you cannot even imagine that the human mind can conceive of and they are doing the selling and we’re doing the buying. (p. 1)

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In a collapsing world, neoliberalism, which has been able to maneuver and mold democracy to its inhuman and greedy interests, finds now the perfect storm to move forward its agenda, in the face of fascism. In depoliticizing society and its social arena, neoliberalism actually did the dirty work for tribal populist impulses to cruise in its supreme form of fascism, by “inverting the relationship between technical rationality and substantive ethos” (Davies, 2014, p. 7). As Touraine (1995) argues, the authoritarian Brejenevian soviet communism, the totalitarian Chinese Maoism, the democratic European social democracy, the autoritahrian post-colonial nationalisms, the Latin American or Indian national popular semi-democratic regimes were all overthrown. Whether one likes it or not, our century is not directed by social actors, legislators and ideologues, as it was the end of the nineteenth century; It is led by the World Bank and the IMF, either by weakening political and social controls of the economy and by strengthening world markets and relative advantages of each country. (p. 9) That is, a “world which politics has been heavily disenchanted by economics requires its own mode of enquiry which is alert to the fact that political logic no longer provides the structures of collective experience and action for many people” (Davies, 204, p. 10). Although democracy is not to be blamed on fascism that becomes viral, the fact is that it has allowed the existence of fascists in its terrain under the flag of social tolerance. Democracy ‘accepted’ in its womb individuals and impulses that were against democracy, a paradox that one must not undermine. The fascism of our time, to use Kalecki’s (2009) framework, while superseeding its own right-wing formulations of the 1960s, exhibits common “macroeconomic and psychoanalytical elements” (Davies, 2018, p. 11). Undeniably, such great regression does not reveal a mere economic failure, but rather a breakdown in the political relationships between appropriation, distribution, and production. Growth cannot pull us out of the crisis, only new principles of appropriation, ownership, and production can. Capitalists and neoliberals are incapable of envisioning what these principles might be, because now that reform has proved impossible, the only thing they can do is to implement populist and authoritarian policies. (Lazzarato, 2015, pp. 56–57) The crisis is out of the so-called political, conveniently, and yet, thus, it is profoundly political. It became a “means of governing in a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse” (The Invisible Committee, 2009, p. 14). The crisis that contemporary global societies face also translates an unprecedented historic regression. Humanity—defined in Eurocentric terms—that, as I have dissected, has been based on sub-humanity (Santos, 2014) is no longer sustainable, precisely because the premises that

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socially constructed and allowed sub-humanity have been exhausted. The current great regression is showing a level of incomprehensiveness way beyond what one thought and defined as ‘impossible.’ It seems, as Pessoa (2002) would say, that “today, the right to live and to triumph is won almost by the same processes by which the admission in an asylum is achieved. The inability to think, the amorality and hyperexistence” (p. 164) are key categories of success in our society. The possibility of the impossibility is with us. While, on the one hand, this great regression is the foreseeable result of an unhappy eugenic cultural politics that has hitherto been triumphant (in spite of the victories and successes of anti-capitalist movements over the centuries, capitalism has always survived all crises, since they are an integral part of their development) that drew ideological, economic, political, and spiritual matrices, on the other hand, it is intriguing why, in the face of such tragedy, counterhegemonic movements of a critical nature were not able to impose themselves as dominant and avoid the suffering of the greater majority of humanity. What lacked the critical platform to be able to interrupt the sub-humanity on which humanity is based? It looks like “society is now, more than ever, organized along immunilogical lines” (Han, 2015, p. 2). This issue is transversal to this book, and we will return to it later on. However, we are now concerned with another crucial question as well. If, as we have been arguing, the crisis is part of the very processes of development of capitalism, and capitalism, as its history proves, has always overcome on its own the crises, how can one be so sure that capitalism will not survive this crisis? That is, if the humanity designed by capitalism is based on a subhumanity, and if we see no signs of the end of capitalism, how can one hypothesize about the end of a system that is granted as a crushing machine of equality? Also, what is our role as educators and curriculum scholars to end capitalism? Such questions are important, and open us to two avenues. The first one, which I will explore in great detail later on, is related to the noisy silences triggered by some insufficiencies on the part of the counterhegemonic movements with a critical and radical inclination. That is to say, I argue that the crisis we are in is not only about neoliberal eugenic triumphalism (although this is an important part of the equation of tragedy), but it is also related with the incapacity of the overwhelming majority of counter-hegemonic radicals and critics—and their critical post-structural postmodernist battles—in realizing that the theoretical and practical solutions to interrupt and annihilate capitalism cannot be found only within the epistemological terrain of Eurocentric Western Modernity, terrain that constitutes the capitalist ideological registry, and major developer of such crises. I argue further that the vitality of critical theory lies in assuming this inability as a way of solving it, as indeed some critical and radical theorists laudably have decided to do. A second path, which we will deal with in the following chapter, relates to the following fact. While on the one hand, it is true that the crisis is part of the genesis of capitalism and that, as history shows, capitalism has always surpassed its own crises, on the other hand, there is no way of ignoring that this crisis transpires different contours.

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Contrary to the crises of the past—which functioned as levers and springs for capitalism to emerge out of them even stronger and always in very creative and innovative ways—this one seems to show very different contours. It took place, Balakrishnan (2009, p.  11) claims, “on a vast larger scale, and no bailout can realistically keep the world economy from entering into either a new era of depression or a protectorate period of slow-growth stabilization, or perhaps some novel of the two.” We are facing a global crisis, “a crisis of hegemony with the breakdown of the authority of the established political classes and parties” (Fraser, 2019, p.  8).” And what it is frighetning is that the reconstruton of the ‘old’ neoliberal hegemonic bloc—progressive and reactionary conservative neoliberals—implies “not just the continuation but the intensification of the current crisis, of the conditions that created Trump” (Fraser, 2019, pp. 28–29). Echoing Gramsci (1999, pp. 275–276) we are facing a crisis of authority, that is the current crisis of the critical is also “a symptom of a ruling class that has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer leading, but only dominant”; that is, Gramsci (1999, p. 276) adds, “the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously.” As he (1999, p. 276) bluntly and insightfully stresses “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” The truth is that it seems that the capitalist system is maxed out; it has reached its limits of scale. It looks like there is no more excess possible for a system that can only survive in perpetual excess. The very own excess has been maxed out. It seems that there isn’t much more latitude in the equation of exploration, especially with a planet whose natural resources have been extinguished daily. This crisis is also the mirror of a model of Western Eurocentric Modernity that seems to inaugurate the beginning of its end. There does not seem to be room for cunning innovation maneuvers that basically try to save what is not salvageable anymore. It looks like a crisis with a “number of unfamiliar characteristics stemming from the inability of advanced capitalist societies to bear the costs of a new socio-technical infrastructure to supersede the existing fixed-capital grid” (Balakrishnan, 2009, p. 14) That is, not only do natural resources show signs of extinction, but also the oppressed of the world have decided on recent unprecedented forms of struggle. In essence, if on the one hand the dominant groups do not want to lose the opportunities that a crisis promotes, the dominated movements and groups are also not willing to ignore and seize the opportunities that this crisis promotes (Mirowski, 2014). Contrary to past crises, this crisis is also the terminal crisis of the eugenic coloniality model of Eurocentric Western Modernity, which means that the responses to the crisis must have to be found beyond the epistemological parameters of Eurocentric Western Modernity—in essence assuming the recognition of the impossibility of maintaining a particular sub-humanity. The very Eurocentric global linear thinking (Mignolo, 2015) that frames the political sphere “is facing closure struggling with struggles able to pave the way for a new order” (The Invisible Committee, 2009, p. 26). It seems that “from left to right, it’s the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistant adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys” (The Invisible Committee, 2009, p. 25).

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The epistemological coloniality model of Western Eurocentric Modernity has run out on a planet that is now perceived as having little more to give to a humanity than its only existence, an existence that relies on exploitation, segregation, poverty and . . . regression. While proposals to confront the crisis (for example in our field of curriculum and education) reveal covert ways of perpetuating a violent epistemic way of existence, it is undeniable that the sub-humanity perpetrated by Modern Western Eurocentric epistemologies is unsustainable. Along with Jorge (2020), I would argue that we need an alarm state to challenge such regression. In the next chapter, I turn my focus to the examination of the coloniality matrix of power pillared in the modern Western Eurocentric epistemological framework. In doing so, I will also argue that such matrix has exhausted its capabilities and arguments to keep dominating hegemonically our society’s attempts to impose on humans and humanity—and consequently a sub-human and sub-humanity—to “maintain control of epistemic meaning” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 172). Paradoxically, what the current social havoc dissected here shows is something that Lipovetsky (2019) and oppressed groups and movements seem to understand that so well, that is capitalism seems to be still the biggest revolutionary force.

Note 1. I thank my colleague and friend Manuel Silva for the countless debates we both had on several issues including the concept ‘righting the left’ while I was at the University of Minho, Portugal.

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3

El Patron Colonial de Poder. Game Over! To Resist Re-existing and/or Re-exist Resisting Colonialism

Let’s go comrades, the European game is definitely finished, it is necessary to find something else. (Fanon, 1963, p. 239)

In this chapter, I examine how Modern Western Eurocentric systems of domination have been responsible for the current unimaginable havoc. As I have examined in the previous chapter, ‘humanity defined in Eurocentric terms’ (Mignolo, 2018) has reached, as Adorno would put it, an appalling ‘retrogressive anthropogenesis’; it has regressed historically in an unprecedented way. The idea is to provide an x-ray of a matrix that has driven ‘humanity’ to such unprecedented regression. Modern Western Eurocentrism drove society to a lasting regress. I will dissect what Quijano (1992) has coined as the ‘coloniality matrix of power’ (el patron colonial de poder) and its epistemological colors. I analyze how such matrix fosters gendered, casted, and raced epistemic privilege and fascism as well as how our education and curriculum is deeply related with epistemological blindness and institutional racism, casteism, and genderism producing a full-blast curriculum epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2011a; 2017; 2016a; Santos, 2014). I examine the clashing dynamics of modernity—colonial world system—and highlight the importance of concepts, such as colonial difference and transmodernity. I argue that ‘(an)other knowledge is not only possible but real’ (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; Santos, 2007a). I will also emphasize the need to engage in a decoloniality way of existence and thinking as well as the need to decolonize education and curriculum. I will dissect the very notions of human and humanity under the Modern Western Eurocentric consulate; such decolonial metamorphoses cannot and will not come just from “the existent philosophies and cultures of scholarship” (Mignolo, 2008, p.  232). It implies a commitment to challenge Western historical epistemicides, destroying millenary geopolitics of power that produced and reproduced a eugenic coloniality of power, being, knowledge, and labor, which portrays “epistemology as something ahistorical” (Mignolo, 2008, p.  234). In a moment that our field is laudably vocalizing the need for internationalization and globalization—which in so many ways reflects pure Westernization (or ‘Tagharrub’ in Arabic terms [Mahmood, 2005])—this is, like never before, a necessary challenge. I will also

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argue that such coloniality matrix of power (Quijano, 1992), although having exhausted its capability and arguments to keep dominating hegemonically our societies, attempts to persist imposing a human and humanity—and consequently a sub-human and sub-humanity—to “maintain control of epistemic meaning” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 172). We are living a crisis, another one, some would argue. Speaking of crisis has always been a commonplace within the social sciences and, in particular, education. The crisis has always been historically ‘the’ condiment that has brought educators and pedagogues closer and farther away. Speaking of a crisis, in itself, thus brings nothing new to the debate, though. Common sayings, such as ‘crises are cyclical,’ or ‘as in the past, the system and people will adjust and adapt, until the next crisis comes,’ won’t help to grasp ‘a given society in almost a vegetative state.’ In many respects, such retrogressive state has reached a point where one doesn’t even realize whether one ‘dies from the cure or from the disease.’ As I have examined before, we are facing a system of dominance whose existence is only possible if in a permanent state of excess; a system conceived by the human being that calls into question the existence of the very human being itself; a system that has exhausted itself; it persists in not realizing that it has exhausted itself; does not seem to realize that, contrary to what happened in the past, it seems that there is no way out of it by evolving within the same logic, which radically changes the equation of the current crisis. Peruvian public intellectual Quijano (2000b) coined this Modern Western Eurocentric system of dominance as el patron colonial de poder, the ‘coloniality matrix of power’ (Mignolo, 2018). Contrary to the crises of the past that have superseded them—escalating and multiplying the dynamics of segregation, oppression, and exploitation of the human being and the planet—such coloniality matrix of power arrives at this crisis that is not only depleted of solutions to address it but is also irreversibly cornered by a huge avalanche of non-Eurocentric, non-Western movements and groups that do not seem to hesitate to give coloniality its final blessing. As Fanon (1963) clearly stated, “the European game is definitely finished, it is necessary to find something else” (p. 239). In fact, “there is no doubt that Europe is no longer the principal producer of critical theories” (Keucheyan, 2010, p.  20). There is “no European miracle, as Africa, Asia and Europe shared equally in the rise of capitalism prior to 1942.” After 1942 Europe took the lead due its “location near America and of the immense wealth obtained through colonialism” (Blaut, 1992, p. 53), without which capitalism and Europe would (probably) have remained peripheral (Franks, 1992, p. 93).

El Patron Colonial de Poder Coloniality survives colonialism. (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243)

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In Europe, Modernity and Eurocentrism, Dussel (2000) alerts us to “the change in meaning of the concept of Europe [as a] semantic slippage [that] has been generally overlooked” (p. 465). He explains: First, the mythological Europa was the daughter of a Phoenician king and thus was Semitic. . . . What became modern Europe lay beyond Greece’s horizon and therefore could not in any way coincide with the originary Greece. . . . [There is a] unilineal diachrony Greece-Rome-Europe [that] is an ideological construct that can be traced back to the late-eighteenthcentury German Romanticism. . . . [In fact,] the single line of development Greece-Rome-Europe is a conceptual by-product of the Eurocentric model. Second, the West consisted of the territories of the Roman Empire that spoke Latin and this included the north of Africa. The West was opposed to the East, the Greek Empire, which spoke Greek; [at] that time, there was no relevant concept of what would later be considered Europe. Third, beginning in the seventeenth century, Constantinople (the eastern Roman Empire) confronted the steadily growing Arab Muslim world. Here, one should not forget that from that point on the classical Greek world—the one traditionally associated with Aristotle—was as much Arab Muslim as Byzantine Christian. Fourth, the Medieval Latin European world confronted the Turkish Muslim World. Again, Aristotle was a philosopher considered to belong more to the Arab than to the Christian world. . . . Aristotle’s writings on metaphysics and logic were studied in Baghdad well before they were translated into Latin in Muslim Spain; then, from Toledo, they arrived in Paris by the end of the twelfth century. Thus Muslim ‘universality’ reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Latin Europe was a secondary, peripheral culture and up to this point had never been the ‘center’ of history. This also applied to the Roman Empire, which, given its extreme western location, never became the center of history of the Euro-Afro-Asian continent. .  .  . Fifth, during the Italian Renaissance a novel coming together of heretofore independent cultural processes took place; the western Latin world joined the eastern Greek world, and they subsequently confronted the Turkish world. In turn, the Turks forgot the Hellenistic-Byzantine origin of the Muslim world and thus allowed to emerge the false equation Western = Hellenistic + Roman + Christian. (pp. 465–467) Europe has nothing to do with the mythological diva fabricated and disseminated by the Western circuits of cultural production. Basically, Europe as is, as it has been fabricated, “is indefensible” (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32). Furthermore, the idea of ancient Greece as a primeval civilization is thus problematic (Paraskeva, 2017; Bernal, 1991). Such fabricated pastoral, which continued with the so ‘curricularized’ ‘discovery’ of the Indies, Maldonado-Torres (2012) claims,

72 El Patron Colonial de Poder “represented the veritable emergence of a ‘new world,’ one that challenged the then existing sense of time, space, laws, knowledge, and social organization, and that opened up new paths of power, knowledge, and being not only from Europe, but gradually for the largest part of humanity” (p. 1). Such new world, which some say is currently globalized i.e. Westernized, is characterized by “the control of labor and subjectivity, the practices and policies of genocide and enslavement, the pillage of life and land, and the denials and destruction of knowledge, humanity, spirituality, and cosmo-existence” (Walsh, 2018a, p. 16). Concomitantly, a “new model and pattern of power travelled and framed the globe” (Walsh, 2018a, p. 16). The emergence of “the Eurocentric ideology of German romanticism” needs to be framed in such context (Dussel, 2000, p.  466). Such a linear, simplistic, diachronic fallacy is the official millenary Western Eurocentric narrative. That is, some consider such narrative to be “an ideological invention that first kidnapped Greek culture as exclusively Western and European and then posited both the Greek and the Romans cultures at the center of world history” (Dussel, 2000, p.  468; Paraskeva, 2016a; Bernal, 1991). Eurocentrism and enlightenment/modernity are a perfect symbiosis on an atrocious eugenic matrix of dominance. Dussel (2000) elaborates on two concepts of modernity; one is very Eurocentric, “provincial, and regional” (p.  469). Modernity, in this view, is “an emancipation, [a] way out, from immaturity by means of reason, understood as a critical process that offers humanity the possibility of new development” (p. 469). However, Dussel (2000) notes that this first view of modernity is Eurocentric because it claims an “intra-European phenomena as the starting point of modernity and explains its later development without making recourse to anything outside Europe” (p. 469). The other concept takes modernity to a different level. Modernity is and acts as a world perspective, which suggests “being the center of world history as an essential trait of the modern world. Such centrality is achieved from various perspectives: state, military, economic, and philosophical” (Dussel, 2000, p. 469). Following Dussel’s (2000) reasoning, “there was not [only] a world history in an empirical sense before 1492,” but, also, it is crucial to examine different stages and metamorphoses in what is commonly, however erroneously, accepted as a monolithic epoch. For example, initially under the leadership of Spain and Portugal and then later replaced by England and France, those metamorphoses attempted to depict “a new paradigm of daily life and of historical, religious, and scientific understanding [to justify] irrational praxis of violence” (Dussel, 2000, p.  472). To overcome such villainous narrative, one needs “to deny the denial of the myth of modernity from an ethics of responsibility” (p. 473). He elaborates, stating: [T]he other denied and victimized side of modernity must first be unveiled as ‘innocent’: it is the ‘innocent victims’ of ritual sacrifice that in

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the self-realization of their innocence cast modernity as guilty of a sacrificial and conquering violence—that is, of a constitutive, originary, essential violence (Dussel, 2000, p. 473) Thus, Dussel (2000) adds, “by way of denying the innocence of modernity and of afrming the alterity of the other (which was previously denied), it is possible to ‘discover’ for the first time the hidden ‘other side’ of modernity” (Dussel, 2000, p. 473)—that is, “the peripheral colonial world, the sacrificed indigenous peoples, the enslaved black, the oppressed woman, the alienation of infants, the estranged popular culture: the victims of modernity, all of them victims of an irrational act that contradicts modernity’s ideal of rationality” (Dussel, 2000, p. 473). As I have examined in other contexts (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a), such ethics of responsibility needs to the problematized within what Walker (2011) classifies as the wrangle ethics of proper and ethics of opacity. That is, epistemology and epistemological battles, as an emancipatory project, must occur without butchering the question of ethics (Walker, 2011). Modernity, Mignolo (2008) attests, is not a strictly European but a planetary phenomenon, “to which the ‘excluded barbarians’ have contributed, although their contribution has not been acknowledged” (pp.  225–226). He (2008) exposes crucial distinctions between modernity and world systems. First, he (2008, p. 228) argues, modernity “is associated with literature, philosophy, and history of ideas, whereas the modern world system is associated with the vocabulary of the social sciences.” Moreover, such description of modernity “is important if we remember that since 1970 both concepts have occupied defined spaces in academic as well as public discourses” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 228). Finally, Mignolo (2008, p.  228) maintains, “modernity (and, obviously, post-modernity) maintained the imaginary of Western civilization as a pristine development from ancient Greece to eighteenth-century Europe, where the basis of modernity was laid out.” In such context, “the conceptualization of the modern world system does not locate its beginning in Greece. It underlies a special articulation of power rather than a linear succession of events” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 228). Modernity is thus “the fruit of management of the centrality of the first world system” (Dussel, 2013, p. 32). Along with Eurocentrism, Mignolo (2008) claims, came the emergence of a commercial circuit in the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, which produced special racial articulations of power. Such articulations, as I have flagged, the Peruvian intellectual Quijano (1992) calls el patron colonial del poder, which are quite crucial in order to understand our current globalized momentum. What has been defined and characterized as globalization or globalizations, Quijano (2000a) asserts, “is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power” (Quijano, 2000a, p. 553). That is, one of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental

74 El Patron Colonial de Poder construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. (Quijano, 2000a, p. 553) In Quijano’s (2000a, p. 553) decolonial reasoning, modernity’s “racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established.” Mignolo (2018) translates such patron as a matrix, thus a “colonial matrix of power, a set of structural conceptual and mechanical relations and flows constitutive of an identity” (p. 114). As in the film Matrix, “machines have created a cyborg making believe that the fabricated illusion is what human beings believe is their reality” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  114). While one could establish a parallel here, “the exception is that the creators of the illusion are in the film, not human beings, but machines that humans have created”’ whereas in the coloniality matrix of power, Mignolo (2018) adds, the creators of the illusions (modernity) using human bodies (labor) energy as well as energies from the biosphere (water, land and oxygen) and the cosmos (sunlight and moonlight) are human beings inside the colonial matrix of power but believing, or making believe, that there is an instance outside the colonial matrix from which it can be observed. Such instance was the Christian God and the Secular Human Scientific/Philosophical Observer. (p. 114) Such patron colonial del poder reflects, “a model of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality” (Quijano, 2000a, p. 533). The coloniality of power, Grosfoguel (2003) defends, helps one to re-frame the modern world system with the “colonial/race” platform (p. 3). To analyze the power relations within global coloniality and global ideologies, one must understand that coloniality is distinct from colonialism. Grosfoguel (2003) explains: [Coloniality] accounts for the entangled, heterogeneous, and mutually constitutive relations between the international division of labor, global racial/ethnic hierarchy, and hegemonic Eurocentric epistemologies in the modern/colonial/capitalist world system. Coloniality of the world scale, with the United States as the undisputed hegemony over non-European people, characterizes the globalization of the capitalist world-economy today: the old colonial hierarchies of West/non-West remain in place and are entangled with the new so-called division of labor. Herein lies the relevance of the distinction between colonialism and coloniality. Coloniality refers to the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of

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colonial administrations produced by colonial cultures and structures in the modern/colonial/capitalist world system. (p. 4) Colonialism and coloniality are indeed two faces of the same coin—the epistemicide. The coloniality debate does not annul or close the colonial debate; it does not dissolve the debates around colonialism and postcolonalism. Quite the opposite. It makes such analysis even more powerful, more complete. The presence of coloniality is the stitching that transforms the previous fabrics of knowledge, power, and language into the tapestry of the neoliberal empire, while colonialism still cuts and adds new pieces or cuts the old to reform and re-create ( Janson, 2020). Colonialism which interrupted the ‘Other’s’ history, as Boahen (2011) argues, is not “a type of individual relations but a conquest of a national territory and the oppression of a people” (Fanon, 1967, p. 80). Colonialism “is not simply an economic or political phenomenon. It possesses an epistemological dimension relating to the emergence of the human sciences as much in the center as in the periphery” (Castro-Gómez, 2008, p. 264). Whereas colonialism, Maldonado-Torres (2007, p.  243) argues, “denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire,” coloniality points into a different yet eugenic complex. Coloniality, “refers to longstanding patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p.  243). Thus, as he argues (2007, p.  243), “coloniality survives colonialism,” it overcome its own historical riverbed, and “it is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243). This is one of the fundamental Achilles’ heels of Modern Western Eurocentric counter-dominant and counter-hegemonic movements in the struggle for social and cognitive justice. Different from settler colonialism, yet related (Walsh, 2018a; 2018b), coloniality is the memory, the legacy of the colonialism, yet it continues to be reborn through neoliberal hegemony as a pervasive colonial power that has strong epistemological ties. So much so, that we may not perceive its power; instead, we see our position as one without agency, never realizing how much of the world we do not understand because we lack the language and knowledge (Janson, 2014). Coloniality, as Mignolo (2018) advocates, opened up two crucial rivers, one that “brought to light the darker side of modernity and another one that mutates decolonization into decoloniality and decolonial thinking” (p. 112). With a eugenic matrix that “orders genocide and supplies the trash,” to adapt Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002, p. 129) analogy, el patron colonial de poder (Quijano, 1992; Mignolo, 2018), as we will see later on, imposes an epistemological

76 El Patron Colonial de Poder faschosphere thus triggering a decoloniality existence and thinking, a full-blast epistemological subversiveness. That is, “decoloniality is the exercise of power within the colonial matrix to undermine the mechanism that keeps it in place requiring obeisance, a mechanism that is epistemic and so decolonial liberation implies epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo, 2018, p 114). Thus coloniality is “a decolonial concept aiming to illuminate the darker side of modernity” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 111). Moreover, and this is crucial, coloniality is not a concept that emerges in Europe to account for issues of European concern—its economy, sensibility, and history—but a concept created in the Third World responding to the needs prompted by local histories of coloniality at the very historical moment when the Third World division was collapsing. In Europe the concerns were on modernity, post-modernity, and globalization, not on coloniality, the darker side of modernity, postmodernity and globalization. (Mignolo, 2018, p. 112) To ignore the very root and maternity of the concept of coloniality would not be innocent at all; rather, it will mirror a crystal example of how epistemological fascism and cleansing frames Modern Western Eurocentric colonial matrix.

Epistemological Faschosphere They repressed as much as possible the colonized forms of knowledge production, models of the production of meaning, symbolic universe, and models of expression and objectification and subjectivity. (Quijano, 2008, p. 189)

The web of a new global division of labor of core-periphery relationships in which “a global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Western and non-Western people, which formed during centuries of European colonial expansion, was not significantly transformed with the end of colonialism and the formation of nation-states in the periphery. The transition from global colonialism to global coloniality transformed the global forms of domination” (Grosfoguel, 2003, p. 6). One of the key features of such new global power with a colonial/modern Euro-centered capitalist face “is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism” (Quijano, 2008, p.  181). Race is indeed a mental construction of modernity (Quijano, 2008). The idea of race shows no parallel in history before the colonization of America—a position that raises many concerns within the gender studies field (Quijano, 2008). Social relations, Quijano (2008) stresses, “founded on the category of race produced new historical others’ identities in

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America—Indians, blacks, and mestizos—and redefined others. Terms, such as Spanish and Portuguese and much later European, which had until then indicated only geographic origin, acquired from then on a racial connotation in reference to new identities” (p. 182). Moreover, “insofar as the social relations that were being configured were relations of domination, such identities were considered as constitutive of the hierarchies, places, and corresponding social roles, and consequently of the model of colonial domination that was being imposed. In other words, race and racial identity were established as instruments of basic social construction” (Quijano, 2008, p. 182). It is needless to mention how such social relations helped produce, reproduce, and solidify a particular Western perspective of knowledge. Continuing his analysis, he (2008, p.  183) explains that following the colonization of America and the European expansionist processes to the rest of the world “the subsequent constitution of Europe as a new id-entity needed the elaboration of a Eurocentric perspective of knowledge, a theoretical perspective on the idea of race as a naturalization of colonial relations between Europeans and non-Europeans.” That is, “historically, this meant a new way, of legitimizing the already old ideas and practices of relations of superiority and inferiority between dominant and dominated”(Quijano, 2008, p. 183). In fact, Quijano (2008) emphasizes, that “this racial principle has proven to be the most effective long-lasting instrument of universal social domination, since the much older principle—gender or intersexual domination—was encroached on by inferior-superior racial classifications” (p. 183). It is in the context of “the worldwide expansion of colonial domination on the part of the same dominant race that the same criteria of social classification were imposed on all the world population [and as a result] new historical and social identities were produced: yellows and olives were added to whites, Indians, blacks and mestizos” (p. 185). Such dominant race stratification structured not only segregated social relations and a new division of labor, but also deliberately contaminated the structure of production, reproduction, and legitimization of knowledge. The invention of such social identities is a blunt evidence of what Grosfoguel (2010) calls “epistemic privilege.” Such privilege of the West, Grosfoguel (2010, p.  30) argues, “was consecrated and normalized through the Spanish Catholic monarchy’s destruction of Al-Andalus and the European colonial expression since the late 15th century.” Grosfoguel deconstructs historically such epistemological eugenicism. As he (2010, p.  30) argues, “from renaming the world with Christian cosmology (Europe, Africa, Asia, and later America) and characterized all non-Christian knowledge as a product of pagan and devil forces to assuming in their own Eurocentric provincialism that it is only within the Greco-Roman tradition, passing through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Western sciences that ‘truth’ and ‘universality’ is achieved, the epistemic privilege of Western, Eurocentric, male ‘identity politics’ was normalized to the point of invisibility as a hegemonic ‘identity politics.’” In this sense, Grosfoguel (2010, p.  30) reiterates, particular forms of knowledge “became the universal normalized knowledge, and in this way,

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all ‘other’ traditions of thought were deemed inferior (characterized in the 16th  century as ‘barbarians,’ in the 19th century as ‘primitives’, in the 20th century as ‘under-developed’, and at the beginning of the 21st century as ‘antidemocratic’)” (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 30). Epistemic privilege is a symptom of the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological faschospere, fueled by schools that portray a twisted image of nonWestern geographicalities and histories, through a curriculum that offers an erroneous vision of homogenized reality, a quite towering ideological trump card within the current Common Core movement. By using race as the welding device of the social relations, modern coloniality’s world system fabricated a raced epistemological thesaurus that wraps dominants and dominated within an official knowledge that acts as if is the only one that has ever existed. This raced model of world power “was able to impose its colonial dominance over all the regions and populations of the planet, incorporating them into its world system and its specific model of power” (Quijano, 2008, p. 188). In so doing, Western Europe, as the epicenter of this model, arrogantly incorporated and merged “such and heterogeneous cultural histories into a single world dominated by Europe” (Quijano, 2008, p. 188). This process of incorporation, what Quijano (2008) calls “intellectual inter-subjective configuration” (p. 188), allowed “all the experiences, histories, resources, and cultural productions [to end] in one global cultural order revolving around European Western hegemony” (p. 189). Adhering to Quijano’s (2008) transmodern decolonized rationale, “Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony” (p. 189). The new space and time of intersubjective interactions of supremacy between Europe and the rest of the planet showed a myriad of compound strategies, related with expropriation, repression, and reproduction of domination. That is, European imperial conquest not only “expropriated those cultural discoveries of colonized peoples that were most apt for developing capitalism to the profit of the European center” (Quijano, 2008, p.  189), but also “repressed the colonized forms of knowledge production, models of the production of meaning, symbolic universe, and models of expression and objectification and subjectivity” (Quijano, 2008, p.  189). Moreover, European onslaught brutally “forced the colonized to learn the dominant culture in any way that would be useful to the reproduction of domination, whether in the field of technology and material activity or of subjectivity especially Judeo-Christian religiosity” (Quijano, 2008, p. 189). At the same time, it is crucial to highlight that Europe cannot be seen as a monolithic identity. The ‘Other’ within the West and its knowledge was (and is) also suppressed and delegitimized. Needless to say, that the repression of knowledge “was the most violent, profound and long lasting among the Indians of IberoAmerica, who were condemned to be an illiterate peasant subculture stripped of their objectified intellectual legacy” (Quijano, 2008, p. 189). The same occurred in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South Asia, as well as in many other places. Western

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Europe(ans) was able to set up a well-orchestrated “epistemic suppression” (Quijano, 2008, p.  189), using all the mechanisms ‘available’ including genocide. These new universes of intersubjective interactions of oppression were racially coded and profoundly cultural. As Quijano (2008) and others denounced, it was a “colonization of the culture” (p. 189); however, he argues one should not ignore that “race was the basic category” (Quijano, 2008, p. 190) in fermenting the coloniality matrix of power. Coloniality is thus about power, being, knowledge, and labour—both material and immaterial. The coloniality of being(s), Maldonado-Torres (2008b) notes, “refers to the process whereby common sense and tradition are marked by dynamics of power that are preferential in character: they discriminate against people and target communities” (p.  220). That is, “the preferential character of violence can be spelled out by the coloniality of power, which links racism, capitalist exploitation, the control of sex, and monopoly of knowledge and related them to modern colonial history” (p. 220). In this context, it is important to scrutinize how such colonialities have been systematically produced and reproduced (not without re-existence though), not only through a constant obliteration and extermination of other forms of knowledge beyond the Western/European epistemological framework but also by usurping and/or silencing the voices, visions, and feelings, which were not convenient to Western capitalist processes of development. Such historical constructions deeply engaged in creating an idyllic version of Western European civilizations, while not hesitating to subscribe to genocidal practices, which were adorned and masked as natural triumphs for Western civilization in the majority of Western school curricula and school textbooks. The dominant school narrative of Columbus’ legacy is a fallacy that constitutes a process of historical engineering (Chomsky, 1992), and historical obliteration (Zinn, 1999) that tends to perpetuate “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 1994, p.  197). In Chomsky’s (2002) terms, the American continent was really a stage for genocide. In the United States, Chomsky (2002) argues, “we just committed genocide. Period. Pure genocide. Current estimates are that north of Rio Grande, there were about twelve to fifteen million Native Americans at the time Columbus landed; [however,] by the time Europeans reached the continental borders of the United States, there were about 200,000 [which means] mass genocide” (p. 135). The shocking reality Chomsky (2002) reveals is “that throughout American history this genocide has been accepted has perfectly legitimate,” notwithstanding the fact that Columbus “was a mass murderer himself ” (p. 136). Columbus’s history is a history of “masculine conquest” (Zinn, 2001, p. 102), and of the myths of the exceptionality—superior—white man (Restallo, 2013). It is crucial to stress that right at the very first ‘encounter’ between ‘white man’ and the peoples of the current Americas, not only was the ‘Other’ subhumanized, inferiorized, and immediately racially constructed, but, also, certain notions of beauty that had never existed before were perverted. The ‘white man,’ when faced with naked bodies, did not see, interpret, and respect them

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in a natural way but constructed another notion of beautiful as “the beauty of a naked body can only be felt by the dressed races” (Pessoa, 2017, p. 65). The Indians were portrayed by Columbus as “although physically naked, [they are] closer to men than to animal,” (Todorov, 1984, p.  35). Columbus was incapable of recognizing a new diversity of languages expressed by the Indians and accepting them as real languages (obviously quite different from Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese). Such ‘physically naked’ condition was de-valued, exoticized, sexualized, and beautified as a thingfication process “that only dressed races could feel” (Pessoa, 2017, p.  65). Thus, Bernaldez adds, “already deprived of language [according to Columbus they are also] deprived of all cultural property [by] the absence of costumes, rites, religion” (as cited in Todorov, 1984, pp. 34–35). It is important to highlight that many people denounced Columbus’s bloodshed colonial ministry during ‘his own majestic era.’ On the very front line of such deep and powerful criticisms, one can flag also a contemporary of Columbus’s, Frey Bartolomé de Las Casas. According to him (2008), the Christians, armed to the teeth, butchered and murdered the native population; they invaded the Indian villages, killing women and their little children, pregnant women, and elderly people. In addition, they organized bets over which one was able to gut an Indian ‘in one shot’; they covered the Indians with oil and burned them; they unleashed famine and wild dogs to tear up and eat the Indians like pigs. As Las Casas (1536–1537) questions, what kind of pleasure did these miserable men have by murdering millions of human beings? What is the point of raping Indian women and killing their sons? In hooks’s (1994) terms, “in our cultural retelling of history we must connect Columbus’s legacy with the institutionalization of patriarchy and the culture of sexist masculinity that upholds male domination of females in daily life; [that is to say] the cultural romanticization of Columbus’s imperialist legacy includes a romanticization of rape” (p. 203). Notwithstanding Columbus’s insidious motivation, the fact is that “textbooks downplay the pursuit of wealth as a motive for coming to the Americas” (Loewen, 1995, p. 30). The fact is that “Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world [through] the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass” (Loewen, 1995, p. 50). Dussel (1995, p. 9) describes how Western conquest “assassinated the Amerindians and if it left any alive, they debased them, oppressing them with servitude. They spared woman, to live in concubinage (sexual domination) and children, to be educated in European culture (pedagogical domination).” And thus, in the name of the new god (gold, silver, money, pounds sterling, or the dollar), they were immolated to the god of nascent mercantilism, the god of economic imperialism, and the contemporary imperialism of the multinational corporations, millions more human beings of the periphery than those the Aztecs immolated to their god Huitzilopochtli that had horrified civilized, religious-minded Europeans. Indeed, the great paradox of Western modernity,

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West (1999) argues, is that “democracy flourished for Europeans alongside the flowering of transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery, a tragic springboard of modernity in which good and evil are inextricably interlocked and still plague us” (p. 55). Columbus’s mark within the Americas is, in essence, one of murder, exploitation, and rape—in a word, genocide. Paradoxically, Western European conquest not only ‘fabricated’ a new god and, in so doing, inaugurated the beginning of the end of Europe because “it deified itself ” (Dussel, 1995, p.  8). However, it also fed the conditions for the need and emergence of a “philosophy of liberation” (Dussel, 1995, p. 9), whose vitality relied in the capacity of the oppressed to “return to the source” as Cabral (1973, p.  63) would put, as a way of living and re-existence (Walsh, 2018a). Undeniably, textbooks exhibit “omissions, stereotypes, and distortions” with regard to Native Americans, blacks, and women, “which reflect the relative powerlessness of these groups” (Anyon, 1983, p. 49), and only a very small group of textbooks “sought to include women and the private sphere in various different ways” (Brindle and Arnot, 1999, p.  108). Textbooks “not only express the dominant group’s ideologies, but also help to form attitudes in support of their social position” (Anyon, 1983, p.  49). At a time when the educational and curriculum fields hoist the flag of internationalization, we must ask, among other issues, What is the epistemological color of such flag? Whose color? or, even better, What is the ideology of that color? and How do you solve such historical equations? I will return to these issues later in this chapter. Incontrovertibly, the coloniality of power is implicated in epistemic privilege and oppression that is a form of epistemicide blessed through the curriculum enacted in schools. The way knowledge has been ‘textbookalized’ is just one supreme example of how our schools, curriculum, and teacher preparation programs play a key role in the social construction of the real colors of a classed, raced, casted, and gendered epistemological faschosphere. In fact, institutional racism, as well as casteism and genderism, pervades our educational institutions appallingly so, even with the countless examples of minorities in senior leadership positions, providing a clarion example of a racist society without racists, as BonillaSilva (2003) would put it. Epistemic racism, as well as epistemic genderism and sexism “are the most hidden forms of segregation in the global system that we all inhabit,” the ‘Westernized/Christianized modern/colonial capitalist/ patriarchal world-system’ (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018; Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; Grosfoguel, 2010; Maldonado-Torres, 2008a). Undeniably, “social, political, and economic racisms, genderisms, and sexisms are much more visible and recognized today than epistemological racism genderism and sexism” (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 29; Walsh and Mignolo, 2018). Moreover, Modern Western Eurocentric current extractivism (Walsh, 2018a; 2018b; de La Cadena and Blaser, 2018)—that is, the accelerated extraction of natural resources to satisfy a global demand for minerals and energy to provide for what national governments consider economic growth (de La Cadena and Blaser, 2018, p.  3), ripping the planet to an unsustainable limit—has its roots

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within a matrix whose pillars are the genocide perpetrated centuries ago on indigenous communities. The exhaustion of natural resources is just but one side of the murder. The other side is (n)eugenicism, the physical termination of specific races and castes and the reinforcement of a racialized, casteized, and genderized society. Echoing Prada, Mariategui (1971) argues that colonialism “could not have happened otherwise; exploitation was the official order and without the toil of the American Indian, the coffers of the Spanish treasury would have been emptied.” Nevertheless, epistemic racism is a foundational form and older version of racism in that the inferiority of ‘non-Western’ people as below the human (nonhumans or sub-humans) is defined on their closeness to animality and the latter is defined on the basis of their inferior intelligence and, thus, lack of rationality. Epistemic racism—one of the cards of the epistemological faschosphere— operates through the privileging of an essentialist (‘identity’) politics of ‘Western’ male elites. That is, the hegemonic tradition of thought of Western philosophy and social theory almost never includes ‘Western’ women and never includes ‘non-Western philosophers/philosophies and social scientists. In this tradition, the ‘West’ is considered to be the only legitimate tradition of thought able to produce knowledge and the only one with access to ‘universality,’ ‘rationality,’ and ‘truth.’ Epistemic racism considers ‘non-Western’ knowledge to be inferior to ‘Western’ knowledge. Since epistemic racism is entangled with epistemic casteism, genderism, and sexism, Western-centric social science is a form of epistemic racism/casteism/genderism that privileges ‘Western’ male’s knowledge as the superior knowledge in the world today (Grosfoguel, 2010, pp. 29–30). Epistemic racism portrayed by Western modernity is at the very core of what Mills (1997) coins as “the racial contract” (p. 11). That is, while political and moral, the racial contract is also epistemological “prescribing norms for cognition to which its signatories must adhere [and] all whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it” (Mills, 1997, p. 11). The racial contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (Mills, 1997, p. 18) If one pays close attention to the canon of scholars preferred and emphasized within Western academic disciplines, Grosfoguel (2010) adds, “we can observe that without exception they privilege ‘Western’ male thinkers and theories, above all those of European and Euro-North-American males” (p. 30). That is, “this hegemonic essentialist ‘identity politics’ is so powerful and so normalized—through the discourse of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ of the Cartesian ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ in the social sciences—that it hides who speaks

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and from which power location they speak from, such that when we think of ‘identity politics’ we immediately assume, as if by ‘common sense,’ that we are talking about racialized minorities” (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 30). In fact, the underlying myth of the Westernized academy which institutionalizes racism (and genderism as well) “is still the scientificist discourse of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ which hides the ‘locus of enunciation’ of the speaker, that is, who speaks and from what epistemic body-politics of knowledge and geopolitics of knowledge they speak from in the existing power relations at a world-scale” Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 20). Within the field of education, in general, and curriculum, in particular, the struggle against the cult of positivism insightfully championed by scholars such as Giroux (1981), needs to be taken to another level, one that precisely challenges the theater of Western epistemological platform. Echoing Grosfoguel (2010, p. 30), “through the myth of the ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ (which in reality always speaks through a ‘Western’ male body and a Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge) critical voices coming from individuals and groups inferiorized and subalternized by this hegemonic epistemic racism and epistemic sexism are denied and discarded as particularistic.” He adds: If epistemology has color—as African philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1998) points out so well—and has gender/color—as African-American Sociologist Patricia Hills Collins (2000) has argued—then the Eurocentric epistemology that dominates the social sciences has both color and gender. (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 30) Undeniably, racism and racial segregation, Mills (1997) posits, “have not been deviations from the norm; they have been the norm not merely in the sense of de facto statistical distribution patterns but in the sense of being formally codified written down and proclaimed as such” (p. 93). Naturally, whites exist in “racial ways while thinking of themselves as acting morally [that is] they experience genuine cognitive difculties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist” (Mills, 1997, p. 93). Such a eugenic episteme “became the universal normalized knowledge” (Grosfoguel, 2010, p.  30). Odd as it might be, not only are epistemic racism, casteism, genderism, and sexism at the very inception and core of Western sciences but so are sciences that are reductively “based on the experience of 5 countries (France, England, Germany, Italy and the United States) that make only less than 12% of the world population. The provincialism of Western Social Science theory with false claims to universality pretends to account for the social experience of the other 88 percent of the world population” (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 31). Eurocentrism, Grosfoguel (2010) argues, “with its epistemic racism/sexism is a form of provincialism that is reproduced inside the social sciences today” (p. 31). Walsh (2012, p. 12) asserts that to speak of the geopolitics of knowledge and the geopolitical locations of critical thought implies the recognition that “in most places in the globe, what continues to predominate

84 El Patron Colonial de Poder are Eurocentric modes of thinking.” Moreover, for intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Fausto Reinaga, she (2012, p.  12) adds, “whose thought found its base and reason in black struggles in the Caribbean and Africa and indigenous struggles in the Indian America, the hegemony, ‘universality’, and violence of such thinking must be confronted, and a different thought constructed and positioned from the histories and subjectivities of the people.” While I do agree that race is a fundamental category that pillars the coloniality matrix of power, it is not the only one. As Santos (2018) would put it “no social struggle, however strong, can succeed if it concentrates only on one mode of domination” (p. 34). Racial capital (Day, 2016) is not the only dynamic the colonialism and coloniality. Recapturing Quijano’s involved in (2000a) argument, race is just but one of the fundamental axes of el patron de poder constructing a social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race (p. 533). For example, as we have examined earlier, curriculum ‘textbookalized’ knowledge speaks volumes about how history has been classed, casted, raced, and gendered while being fabricated, taught, and legitimized in our schools. School knowledge is not just racially coded. Both the dark and the light side of modernity “is characteristic of the co-construction of the coloniality of power and the colonial/modern gender system” (Lugones, 2008, p.  12). Coloniality, Lugones (2008) states, is indeed a gendered system as well, which “congeals as Europe advances the colonial project(s) and it begins to take shape during the Spanish and Portuguese colonial adventures and becomes full blown in late modernity.” She continues: The gender system has a “light” and a “dark” side. The light side constructs gender and gender relations hegemonically. It only orders the lives of white bourgeois men and women, and it constitutes the modern/colonial meaning of “men” and “women.” (Lugones, 2008, p. 15) Coloniality, Lugones (2008, p. 15) adds, imposes a racialized cult of sexual purity. Purity and passivity are “crucial characteristics of the white bourgeois females who reproduce the class, and the colonial, and racial standing of bourgeois, white men; however, equally important is the banning of white bourgeois women from the sphere of collective authority, from the production of knowledge, from most of control over the means of production.” It goes without saying that “weakness of mind and body are important in the reduction and seclusion of white bourgeois women from most domains of life, most areas of human existence” (Lugones, 2008, p. 15). Coloniality, Lugones (2008, p. 15) says, is based on a racialized heterosexualist gender system “as heterosexuality permeates racialized patriarchal control over production, including knowledge production, and over collective authority.” Heterosexuality, is both compulsory and perverse among white bourgeois men and women since the arrangement does significant violence to the powers and rights

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of white bourgeois women and it serves to reproduce control over production. White bourgeois women are inducted into this reduction through bounded sexual access. (Lugones, 2008, p. 15) Harding (2017) argues that “gender and sexuality considerations should not be regarded as an optional addition to analyses of colonialism; they are an intrinsic element of such phenomena. Furthermore, colonialism could not succeed without the constant interference in Indigenous sexual relations that was Iberian colonial policy” (p. 628). Coloniality, thus, frames an epistemological faschosphere, a tout court epistemological fascism, which irremediably triggers epistemological disobedience, a perpetual praxis of insurgency against a classized, racialized, and genderized social matrix, which contains “processes and possibilities of collective analyses, collective theorization, and collective practice—all intertwined that help engender an otherwise of relational being, thinking, feeling and doing, and living in places marked by extremes of violence, racism and patriarchy in today’s matrix of global capitalism/modernity/coloniality” (Walsh, 2018b, p. 36). Decolonial feminisms, Walsh (2018b) argues, need to be understood in such context; that is, as an insurgent praxis against such faschosphere as a classized, racialized, and genderized epistemological (n)eugenics (p. 36). Contrary to the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo, 2018), decolonial feminisms “situate feminisms as plural” (Walsh, 2018b, p.  39). That is, “decoloniality can no longer be taught by a hero, the privilege figure in the individualistic imaginary of Western modernity” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  115). In this sense, decolonial feminisms “articulate and situate the pluri- and universal of feminisms, understood as spheres not of unification (or uni-versalization) but of pluralism, plurality, and possible interrelation, thus disrupting and transgressing the White feminist universal as they pursue insurgencies, standpoints, and propositions of decoloniality and decolonization” (Walsh, 2018b, p. 39). Insurgency is a philosophical praxis of cimarronaje (Gruesco as cited in Walsh, 2018b, p. 42)—a delinking existence, a “way to rethink oneself against the form of colonialism which is structured on the denial and negation of the other (slave) and determines a sense of gender as an imposed category” (p. 42). In addition, it is a praxis of malungaje, which is a “sort of foundational trope and counterideology to the psychic annihilation of the travesty and social death of slavery, as a transhistorical concept that takes into account the agency of Black peoples in antisystemic movements and struggles that affirm survival and life” (Branche as cited in Walsh, 2018b, p.  44). Decolonial feminisms, Walsh (2018b) adds, are a casa dentro (in-house) way of thinking and existing, of disobedience, rebellion, re-existence, a decolonial freedom. Casa dentro, as Garcia (as cited in Walsh, 2018b, p.  43) claims, cannot be understood in Western Eurocentric terms; it refers to “collective memories, philosophies and knowledges inherited from the ancestors, histories of acts of resistance, and other elements that mark and permit our difference, our forms of life and community” (p. 43). Such collective memories flow with

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palabrandar, a “collective walking of words without owners, a community-based ethic grounded in the defense of dignity, territory and life” (Walsh, 2018b, p.  37), recognizing and naming it—not in Western terms—the oppressor and its thinking. Cimarronage and mulangaje are ways of being, attitudes, habitus, ways of teaching, and pedagogies (Walsh, 2018b). In this sense, insurgency against the colonial matrix of power is also about “reconceptualiz[ing] modes of interpretation and of reading, seeing and being in and with the world, and negotiat[ing], construct[ing], and advanc[ing] possibilities and prospects that are intercultural and decolonial in effort, project, and orientation” (Walsh, 2018b, pp. 38–39). It is thus impossible to engage in a decolonial commitment, ignoring the intellectual endeavors provided by epistemological frameworks such as black studies and black feminism, “whose principal goal is to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with western man” (Weheleye, 2014, p. 5). In what follows, I reemphasize how the coloniality of knowledge promotes the elaboration of Eurocentrism as a hegemonic knowledge perspective based on epistemic racism, genderism, and sexism. I appeal and subscribe to the need for intellectual decolonization because the models of the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism not only do not cease to be Eurocentric, but, although important, they are also not sufficient to describe the realities beyond the Occidental framework. I end by dissecting Modern Western Eurocentric notions of ‘human and humanity’ and claiming that ‘another knowledge is possible.’

Neugenic Eurocentric Hydra How can we overcome the Eurocentric modernity without throwing away the best of modernity as many Third World fundamentalists do? (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 1)

As we have been examining, there is a theory of communicating vessels, a symbiosis between the coloniality of power and being and Eurocentrism. The success of Western Europe in becoming the center of the modern world system “developed within Europeans a trait common to all colonial dominators and imperialists: ethnocentrism” (Quijano (2008, p.  189). The fallacy of Western Europeans as naturally superior needs to be seen as “a mental operation of fundamental importance for the entire model of global power, but above all with respect to the intersubjective relations that were hegemonic, among other reasons because of the production of knowledge” (Quijano, 2008, p. 190). Furthermore, Quijano (2008, p. 190) stresses that “the Europeans generated a new temporal perspective of history and relocated colonized populations, along with their respective histories and cultures, in the past of a historical trajectory whose culmination was Europe.” As a result, he (2008, p. 190) adds, “the intersubjective and cultural relations between Western Europe and the rest of the World were codified in a strong play of new categories”:

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East/West, primitive-civilized, magic/mythic-scientific, irrational-rational, traditional-modern, Europe-non-Europe. Even so, the only category with the honor of being recognized the other of Europe and the West as ‘Orient’—not the Indians of America and not the Black of Africa who were ‘simply’ primitive. (Quijano, 2008, p. 190) In such imagined modernity and rationality, as I have mentioned before, race was ‘a’ pillar in the entire epistemology that was about to arise; such epistemology was produced as clean, pure, colorless, immaculate, superior, natural—in a word, unique. Without acknowledging this, it is impossible, as Quijano (2008) stresses, to “explain the elaboration of Eurocentrism as the hegemonic perspective of knowledge otherwise” (p. 190). Eurocentrism is anchored in two myths, namely, [First] the idea of history of human civilization as a trajectory that departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe; second, a view of the differences between Europe and non-Europe as natural (racial) differences and not consequences of a history of power. (Quijano, 2008, p. 190) Both myths, Quijano (2008, p. 190) argues, “can be unequivocally recognized in the foundation of evolutionism and dualism, two of the nuclear elements of Eurocentrism.” It is appropriate to flag here that the myth of ancient Greek culture as a white ars magistra “performs an essential function in Eurocentric construct as well as in modern ideology” (Amin, 2009, p.  166). In fact, modern ideology “was not constructed in the abstract ether and pure capitalist mode of production” (p. 165). Continuing his analysis, Amin (2009) articulates that [c]onsciousness of the capitalist nature of the modern world came relatively late, as a result of the labor and socialist movements and their critique of the nineteenth century social organization, culminating in Marxism. At the moment when this consciousness emerged, modern ideology already had three centuries of history behind it, from Renaissance through the Enlightenment. It had therefore expressed itself as a particularly European, rationalistic, and secular ideology, while claiming a worldwide scope. (p. 165) In addition, Mignolo (2008), following the rationale, put forward by Braudel, Wallerstein, and Arrighi, argues that “the history of Western epistemology as it has been constructed since the European Renaissance runs parallel to and complements each other” (p. 226). That is, the “expansion of Western capitalism implied the expansion of Western epistemology in all its ramifications, from the instrumental reason that went along with capitalism and the industrial

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revolution, to the theories of the state, to the criticism of both capitalism and the state” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227). Indeed, there is a resemblance between the Renaissance episteme and the episteme framework tenaciously defended by the so-called curriculum humanists and social meliorists in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, which I was able to dissect elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2011a). The cartography of knowledge that erupted “from Renaissance epistemology [was] grounded on the trivium and quadrivium and strongly dominated by rhetoric and humanities” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227). Mignolo (2008) adds that “Bacon replaced rhetoric with philosophy, and the figure of the Renaissance humanist began to be overtaken by the figure of the philosopher and the scientist that contributed to and further expanded from European Enlightenment” (p. 227). Bacon emphasized History, Poesy, and Philosophy as the towering categories of human rationale: “history has reference to Memory, Poesy to imagination and Philosophy to reason” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227). The impact of such matrix in our field is irrefutable. As I examined elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011a), at the turn of the twentieth century, the curriculum field saw mental discipline, as well as the professed five windows or provinces of the soul, as the dominant pedagogical narrative. Such windows advocated by Harris (1889, pp.  96–97), namely, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, and literature, were five provinces that would remain the means by which the culture would be propagated and perpetuated to the majority of citizens (Paraskeva, 2011a, p. 31; see also Kliebard, 1995). Then, as I also examined in other contexts (Paraskeva, 2018; 2017; 2016a; 2014), at the turn of the nineteenth century, a wide, uniform plan of studies was promoted, one in which all the mental faculties would be duly exercised, especially because the (total) perfection of the mind depended on the incessant exercise of its various powers (Paraskeva, 2011a, p. 24; see also Muelder, 1984; Tyack, 1974). Thus, the “mental discipline by which mind-as-muscle could be strengthened” (Beyer and Liston, 1996, p. 3) would not actually depend on the isolated study of mathematics, or on an isolated study of classical languages, but on a perfect symbiosis between “the different branches of literature and science, as to form in the student a proper balance of character” (Silliman, 1829, p. 301). Actually, “the success of each is essential to the prosperity of the other” (Silliman, 1829, p.  323). The roots of mental disciplinarism, the most famous doctrine at the end of the nineteenth century (Kliebard, 1995; Paraskeva, 2007a; 2011a; 2011b), “could be traced in some respects to the classical university of the Middle Ages” (Beyer and Liston, 1996, p. 3), with its emphasis on the artes liberales and sermonicales (Paraskeva, 2001). The Yale Faculty Report, for instance, defended classical languages as the guarantors of mental exercise, dictating rigor and discipline by means of recitation and memorization. The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is “marked above all by [such] disciplinarization and [consequently] professionalization of knowledge, that is to say, by the creation of permanent institutional structures designed both to produce new knowledge and to reproduce the producers of knowledge” (Wallerstein et al., 1996, p.  7). Moreover, this disciplinarization of knowledge

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is not only connected with the division of labor in a capitalist segregated society but also needs to be seen as “an attempt to secure and advance ‘objective’ knowledge about ‘reality’ on the basis of empirical findings (as opposed to speculation). The intent was to ‘learn’ the truth, not to invent or intuit it” (Wallerstein et al., 1996, p. 13). The Renaissance sect or cult of artes liberales and artes sermonicales (Paraskeva, 2001; 2011a; 2011b) that pervades Western educational apparatuses is an integral part of “Eurocentric culturalism” (Amin, 2009, p.  156). In turn, if the new world is capitalist (and it is indeed) and is based in particular features of its mode of production, all the social apparatuses are dynamically connected in this web. It is better to say that its existence is only possible while these social apparatuses work to sustain such mode of production and reproduction, affirming itself as a “system founded on eternal truths with a transhistorical vocation” (Amin, 2009, p.  155). In this context, the dominant ideology of the new world fulfills three major functions, namely (a) obscures the essential nature of the capitalist mode of production, (b) deforms the vision of the historical genesis of capitalism, by refusing to consider this genesis from the perspective of a search for general laws of the evolution of human society. Instead it replaces this search with a twofold mythic construct, (c) refuses to link the fundamental characteristics of actually existing capitalism—that is the center/periphery polarization, inseparable from the system itself—to capitalism’s worldwide process of reproduction. (Amin, 2009, p. 155) Such epistemological framework—in which Humboldtianism is not innocent and quite towering in the Western epistemological cartography and currently pretty much hegemonic globally—imposed itself as unique global research and methodological episteme, under a dangerous scientific fallacy that there are no other epistemological dynamics that are scientifically acceptable (Paraskeva, 2011a; 2016a; Smith, 1999). The geography of world epistemology is reduced to the Western white space and time—which is basically 20% of the planet. When capitalism, Mignolo (2008, p. 227) claims, “began to be displaced from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic (Holland, Britain), the organization of knowledge was established in its universal scope.” Concomitantly, the racialized epistemological claim of ‘there can be no others’ inscribed a conceptualization of knowledge to a geopolitical space (Western Europe) and erased the possibility of even thinking about a conceptualization and distribution of knowledge ‘emanating’ from other local histories (China, India, Islam, etc.). (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227) This is profoundly crucial to understand for what I called Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; 2014; 2011a; 2011b) and its role in the struggle for social and cognitive justice, an issue that we will examine later on.

90 El Patron Colonial de Poder Within this context, Mignolo (2008) insightfully “refers to the changing faces of colonial differences throughout the history of the modern/colonial worldsystem and brings to the foreground the planetary dimension of human history silenced by discourses centering on modernity, postmodernity, and Western civilization” (p. 229). Grosfoguel (2003) argues that colonial difference is crucial to geopolitically locate within the forms of thinking and cosmologies produced by subaltern subjects as opposed to hegemonic global designs” (p. 10). Following Mignolo and others, one would claim that the umbilical metamorphoses between coloniality of power and colonial difference are undisputable. That is, both the coloniality of power and the colonial difference(s) form a complex set of non-monolithical spaces and chronos, rubbing against and legitimizing each other. These acts become a punctum—to use Barthes’s concept from Camara Lucida—in which oppressed epistemologies and local histories are alienated, ignored, produced as non-existent. This clash—militaristic if need be— between the coloniality of power and the local epistemes imposes an official geography of knowledge. Modernity Western school apparatuses, as I have repeatedly argued in other contexts (2007a; 2007b; 2011a; 2011b; 2015; 2016b), have been both the factory and locomotive of a massive secular lie, a lie that is at least five hundred years old, a lie that lies on each desk of each classroom, a lie based on a eugenic defense and promotion of dominant Western forms of knowledge. Consequently, this lie brings up questions of how many generations were evaluated based on this lie and how many children were severely penalized for not knowing ‘the’ who or ‘the’ what of ‘the lie’? What one does see is the ability to fabricate the social conditions that naturally impose what constitutes the truth as a source of power and control by Western schools, silencing non-Western rivers, on which these “truthful lies” are based. That is, the suppression of other forms of knowledge is a clear and objective form of social fascism. Such an argument is crucial, especially nowadays when the Common Core objectives and assessments cult frame has swamped teachers on how Western influence can be seen in Eastern literature, with no attention to consider how Western literature has been influenced by the East. Maldonado-Torres (2012) stresses how this eugenic system and worldview expresses fundamental tasks, such as “colonial expansion, colonial reconceptualization of physical and human geography, the recreation, intensification, and naturalization of hierarchies of being that divide some humans from others, and the subordination of people and nature to the demands of production and accumulation” (p. 2). In fact, “this is not only colonialism, understood as a political or cultural condition, but coloniality, conceived as a matrix of knowledge, power and being” (Maldonado-Torres, 2012, p. 2). Such a matrix could be referred to as “modernity/coloniality” (Maldonado-Torres, 2012, p. 2). Before such intricate matrix, our task is to engage systematically in decolonization processes, to disrupt such modernity/colonialities and create a de facto just epistemology. Grosfoguel (2011) raises insightful challenges in this regard:

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Can we produce a radical anti-systemic politics beyond identity politics? Is it possible to articulate a critical cosmopolitanism beyond nationalism and colonialism? Can we produce knowledge beyond Third World and Eurocentric fundamentalisms? Can we overcome the traditional dichotomy between political economy and cultural studies? Can we move beyond economic reductionism and culturalism? Such questions are quite crucial as they will help one to understand and find just ways of “how can we overcome the Eurocentric modernity without throwing away the best of modernity as many Third World fundamentalists do” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 1). Grosfoguel (2011) elaborates on the clashes within the Latin America Subaltern Studies Group, which occurred in a ‘dialogue’ between the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group in October 1998. According to him (2011), the members of this study group, who were primarily Latin American scholars from the United States, “despite their attempt at producing a radical and alternative knowledge, they reproduced the epistemic schema of Area Studies in the United States. With a few exceptions, they produced studies about the subaltern, rather than studies with and from a subaltern perspective. Like the imperial epistemology of Area Studies, theory was still located in the North while the subjects to be studied are located in the South” (p. 3). Grosfoguel (2011) highlights his (and obviously others’) frustrations and disappointment with blunt reproductions of an epistemic coloniality in doing a coloniality critique. The epistemic consequences of the knowledge produced by this Latin Americanist group were very serious, because “they underestimated in their work ethnic/racial perspectives coming from the region, while giving privilege predominantly to Western thinkers” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p.  3). Along with Mallon (1994), Grosfoguel (2011) adds that this critique gives “epistemic privilege to what they called the ‘four horses of the apocalypse’ that is Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci and Guha. Among the four main thinkers they privilege, three are Eurocentric thinkers while two of them (Derrida and Foucault) form part of the poststructuralist/postmodern Western canon. Only one, Ranajit Guha, is a thinker thinking from the South” (p. 3). Such an overwhelming presence of Western (white male) thinkers quite incapable of thinking outside the Western frame of reference or even inviting voices beyond their fixed rationale, not only ‘betrayed’ the fundamental mission of the study group but was also a regression on the struggle for epistemic justice a background that needs to be addressed (see also Mallon, 1994). Echoing Mignolo, (2000), Grosfoguel (2011) examines such a back set. Among the many reasons for the split of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, he (2011, p.  3) argues that, “one of them was between those who read subalternity as a postmodern critique (which represents a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism) and those who read subalternity as a decolonial critique (which represents a critique of Eurocentrism from subalternized and silenced knowledges).” Fatally, “for those of us that took side with the decolonial critique,

92 El Patron Colonial de Poder the dialogue with the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group made evident the need to epistemologically transcend, that is, decolonize the Western canon and epistemology” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 3). Grosfoguel’s (2011) claim needs to be taken seriously. The value of critical theory—among other aspects—relies in its capacity to decolonize. Such a process requires endogenous and exogenous itinerant messy forces working (spontaneously why not?) consciously and simultaneously. In implies to provincialize Eurocentrism, as Chakrabarty, (2007) would put it, that is to undo the ideological supremacy of Europe (Singh, 2018). These tensions were also explicit within the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, which mainly poses, according to Grosfoguel (2011), “a critique to Western European colonial historiography about India and to Indian nationalist Eurocentric historiography of India” (p. 3). However, “by using a Western epistemology and privileging Gramsci and Foucault, they constrained and limited the radicalism of their critique to Eurocentrism. Although they represent different epistemic projects, the South Asian Subaltern School privilege of Western epistemic canon overlapped with the sector of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group that sided with post-modernism” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 3). Despite the tensions and paradoxes (not being nonEurocentrists, at least, and producing a Eurocentric anti-Eurocentric critique), such study groups represent a great contribution to the field; they create a crystal clear understanding for the militants of the decolonial critique about the need to decolonize not only subaltern studies but also postcolonial studies, which was an issue examined by Grosfoguel (2006a; 2006b) in earlier contexts as well. Such a decolonial call is not an essentialist posture. It is not a functionalist fundamentalist anti-European critique. It is an assumption that even critical, postmodern, and poststructuralist theories, although strong and laudable, are not sufficient to disrupt the coloniality of power and being since they are basically an anti-Eurocentric/Western critique from a Eurocentric/Western fundamentalist position. Such decolonial commitment is, in Grosfoguel’s (2011) words, a commitment to border thinking. Border thinking, he (2011, p.  4) maintains, is critical of both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism. It is precisely a critical response to both hegemonic and marginal fundamentalisms. What all fundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality. However, in Grosfoguel’s (2011, p. 4) terms, one cannot ignore that any “decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of thought than simply the Western canon (including the Left Western canon)”; that is, a really just global “decolonial perspective cannot be based on an abstract universal (one particular that raises itself as universal global design), but would have to be the result of

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the critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal as oppose to a universal world” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 4). Thus, decolonizing knowledge processes “would require to take seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 4). In his (2011, p. 4) terms, both “postmodernism and poststructuralism as epistemological projects are caught within the Western canon reproducing within its domains of thought and practice a particular form of coloniality of power/ knowledge.” In this context, Grosfoguel’s (2011) and others’ criticism of the Western/ Eurocentric epistemological totalitarian model (including the Western Left canon) addresses some of the issues I will examine later on about the potential but also about the limits, challenges, and vicissitudes of critical and poststructural models in the field of curriculum. That is, not undoing the merits of critical and poststructural theories as well as ‘political economy and cultural studies,’ it is important also to realize how such theoretical frameworks have been and continue to be steps forward toward a decolonization process because such theoretical frameworks although counterhegemonic never stopped being Eurocentric in their anti-Eurocentric criticism. This, as I have examined elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2017), is a future path for the curriculum field, and it is at the core of what I call ICT—Itinerant Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; 2014; 2011a).

Beyond the ‘Posts’: Decolonial(ity) Thinking and the Commitment to Delinking Decoloniality necessarily evokes coloniality. (Walsh, 2018a, p. 23)

In an insightful and beautiful piece, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Mignolo (2011) explains some of the interesting outcomes from two crucial meetings. The first one was in May 2004 with Arturo Escobar and el coletivo from the modernity/coloniality project of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They met to examine issues around Critical Theory and Decolonization. Following Mignolo (2011), el coletivo was driven by imperative matters, such as [W]hat should ‘critical theory’ aim to be when the damnés de la terre are brought into the picture, next to Horkheimer’s proletarians or today’s translation of the proletariat, such as the multitudes; how can “critical theory” be subsumed into the project of modernity/coloniality and decolonization? Or would this subsumption perhaps suggest the need to abandon the twentieth-century formulations of a critical theory project? Or, would it suggest the exhaustion of the project of modernity? (p. 43)

94 El Patron Colonial de Poder The second one, Mapping the Decolonial Turn, was organized by Nelson MaldonadoTorres and held in Beverley in April 2005, involving el coletivo modernity/ coloniality project and members of the Caribbean Philosophical Association project titled Shifting the Geographies of Reason as well as with a group of philosophers and Latino cultural critics. According to Mignolo (2011), despite the tensions and consequences, such encounters made it clear that “while modernity/ coloniality are analytical categories of the colonial matrix of power, the category of decoloniality widened the frame and the objectives of the project, the same conceptualization of coloniality that is constitutive of modernity is already decolonial thinking in progress” (p. 44). Mignolo (2011) brings to the fore the importance of the genesis of the decolonial(ity) thinking, which was a concept advanced by Anibal Quijano (1992), in his piece Colonialidad y Modernidad/ racionalidad, where he argues for the need to build analytical limits to the Eurocentric hegemonic platform (p. 44). Decolonial thinking, Mignolo (2011) claims, involves a nonnegotiable desprendimento, a decolonial delinking, which I would add must be a total detachment (p. 3). Following Mignolo’s (2011) examination of Quijano’s reasoning, desprendimento or desprenderse (i.e., delinking) implies epistemic de-linking or, in other words, epistemic disobedience. Epistemic disobedience leads us to decolonial options as a set of projects that have in common the effects experienced by all the inhabitants of the globe that were at the receiving end of global designs to colonize the economy (appropriation of land and natural resources), authority (management by the Monarch, the State, or the Church), and police and military enforcement (coloniality of power), to colonize knowledges (languages, categories of thoughts, belief systems, etc.) and beings (subjectivity). “Delinking” is then necessary because there is no way out of the coloniality of power from within Western (Greek and Latin) categories of thought. (p. 45) That is, one needs to “desprenderse de las vinculaciones de la racionalidadmodernidad con la colonialidad, en primer término, y en definitiva con todo poder no constituido en la decisión libre de gentes libres [extricate oneself from the linkages between rationality/modernity and coloniality, first of all, and definitely from all power which is not constituted by free decisions made by free people]” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 45). Thus, delinking “implies epistemic disobedience rather than the constant search for ‘newness’ [and] takes us to a different place, to a different ‘beginning’ (not in Greece, but in the responses to the ‘conquest and colonization’ of America and the massive trade of enslaved Africans), to spatial sites of struggles and building rather than to a new temporality within the same space (from Greece, to Rome, to Paris, to London, to Washington, DC)” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 45). In this sense, decoloniality is “the energy that does not allow the operation of the logic of coloniality nor believes the fairy tales of the rhetoric of modernity”

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(Mignolo, 2011, p.  46). Decoloniality is “the anthropoi expressing and engaging in actions that reflect an unwillingness to accept the domains of coloniality (power, knowledge, subjectivity, sexuality) that justify violence in the name of modernity, a concept premised on the salvation of colonized populations (Garcia and Baca, 2019, p.  4). Thus, decoloniality, they (2019, p.  4) claim, “is marked by a shift and break from storytellers of the past—think white Western male subjectivity—to the anthropoi, the ‘other’s themselves.” That is The anthropoi acts of delinking from the “West” for an ‘otherwise’ local epistemology works to reinscribe the geo- and body-politics of knowledge and understanding that has been repressed and oppressed or that is still colonized as a result of hegemonic models of thinking and epistemology (Garcia and Baca, 2019, p. 4) Decoloniality, blatantly, is not just a call to interrupt the Cartesian model of modernity. It ofers a solution of another word, another world. Decolonial thinking is not just about the possibility of another epistemology. It is about the real existence of such a non-Western epistemological river. Mignolo (2011) clashes with specific critical views that vehemently challenged modernity, however reductively. That is, Mignolo’s (2011) notion of delinking is not cocooned in the swamp of political economy, as Amin (1990) would argue, in his Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World. Mignolo’s (2011) decolonial call to delink reacts against (post)modern totalitarian levels of thought that paradoxically ignore the epistemic sphere. In this context, Mignolo (2011) challenges leading poststructuralists such as Foucault, Said, and Spivak, among others, because they built a critique confined to Western frameworks, ignoring the word and the world of crucial non-Western intellectuals. Mignolo’s (2011) call is a call to decolonially delink, a radical delink, one that explodes and implodes the rational pillars of postmodernity and neocoloniality. In Mignolo’s (2011) decolonial consulate, “decolonial thinking emerged at the very foundation of modernity/coloniality, as its counterpoint [and it] is differentiated from post-colonial theory or post-colonial studies in that the genealogy of these are located in French post-structuralism more than in the dense history of planetary decolonial thinking” (p. 46). That is, more than anticapitalist and anticolonialist, the very roots of the decolonial are precisely ante-capitalist and ante-colonialist, without ceasing to be anticolonial and anticapitalist. Tlostanova and Mignolo (2012) elaborate over the differences and parallels between postcolonial and decolonial thinking. As they argue (2012) in addressing the limits of postcoloniality, decolonial thinking is not against postcolonialism (p. 31). Precisely the opposite, decolonial thinking brings “forward another option.” After all, both postcoloniality and decoloniality are “two different responses to the five hundred years of Western consolidation and Imperial expansion, [responses] that were [and are] built on different historical experiences, languages, memories, and genealogies of thought” (Tlostanova and Mignolo, 2012, p. 32).

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Tlostanova and Mignolo (2012) claim that postcolonial studies “emerged mainly in the US [concerned and focus] with the body politics of knowledge [starting] from the version of history that places the British Empire (or sometimes the French Empire) at the Center of modern colonial history and all in all postcolonial studies and theories are connected to the splendors and miseries of French post-structuralism through which colonial experiences in British and India were filtered” (pp. 32–33). However, with decolonial thinking, the focus or the password is desprendimento total, meaning, “to delink from principles and structures supporting the existing system of knowledge and humanities; [decolonial thinking] questions the rhetoric justifying the role of the social sciences and the humanities as well their methodology. Such desprendimento total is the best weapon to help decolonizing the mind of both the colonizer and the colonized (Wa Thiong’o, 1986; Mammi, 2013), and to unpack the subsumed psychological framework that produces the ‘slaves of the white myth’ (Galdwin and Saidin, 1980). Decolonial thinking calls into question the disciplinary legitimacy of knowledge and the disqualification of knowledge that does not obey the existing disciplinary rules” (Tlostanova and Mignolo, 2012, p. 32). That is, decolonial thinking is a commitment “to learn to unlearn in order to relearn” (Tlostanova and Mignolo, 2012, p.  32), or, to complexify Smith’s (1999) concept of disciplinary disobedience, it is a call to disciplinary detach. In sum, [p]ostcolonality presupposes postmodernity, while decolonial thinking and decolonial option are always delinked from modernity and post-modernity. It brings to the foreground a silenced and different genealogy of thought. The decolonial option originated not in Europe, but in the Third World, as a consequence of struggles for political decolonization. And it emerged among ‘minorities’ in the heart of the US as a consequence of the Civil Rights movement and its impact on decolonizing knowledge and being through gender and ethnic studies. (Tlostanova and Mignolo, 2012, p. 33) Coloniality, Mignolo (2018) argues, “is not a postmodern conceptual introduction in the sense of rejecting metanarratives” (p. 107). Quite the opposite, “it claims the necessity of five hundred years’ macronarratives of the colonial matrix of power that modern macronarratives disguised, and postmodern philosophy ignored” (p. 170). In this sense, “thinking without modernity, delinking from its fictions, is one of the major decolonial challenges” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 109). Decolonial thinking is a nonnegotiable commitment, a way of life framed in a diferent reading of the word and world. It is not a solution designed for an irremediable, interminably postponed future. It is concrete, and it resurfaces from within the belligerent clashes between colonizers and colonized. It is a utopia of the past materialized within the present. As I have examined before, decoloniality (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018) incorporates a legacy with more than five hundred years of existence. In Walsh’s (2018a) terms, since the first ‘encounter’ with ‘the Whites’ “decoloniality has been a

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component part of (trans)local struggles, movements and actions to and refuse the legacy and ongoing relations and patterns of power established by external and internal colonialism and the global designs of the modern world” (p. 16). In this sense, decoloniality denotes ways of thinking, knowing, being, and doing that began with, but also precede, the colonial enterprise and invasion. It implies the recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class, that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and Western modernity. (Walsh, 2018a, p. 17) Decoloniality—which as I have mentioned before “necessarily evokes coloniality” (Walsh, 2018a, p. 23)—is full-blast epistemic disobedience, which, as Mignolo (2011) argues, is not just a contemporary issue although it runs parallel with modernity; it emerged immediately with the institutionalization of coloniality (p. 45). That is, “if coloniality is constitutive of modernity since the salvationist rhetoric of modernity presupposes the oppressive and condemnatory logic of coloniality (from there come the damnés of Fanon), then this oppressive logic produces an energy of discontent, of distrust, of release within those who react against imperial violence” (Mignolo, 2011, pp. 45–46). Decoloniality is thus a decolonial insurgence, a clarion ‘no’ to the colonial matrix of power, it is not “just about, but about to re-exist, as there is a relation between resistance and re-existence and/or to re-exist resisting” (Walsh, 2018b, p. 33). Decoloniality, Walsh (2018a) claims, is not an innocuous individual attitude, but it attempts “to make visible, open up and advance radical distinct perspectives and possibilities that displace Western rationality as the only framework and possibility of existence, analysis and thought” (p. 17). Tlostanova and Mignolo (2012) also claim that decolonial thinking stems from “the sixteenth century and cut[s] across the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries” (p. 31). Mignolo (2011) unveils the first manifestations of the decolonial turn portrayed by Waman Puma de Ayala and Ottobbah Cugoano, who published, respectively, New Chronicle and Good Government around 1616 and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery in 1787 (p. 47). Mignolo (2011) adds that these works are decolonial political treatises that, thanks to the coloniality of knowledge, were not able to share the table of discussion with the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. To reinscribe them today in the genealogy of decolonial thinking is an urgent project. Without this genealogy, decolonial thinking would be nothing more than a gesture whose logic would depend on some of the various genealogies founded by Greece and Rome, and be re-inscribed in the European imperial modernity after the Renaissance, in some of the six imperial languages already mentioned: Italian, Castilian,

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and Portuguese during the Renaissance; French, English, German during the Enlightenment. Waman Puma and Cugoano thought and opened a space for the unthinkable in the imperial genealogy of modernity, as much in their rightist aspects as in their leftist aspects. (p. 47) Mignolo (2011) argues that “Waman Puma and Cugoano opened the doors to an other thinking, to a border thinking, by way of the experience and memory of Tawantinsuyu in the former; and of the experience and memory of the brutal African slavery of the Atlantic in the latter” (p. 48). Decolonial is a commitment to delinking and opening; its foci are not the doors that lead towards the truth (aletheia), but rather to other places; to the places of colonial memory; to the footprints of the colonial wound from where decolonial thinking is weaved; [that is,] doors that lead to other types of truths whose basis is not being but the coloniality of being, the colonial wound. Decolonial thinking presupposes, always, the colonial difference. (Mignolo, 2011, p. 48) As an alternative way to challenge both dominant and counter-dominant Modern Western Eurocentric platforms, decoloniality places “tribal epistemologies at the center of the debate as epistemologies are woven tightly with a personal identity that shifts over a life span” (Kovach, 2012, p. 55). Decolonial thinking challenges the “presumed totality of the gnosis of the Occident” (Mignolo, 2011, p.  48). Mignolo (2011) asserts that “a decolonial turn is the opening and the freedom from the thinking and the forms of living (economies-other, political theories-other), the cleansing of the coloniality of being and of knowledge; the de-linking from the spell of the rhetoric of modernity, from its imperial imaginary articulated in the rhetoric of democracy” (p. 48). It is interesting to notice how for both Waman Puma de Ayala and Ottobbah Cugoano, decolonial thinking relied on Christianity. But it was a reading of Christianity as being equivalent to that of the democracy of the pen and the word of the Zapatistas; [that is,] democracy is not the private property of Western thought and political theory, but rather one of the principles of coexistence, of good living. Such a concept of democracy collides with the concept and form of democracy in the U.S. context that appears almost an antithesis to co-existence. As is shown in the following chapters, “the genealogy of decolonial thinking is un-known in the genealogy of Western European thinking” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 59). Such border thinking will pay due respect to other epistemological forms beyond the Western Eurocentric totalitarian, one that for the past millennium has been produced and reproduced as I have been examining. Such border thinking is a commitment with epistemic justice and with social and cognitive justice. As the report prepared for the National Working Group on Education and the Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs, Ottawa, Canada, reveals

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“whether or not it has been acknowledge[d] by the Eurocentric mainstream, Indigenous knowledge has always existed” (Battiste, 2002, p.  4). The task for indigenous academics has been “to affirm and activate the holistic paradigm of Indigenous knowledges to reveal the wealth and richness of Indigenous languages, worldviews, teachings, and experiences, all of which have been systematically excluded from contemporary educational institutions and from Eurocentric knowledge systems” (Battiste, 2002, p. 4). Thus, “through this act of intellectual self-determination, Indigenous academics are developing new analyses and methodologies to decolonize themselves and their communities, and their institutions” (Battiste, 2002, p. 4). As I was able to examine elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a), “Eurocentric thought asserts that only Europeans can progress and that Indigenous peoples are frozen in time, guided by knowledge systems that reinforce the past and do not look towards the future” (Battiste, 2002, p. 4). Also, the idea or the cult “of people not being able to get by without Europe’s theoretical or cultural achievements is one of the most definitive tenets of modernity. This logic has been applied for centuries to the colonial world” (Maldonado-Torres, 2003, p. 5). Such an ideological cult, Mignolo (2008, p. 227) maintains, is anchored in a myriad of strategies that “have been used to reinforce the myth that regions outside Europe contribute nothing to the development of knowledge, humanities, arts, science, and technology.” Such strategies, among other issues, “include the blind reliance on and citation of Greco-Roman references despite the fact that the Greek alphabet is largely of Syrian/Lebanese origin” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227). In Mignolo’s (2008, p. 227) decolonial terms, the Eurocentric matrix is also one of “manipulation of dates and demotion in importance of non-European knowledge such as Mayan, Hindu, and Arabic numerals, the concept of zero and algebraic notations, the use of decimals, and the solution of complex equations.” It is a predatory historical logic that plunders any form of knowledge and science beyond the Eurocentric platform. It thus imposes eugenic forms of scientific praxis through “the Europeanization of the names of outstanding scientists and their devices, scientific documents, and processes to undermine equal and fair assessment of the global history of knowledge (for instance, a comet identified by the Chinese as early as 2,500 years ago is attributed to Halley)” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227); it classifies and trivializes “non-European science and technological innovations and inventions as ‘art’” (Mignolo, 2008, p. 227). As we have detailed in length elsewhere (see Paraskeva, 2011a), the best way for schools to fight for a just and equal society—especially when facing the impact of neoradical centrist policies and strategies—is to engage in a struggle for what Santos, Nunes, and Meneses (2007) call epistemological diversity. They argue that there is no such thing as “global social justice without cognitive justice” (p. ix). In fact, by identifying particular forms of knowledge as “official,” schooling participates in what Santos (1997) called epistemicides—a lethal tool that fosters the commitment to imperialism and white supremacy (hooks, 1994). Santos et al. (2007) astutely claim that the “suppression of knowledge [of

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indigenous peoples of the Americas and of African slaves] was the other side of genocide” (p. ix). Their argument is worth quoting at length here: Many non-Western (indigenous, rural, etc.) populations of the world conceive of the community and the relationship with nature, knowledge, historical experience, memory, time, and space as configuring ways of life cannot be reduced to Eurocentric conceptions and cultures. . . . The adoption of allegedly universal valid, Eurocentric legal and political models, such as the neoliberal economic order, representative democracy, individualism, or the equation between state and law often rests . . . on forms of domination based on class, ethnic, territorial, racial, or sexual differences and on the denial of collective identities and rights considered incompatible with Eurocentric definitions of the modern social order. (pp. xx–xxi) Thus, one cannot deny that “there is an epistemological foundation to the capitalist and imperial order that the global North has been imposing on the global South” (p. ix). What we need, Santos (2004) argues, is to engage in a battle against “the monoculture of scientific knowledge [and fight for an] ecology of knowledges” (p. xx), which is an invitation to the promotion of non-relativistic dialogues among knowledges, granting equality of opportunities to the different kinds of knowledge engaged in an ever broader epistemological disputes aimed both at maximizing their respective contributions to build a more democratic and just society and at decolonizing knowledge and power. (p. xx) Thus, the fight should be against the coloniality of power and knowledge. In fighting this battle, one will end up challenging particular notions, concepts, and practices relative to multiculturalism that are profoundly Eurocentric, [that] create and describe cultural diversity within the framework of the nation-states of the Northern hemisphere . . . the prime expression of the cultural logic of multinational or global capitalism, a capitalism without homeland at last, and a new form of racism, tend[ing] to be quite descriptive and apolitical thus suppressing the problem of power relations, exploitation, inequality, and exclusion. (Santos, 2004, pp. xx–xxi) We actually need a multicultural approach that adopts an emancipatory content and direction aimed mainly at the multiple articulations of diference. Thus, we will be allowing for the fruitful conditions of what Santos (2004) calls the sociology of absences. In other words, what we have is a call for the democratization of knowledges that is a commitment to an emancipatory, nonrelativistic, cosmopolitan ecology of knowledges,

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bringing together and staging dialogues and alliances between diverse forms of knowledge, cultures, and cosmopologies in response to different forms of oppression that enact the coloniality of knowledge and power. [We need actually] to learn from the South (since) the aim to reinvent social emancipation goes beyond the critical theory produced in the North and the social and political praxis to which it has subscribed. (Santos et al., 2007, p. xiv) In fact, it would be a mistake to disassociate Western hegemonic epistemologies from the dehumanizing imperialist and colonialist ideological platforms. As Smith (1999) notes, [i]mperialism and colonialism are the specific formations through which the West came to “see,” to “name,” and to “know” indigenous communities. The cultural archive with its systems of representation, codes for unlocking systems of classification, and fragmented artifacts of knowledge enabled travelers and observers to make sense of what they saw and to represent their new-found knowledge back to the West through the authorship and authority of their representations. (p. 60) That is, Grande (2004) states, “the predominantly white, middle-class advocates of critical theory will need to examine how their language and epistemic frames act as homogenizing agents when interfaced with the conceptual and analytical categories persistent within American Indian educational theory and praxis” (p. 3). The fabrication of modernity and its subsequent rationale “produced a perspective of knowledge and mode(s) of producing knowledge that gives a very tight account of the character of the global model of power: colonial/modern/capitalist Eurocentered. This perspective and concrete mode of producing knowledge is Eurocentrism” (Quijano, 2008, p. 197). Eurocentrism is the name of a perspective of knowledge whose systematic formation began in Western Europe before the middle of the seventeenth century, although some of its roots are, without doubt, much older. In the following centuries this perspective was made globally hegemonic, travelling the same course as the dominion of European bourgeois class. (Quijano, 2000b, p. 549) Its constitution, Quijano (2000b, p. 549) adds, “was associated with a specific bourgeois secularization of European thought and with the experiences and necessities of the global model of capitalist (colonial/modern) and Eurocentered power established since the colonization of America.” It does not involve however “all of the knowledges of history of all Europe or Western Europe in particular, and it does not refer to all the modes of knowledge of all Europeans and all epochs” (Quijano, 2000b, p. 549). Instead, one is actually before a very

102 El Patron Colonial de Poder concrete canon of reasoning, a “specific rationality or perspective of knowledge that was made globally hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming other previous or diferent conceptual formations ad their respective concrete knowledge’s, as much in Europe as in the rest of the World” (Quijano, 2000b, p. 549). Following Amin’s (2009) notes, Eurocentrism is much more than a vision of ignorance and fear, and it “implies a theory of world history, and departing from it, a global political project” (p. 154). Such a global ideological-political project “legitimates at one and the same time the existence of capitalism as a social system and the worldwide inequality that accompanies it” (Amin, 2009, p.  156). Eurocentrism is a “Christianophile myth” and an antithetical racist construct of Orientalism that (1) removes Ancient Greece from the very milieu in which it unfolded and developed—the Orient—in order to annex Hellenism to Europe arbitrarily, (2) retains the mark of racism, the fundamental basis on which European cultural unity was constructed, (3) interprets Christianity also annexed arbitrarily to Europe, as the principal aspect in the maintenance of European cultural unity, conforming to an unscientific vision of religious phenomena, and (4) concurrently constructs the vision of a near East and the more distant Orients on the same racist foundation, again employing an immutable vision of religion. (Amin, 2009, p. 166) Eurocentrism is the epistemicide. Orientalism, Samir Amin (2009) argues, is an “ideological construction of a mythical Orient whose characteristics are treated as immutable traits defined in simple opposition to the characteristics of the Occidental world. The image of this opposite is an essential element of Eurocentrism” (p. 175). Eurocentrism is not actually a social theory, Amin (2009) claims. It is, indeed, “a prejudice that distorts social theories” (Amin, 2009, p. 166). As I was able to examine in great detail elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a), modernity has been able to weave a particular vision of history that not only laudably silences non-Western epistemological forms but also deletes any non-Western epistemological fertilizer at the very core of Western epistemological platform. The Western European epistemological matrix has been vehemently challenged by African intellectuals. Within the struggle against what modernity and post-modernity represent and their own reductionisms and insufciencies to accurately examine and represent social reality emerged, the concept of transmodernity, which is “a real paradigm change that intends to clarify gnoseologic, sociologic, ethical and aesthetic relations” (Rodríguez Magda, 2011, p. 1). Rodríguez Magda (2011) adds that transmodernity would seek a synthesis between premodern and modern position, constituting a model which accepts the coexistence of both, in order to reconcile the notion of progress with the respect for cultural and

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religious differences, trying to stop the rejection, mainly from Islamic countries to the Western view of modernity. (p. 2) As I have mentioned, before the current globalization and internationalization fever that swamps our field, the struggle for a relevant and just curriculum must be a struggle for social and cognitive justice. More than the next momentum of such critical curriculum river, this is the momentum, a commitment to decolonial thinking that will produce not just an accurate and productive self-critique of the insufciencies of the radical critical model of (post)modernity but will also simultaneously pay attention to the importance of challenging the colonial power matrix that via education and curriculum ferments and fosters epistemicides. Such critical river needs to be sentient of the wor(l)ds behind and beyond the Western epistemological platform, wor(l)ds that are non-monolithic. As I have examined elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2011a; 2011b; 2007b), a powerful way to do this is to assume a commitment to an itinerant posture and engage in what I have termed ICT (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; 2014; 2011a).

Game Over! Man3 as Man2 on Steroids As a decolonial thinker, once I know what Human/Man means, I do not wat to be human. (Mignolo, 2018, p. 171)

I have been arguing that modernity is under the gun due to the impossibility of perpetual submission from the ‘the other.’ That is, “the exclusion and cornering into poverty [better say, quasi extermination] of African, Asian, and Latin American and other non-Western otherness and their indomitable will to survive” pushed modernity to an unsustainable point (Dussel, 2013). Modernity got lost irremediably between the real(ity) and representations of the real(ity). For all practical purposes, the Western Cartesian modernity model, as a hegemonic matrix, with its arrogant claim to address global social issues, is not just moribund; it is dead. Modernity, Harding (2008) claims, was/is a “misleading dream” (p. 23). Such deceptive metamorphosis wasn’t a ‘silenced’ concern in leading Eurocentric intellectuals, such as Pessoa: Since the middle of the eighteenth century a terrible disease has gradually descended upon civilization. Seventeen centuries of Christian aspiration constantly deceived, five centuries of postponed pagan aspiration— Catholicism had faltered as christianism, the renaissance that had failed as paganism, the reform that had failed as a universal phenomenon. The disaster of all that was dreamed, the shame of all that had been achieved, the misery of living without dignity that others could have with us, and without the lives of others that we could have worthily. (Pessoa, 2017, p. 214)

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Modernity’s final sentence was determined partially by modernity itself and its truly totalitarian cult, which was a cultural and economic napalm that attempted to erase all other epistemological manifestations, that paradoxically ended up being systematically reinforced and strengthened from the belligerent clashes with modernity. If colonialism is a crime against humanity, and colonialism and imperialism had no existence outside of modernity, then modernity is also not innocent in such crime against humanity—not because it was inconsequential in dodging genocidal policies and practices, but precisely because its very existence relies on its capacity to perpetuate massive genocide. Great achievements in areas such as space conquest and technologies have been reduced to a pale inconsequentiality for the massive majority of the world’s population in the face of slavery, genocide, holocaust, poverty, inequality, social and cognitive apartheid, intergenerational injustice, and the temerity to change nature, among other issues. We are up against “a civilizational crisis, a crisis in which the universal model or paradigm of the West is crumbling before our very eyes, it is a war against life in all of its practices, forms and manifestations” (Zapatistas as cited in Walsh, 2018a, p. 15). Painfully, all of these sagas are at the very root of such modern, societal, technological advancements. The way “many non-Western populations of the world conceive of the community and the relationship with nature, cannot be reduced to Eurocentric conceptions and cultures” (Santos et al., 2007, pp.  xx–xxi). The twentieth century, Thernborn (2010) claims, “was the last Eurocentric century” (p. 59). Recapturing Fanon’s (1963) insightful argument, “let’s go comrades, the European game is definitely finished, it is necessary to find something else” (p. 239). Needless to mention is how the educational system, in general, and curriculum, in particular, are both profoundly implicated in such epistemicide. In fact, by identifying particular forms of knowledge as “official,” schooling participates in a blunt epistemicide (Santos, 1997; Paraskeva, 2011a)—a lethal tool that feeds the dynamics of White supremacy and a eugenic empire (hooks, 1994). Following Amin’s (2009) notes, Eurocentrism and its abyssal thinking is much more than a vision of ignorance and fear, and it “implies a theory of world history, that legitimates at one and the same time the existence of capitalism as a social system and the worldwide inequality that accompanies it” (Amin, 2008, p. 156). Eurocentrism is the reinforcement of a severe Occidentosis. Eurocentrism is not actually a social theory, it is indeed “a prejudice that distorts social theories” (Amin, 2008, p. 166). Modern Western Eurocentric thinking “is an abyssal thinking” (Santos, 2007b, p. 45). It consists of a system of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of “this side of the line” and the realm of “the other side of the line.” (Santos, 2007b, p. 45)

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Such abyssal lines constitute the very core of “the epistemological foundation of the capitalist and imperial order that the global North has been imposing on the global South” (Santos et al., 2007, p. ix). There is no ‘incomplete other’ (Todorova, 1997). Invisibility and non-existence of the “one side” are the roots of visibility and existence of the “another side.” That is, on the other side of the line, there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific inquiry. (Santos, 2007b, p. 47) In such context, not just knowledge, but the very question/answer “what is to think” is totally prostituted. How can ‘one’ actually claim that one really knows the things that one claims to know if an immense epistemological platform that congregates a myriad of other forms of episteme has been viciously produced as nonexistent? Welcome to the colonial zone, a zone that is “par excellence, the realm of incomprehensible beliefs and behaviors which in no way can be considered knowledge, whether true or false” (Santos, 2007b, p. 48). Such abyssality is the Eurocentric matrix that “immunologically organizes the world posing a particular topology” (Han, 2015, p. 3). This topology reflects “borders, transitions, thresholds, fences, ditches, and walls that prevent universal change and exchange” (Han, 2015, p. 3). Thus, hybridization is completely of the table as “immunological hyperaesthesis would not allow hybridization to occur in the first place” (Han, 2015, p. 3). Notwithstanding such eugenic pedigree, dominant and specific dominant forces within the coloniality matrix of power refuse to admit that the idea of humanity, human and nature, ‘coloniality’ created the irreversible conditions to place the coloniality matrix of power on death row. It looks like a disformed beast at the end of its life beset by an immeasurable sea of victims it had created, victims that between death—in Eurocentric terms—and coloniality they chose the former. The coloniality matrix of power produced and has been producing oppositional dynamics as the only possible way to exist. Instead of grasping the real interactions and existences based in complementarily and/or coexistence of the opposition, like so many cultures beyond the realm of Western Eurocentrism, the fact is that “the law of contradiction or of non-contradiction seems to be the seed for the semantic construction of binary opposition in nonmodern Western thoughts” (Mignolo, 2018, pp. 154–155). That is, narratives, ideas, and praxis “built around the idea of modernity, its rhetoric and goals, assumed the logic of non-contradiction and the semantic of binary opposition” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 155), an inflexible system set up “since the European Renaissance and Enlightenment” that constructed the idea, definition, and existence of a specific human (and consequently sub-human or non-human), humanity (and consequently sub-humanity or non-humanity) and nature, a non-correspondable noun beyond an orbit drafted and institutionalized by the coloniality matrix of power (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018). The rhetoric of modernity, Mignolo (2018) argues, “was built on the opposition between Christians and non-Christians, masculine and feminine, white and non-White,

106 El Patron Colonial de Poder progress and stagnation, developed and undeveloped, First and Second/Third World” (p.  155). Such logic of opposition and non-contradiction (or contradiction of non-contradiction) was in fact a philosophical praxis of denial, of constructions of non-existences, the perpetual enzyme of abyssality (Santos, 2014) as the only possible way of existence, a “constitutive act of coloniality legitimized by the rhetoric (narratives) of modernity” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 155). Since the Renaissance, such narrative “was and continues to be built on a logic of coloniality, a logic that denies and disavows non-European local times and spaces and non-European ways of life” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 155). Thus, ‘human’ and ‘humanity’ were actually an invention eugenically drawn based on oppositional dynamics. Such human is a “fictional noun pretending to be its ontological representation” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  155). Wynter’s (2003) framework, brought to the table by Mignolo (2018), helps a great deal here. She argues that, with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, one witnesses the construction of ‘Man1 and Man2’ respectively. That is, those who conceptualized such classifications “as standing for the human were self-identified with the entity (Man1 and Man2 = Human) that they were describing and in so doing they draw the differences with entities that were lesser than or non-human” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 157). Man1 and Man2 more than an existent entity is the only way to exist as human that provides a very concrete humanity (Mignolo, 2018; Wynter, 2003). The invention of human (Man1 and Man2) and humanity was concomitantly not only the invention of the ‘other’ in which ‘its’ visibility is only recognized according to the interests of a eugenic humanity; otherwise, it doesn’t exist, it is non-human, but also of nature. Nature—as such—“doesn’t exist or exists as an ontological” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 158) force. The construction of nature in a humanity designed and led by ‘Man1 and Man2’ (Wynter, 2003) was a vehement dismissal of what really exists in nonmodern non-Western non-Eurocentric terms, that is “the relentless generation and the regeneration of life in the solar system from which process emerged a species of living/languaging organisms” (Mignolo, 2018, pp. 158–159). Moreover, Mignolo (2018) adds, “from life on Planet Earth to the other planets touring around the Sun there is no single entity that could correspond to the noun nature. There is no such concept in other non-Western languages” (p. 159); thus, “if there is no such concept, it is because there was no conceptualization corresponding to what Europeans understood as nature” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 159). In this sense it is crucial to question the very existence of these three fundamental categories of coloniality matrix of power i.e. human, humanity, and nature. The frustrations with such eugenic vision and existence of humanity, human, and nature have never been peaceful, even within the modern Western Eurocentric landscape, and have always triggered strong animosity on the part of counter-hegemonic movements and groups. It is in this context and in reaction to the historical legacy of human and humanity, that Braidotti’s (2013) rationale of the post-human gains momentum. Mignolo’s (2018) dialogue with both Wynter’s (2003) and Braidotti’s (2013) rationale, which places “posthuman as a Eurocentric critique of European humanism” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 171), helps

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one to understand how “human, Man/Human and Posthuman are three moments in the history of the coloniality matrix of power attempting to maintain control of epistemic meaning in the sphere of culture, parallel to the control of meaning and power in the sphere of economic and politics” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  172). That is, Wynter’s dynamics “of Man1 in the Renaissance and Man2 during the Enlightenment could well be extended to Man3, the posthuman” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  171). Basically, the posthuman drive is incapable of reinvigorating, in a way, the predicaments of previous ‘Mans’; it is Man2 on steroids. Modernity by itself “is not only a cultural revolution” (Amin, 2008, p.  88); one cannot delink the abyssal thinking from the political economy and culture of the material conditions of the epistemicide underlying the emergence and development of capitalism. It is actually the carburetor of such system. While the Portuguese-Spanish Treaty of Tordesillas could be identified as the first Western modern global line produced by such abyssal episteme, “the true abyssal lines emerge in the mid-sixteenth century with the amity lines” (Santos, 2007b, pp. 49–50). The very Western modern claim of “beyond the equator there are no sins” was a kiss of death to the other side of the line (Santos, 2007b, pp. 49–50). Colonialism is “the blind spot upon which modern conceptions of knowledge and law are built” (Santos, 2007b, p. 50). Modern humanity “is not conceivable without modern sub-humanity” (Santos, 2007b, p.  52). Precisely because of this, why it is so difficult to destroy such social beast? Why does the creation of the world that we wish to see and so eloquently unpacked, for example in the Bamako Appeal that “affirms the solidarity of the people of the north and the south in the construction of internationalism on an antiimperialist foundation” (Amin, 2008, p. 111), seem to be unreachable? Why does it appear impossible to have a sustainable critical theory and pedagogy before such social havoc? In fact, “it seems that there is no lack of issues that can promote anger, discomfort, and indignation” (Santos, 1999, p.  22). However, the challenges to edify an effective critical theory of society are overtly undeniable. For example, the aggressiveness of neoliberal policies has caused serious mutilation to the construction of a robust critical theory and pedagogy. There is no question about it. The systematic attacks on public education, the financial and cultural strangulation of public institutions, the disqualification and de-professionalization of teachers, poor preparation of teachers, the attacks on bilingualism, condescension for special education programs, adulteration and militarization of public higher education, the destruction of tenure, the multiplication of adjunct faculty, attacks on the liberal arts, blinded cult on STEM programs, the elimination of all programs that the market does not want, the precariousness of teachers’ work, attacks on unions, the manipulation of faculty senates, all of this has caused serious difficulties to the critical project. Should not this ‘chaos’ be more than enough to help the emergence of a dominant critical theory and pedagogy? What more will it take for a critical social theory to be established as a cultural hegemony in the face of such social tragedy?

108 El Patron Colonial de Poder The paradox is that at the level of the discourses, I know of few educators who do not identify themselves as advocates of critical thinking and engage in developing critical skills in their students, but I argue that is only at the level of the discourse. If one randomly grabs the syllabi of any undergrad or grad program, he or she will certainly notice listed in the learning objectives ‘the development of critical thought and critical skills.’ As a phoneme and grapheme, the ‘critic’ colonized the academy. Now, if ‘we are all critical,’ why is it that critical theory and pedagogy are always marginal? Why did critical theory turn into a painful ordeal, a calvary for so many of us critical theorists? Why is neoliberalism capable of imposing itself as a public pedagogy? Moreover, how many (overt) programs of critical pedagogy exist in the United States? Does not this social chaos have the necessary ingredients for critical pedagogy to promote another commonsense? For example, if we compare the social reality that preceded historical events like the Russian Revolution and more recently the emergence of Nazism, are we in present-day societies far from the chaos that preceded those tumults that ‘turned’ the world ‘upside down’? How and why is it that this social chaos turns out to be anemic in advancing a critical social theory and pedagogy? Clearly it seems that critical theory and pedagogies showed an inability to “sustain a convincing critique of the present social formation in face of the need for such critique” (Poster, 1989, p. 1). My position will certainly or probably be controversial for some of my colleagues. The social construction carried out by neoliberal policies is a very short blanket to explain ‘the problems’ of critical theory and pedagogy. While I do subscribe to positions such as the ones like Berardi (2012), which claim that the “the economic dogma has taken hold of the public discourse and has destroyed the critical power” and that “political reason and that the collapse of the global economy has exposed the dangers of economic dogmatism, but its ideology has already been incorporated into the automatisms of living society” (p. 7), the fact is that such quasi Armageddon is not enough to explain the number of natural insufficiencies within the very counter-hegemonic platform, again, despite huge accomplishments. Rightist dominance is not detached from a very concrete ‘Left establishment’ (Cusset, 2018). Although such social pandemonium plays a crucial role, in the challenges faced by critical approaches it also requires a serious and deep analysis at the very core of critical social pedagogy and theory to understand such insufficiencies and ways of moving forward. This implies, as Cabral would put it, intellectual honesty toward a selfcritique and to engage in decolonial thinking—a decolonial existence—“by asking what it means to be human and rejecting the ontology and epistemology of the human and of humanity.” That is, a decolonial thinker, “once knowing what Human/Man means, doesn’t want to be human” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  171). Instead of simply rejecting “its content and adding a prefix (posthuman), decolonial thinkers start by asking how these concepts come into being: when, why, who and what for?”(Mignolo, 2018, p. 171). In what follows, I will examine what actually happened to critical theories and pedagogies. In so doing, I will examine the impasses and in most cases the

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setbacks that we have seen in our field after the great achievements of progressive and critical groups, during the heyday of neo-Gramscianism championed by what I call ‘the generation of utopia,’ which at the dawn of 1970s and 1980s, led successful struggles for a more relevant and just curriculum. In doing so and reinforcing the rationale of Santos (1999), I claim how critical curriculum theory and pedagogies were involved and bogged down in a gullet framed by an anti-functionalist functionalism, contaminated with a severe Occidentosis and throw it in a kind of involution metamorphoses. Before I do that, let’s turn our focus to the multifarious and rich terrain of critical theory and try to examine what really happened to critical theory that seems to be incapable of dismantling dominant modern Western Eurocentric epistemological hegemonic tradition and impose itself as a dominant epistemological matrix.

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4

What Happens With Critical Curriculum Theory?

Fascism became respectable. (Horkheimer, 1999, p. vi)

This chapter touches a very sensitive nerve for all critical theorists and pedagogues: what is really the case with critical theory? We are at a time when conservative movements with radical tendencies as well as viral fascism and authoritarian impulses both in the United States and in other nations, which are wrapped in neoliberal policies that are the true heart of late capitalism, seem to have finally lost the shame and, without any embarrassment, openly defended and institutionalized (n)eugenic policies, an unprecedented historical regression, as I had the occasion to analyze previously. Consequently, I intend with this chapter to try to contribute to a debate that I believe is more crucial than ever right now. While this is not a new concern—see for example Santos (1999); Fraser (1990)—I hope I am bringing alternative ways of addressing the issue. Before I turn to the earlier question though, it might be wise to draw a sketch—albeit briefly—penciling in some of the major issues advocated by intellectuals, associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research), issues that were crucial not only to help to understand capitalism in its liberal market and state forms, the right and the left turn authoritarian fascist impulses and atrocities, as well as the failures and frustrations to overthrow systems of dominance and exploitation, but also the way those issues gradually would end up shaping the critical epistemological river of the curriculum field (Paraskeva, 2011; 2014). Thus, they helped edify and build the progressive leftist utopia—as defined by Rorty (1998)—towards a just world. The idea here is not to make an exhaustive chronological exegesis on critical theory, and framing it historically, its emergence, different influences, tendencies, as well as epistemological avenues that they dare to defy and tear. Such work was insightfully accomplished so far by other scholars (Arato and Gebhardt, 1985; Honneth, 1991; Benhabib, 1986; Held, 1980; Kellner, 1989). My focus is to flag some of the different metamorphoses of the intellectual legacy of the Institut für Sozialforschung in their struggle for social justice and emancipation and in doing

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so providing a context to better situate and dissect some of the vital challenges preventing critical theory to become hegemonic. As I address the question that structures this chapter, I will try to flag how some of the major wrangles championed by the demiurges of Institut für Sozialforschung debouched and flooded the educational and curriculum field, promoting concrete identity shock waves at the very core of what I coined elsewhere as the radical critical curriculum river (Paraskeva, 2016; 2014; 2011). I also will try to relate my analysis to some crucial aspects of what have been defined as the curriculum epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2017; Santos, 2014) and its nexus with educational policies, curriculum, and teacher preparation. Critical theory erupts organically and threateningly before the painstaking dismay of Marxist predictions. Before World War I, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted, on the basis of what they claimed to be a scientific theses, the end of capitalism denounced as human barbarism. That is to say, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s terms, and for the Marxist school intellectuals, the workers of the whole world united by a strong social conscience as an oppressed and exploited class would defeat the capitalist system and begin the construction of a society more equal and towards a global communist egalitarian society. Capitalism would thus implode as a consequence of its own historical processes, triggered by belligerent conflicts, conflicts that would be unavoidable due to its very own idiosyncrasies. To the astonishment of the Marxist and progressive revolutionary forces, from July 28, 1914, to November 11, 1918, the world faced an unprecedented historical genocidal warfare, World War I, involving over 70 million soldiers, 16 million casualties, out of which over 7 million were civilians. However, shockingly, a proletariat-led communist revolution would happen not in the spectrum of developed capitalist nations and as a consequence of such carnage, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the Marxist school intellectuals would have predicted, but in Russia, on October 1917, a nation fundamentally of agrarian economy and, at the time, not as technologically developed as others of the capitalist universe. In the minds of progressive intellectuals, clearly, and contrary of what George Lukács (1968) and others had anticipated, while the “objective conditions for revolution were present, the subjective conditions were lacking” (Kellner, 1989. p.  12); Marx’s interpretations of “the economic and social dimensions of history” proved to be wrong (Hobsbawm, 1997, p. 144); it was undeniable that “the European labor movements did not develop into a unified struggle of all workers despite capitalism facing a series of acute crises” (Held, 1980, p. 35). In a way, while the oppressed living conditions of the proletariat did not change at all, its “action happen to occur only within the framework of society, as the proletariat has been integrated into society” (Horkheimer, 1999, p. vi). This alarming and irrefutable contradiction required at least questioning the Marxist theses and a complete reformulation of its theoretical matrix by revolutionary intellectuals and progressive forces. Appallingly, capitalism was able to show its transformative impulses to perpetuate its own hegemonic

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power, even if that would come—as it did come—attached with genocide as a tag price. In fact, genocide became the norm, natural, trivial, fueled by new commonsensical totalitarian forms of government framed on an ideology of terror (Arendt, 1958). The endlösung (final solution) examined and described in Arendt’s (1963) polemic report on the banality of evil, despite the ferocious controversial and revolt justifiably raised within and beyond the Jewish community around the world, nevertheless reveals—as we will see later on—the real colors of a banality of brutality as one of the climaxes of the reified processes of the instrumental reason; the brutality of the Nazi regime was marshaled by individuals terribly and horribly normal such as Eichmann, the example of a bureaucrat that simply obeys orders completely anesthetized by the need to differentiate right and wrong (Arendt, 1963). As Ranciere (2004, p. 37) insightfully states, “everything fits together in the kingdom o bastardy.” Since capitalism proved to be transformative in a genocidal way and commonsensically socialized itself within a mantra of creative destruction (Harvey, 2007), events such as World War I and its aftermath exposed irreparably the inaccuracy and inconsistency of existing counter-hegemonic frameworks and pushed for the need for new transformative—critical and interdisciplinary— ways of approaching reality. The dice were thrown, and the search for such a radical alternative approach ignited the emergence of a critical transformative interdisciplinary approach, and, in 1923, a young, Jewish German Argentine Marxist Felix Weil organized a successful meeting bringing together different Marxist trends to examine social phenomena and, in doing so, trying to dissect what was really the case with Marxism that seemed to be greatly failing. This meeting would be the enzyme for the edification of the Institut für Sozialforschung (hereinafter das Institut), commonly known as the Frankfurt School, established in June 22, 1924, and initially financed by Felix Weil. Emerging from a vast and complex multitude of work predominantly done by male intellectuals, such as Carl Grünberg, Karl Korsh, Henryk Grossman, Otto Kirchheimer, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, and many others, through das Institut, critical theory emerged in the aftermath of World War I and soon established a solid multifarious terrain of contestation and alternatives to traditional theories of society to build sustainable and accurate answers to a simple question: How is it that a society so technologically and scientifically advanced evolved in such unprecedented authoritarianism and barbarism? How is it that such a ‘developed society’ irremediably slips into historical genocide, drowns in an unprecedented bloodbath and mutilates its destiny? How was it possible to normalize such catastrophe? Why, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002, p.  xiii) argue, “instead of entering a truly human state, is [humanity] sinking into a new kind of barbarism?” Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and the Marxist movement believed that a massive irresistible movement towards a class revolution would occur, smashing the systemic economic inequality, but it didn’t. In fact, all the economic

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and social chaos that the Marxists foresaw did actually happen; however and despite that, why did the world never witness a massive uprising of the oppressed and the destruction of capitalism? Why did such chaos not prompt a proletarian revolt and triumphalism? Why didn’t unprecedented sanguinary events spark within the oppressed and exploited working class the impetus to occupy power and build an anti-capitalist and emancipatory society? Was it possible that Marx and the Marxists’ predictions were dead wrong? Was it possible that Marx was not that wrong, but the vulgar interpretations that were made on and from Marx and Marxist contributions? How could one reconcile right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism and the proletariat and oppressed’s apathy, and in many cases even supportive of their oppression? Was there any difference regarding the lethal consequences faced by the oppressed between left and right fascist impulses? How do we combat, Eagleton (2012) adds, “a power structure that has become the commonsense of a whole social order rather than one which is widely perceived as alien and oppressive?” (p. 197). How much and for how long does the proletariat have “to suffer before it achieves ideological maturity, before it acquires a true understanding of its class situation and a true class consciousness?” (Lukács, 1968, p. 72). How was capitalism able to create an unbreakable matrix glued by workers and consumers? It seemed that the economy alone was a relaxed device to justify the massive latitude of atrocities and there was a need to pay more close attention to culture, and other social spheres. Moreover, when it was hoped that social crises would promote greater and deeper class consciousness of the working class, what happened was precisely the emergence of a quasi class cluelessness. Questions such as “the crises of capitalism, authoritarianism, Nazism and fascism, manipulation of areas of culture and social relationships and individual development, as well as Marxism and the state” (Held, 1980, p.  35), naturally hold paramount significance in das Institut’s research signature. On July 18, 1925, Adolf Hitler—an Iron Cross, first class medaled dispatched runner soldier in the German Army during World War I, arrested and furious with the humiliation faced by Germany with the armistice of World War I—published Mein Kampf, written in prison in which he overtly lays out his eugenic strategy to multiply and perpetuate the German Aryan race at the cost of mass genocide of Jews, Gypsies, people with disabilities, and people of color. Anti-Semintism “was offered as a narrative explanation for the troubles experienced by ordinary Germans” (Žižek, 2012, p. 35). “Germanism” was oppressed (Hitler, 2015, p. 145), and Germany was highjacked by a ‘mummy’ state like Austria. Hitler (2015) unleashes a mortiferous attack both on the right and left of the political realm, blaming them for the weak condition of the German people (p. 323). Internal colonization, while crucial to move towards a superior Aryan race condition through the termination of all other races, was not enough since other races will conquer more territories (Hitler, 2015). Thus, in his (2015) own words, “races culturally better, however less inexorable, would need to limit theirs actions, while people culturally inferior will reproduced

118 Critical Curriculum Theory endlessly as they had more land, to a point that eventually one day the world would be in the hands of a culturally inferior majority” (p. 139). The challenge and the need for a robust and effective critical theory would still become more complex when a decade after the emergence of das Institut, Hitler seized power in 1933. His chancellorship and the concomitant rise of Nazism forced the course of history in one quite predictable direction. Under Hitler’s Führership, on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded neighboring country Poland and prompted the beginning of World War II (1939–1945)— resulting in over 60 million deaths out of which around 6 million were Jews— and forced critical intellectuals to run away from Germany to other European nations (Geneva, 1933) and the United States (1935). Thus, das Institut crossed the Atlantic and functioned temporarily in exile at Columbia University, New York. Such move from Germany would have a tremendous impact in the future journey of das Institut and its intellectuals. By this time also, Freud was a massive visible intellectual force, and, in turn, the intellectuals of das Institut moved towards re-working the Marxist economic materialism by paying close attention to Freud’s psychological insights to better explain the absence of a deep consciousness of class segregation and inequality. Freud “genuinely believed in reason as the one strength man has and which alone could save him from confusion and decay” (Fromm, 1973, p. 32). Horkheimer (1999) uses no euphemisms to define his perplexity before shocking atrocities and the lassitude of the proletariat. The idea, he (1999) argues, “that in the early thirties the united workers, along with the intelligentsia, could bar the way to National Socialism was not mere wishful thinking” (p. v). Also, the 1930s rammed the socialist utopia—from within—exposing Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin’s dictatorship, paced by “open terror and ensuing purges in the Soviet power apparatuses that help destroyed all illusions concerning the first experiment of socialism” (Benhabib, 2012, p. 67). Oddly and shockingly, fascism became respectable, and the idea of the growing wretchedness of the workers, out of which Marx saw rebellion and revolution emerging as a transitional step to the reign of freedom, has for long periods become abstract and illusory. (Horkheimer, 1999, p. vi) Both the crisis of capitalism, the atrocities triggered by such crisis, the apathy of the working class, as well as the Marxist apocalypse under Stalin, sparked a set of questions that drove das Institut’s research: How could these better be understood? What was the relationship between the political and the economic? Was the relation changing? Given the fate of Marxism in Russia and in Western Europe, was Marxism itself nothing other than a state orthodoxy? Was there a social agent capable of progressive change? What possibilities were there for effective socialist practice? (Held, 1980, p. 35)

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From the West to the East, in the eyes of critical intellectuals of das Institut, the genocidal events that shook and framed the world were just another example unequivocally testifying how deep the decay of contemporary society was. This decay shook the very pillars of utopianism, an issue that, critical progressive forces could not aford to give up, and it was meticulously dissected by the critical intellectuals. However, the doctrine of Marx and Engels, though still indispensable, for understanding the dynamics of society can no longer explain the domestic development and foreign relations of the nations. Socialism, the idea of democracy realized in its true meaning, has long since been perverted into an instrument of manipulation in the Diamat countries, just as the Christian message was perverted during the blood-bath centuries of Christendom. (Horkheimer, 1999, p. vi) Before the atrocities as well as the lethargy from and within the oppressed proletariat, “the entire Marxian paradigm of the critique of political economy was thrown into question” (Benhabib, 2012, p. 71). The disappointment and shock with “the first experiment of socialism in the Soviet union, and especially the experiences of European fascism and the destruction of European Jewry had blocked of all hopes for a revolutionary transformation of capitalism from within and Critical theory was confronted with the task of thinking the ‘radically other’” (Benhabib, 2012, p. 66). Clearly the “incredibly optimistic vision of Enlightenment” (Harvey, 1990, p. 13) was fading miserably before the social chaos, which became a tout court normalcy. The twentieth century—with its death camps and death squads, its militarism and two world wars, its threat of nuclear annihilation and its experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—has certainly shattered the optimism [propelled by the Enlightenment]. Worse, still, the suspicion lurks that the Enlightenment project was doomed to turn against itself and transform the quest for human emancipation into a system of universal oppression in the name of human liberation. (Harvey, 1990, p. 13) There was a clear need for an approach that could accurately examine and ideologically explain the apathy of the proletariat and the ideal individual needed to lead and pave the way towards emancipation. An interesting powerful answer came from a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and one of the founders of Western Marxism, György Bernát Löwinger, widely know as Georg Lukács, and his emphasis on the Marxian concept of reification—in fact, so crucial to understand some of the current challenges facing educational policy, and reform, curriculum, teaching education and supervision. It seemed that

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the future needed to go beyond Marxism without avoiding going through it. In challenging reductive Marxist analysis, the identification of new ways for social emancipation required close attention of issues such as “consciousness, subjectivity, culture, ideology and the concept of socialism itself precisely in order to make possible radical political change” (Kellner, 1989, p. 12).

A Lethargic Reified Social Consciousness The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity. (Marx, 1990, p. 125)

In the minds of the first generation of das Institut’s intellectuals, one of the reasons for the failure of Marx and Engels’s predicaments—or, as some would put it, misreading’s of Marx and Marxist previsions—was due to the fact that the working class lethally ignored how the material advances and prosperity generated by capitalism have corroded and corrupted their very own class consciousness, discouraging their involvement and active participation in a communist revolution or in any kind of radical transformation that would end capitalism or any other system of dominance. Manipulation and seduction dazzled and anesthetized the proletariat from its sense of class consciousness, a class that became intoxicated and obfuscated in a materialistic web propelled by a “ghostly objectivity” (Lukács, 1968, p.  100) of the capitalist dynamic ‘production-consumption-production,’ a web that diluted a whole context and historical processes grounded in the exploitation and oppression of the working class. It seemed that the problem was probably at the very core of social classconsciousness, a process that did not allow the workers to understand their very own oppressed dynamics and to triumphantly revolt. In attempting to exhume the reasons the working class did not take advantage of the revolutionary impulse triggered by the crisis of capitalism, Lukács would end up finding an answer for such absent and lethargic proletarian social consciousness, curiously in the Marxist analysis itself, more precisely in Marx’s concept of ‘reification’, and its nexus with the Taylorian mechanist division of labor and the concomitant commodity. Such mechanist division of labor “brutalizes the individual, overshadowing dynamics such as leisure, and happiness, determining so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment commodities.” Enlightenment unleashed “an incurable sickness of all entertainment” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p.  109) in which, as we will see later on, ‘means’ and ‘ends’ become truncated (Fromm, 1973). In this context, Lukács (1968) describes this phenomenon as “reification of commodities, a process quite closely to alienation” (Lukács, 1968, p. xxiv) and one that “fragments and dislocates our social experience so that under its influence we forget that society is a collective process and come to see it instead

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merely as this or that isolated object or institution” (Eagleton, 2012, p.  181). Drawing from Das Kapital, George Lukács (1968) argues that “the phenomenon of reification requires that a society should learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange” (p. 91). That is, reification, in Marxist terms, requires a separation of the producer from his means of production, the dissolution and destruction of all ‘natural’ production units, etc., and all the social and economic conditions necessary for the emergence of modern capitalism tend to replace ‘natural’ relations which exhibit human relations more plainly by rationally reified relations. (Lukács, 1968, p. 91) Also, as flagged previously, reification juggles and misrepresents utopianism as a state and process as “utopians are prevented by the undeveloped nature of the proletarian movement from seeing the true bearer of historical movement in history itself, in the way the proletariat organizes itself as a class and, hence, in the class consciousness of the proletariat” (Lukács, 1968, p. 78). That is, they are not “yet able to take note of what is happening before their very eyes and to become its mouthpiece” (Lukács, 1968, p. 78). In Honneth’s (2009) terms, and contrary to the Marxist perpectives, “the working class does automatically develop a revolutionary readiness to convert the critical content of theory into society-changing practice as a result of the consummation of the mechanized division of labor” (p. 37). Such rational reification of relations crosses the central axis of curriculum, teaching, and evaluation. That is, teachers and students share a well-established reified rational relationship not only through the monarchy of disciplines—what Philip Phenix (1964) called ‘realms of meaning’ or William Harris (1889) coined as ‘windows of the soul’ within an explosive silence cocktail of both form and content to decant the power of the person (Pinar, 1988)—which imposes a deep and clear corset of the teaching work through a clear relational epistemological absence in the scope of the disciplines of knowledge. Teachers—and what happens in the classrooms—don’t need to (actually they cannot) go beyond their disciplines; they don’t exist in an integrated curriculum pedagogical structure. The system is not designed to exist in such integrated relationality—quite the contrary. Thus, the pedagogic fragmentation consolidates a scientifically and epistemologically legitimized compartmentalized rationality based on a “phantom objectivity that oils the relation between people” (Lukács, 1968, p. 83), and between people and knowledge, that interferes and establishes the reified tone of pedagogical relationships. The reification of the pedagogical praxis fuels— and has been fueled by—the de-skilling of teachers (Apple, 1988), reinforcement of the cult of positivism (Giroux, 1981), solidification of education and pedagogy as an oppressive praxis (Freire, 1985; hooks, 1994), thus paving the way for the fallacy of mono-culturalism (Darder, 2012). It goes without saying that such knowledge compartimentalization represents a towering pillar of the epistemological eugenic oligarchy of the ‘one best system’ (Tyack, 1974), which

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was designed to deliver and solidify the epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2016; 2011; Santos, 2014; 2017; 2005). At the core of such “ghostly objectivity” (Lukács, 1968, p.  100) relies the commodity that “can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole” (Lukács, 1968, p. 86). It was not inadvertedly that Karl Marx opens up the canon of capitalism in his Das Kapital by examining the commodity, as “the commodity structure penetrates society in all its aspects and remolds it in its own image” (Lukács, 1968, p.  85). Nor surprisingly, for instance, one of the lethal moves of neoliberal impulses and movements, was what came subsumed in the social processes of re-articulating of the privatization of public rights, which was the concomitant transformation of education as a commodity. The commodity and its accumulation, as Marx (1990) categorically stated, is at the very core of ‘wealth’ of the nations. In his (1990) words, “the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities” (p. 125). Thus, an accurate examination of such societies “must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity” (Marx, 1990, p.  125). The commodity is the ideological glue of the capitalist system, the reified “synecdoche” (Eagleton, 2012, p. 181) that binds together both the bourgeoisie and proletariat through a segregated automatist division of labor, the hallmark feature of the modes and conditions of production of the capitalist system: the reification produced by commodity relations assumes decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. That is, only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate themselves from servitude to the ‘second nature’ so created. (Lukács, 1968, p. 86) Autonomous human existence has been perpetually highjacked by ‘a’ commodity produced by workers that have no existence out of it, regardless of being oppressed or oppressors. As we argued before, such reification metamorphoses is intimately connected with the impact of Taylorism in the labor processes. That is, the process of labour is progressively broken down into abstract, rational, specialised operations so that the worker loses contact with the finished product and his work is reduced to the mechanical repetition of a specialised set of actions. With Taylorism this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialised rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts fact that the process of labour. (Lukács (1968, p. 88)

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The division of labor, and its concomitant “divorce between work, and the individual capacities, and needs of the worker produces comparable efects upon social consciousness” (Lukács, 1968, p. 98). Such inhuman, standardized, brutalized, and specialized modes and conditions of production—so greatly at the core of curriculum, teacher preparation, and supervision, being fueled by Taylorism and the division of labor in education—“crippled society to the point of abnormality” (Lukács, 1968, p. 99). Moreover, there is a “split between the worker’s labor-power and his/her personality, which metamorphosis him/ her into a thing.” Within such thingfication metamorphoses, class-consciousness is mechanically suppressed and “detached from the whole personality and placed in opposition to it, becoming a thing, a commodity” (Lukács, 1968, p. 99), like any other commodity, like a house or a car or education, knowledge, curriculum, teaching, evaluation, and supervision (Apple, 2000). Furthermore, The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people. (Lukács, 1968, p. 83) Taylorism thus frames the metamorphoses of the curriculum epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2016) as it structures the epistemological segregated bone of education, curriculum, teaching, and evaluation (Kliebard, 1995; Schubert and Lopez Schubert, 1980; Paraskeva, 2011). As the workers in an assembly line of a car shop don’t see the final product, teachers don’t see as well. They sold their labor, which is epistemologically triturated, for specific assembly lines to produce a concrete unit value commodity. Moreover, each teacher reflects an outcome, a commodity with a concrete price tag that varies according to the field of study and a concrete shop, or as Aronowitz (2001) would put it “knowledge factory,” which is a deplorable matrix supported by exquisite and sadistic segregated processes (Karabel, 2005; Ginsberg, 2011). Like any other worker, teachers “experienced the reverse of this self-deification, that is the machine has dropped the driver and it is racing blindly into space. At the moment of consummation, reason has become irrational and stultified” (Horkheimer, 2004, p. 168) Teachers—themselves converted into a commodity, like the students—have little control or no control at all in a final layout of the commodity they helped produce. Not only is their relationship with such commodity a reified ‘synecdoche’ (Eagleton, 2012), but also, the very commodity produced is indeed synecdochally and eugenically reified as it is not just a result of a selective tradition, as Williams (2013) eloquently stated, but also the vivid example of a eugencic abyssal line (Paraskeva, 2016; Santos, 2014); such line solidifies a (n)eugenic curriculum line that divides ‘who and what exists,’ thus wiping out from curriculum, teaching, and supervision critical affairs of the existence of any epistemological value beyond ‘this’ side of the line, i.e. beyond the Modern Western

124 Critical Curriculum Theory Eurocentric epistemological terrain (Paraskeva, 2017; Santos, 2014). To make things even worse, such selective tradition occurs also and only within the very Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological yard, thus imposing ‘scientifically’ the yoke of certain Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological formations—and silencing so many others—that helps perpetuate a system of dominance. As I had the opportunity to examine elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2017), we are before an epistemicide within the epistemicide, as both dominant and counter-dominant positions express a “fatal affinity” (Santos, 2018, p. viii). Reification is, thus, a metamorphosis that ideologically permeates epistemological blindness (Sousa Santos, 2014), which is a supreme condiment of epistemological fascism, fertilizing the challenges propelled by the structural idiosyncrasies of class-consciousness. Such epistemological fascism/blindness interferes dramatically in very idiosyncratic structures of class-consciousness, stripping it from any qualitative dimension. The distinction between “a worker faced with a particular machine, the entrepreneur faced with a given type of mechanical development, the technologist faced with the state of science and the profitability of its application to technology” (Lukács, 1968, p.  98)—and one could add the teacher heavily equipped or not with state-of-the-art technological and pedagogical approaches, facing the challenges of a particular classroom—“is purely quantitative; it does not directly entail any qualitative difference in the structure of consciousness” (Lukács, 1968, p. 98). Lukács (1968) pushes the debate for the utter need of a comprehensive theory of class consciousness, one that understood the dangers of an intensified division of labor in which the finished article ceases to be the object of the work-process and unity of the product as a commodity no longer coincides with its unity as a use-value, and the fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of the subject. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not. (Lukács, 1968, pp. 88–89) If capitalism would naturally implode from severe inner contradictions and crises, triggering the upheaval of the oppressed proletariat, if the proletariat “could not liberate itself without destroying the conditions of its own life” (Lukács, 1968, p. 21), and if such proletariat became an instrumental piece of a monstrous reified social process to the point that it undermines the need to solidify its social class consciousness not only against capital but for itself as well (Lukács, 1968, p. 76), how can one envision any murmur of a revolutionary change? Was/is revolutionary change a pragmatic impossibility? How accurate

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is the Lukacsian approach? As Horkheimer (1999) argues, “if experience and theory contradict each other, one of the two must be reexamined, as either the scientist has failed to observe correctly or something is wrong with the principles of theory” (p. 188). To complexify such challenge, the reified nexus ‘commodity—modes and conditions of production,’ the ultimate social nuke of capitalism as a system of domination, mercilessly binds together both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In fact, the proletariat shares with the bourgeoisie the reification of all aspects of its life (Lukács, 1968, p. 149), that is, “the objective reality of social existence is in its immediacy the ‘same’ for both the proletariat and bourgeoisie” (Lukács, 1968, p. 150). This is not a minor issue at all. In Gandhian terms, “any system of domination brutalizes the victim and the oppressor” (Santos, 1995, p.  516), that is, “the oppressed is never a pure victim and the oppressor needs to be liberated as well” (Santos, 1995, p. 516). As the capitalist system “continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher and higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man” (Lukács, 1968, p. 93). This is a challenge since, no doubt the very existence of the proletariat implies criticism and the negation of this form of life. But until the objective crisis of capitalism has matured and until the proletariat has achieved true class consciousness, and the ability to understand the crisis fully, it cannot go beyond the criticism of reification and so it is only negatively superior to its antagonist. (Lukács, 1968, p. 72) It is crucial to understand the “concept of rationality that underlies contemporary industrial culture” (Horkheimer, 2004, p. v), as well as to acknowledge “rationalization processes, as unthinkable without specialization” (Lukács, 1968, p. 88). This is so visible in education. New modes of teaching labor and labor conditions became the whirlwind of an intellectual anti-intellectualism (Paraskeva, 2016). Intellectualism in teaching is sinking under the auspicies of policies that flood the field with what Geissler (2018) would coin as seasonal associates. Geissler’s examination of the workers’ brutal conditions in big corporations fits like a glove in the daily lives of our teaching force in schools. Like any other commodity and its circular realm of profitability and unit market value, curriculum, teaching, evaluation, and supervision are under the yoke of time as “time is everything [human being] is nothing, quality no longer matters and quantity alone decides everything” (Lukács, 1968, p. 89). The quality and time vacuum is a reality that resonates in so many ways with teachers. Lethally, teachers can be certified in programs duly accredited by each state without having the slightest idea of the existence of multiple pedagogical perspectives, without understanding which pedagogical perspective they identify with, without knowing which pedagogical perspective is more efective and fair for the students in their classrooms, and without comprehending how these

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pedagogical perspectives are politically and ideologically situated—not to speak of a total lack of social sensitivity in relating pedagogy to serious social aspects of our age such as poverty, hunger, drugs, opioids, crime, immigration, racism, xenophobia, genderism and classism, etc. (Drisko, 2017; Janson, 2020; Silva, 2016; Branco, 2015). In the midst of an unprecedent social havoc, Žižek (2012) claims, commonsensically the ‘other’ has been targeted as a “foreign intruder who dares to disturb our way of life” (p. 35). As capitalism progresses, the tentacles of these processes of reification, which are devoid from a socio-historical basis, continue to evolve and to promote the fabrication and construction of realities, which, in the context of late capitalism—popularoush neo-liberalism—have been capable of imposing at the level of commonsense the trivialization of the real, reality, and truth. Today, we are fighting a great battle—probably the greatest one—at the level of the commonsense, not between the true and the false and the way in which they persistently exist in the socio-historical contexts; the battle today is over the need to immediately torpedo the danger of a triumphant commonsense that imposes the existence of ‘post-truth’ as natural, as the real (McIntyre, 2018). The post-truth is the nonexistent existence that exists. Unfortunately, education and curriculum are not innocent in such facticide. The post-truth momentum unleashed a specific understanding of truth based on ‘because I say so’ and ‘I can say so’, rationale versus science and its concomitant facts that are ridicularized, trashed, and undermined (McIntyre, 2018). I argue that the existence of a school, curriculum, and teacher preparation that continues to operate at the margin of the most critical problems of society exemplifies the Enlightenment reified social consciousness that curiously in a moment of crisis—military or economic—did not and will not hesitate to blame the victims. It goes without saying that, under such apparatuses, one witnesses a huge regression on most of the social emancipation, social justice, and equality battles as they tend to become what the systems of dominance allow them to become, a mere discursive journey. The industrialization of public school systems was a trump card within Enlightenment-modernity, which hides a eugenic inherited shame (Selden, 1999). The object of education is mass production keeping in mind that “the objectification of their labor-power into something opposed to their total personality” (Lukács, 1968, p. 99). Going back to the reification processes unearthed by Lukács (1968): It is towering in what Hall (1985) and other cultural theorists would later deepen and develop under the articulation and re-articulation processes. Again, it is crucial to understand the important role played by such reification within the so-called cultural politics of the commonsense, helping solidify concrete hegemonic formations. Therefore, I argue that undeniably, before the shocking outcomes of the devastating belligerent events of the beginning and mid-twentieth century, there was clear need for a radical comprehensive non-traditional theoretical approach. This approach would provide, not only an accurate analysis of reality, as well as defy and disrupt the dominant theoretical models, but also break with Marxist reductive orthodoxies offering valid alternatives to social

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emancipation and to the end of any system of dominance and exploitation. An interdisciplinary vein was thus emerging, one that simultaneously challenged the pilgrim cult of political economy as the master key of social conflicts and unique propeller of the systems of domination and the incorporation of aspects from the psychoanalysis and cultural yarns, opening the door to a new language and a new way of thinking about thinking, about thinking reality and of doing philosophy.

Das Institut If the lion has a consciousness, his rage at the antelope he wants to eat would be ideology. (Adorno, 2004, p. 349)

In view of the historical processes of the last centuries, it became increasingly more indisputable that the project of Enlightenment-modernity with its own inner logics of “objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art” (Harvey, 1990, p. 12) turned out to be a false promise. The feverous dream that “human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life would be achieved naturally through the accumulation of knowledge generated by many individuals working freely and creatively” (Harvey, 1990, p.  12) became a nightmare. The grand narratives of Enlightenment—such as “the scientific domination of nature, the development of rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought promising liberation from the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition” (Harvey, 1990, p.  12)—were torpedoed before the crude chaotic realities of the twentieth century. Undeniably, it seemed that the very pillars and components of Enlightenment-modernity end up working against it, and its efficiency to secure “the universal, eternal and the immutable qualities of the universe” (Harvey, 1990, p. 12) was clearly in question. In a way, as Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) argue, “ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness” (p. 12). While I argue that it would not be wise to focus just on the dark side of Enlightenment—after all we have to acknowledge different mutations within Enlightenment throughout history, as well as some of its accomplishments— for some pricy, for others priceless—it is prudent to examine why Enlightenment’s very DNA undermined and in many ways rammed its own so-called notable utopias. It is thus crucial to question, if such utopias were so ‘notable’ why humanity became a stage of chaos under the auspices of Enlightenment’s consulate? In Harvey’s (1990) rationale, this is not a minor issue, and remains a divisive matter. Whether or not, the enlightenment project was doomed from the start to plunge us into a Kafkasque World, whether or not it was bound to lead us to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and whether has any power to inform, and inspire contemporary thought and action are crucial questions. There are those, like

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Habermas, who continue to support the project, albeit with a strong dose of skepticism over aims, a lot of anguishing over the relation between means and ends, and certain pessimism as to the possibility of realizing such a project under contemporary economic and political conditions. And there are those—and this as we will see, the core of the postmodernist philosophical thought—who insist that we should in the name of human emancipation, abandon the Enlightenment project entirely. Which position we take depends upon how we explain the dark side of our recent history to the degree to which we attribute it to the defects of Enlightenment reason rather than to a lack of its proper application. (pp. 13–14) Building on Harvey’s (1990) arguments, I would reiterate that there is not just one dark side of contemporary history. However, at the very base of such multitude of sides, which led to Enlightenment’s failure, relies its very own eugenic matrix—as I have mentioned previously, el patron colonial de poder (Quijano, 1992; Mignolo, 2018)—a matrix that integrates both dominant and counterdominant traditions. While the first arrogantly champions the curriculum epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2017; Santos, 2014), propelling a radical transmutation of values as well (Marcuse, 1999), the latter produces its journey towards the utopia of a radical transformation of needs, towards an emancipated and liberated human being in an emancipated and liberated world. However, while the first did not hesitate in propelling a selective agenda and outcome, the latter among other aspects and despite its major accomplishments, mistakenly advocated a unique way—an only one possible journey—and, in so doing eugenically, ignored a multiplicity of other world epistemological veins towards social emancipation. In this regard, Enlightenment mutilated its own utopias, utopias uniquely confined only within the principles of Enlightenment with no existence out of it. Enlightenment/Modernity showed a false Baconian myth of a unique universal science, a ‘false collective uno,’ a “unity of the manipulated collective that consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could make people into individuals” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 9). We live in a world so epistemologically diverse, framed by a non-monolithical yarn of oppressor and oppressed belligerent wrangles, determined by and within the Enlightenment/Modernity canon and epitomized by carnages, such as the World Wars I and II, Stalinism, and atomic atrocities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as persistent social sagas, such as poverty, exploitation, starvation, human trafficking, and destruction of the planet. With this in mind, it seems that Enlightenment/Modernity’s final blessings were always a matter of time. It seem that chaoticism and atrocitycism became normalcy, which made Adorno (2011) in a dialogue with Horkheimer to bluntly admit that it was not possible to “call for the defense of the Western world” (p. 36). It is in such puzzled broad context that one should frame the work and thought produced by the intellectuals of das Institut—reflected in the major oeuvres from what might be called the first generation of its critical scholars—launching a

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ferocious challenge to the “inevitable decay of the Enlightenment’s promise of knowledge uncontaminated by power deference and superstition” ( Jones, 2013, p.  4). In his afterword to the Dialectic on Enlightenment, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (2002) recaptures Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002, p. 1) opening statement on the concept of enlightenment. He re-emphasizes that enlightenment, “understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment program was the disenchantment of the word” (p. 218). In Horkheimer’s (2004) mind, within enlightenment, reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete. Speculation is synonymous with metaphysics, and metaphysics with mythology and superstition. We might say that the history of reason or enlightenment from its beginnings in Greece down to the present has led to a state of affairs in which even the word reason is suspected of connoting some mythological entity. (pp. 17–18) Reason “has liquidated itself as an agency of ethical, moral, and religious insight” (Horkheimer, 2004, p. 18). Das Institut intellectuals, from diferent theoretical axels, reinforced the emphasis on the need for an alternative political thinking, an alternative critical critique of the critique, consciously acknowledging that “in this world things are complicated and are decided by many factors forcing one to look into problems from diferent aspects, not just from one alone” (Horkheimer, 1999, p. vii). It was important to have a radically diferent approach to unpack reified ways of existence and of thinking related with the culture industry, consumer society, and irrational bureaucratic rationalized frameworks at the very core of Enlightenment’s modernity. The focus gradually mutates “from class issues to the domination of nature and the power of the mass media” (Feenberg, 2013, p. 103). Also, while Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002) concept of the instrumental account of reason echoes some major insights propelled by Marx’s and Lukács’s conceptsof reification, the truth of the matter is that the concept was “cut loose from its original Marxist roots” (Feenberg, 2013, p. 103). Some debris of such wrangle—although within different and varied mutations— between progressive forces who believe in Marxism and its post avenues as the only path towards change on one side, and progressive forces who believe that change would not be achieved just from within a Marxist platform on another side, had a huge impact in the field of education and curriculum and it is still a very divisive enzyme in our field, although paradoxically, one of the sources of the curriculum epistemicide as well (Paraskeva, 2017). In the United States, and in other contexts, this wrangle permeates the works of critical, as well as progressive educators and triggered some of the most heated and belligerent debates and fractures in the field. Examples of this include the “Curriculum

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Theorizing since 1947: Rhetoric or Progress?” meeting held on October 7–8, 1977, at the State University College of Arts and Science in Geneseo, the battles between traditionalists, conceptual empiricists, and reconceptualists (Pinar, 1975) as well as the reconceptualist ‘movement’ (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011). As I was able to examine elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011), major theoretical earthquakes erupted within the very marrow of such powerful groups of diverse thinkers, around issues of ideology, power, hegemony, segregation, inequality, agency, eugenic literacy forms, the nexus of class, race, gender, and capitalism, and few of them did not ignore the echoes from the Global South, and they did not hesitate in pushing the Marxist examination out of its own lethal orthodoxies and in some cases moving towards a decolonial path (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016; 2014; 2011; Darder, 2016). It was also out of such rich intellectual battles that justifiable and powerful dissent erupted within the radical critical counter-hegemonic platform with scholars refusing to labor within what they perceived as a straitjacketed theoretical approach, which was ideologically worn out and saturated. Such approcahes compromised historical consciousness, the personal, new ideas and critical awarenesses—reminding us, how Huebner was so avant la lettre. Recently the debates around caste—so alarmingly absent in our field, an issue that we all should scrutinize—is adding more ashes on a healthy endless epistemological fire (see Teltumbde, 2014; Paraskeva, 2018). Currently, some of the most interesting and healthy wrangles, passions, fears, ‘loves and hates’ have been erupted from ‘complicated conversations’ and dialogues among indigenous, subaltern, anti-colonial, decolonial, and specific counter-hegemonic Eurocentric scholars. Das Institut’s intellectuals associated the failure of an upheaval from the working class before the success of the world’s atrocities with the capitalist’s ability and malleability to create—or better say ‘socially construct’—a weak class consciousness through the institutionalization of an instrumental account of reason, anchored on the scientific absolutism of positivist truth, that—among other things—dodges philosophy to a lesser terrain, a kind of epistemological avatar, destitute of “any concept of truth” (Horkheimer, 2004, p. 73). In a society heavily industrialized and technologically advanced, “positivism finds in it the medium for the realization (and validation) of its concepts—harmony between theory and practice, truth and facts—and philosophic thought turns into affirmative thought, non-affirmative notions as mere speculation, dreams and fantasies” (Marcuse, 2002, p.  176). The objective nature of reason subsumes in its subjective nature, and reason “become[s] completely harnessed to the social process” (Horkheimer, 2004, p.  21), it becomes mechanistic, technical, since it gives up ‘its autonomy,’ and the more ideas “become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thought with a meaning of their own” (Horkheimer, 2004, p. 22). The neglect or the cleansing of a specific philosophical dimension to grasp social reality has led “contemporary positivism to move into a synthetically impoverished world of academic correctness and to create more illusionary problems than it has destroyed” (Marcuse, 2002,

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p.  191). With positivism, “thought loses not only autonomy in face of reality, but with it, the power to penetrate reality” (Adorno, 2005, p.  126). Having given up autonomy, “reason has become instrumental” (Horkheimer, 2004, p.  21). The thesis of positivism “is that even a metaphysics that has escape to the profanity is void, even the idea of truth, on whose account positivism was initiated, is sacrificed” (Adorno, 2004, p.  403). Positivism carpet-bombed any epistemological whimsy, any epistemological whisper, groan, or breath out of its eugenic constituency. For positivism, the technical process, to which the subject has been reified after the eradication of that process from consciousness, is as free from the ambiguous meanings of mythical thought as from meaning altogether, since reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus. Reason serves as a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools, rigidly purpose-directed and as calamitous as the precisely calculated operations of material production, the results of which for human beings escape all calculation. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 23) Quite naturally, reason is fetishized, mechanicized; if reason “itself is instrumentalized, it takes on a kind of materiality and blindness, becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced” (Horkheimer, 2004, p. 24). It is as if thinking itself had been “reduced to the level of industrial progress, subjected to a close schedule, in short, made part and parcel of production” (Horkheimer, 2004, p. 21). That is, concepts, instrumental to human thought, “cannot make sense if sense itself is a negation, if every memory of an objective meaning beyond the mechanisms of concept formation has been expelled from the concepts to which concepts are nothing but accidental, interchangeable tokens, took the consequence and honored truth by extirpating truth” (Adorno, 2004, p. 80). Thus, “facts are stripped from all that makes them more than facts” (Adorno, 2004, p. 99). Similar to behaviorism, positivism “rule[s] out all the concepts that could not be directly observed such as sensation, perception, image and even thinking and emotion, as they are subjectively defined” (Fromm, 1973, p. 34; 1941). Mechanicism—which fuels social automatisms—becomes normalcy fostering a desensitized social habitus. For instance, if a German fascist launches a word like “intorable [Untragbar]” over the loudspeakers one day, the whole nation is saying “intolerable” the next. The universal repetition of the term denoting such measures makes measures too familiar. Countless people use words and expressions which they “either have ceased to understand at all or use only accordingly to their behavior functions, just as trademarks adhere all the more compulsively to their objects the less their linguistic meaning is apprehended” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, pp. 134–135). Merciless exploitation dynamics cannot be undermined either, as “it is difficult to get someone to understand something when his/her salary depends upon his/her not understanding it” (Sinclar as cited in Parenti, 2011, p. 2).

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Curriculum is contaminated with such positivist epistemological cleansing, triggering a reaction and framing the counter-dominant agenda, which has been insightfully grabbed and multidimensionally unpacked by the demiurges of the critical curriculum river (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011). The cult of positivism imposed a particular classed, raced, gendered, and casted scientificity of science that legitimizes a very particular knowledge and what constitutes truth and false and informs official pedagogical forms and reforms; it denies the “the autonomy and authority of teachers” (Giroux, 2011, p. 5), framing curriculum and pedagogy within a dangerous ‘presentism’ (Pinar, 2004) or ‘momentism’ (Paraskeva, 2014). One of the consequences of the formalization of a rationalistic reified thought and existence within such thought “is that justice, equality, happiness, tolerance, all the concepts that were in preceding centuries supposed to be inherent in or sanctioned by reason, have lost their intellectual roots” (Horkheimer, 2004, p.  24). Moreover, “knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought makes itself mere tautology, and the more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 20). In fact, and to re-emphasize an issue I have raised before, under such reified instrumental account of reason, alternative realities have been produced, and knowledge, truth, and social constructions of reality dangerously solidify as a set of fetishized processes in which data, empirical evidence, and scientific literacy are sidelined, being confined to a pale footnote or even ridicularized before the oligarchy of the spectacle (Hedges, 2010), which commonsense imposes as the new real, the post-truth momentum. We are facing an era framed by a specific data, “statistics that say nothing about the substance to which they refer” (Gil, 2009, p. 32). One actually doesn’t have to go back that far in history to face such illusion (Hedges, 2010), so overtly visible in the current approaches of authoritarian populist nationalist leaders, such as Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Kim Jong-un, Robert Mugabe, Narendra Modi, Viktor Mihály Orbán, Andrzej Duda, and Jair Bolsonaro, among others. With justifiable differences none of them based their policies on data or scientific readings and findings of the real(ity) but on the cult of body, image, terror, and spectacle. The most current shockingly normalized example of this particular posttruth oligarchy is the BrexitGate, in which the referendum’s riverbed was not the truth, the facts, and the data but pure manipulative tabloided information (Davies, 2018). In Gil’s (2018) terms, populism invents alternative facts, and fake news to discredit the independent media, which threatens it precisely with the truth of the facts. To erase reality is to ensure that it will not be confronted with the ‘reality principle’, relying only on the alternative reality, manufactured according to the convenience of populist power. If reality no longer depends on the relation between the statement and reality, but on its relation to the ‘subject of enunciation’, the oscillation between truth and lie is the same as the oscillation between

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lie and lie. Transparency does not lie in the content of the message, but in the fact that a populist like Trump enunciates. (p. 465) Populism and authoritarianism are the total discourse of truth. Frontality is pivotal and populism is ‘the truth.’ Populists say openly what the democratic establishment is incapable of saying. Yet “populism is not just a discourse of truth. It is a total transparent discourse that tends irremediably asymptotically to the absolute truth” (Gil, 2018, p. 464). The difference between a ‘wannabe dictator’ who claims he can kill a person in cold blood in a street in New York and that nothing will happen to him as well as despicably attacks women, people of color, minorities, and people with disabilities and a real dictator who butchers millions of his own people is just what Gaston Bachelard (2014) calls the ‘poetics of space.’ The constant attack of green policies and global warming, public education, teachers, and unions has been produced by completely belittling data and ‘empirical facts’ and, in so doing, creating another truth momentum, the post-truth, a mythomaniac commonsensical canon through the demystification of myths pillared in other myths, sustaining, as Leys (2006) would put it, ‘a cynical society.’ Populism and authoritarianism not only institutionalize but actually are based on a “collective hallucination” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 224). Perilously the populist fascist explosion one is facing currently cannot be reductively defined in terms of left, right, or center as there are right-wing, left-wing, and centrist populist parties. It is “not an ideology, but a political logic—a way of thinking about politics” (Judis, 2016, p. 14; cf. also Kazin, 2017). Enlightenment-modernity thereby regresses “to the mythology it has never been able to escape” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 20). Enlightenment-modernity is thus framed as mass deception (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002), an emptied balloon of any reflexive emancipatory rationality due to positivism and its multifarious legacy, which unleashes and weaves a reality framed in “a unified, functional language, which is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language” (Marcuse, 2002, p. 99). Existence in a system of dominance such as late capitalism “is a permanent rite of initiation, everyone must show that they identify wholeheartedly with power which beats them” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p.  124). Naturally, categories such as identity, agency, and subjectivity—crucial in any process towards social emancipation—“[have] volatilized into the logic of supposedly optional rules, to gain more absolute control” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 23) as well as into an oppressive technical bureaucratic rationale “to which the subject has been reified after the eradication of that process from consciousness, is as free from the ambiguous meanings of mythical thought as from meaning altogether, since reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 23). For this generation of intellectuals of das Institut, “Marxist categories of class, exploitation, surplus value, profit, pauperization, and breakdown are elements

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in a conceptual whole, and the meaning of this whole is to be sought not in the preservation of contemporary society” (Horkheimer, 1999, p. 218). It was clear that the idea was to clearly rework and refine the Marxist argument, as Adorno (2011) argues in his debate with Max Horkheimer, stating that one “should avoid at all costs a debased form of Marxism” (p. 37). The point, to rely on Aronowitz’s (1990a, p.  1; 1990b) argument, was not to keep “re-interpreting Marxism in various ways, but to change it,” framing it into a radical logic (Benhabib, 1986). Needless to mention, the struggle to unpack the cult of instrumental reason was an ideological claim as ideology “naturalizes social reality” (Eagleton, 1991, p. 199). As Eagleton (1991) argues, “somebody who is entirely the victim of ideological delusion would not even be able to recognize an emancipatory claim upon them; and it is because people do not cease to desire, struggle and imagine, even in the most apparent unpropitious of conditions, that the practice of political emancipation is a genuine possibility” (p. xiv). In the minds of das Institut intellectuals, ideology was at the core of the process of (de)constructing false/partial social consciousness. Thus, it was intimately connected with identity thinking, “a covertly paranoid style of rationality which inexorably transmutes the uniqueness and plurality of things into a mere simulacrum of itself, or expels them beyond its own borders in a panic stricken act of exclusion” (Eagleton, 1991, p. 126). I will return to this issue later on when digging into Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Consequently, ideology underpins the capitalist instrumental rationality with positivist impulses in which social regulation smashes any attempt of social emancipation (Santos, 2014). One should not ignore though that within the struggle to reexamine the Marxist platform, rescuing it from dogmatic orthodoxies and pushing it into a more sophisticated level in order to unpack intricate reified processes that fuel a commodity fetishism, the first generation of the intellectuals of das Institut were not alone in the struggle to open such reified canon, which propelled a commonsensical instrumental account of reason. In fact, it would be appropriate to not ignore the work championed early on by the Italian philosopher Gramsci (1999) and his concept of hegemony that constitutes a crucial reexamination of the concept of ideology. The fact that there is little or no evidence at all between the first generation of intellectuals and the work and legacy of Gramsci is puzzling. Being Gramsci, “the thinker of superstructures” (Keucheya, 2010, p. 31), such silence remains a great avenue to be explored. As the critical theoretical platform developed towards a “non-dogmatic theory of society” (Held, 1980, p.  45), it became increasingly clear that political economy alone was not sufficient to explain the production and consolidation of an instrumental rationality. The Marxist influence in the theoretical avenues explored by das Institut intellectuals—in fact, a commitment explicitly made right at Carl Grünberg’s inauguration lecture in which he claimed Marxism has the “best scientific research and philosophical system to unpack the balance of power and resources” (Held, 1980, p.  30)—is undeniable, and, thus, Marxist political economy is “at the very core of the emergence of critical theory”

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(Held, 1980, pp. 40–41). However, what is also undeniable is the need to expend the critical approach above and “beyond the narrow economic determinism of traditional Marxism by uncovering and analyzing the entire world of live experience and culture, including aesthetics, which had previously been treated as a mere superstructural reflection of the economic infrastructure of modes and relations of production” (Van Den Abbeele, 2001, p.  15). Marx’s (1990) claim that the dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the laborer to the capitalist was losing steam, and the idea that “economic collapse alone would not generate and guarantee any successful revolution” (Held, 1980, p.  44) gained traction, thus pushing das Institut intellectuals to pay close attention to other social dynamics. In turn, the move from “the critique of political economy into the critique of instrumental reason signals not only a shift in the in the object of critique, but, more significantly, in the logic of critique” (Benhabib, 1986, p.  79). Such new logic will help to lay the foundations for a new theoretical approach, one that not only challenges the very notion of immanent critique but also emphasizes “cultural and psychological relations as domains in which individuals live through the crisis generated by the economy” (Benhabib, 1986, p.  70). Culture “appears between the system of social labor and malleable human instincts in the obstinate form of organized learning processes that anchor the behavioral expectations required by the economy as libidinally charged goals of action in the individual psyche” (Honneth, 1991, p. 27). The task for das Institut intellectuals was to create “a kind of supradisciplinary social theory” (Kellner, 1989, p. 7) to better understand social domination and, in doing so, to understand where Marxist analysis failed—much of it in its econometric reductionism of the base-superstructure model—and to begin to pay more careful attention to the relative autonomy of the dynamics that were wrongly confined on(ly on) the superstructure. Stripping the base-superstructure amphorae and jazzing Marxist dynamics of ideological production with Freud’s psycho-matrix, intellectuals of das Institut blended historical materialism and psychoanalytic theory. Honneth (1991) deserves to be quoted in length here: In place of a trivial psychology, based on the rationalistic model of action in utilitarianism, a psychology that begins with the malleability and displaceability of human instincts should be developed. We can theoretically explain the modes of action of those social groups that participate in social repression against their own rational interest only if we consider that the needs motivating a subject not only exhibit extraordinary variation but also, under pressures of frustration, are forcibly deferred to compensatory goals. Therefore, a critical theory of society that investigates the causes of the latency if the class conflict it predicts must rely upon a psychology that has abandoned the theoretical presupposition of the purposive-rational motivation of human action. It is theoretically logical and politically essential, Eagleton (1991) argues, that an accurate scientific reason “should penetrate to the inmost recesses of the

136 Critical Curriculum Theory human psyche” (p. 65). Modern psychology will allow a better understanding about why “the experience of social dependency and oppression is blocked and repressed by an instinctual motor falsifying consciousness even before it becomes knowledge” (Honneth, 1991, p. 22; Adorno, 2004). In this sense, within a new interdisciplinary theory of society that empirically unpacks the dense swamp of reified class-consciousness, “economics requires psychological theory that analyzes the socialization process of individual drives through which a social system that controls nature is integrated into the socially accepted unity of a life process. Psychoanalysis ofers the theoretical paradigm that according to Horkheimer has the capacity to solve the problem” (Honneth, 1991, p. 22). That is, whereas “historical materialism sees consciousness as the expression of social existence, psychoanalysis sees it as determined by instinctual drives” (Fromm, 1982, p. 481). Fromm (1982) argues that “in connection with psychology, the economic factor plays a role in historical materialism only to the extent that human needs—primarily the needs of self preservation—are largely satisfied by the production of goods” (p. 488). The fact that under repression in advanced capitalists societies workers are more likely to remain part of the prevailing system than to turn against it (Marcuse, 2002; Kellner, 2002), and the fact that Marxism has been unable to explain the psychic sphere of a reified working class consciousness (Marcuse, 1955) pushes the urge to pepper the revolutionary matrix with Freudian psychoanalysis. Freudianism was also viewed as a powerful field to help better dissect “the unity of a single process of domination within the arena of political power systems ranging from the Stalinist Soviet Union, through fascist Germany, to the state capitalism in the United Sates, as distinctions among such systems of dominance were barely distinguishable” (Honneth, 1991, pp. 35–36). Subjugation and atrocity become subjectified, thus ideologically rationalizing “any alternative as utopian” (Marcuse, 2002, p.  149). With the climax of barbarism trivialized with a “Fuhrer which directly orders both the holocaust and the supply of trash” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 129), utopianism— blocked primarily by the complete disproportion between the weight of the overwhelming machinery of social power and that of the atomized masses (Horkheimer, 2004, p. 186)—melts, quasi became a praxis of nothing, the vacuity of nothing, the void of a precise nowhere, quite dangerous, as utopia historically was always a central piece in the critical emancipatory project understood as an endless journey towards hope and possibility towards a just ideal. The idea “that, after this war, life will continued ‘normally’ or even that culture might be ‘rebuilt’—as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation—is idiotic” (Adorno, 2005, p. 55) though. Hence, the success of a socially emancipated society implied first and foremost the capacity to understand the reasons it was the oppressor and the capitalist system of domination and exploitation that actually seemed to take advantage of such torrential spurt of brutalities and not the oppressed working class. While paying attention to the natural and psychological impulses within the social construction of class-consciousness helped create a more robust

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examination of society, there was however a need to pay close attention to a “new element of social reproduction, between socialization of individual instincts and the system of social labor, namely the culture industry” (Honneth, 1991, p.  24)—so responsible for the welding of a one-dimensional thought (Marcuse, 2002)—that is how the reification processes materialized daily in society through standardized and commodified cultural artifacts. The cultural industry also provides “ideological support” (Adorno and Rabinbach, 1975, p. 13) to a market-oriented web of commodities and its dangerous social nexus, in which we relate to each other in the same way that things and objects relate to the market (Fromm, 1973; 1941). The cultural industry helps legitimate systems of dominance fabricating a ‘personality package’ (Fromm, 1973; 1941) related with “the crisis of reason that is manifested in the crisis of the individual whose agency it has developed” (Horkheimer, 2004, p. 128) and that needs to be radically changed. The cultural industry produces an erroneous commonsense “that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, and impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves” (Adorno and Rabinbach, 1975, p.  19). It is a core component of the meaningless nexus ‘human beings and their labor,’ a nexus that has no meaning in itself (Fromm, 1973), and paves a reified reason in which “objectivity is calculated by subjects manipulating it” (Adorno and Rabinbach, 1975). As conformity replaces consciousness, culture dynamics “denotes a field of social action in which social groups create common values, objectify them in the institutions of everyday life and hand them down in the form of symbolic utterances” (Honneth, 1991, p. 25). Thus, it is not the social action of individuals, “but an institutionalized ring of cultural agencies that mediates between economic imperative of societal self-preservation and the complementary task of the socialization of the individual needs” (Honneth, 1991, p. 29). The culture industry, in the minds of das Institut intellectuals, was a superior weapon of annihilation of the endless multitude of the human being, shrinking its very existence and identity into “only one dimension” possible (Marcuse, 2002, p. 13). Connected with consumerism, such one dimensionality becomes socially lethal, as commodities and their production “indoctrinate and manipulate promoting a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood” (Marcuse, 2002, p. 14). As commodities “become available to more individuals in more social classes, the indoctrination they carry ceases to be publicity, and it becomes a way of life” (Marcuse, 2002, p. 14). It goes without saying that education and curriculum have been since their inception the carburetor of such one-dimensionality both through their form and content. Through curriculum, evaluation, and teacher education a eugenic pedagogical habitus (Bourdieu, 1990a; 1990b) is normalized, institutionalized, boosting particular “forms of language which initiate, reinforce, and generalize special types of relationships with the environment and thus create for the individual particular forms of significance” (Bernstein, 1977, p.  70). Hence, such uni-dimensionality is the riverbed of the epistemicide (Santos, 2017;

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2016; 2014; 2012), and of the epistemicide within the epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2014)—provoking, imposing, and instigating a specific eugenic matrix of reasoning, an issue that was not minimized by particular waves of the radical critical curriculum river (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011), or should I say, both radical and critical ‘curricologos’ and ‘curriculists’ (Paraskeva, 2005). In fact, Horkheimer and his contemporaries saw the importance of paying attention to a “series of cultural institutions mediating the behavioral requirements of social production and the subject through the stably institutionalized process of education and acculturation” (Honneth, 1991, p.  27). That is, “parental rearing practices, school curricula, and religious rituals are media that affect all social classes and continuously reflect the behavior constraints of the economic system back upon the individual psyche, albeit indirectly and in fragmented manner” (Honneth, 1991, p. 27). In das Institut’s desideratum to move towards a more sophisticated supradisciplinary theoretical approach—one focused on an alternative logic of critique—and through a peculiar reading of Hegel’s rationale, Adorno (2004) articulates the concept of immanent critique as negative dialectics. That is, the task of immanent critique “is to transform the concepts, which it brings, as it were, from the outside, into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is. It must dissolve the rigidity of the temporarily and spatially fixed object into a field of tension of the possible and the real” (Adorno, 1976, p. 69). Dissolving “the rigidity of the fixed object into a field of tension of the possible and the real is to comprehend the unity of essence and appearance as actuality, as essence defines the realm of possibilities of what is” (Benhabib, 1986, p. 80). In this context, the immanent critique of political economy seeks to transform “the concepts which political economy brought from the outside into what the object left to itself seeks to be. By revealing how the categories of political economy transformed themselves into their opposites, Marx was also dissolving the existent into a field of tension of the possible and the real” (Benhabib, 1986, p. 80). Immanent critique is “always a critique of the object as well as the concept of the object” (Benhabib, 1986, p. 80). That is, “to grasp an object as actuality means to show that what the object is, is false. Its truth is that its given facticity is a mere possibility, which is defined by a set of other possibilities, which it is not. This implies a mode of knowing which hypostasizes what is, is not true knowledge” (Benhabib, 1986, p. 80). Adorno (2004) frames immanent critique as negative dialectics to mitigate “the speculative identity of the concept and object” (Benhabib, 1986, p.  80). Negative dialectics “is the unending transformation of concepts into their opposites, of what is into what could be but is not” (Benhabib, 1986, p.  80). Moreover, Adorno (2004) put forward the concept of ‘negative thinking,’ claiming that Enlightenment tragedy is profoundly grounded on a theoretical and practical ‘dialectical impossibility’ based on the Hegelian inconsistency that all real is well rounded, defined, and rationale (Adorno, 2004). In his (2004) terms, real and rationale are not necessarily identical by definition—as positivists defend. Dialectics, as it has been perceived in Hegelian terms, “is the

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ontology of the wrong state of things” (Adorno, 2004, p.  11) since the nexus ‘real-rationality’ is something perpetually incomplete, and an extenuating ‘always-about-to-be’ momentum. Such nexus constitutes a prima facere pendulum of the Enlightenment/Modernity instrumental account of reason ossified in a concrete positivistic ideological account of the scientificity of science that shreds and hackles the real(ity) only within tainted perceptions of dodging categories of ‘us vs. them’ “true or false, yes or no [which fuels] the bureaucratic way of thinking that has become the secret model for a thought allegedly still free” (Adorno, 2004, p.  32). It is within such context that Adorno (2004) challenges linear concepts of identity thinking, arguing that “dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity” (p. 5). That is the idea that all real is rational, that mind and matter as well as concepts and objects are identical by definition, is egregiously wrong, it de-historicizes real(ity) as well as the processes of rationality, and as I will examine later on, will call philosophy to a prominent place to address the social phenomena more accurately. Such relationships and interfaces promote illusive identity formations established within very concrete historical conditions. In so doing, he (2004) flays identity thinking and its inconsistent nexus among human agency, society, and reality, between concepts and objects, between mind and matter, underlining the dangers of framing such nexus out of contradictions and conflict. Since “contradiction is non-identity under the aspect of identity” (Adorno, 2004, p.  5), identity is indeed about non-identity, which fatally deflates linear dichotomist identity matrixes. Negative thinking “presupposes the ability to make a distinction between existence and essence, fact and potentiality, and appearance and reality” (Kellner, 2002, pp.  xiv–xv). In the minds of das Institut intellectuals, identity “is the primal form of all ideology, that is our reified consciousness reflects a world of objects frozen in their monotonously self-same being, and in thus binding us to what it is, to the purely ‘given’ blinds us to the truth that what is, more than it is” (Eagleton, 1991, p.  126). The fatal part of ideology, Adorno (2004) argues, is that “it dates back to biology. As a mere means of itself it becomes an end. This turn is already a turn to false consciousness. If the lion has a consciousness, his rage at the antelope he wants to eat would be ideology” (p. 349). All forms of consciousness, Sartre (1984) argues, are consciousness of something; that is, without consciousness the socio constructed ‘transphenomenality of Being’ doesn’t exist. That is, “Being-in-itself is never either possible or impossible. It is” (Sartre, 1984, p. lxviii). As “reason becomes inherently violent and manipulative simply to think is to be guilty and complicit with ideological domination, yet to surrender instrumental thought altogether would be to lapse into barbarous irrationalism” (Eagleton, 1991, p. 127). This is a crucial ideological wrangle that was not unnoticed by major intellectuals in our field (Greene, 1974; Apple, 1979; Giroux, 1981; Pinar, 1975). In fact, if there is a field, “in which essence is not a mere beyond, that the well known is such because it is well known, not known” (Benhabib, 1986, p. 80), an apparatus—ideological and repressive (Althusser, 1971)—in which one actually perceives that concepts and objects are not ‘necessarily’ identical, which

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is the field of education and curriculum. As Pessoa (2002) accurately put it, “everything we do in arts and in life is always an imperfect copy of what we thought of doing” (p.  158). The gargantuan abyss between such terrains— despite being obliterated by mainstream forces—shows a very concrete rational irrationality which, as we will see later on, paves a very specific curriculum ‘chaos and rhythm’ (Gil, 2018) that has been historically challenged by a multitude of approaches within a vast diverse ideological and pedagogical fluxes that rainbows a very peculiar radical critical curriculum river since its inception at the end of the nineteenth century. Negative thinking was framed as a superior level of a radical critical critique of the critique not only helping to accurately perceive how concepts and objects are dynamic and change, mutate, transform, die over the course of history and are tagged within a specific historical context but also to challenge how “language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society” (Horkheimer, 2004, p.  2). In such context, and without undermining the importance of hard empiricism, das Institut intellectuals did not hesitate in bringing philosophy back to the table since in a totalitarian era, “the therapeutic task of philosophy, would be a political task” (Marcuse, 2002, p. 203). Unlike Lukács, who paid attention to the ontological dynamic of dialectics, thus moving towards an ontological dialectical of the social being, Adorno (2004) waltzes with Karl Marx’s 11th thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach, claiming that “philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (p. 3). Futhermore, [t]he summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried. Philosophy offers no place from which theory as such might be concretely convicted of the anachronisms it is suspected of, now as before. Perhaps it was an inadequate interpretation, which promised that it would be put into practice. Theory cannot prolong the moment its critique depended on. A practice indefinitely delayed is no longer the forum for appeals against self-satisfied speculation; it is mostly the pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require. (Adorno, 2004, p. 3) Philosophy was sidelined (Fromm, 1973) thus needed a duel with(in) itself, one “that confronts and fuels contradiction and conflict helping come to grips with reality” (Marcuse, 2002, p. 136). That is, “philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself ” (Adorno, 2004, p. 3). The subject-object quarrel is not a static one prostrated in a socio-historical vacuum and ideologically destituted; in fact, there is no philosophy or philosophical structures out of dialectical wrangles as “philosophy originates in dialectic; its universe of discourse responds to the facts of an antagonistic reality” (Marcuse, 2002, p. 130). Philosophy “confronts

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the existent, and it can function as a corrective of history, so to speak” (Horkheimer, 2004, p. 196), helping produce a radically diferent class-consciousness. We are before what Santos (2018, p. vii) insighfully calls “the corner stone of Western-centric critical thinking.” We need alternative interpretations within the interpretation before any attempt to transform critical philosophical thinking. We will return to this issue later on. In the aftermath of World War II, das Institut returned to Frankfurt, “with a focus on social-theoretic approaches employing methods of qualitative social science to expose the ideological structures responsible for various societal pathologies” (Anderson, 2011, p.  34). It was also during this second heyday of the Institute (1950–1970) that one saw concrete fractures within its founders and the concomitant fading away of the first generation of its intellectuals (Theodor Adorno died in 1969, Pollock in 1970, and Max Horkheimer in 1973) and the gradual emergence of another generation of intellectuals, such as Alfred Schmidt, Albrecht Wellmer, Claus Off, Oskar Negt, Karl Otto Apel, and Jürgen Habermas, that would be instrumental in the work and framework edified by the latest contemporary generation of critical scholars from Axel Honneth, Agnes Heller, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, among so many others (Anderson, 2011). Habermas (1987, p. 196) emphasizes the need to recognize “that the human being is both a labouring and a communicating being: the reproduction of life is determined culturally by work and interaction.” Thus, Horkheimer and Adorno’s reasoning lacks a theory of communicative rationality that negates instrumental rationality (Habermas, 1987). In his (Habermas, 1971b) understanding, the struggle to unpack the instrumentality of reason could not ignore technical, practical, and emancipatory forms of knowledge. While, for example, with Habermas one noticed that the ‘equation’ changed dramatically—from an emphasis on social consciousness towards knowledge interests, and a critical communicative platform—with Honneth, Fraser, and Benhabib, for example, one witnesses the need to address sociological voids within the matrix of the first generation of das Institut intellectuals. In Habermas’s terms, while “capitalism has eliminated the possibility of the internal collapse of capitalism and the organization of the proletariat against domination, the thruth was that the proletariat was not structurally blocked and it was necessary to rethink its emancipation—in relation to Marx and Horkheimer” (Nobre, 2004, pp.  54). Habermas saw positivism as “the false consciousness of a correct praxis” (Habermas, 1976, p.  198), and he openly acknowledged Marxist limitations (Habermas, 1971a; 1971b). While Habermas’s emphasis is in his “fascination with linguistic conditions for reaching understanding free from domination which is insufficient as a normative basis for social critique” (Pilapil, 2011, p.  84), Honneth argues that it is not the restriction of linguistic rules, but the violation of person’s identity claims acquired through socialization that constitutes injury to moral experience. That is, while Habermas argues that “every process of reaching understanding takes place against the background of a culturally ingrained preunderstanding” (Habermas, 1984, p 100), and the reification of an instrumental account of reason could not

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be accurately unpacked and terminated without paying close attention to the “visceral nexus knowledge and interests, Honneth works tenaciously towards a “detranscendentalized concept of reason” (Honneth, 1995, p. 1) and puts forward a theory of social and intersubjective recognition as the superlative task to understand the emergence of social conflicts and power struggles. Individual as well as collective identity matters are produced—constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, nullified—“through intersubjective metamorphosis mediated by struggles for recognition” (Honneth, 1995, p. 68). Fraser (1990) also concurs that the struggles for social recognition, although vital, could not be fully accomplished by sidelining the material inequalities and disparities deeply rooted on the modes of production and conditions of those modes of production. That is, as a battle for social justice, the struggles for social and intersubjective recognition need to be undeniably a struggle for redistribution as well. Honneth’s and Fraser’s approaches exhibit differences. Whereas for the former, the struggle for recognition supersedes the struggles for redistribution, that is the material aspects triggering social actions and conflicts were hierarchically inferior to the social intersubjective relations, for the latter, the overemphasis on recognition could not undermine the struggles for redistribution of economic commodities, actually a source of the lack recognition. In this sense, Fraser advances the need for a dual perspective, one that puts both struggles as mutually inclusive (Fraser and Honneth, 2003). The struggles for social intersubjective recognition and identity so well theorized by intellectuals, such as Honneth, Taylor, and others, did not even interrupt—let alone defeat—social and economic inequalities (Fraser and Honneth, 2003). The challenge though is how to edify a dualist perspective of social justice, one that blends both recognition and redistributions as the sides of the same coin, an issue that was not ignored by Seyla Benhabib (1986) as well. Like Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib (1986) blends feminist approaches and critical theory and in doing so, helps fill a shameful gap within the critical platform, building a more just approach to challenge a well-defined dominant male account of instrumental reason, and in doing so challenging patriarchy at the very core of a brutal system of dominance. Even though the contributions of the later generations of critical intellectuals have gone different ways, the fact is that such theoretical paths and movements need to be understood within the context of the work done by the intellectuals of the first generation. The work of the second and third generations had and has been built, somehow, in reaction of what was accomplished or not by the demiurges of the critical platform. In Sloterdijk’s (2011, p.  61) terms, it is “the Frankfurt School though that neverthless continues to have considerable success in the diffuse impregnation of mentalities.” A couple of years from now, das Institut celebrates its first century, a century that mirrors a massive refined and impressive critical intellectual legacy that despite overt and clear differences attempted to produce a robust theory to better grasp systems of dominance. In doing so, among many issues, they ended up not only unpacking the dominant structures propelling systems of

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dominance, but also opening the canon of grand narratives such as Marxism. Although Marx was not so wrong in so many issues (Eagleton, 2011), it seems though that, for the different generations of das Institut intellectuals, “Marxism was/is ossified, its postulates are inscribed in stone but have no importance in the discourse of social theory, in a world where real persons try to solve real problems” (Aronowitz, 1990a, p. 21; 1990b). Painfully, in leading Western societies, Aronowitz (1990a, p.  21; 1990b) argues, “Marxism has become not the theory of the workers movement, but of avant-garde intellectuals.” Said (1993) didn’t mince his words when he blasted critical theory obliviousiology beyond class. While aknowledging crucial insights and victories, Said (1993) challenged the silence on issues of race and spaces/times of resistance within the very imperial matrix. As De Certeau (1988) argues, the system has cracks, and resistance also occurs from within, acting within the cracks of the system Up to this point, I have been examining, albeit in a very general way, the paths taken by the demiurges of das Institut and its disciples. As I have argued, my aim was not to make an exhaustive historical analysis on critical theory and das Institut. Such work has been very well done in extraordinary theoretical incunabula (Arato and Gebhardt, 1985; Honneth, 1987; Held, 1980; Kellner, 1989; Benhabib, 1986), which greatly help us to understand the challenges faced and successes achieved by an extraordinary generation of intellectuals who have shaken the academia, unions, social movements, civil society, and, also, with the dominant groups and institutional powers. Also, as I was unfolding the critical matrix, I was able to argue how different metamorphoses of the critical terrain arrived at the shores of our field and influenced so many curriculum battles and fueled countless pedagogical wrangles. In the United States and other Western countries with a dominant Eurocentric Western epistemological matrix, the field of curriculum was a stage upon which these belligerent confrontations were carried out by what I call ‘the generation of the utopia’ that in a non-monolithic form created a flow that I have treated in other spaces (Paraskeva, 2016; 2014; 2011) as critical radical curricular river. It is never too much to remind ourselves that we all sit on the shoulders of our theoretical ancestors and whether or not it is now possible to put on the table of the curriculum debate a myriad of fractural issues that must be addressed and resolved by the educational phenomenon—such as racism genderism, classism, casteism, genocide, poverty, immigration, exploitation, segregation, etc.—it is because there is a whole past of pugnacious struggles carried out by a group of intellectuals and social activists that have made it possible to conquer many of the spaces and times that so many of us have today. The main objective of this chapter was, thus, to produce a very general outline of some of the structural questions posed by the intellectuals of das Institut in order to better contextualize and understand the reasons that it has become impossible—some will say difficult—to edify a critical social hegemonic theory. Summing up, Enlightenment-Modernity’s decline and debilities unveiled a shrewd crisis in one of its very towering pillars, science, a crisis that needs to be framed in the context of a general crisis. Despite so many scientific and

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technological advances and accomplishments, as Horkheimer (1999) argues, the same scientificity of science that “made [the] modern industrial system possible is the same that is cornering it into an asphyxiating crisis” (p. 3). Undeniably, that ‘our’ society has been “unable to make effective use of the powers it has developed and the wealth it has amassed” (Horkheimer, 1999, p.  4) is a paradox that defines capitalism and so insightfully is painted by Santos (2005). That is, despite the magnitude of the social chaos triggered by Enlightentement-Modernity, as well as the superior sophistication of the critical apparatuses, societies are currently experiencing a devastating massive regression, confirming the incapability of the critical platform to help reverse the malaise and impose itself as a hegemonic bloc. Notwithstanding the social havoc and despite the sophistication of the critical platform in helping better understand both the mechanics of systems of dominance and the failures in destroying such mechanisms, as Boaventura Sousa Santos (2005) insightfully argues, we live a paradoxical time. In fact, if one could identify the Horkheimian ‘punctum’ (Barthes, 1981) in Santos’s approaches, this would be the one. He (2005) states, on one hand, our current time is marked by huge developments and thespian changes, an era that is referred to as the electronic revolution of communications, information, genetics and the biotechnological. On the other hand, it is a time of disquieting regressions, a return of the social evils that appeared to have been or about to be overcome. The return of slavery and slavish work; the return of high vulnerability to old sicknesses that seemed to have been eradicated and appear now linked to new pandemics like HIV/AIDS; the return of the revolting social inequalities that gave their name to the social question at the end of the nineteenth century; in sum, the return of the specter of war, perhaps now more than ever a world war, although whether cold or not is as yet undecidable. (Santos, 2005, p. vii) My analysis thus far, although brief, allows us to perceive the richness, sophistication, and perceptiveness of a theoretical framework that undeniably ofered important analyses and ways to dismantle systems of domination and oppression towards a more just and equal society. Precisely because of this, it is intriguing why such a powerful theoretical framework could not be imposed as dominant. That is, in a era completely crushed by the rhythm of chaos, why the battle against the instrumental functionalism of reason, against the cult of a certain view of science with positivist tics, against the solidification of a regulated society led by intellectuals and critical movements could not and cannot realize how to achieve the final victory? Given such a sophisticated picture, why didn’t the great battles fought by the critical movement—despite many achievements—organically impose a critical rationality that promotes an emancipated society? Why do critical counter-hegemonic movements and groups win battles—and there were many—but not the war? And because of

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that, much of what was gained in such battles is now found to be in danger. How is this ‘back-to-back’ possible? A back-to-back is not the same as ‘begin from the beginning’ as Slavoj Žižek (2009) suggested, but probably fatally can lead us to that. At times, it seems that, since it is impossible to avoid the confrontation, it has become convenient and ‘comfortable,’ and thus appropriate, to push the critic to the space of battles, a perpetual space of theoretical entertainment, thus preventing the critical from the space of a final war. It seems that critical theory was dangerously feeding what it was fighting against. The truth is that critical theory comes to the dawn of the twenty-first century filled with black nodes and completely ragged.

What Really Happens With Critical Theory? “The following day, no one died.” (Saramago, 2009, p. 1)

It seems that the golden age of critical theory, as Eagleton (2003) would put it, is passing. Today, Honneth (2009) states, there is an “atmosphere of the outdated and antiquated, of the irretrivably lost, which surrounds the grand historical and philosophical ideas of critical theory, ideas for which there no longer seems to be any kind of resonance within the experience of the accelarating present” (p. 19). The younger generation “carries on the work of social criticism without having much more than a nostalgic memory of the heroic years of Western Marxism” (Honneth, 2009, p. 19). Why? How come a supradisciplinary “theory of society against domination in all of its forms” (Held, 1980, p.  35) that challenges the false notion of detached science and runs “counter to prevailing habits of thought” (Horkheimer, 1999, p.  218) not only has been incapable to assume a hegemonic position but also in so many parts of the world has been struggling to make a significant footprint or any footprint at all? Santos’s (1999) approach challenges the field with another powerful question: Why it is so difficult to build a critical theory? In his words “in a world where there is so much to criticize, why has it become so difficult to produce a critical theory?” (Santos, 1999, p.  197). To complexify the argument, “is another politics of the world possible, a politics that no longer necessarily rests upon difference or alterity but instead on a certain idea of kindred and the in-common?” (Mbembe, 2019, p.  40). If so, what would be the role of critical theory? Is it possible that critical approaches face the same healthy plague of philosophy that is being fundamentally and irremediably a praxis of criticism without creation, as DeLeuze and Guattari (1994) would put it? I argue that most of the crucial reasons that the critical theoretical movement felt and continues to experience difficulties in imposing itself as dominant—a stark paradox, especially on a planet that raises a white flag against human irrationality—lies also in the critical theoretical terrain itself and not just in the neoconservative, neoliberal triumphalist bestride.

146 Critical Curriculum Theory The logic undergridding the very concept of reification faced severe critique. Eagleton (1991, p.  46) eloquently dissects the contradiction involving such logic. Drawing on Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, he (1991) argues that das Insitut intellectuals claimed that “capitalist societies languished in the grip of all-pervasive reification, all the way from commodity fetishism, and speech habits to politicalbureaucracy and technological thought” (p. 46). In Eagleton’s (1991) terms they not only overestimated the concept, but also presented as a “monolithic dominant ideology” (p. 46). If, Eagleton (1991) argues, “reification exerts its sway everywhere then this must presumably include the criteria by which we judge reification in the first place in which case we will not be able to indetify at all” (p. 47). That is “the final alienation will be not to know that we were alienated” (Eagleton, 1991, p. 47). Not only are we before a contradiction; we are before an erroneous exegesis of a particular system of dominace, in this case, capitalism. Eagleton’s (1991) and William’s (1977) rationale helps unpack such fallacy. Every social formation contains dominant, residual, and emergent forms of consciousness since no mode of production or dominant social order or culture can include or exhaust all human practice, energy, and intention (Williams, 1977; Eagleton, 1991). Also, critical theory, among several issues, erroneously, perceived “society as a totality and, as such, proposes a total alternative to the society that exists” (Santos, 1999, p. 201). Futhermore, “there is no single principle of social transformation, and even those who continue to believe in a future socialist see it as a possible future in competition with alternative futures” (Santos, 1999, p. 202). In Santos’s (1999, p. 202) terms, there are no unique historical agents or a unique form of domination; there are multiple faces of domination and oppression and many of them have been irresponsibly neglected by modern critical theory, such as patriarchal domination. Since the faces of domination are manifold, the resistances and the agents that lead it are manifold. In this context, in the absence of a single principle, Santos (1999, p. 203) argues, “it is not possible to bring together all resistances and agencies under a common grand theory.” Thus, and echoing Santos’s (1999, p. 203) reasoning, “more than a common theory, what we need is a translation theory that makes the diferent struggles mutually intelligible and allows collective actors to talk about the oppressions they resist and the aspirations they animate (Santos, 1999, p. 203). Such translation theory will help address a crucial weakness within the critical platform propelled by the first generation of das Institut intellectuals, one that erroneously “remained constantly closed in the face of all attempts to consider the historical process other than from the point of view of the development of social labor” (Honneth, 1987, p.  357). This is a fundamental theoretical deficit within the interdisciplinary theory of society advocated by the critical armada. In fact, “because no other type of social action is conceded

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along side of social labour, intellectuals such as Horkheimer can only take the instrumental forms of social practice systematically into account on the level of their theory of society” (Honneth, 1987, p. 357); hence, they “lose sight of that dimension of everyday practice in which socialized subjects generate and creatively develop common action-orientations in a communicative manner” (Honneth, 1987, p. 357). That reality, the crude, mundane, everyday practice, is flooded with examples “that would push us to critically question ourselves about the moral nature and quality of our societies, and to seek for theoretical alternatives based on the answers that we urgently need to face such sagas” (Santos, 1999, p. 199). In this context, decolonial thinkers have strongly and forcefully denounced Western Eurocentric Modernity in its dominant and specific counter-dominant forms as tout court inconsequential to address global and local needs (Santos, 1999; 2014; Paraskeva, 2014; 2016; Grosfoguel, 2010; 2011; Maldonado-Torres, 2003; 2008; Walsh, 2012). Despite such paradoxical alley, and after a concise description of our current social sagas, such reality should “cause us enough discomfort or indignation to compel us to question ourselves critically about the nature and moral quality of our society and to seek alternatives that are theoretically based on the answers we give to such interrogations” (Santos, 1999, p.  199). Odd as it might be, Santos (1999) states, it is not easy to edify such theoretical alternatives (p. 200). Marxist and Neo-Marxist critical approaches have multiplied in theoretical attempts to better analyze the most crucial social issues. Today, the impact of “structuralist, existentialist, psychoanalytical, phenomenological approaches that attempt to offer the best analyses of dynamics such as class, conflict, elite, alienation, domination, exploration, racism, sexism, dependence, world system, liberation theology” (Santos, 1999, p. 200) are undeniable and constitute powerful terrains in which social theorists work quite hard to understand and transform reality. In mapping out the complex conundrums of the postmodern path, Anderson (1998) insightfully exhumes the emergence of the term and idea of postmodernism, “which supposes the currency of modernism” (p. 3). Whereas the emergence of modernism is related with “an aesthetic movement to a Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario” (Anderson, 1998, p.  3), at the end of the nineteenth century, which constituted cultural independence from Spain, postmodernism “first surfaces in the Hispanic inter-world of the 1930’s by Frederico de Onis,” and it was used as a concept that attempted to describe “a conservative reflux within modernism” (Anderson, 1998, p.  4). Such exhumation is crucial not only because it exposes—once again—the very non-Western root of specific critical epistemological platforms but also reveals how and why both terms and ideas arrived in Western shores, how and why the meanings were naturally transformed, and who benefited and for what purposes. Anderson (1998) by unearthing the postmodern army reveals a diachronic path from “a literary encounter in Peru” at the end of the nineteenth century to Lyotardian and Habermasean exemplars, such as ‘the postmodern condition and modernity as

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an incomplete project.’ In addition, in doing so, one can visibly perceive the tenacious commitment to go above and beyond modern critical orthodoxies, while concomitantly admitting their limitations as the best intellectually honest way to celebrate its accomplishments. In fact, while “an integral part of the modern” (Lyotard, 1984, p.  12), postmodernism violently reacts against the “grand narratives” (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv) that fueled modernity. The move towards the postcritical, poststructural, and postmodern terrain, which led to irreparable fractures within the most orthodox critical crux, is the unmistakable sign of a critical crisis within the critical terrain, given the absence of responses to the social problems, a critical framework that has become bogged down in the swamp of a Eurocentric modernity of which it is part of, and, from which, despite its achievements—and there were and are many—it has dangerously built up false promises, generating expectations. The towering failed promises of modernity—i.e. “equality, freedom, peace and domination of nature” Santos (1999, pp. 198–199)—triggered the great regression current societies are facing. Adding to this, Santos (1999) claims, that hunger and poverty have reached alarming figures compared with any preceding centuries. In fact, he (1999, p.  199) adds, the “violations of human rights in countries living formally in peace and democracy take on overwhelming proportions.” To make things even worse, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the peace that many thought ultimately possible became a cruel mirage. The promise of the domination of nature was fulfilled in a perverse way in the form of destruction of nature and ecological crisis. (Santos, 1999, p. 199) Irrespective of palpable noteworthy eforts and accomplishments, it is erroneous to think that “after all it remains as easy or as possible to produce critical social theory as it has been before” (Santos, 1999, p. 200). Furthermore, firstly, “many of these concepts no longer have the centrality they once enjoyed or were internally so reworked and nuanced that they lost much of their critical strength” (Santos, 1999, p. 200). Secondly, he (1999, p. 200) adds, “conventional sociology, both in its positivist and antipolitical aspects, managed to pass as a remedy for the crisis of sociology the critique of critical sociology.” While in the case of positivist sociology, such critique was based “on the idea that the methodological rigor and social utility of sociology presuppose that it concentrates on the analysis of what exists and not on the alternatives to what exists and” (Santos, 1999, p. 200), the truth of the matter is that such criticism in the case of anti-positivist sociology was based “on the idea that the social scientist can not impose his normative preferences for lacking a privileged point of view to do so” (Santos, 1999, p. 200). Santos (2018) makes no euphemisms in his challenge to post-structural and feminist critical approaches of society, which remain within the limits of matrix they were challenging. Eagleton (2003) is even more corrosive yet on

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the point, condemning the daydreams of certain academic circles and cultural hemispheres: Structuralism, Marxism, Post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics as they were. What is sexy instead is sex. On the wider shores of the academia an interest in French philosophy has given away to the fascination with French kissing. In some cultural circles, the politics of masturbation exert far more fascination than the politics of the Middle East. Socialism is not out of sado-masochism. Among students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body not the famished body. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in laboring bodies. (p. 2) Jameson (2016), also in his outstanding piece An American Utopia, didn’t rely on any euphemism in his critical analysis of Utopia as an ideological device of modernity. In Jameson’s (2016) words, the great Utopias promised and pursued by powerful political movements and intellectuals over the past centuries, namely communism, socialism, and social democracy, for so many people are today a heap of concepts and obsolete practices in the suburbs of the scrapyard theory, a specimen of ideological scrap that for most functions as a nightmare that ofers nothing to the rail of utopia. However, although lost for so many, Utopia remains a magnet on the horizon. The fact is that the background of utopia is filled with an amalgam of epistemological lines projected and projectable both in the Global North and in the Global South. Jameson (2016) emphasizes ‘dual power’ as an alternative to a putrid tangle with which ideological plasmas such as socialist, communist, and social democrat colonized the utopia of modernity. In fact, the intention to believe in a utopia just painted with certain colors was one of the greatest pitfalls of modernity and an undeniable symptom of epistemicide. That is, even the form of combating the epistemicide appeared proposed and defended in the form of another epistemicide. In fact, as Jameson (2005, p.  220) argues, modernity “reason, turned cynical.” Part of this needs to be framed in terms of History, “a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here” ( Jameson, 2003, p.  76). This places society before an egregious challenge, one that aims to “to locate radical difference and how to jumpstart the sense of history so that it begins again to transmit feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia” ( Jameson, 2003, p.  76). However, Jameson (2016, p.  2) complexifies, our current era has witnessed “a marked diminution in the production of new utopias over the last decades (along with an overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable dystopias, most of which look monotonously alike).” Utopian thinking, Jameson (2016, pp. 2–3) adds, was always “bound up with the fortunes of a more general concern not to say obsession of power.” The truth of the matter is that, despite all the notable gains in the historical battles against capitalism,

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traditional leftist alternatives to capital were doomed to fail (Jameson, 1974). The very idea of utopia as a permanent stage and state of imagination, fantasy, a doable and reachable dream became practically impossible, pushing and cornering the subject into in a no-man’s-land, a stage paced by a quasi perpetual chaos between a political commitment towards a just world we all wish to see, and the utopia which feeds such commitment. (Jameson, 2016). In this sense, Jameson (2016, p.  2) argues, the current challenges faced by utopian perspectives are closely related with the “virtual dissolution of practical politics of all kinds on the left.” In a sense one is facing a puzzling hiatus which blurs the distinction between a political program and utopian vision, thus challenging any utopian possibility. As he (2016) argues, I can’t be sure whether I am proposing a political program or a utopian vision, neither of which, according to me, would be possible any longer. Why not? Well, the left once had a political program that was called revolution. No one seems to believe in it that anymore, partly because the agency supposed to bring it about has disappeared, partly because the system that was supposed to replace has become too complicated and too omnipresent to begin to imagine how to replace it, partly because nobody believes in revolution anymore and the very language associated with it is became as old fashioned and as archaic as that of the founding fathers. It is easier someone once said, to imagine the end of the world than it is imagine the end of capitalism, and with that the idea of revolution overthrowing capitalism seems to have vanished. Well let’s be fair. The left did have another political strategy and that was reformism sometimes in counter distinction with revolutionary communism called socialism. But I am afraid no one believes in that any longer either. The reformists or social democratic parties are in complete shambles. They have no programs any longer perhaps to regulate capitalism so it doesn’t do any catastrophic damage; there is omnipresent corruption both in these parties and the system at large, which is in any case too enormous and too complex to be susceptible of any decisive tinkering which might improve it let alone lead to something you could truly call systemic change; social democracy is in our time irreparably bankrupt and communism seems to be dead. Thus it would seem both of Gramsci’s celebrated alternatives the war of maneuvers and the war of position no longer seem theoretical adequate to the current situation. ( Jameson, 2016, pp. 2–3) Although Santos (1999) adamantly claims “existence does not exhaust the possibilities of existence itself ” (p. 197), in Jameson’s (1984) rationale, the utopia has been weakened in a postmodern turn by a concrete cultural logic that distorts contemporary life, undermining social consciousness, desensitizing feelings, solidifying critical apathy, forming “a series of semiautonomous and

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relatively independent traits and features, a unique privileged symptom of a loss of historicity” (p. x). Clearly, the critical post-critical platform was a short quilt to the Utopian path. Ahmad (2008) acknowledges how a number of tendencies in “Western Marxism contributed to a later ascendency of post-structuralism” (p. 38). However, he argues that it is crucial “to connect theory with the determinate and shaping forces of our time and not through poststructuralism” (Ahmad, 2008, p. 37). That is, any theoretical position that is oblivious of the history of materialities as a progressivist modes-of-production narrative, historical agency itself as a myth of origins, nations and states as irretrievably coercive, class as simply discursive constructs, and political parties themselves as fundamentally contaminated with collectivist illusions of a stable subject position—a theoretical position of that kind, from which no poststructuralism worth the name can escape—is, in the most accurate sense of these words repressive and bourgeois. (Ahmad, 2008, pp. 35–36) Clearly, as Santos (2018) would put it, within the modern critical platforms “there is no room for bringing into account other ways of knowing that might correct or overcome the past failures of previous scientific knowledge” (p. 27). Undeniably, over the last couple of decades, Berardi (2012) argues, “disruptions have multiplied in the planetary landscape, but they have not produced a change in the dominant paradigm, a conscious movement of self-organization, or a revolutionary upheaval” (p. 11). Quite the opposite. Capitalism “remains a formidable desiring machine, a machine that has been tied from birth to a savage repressiveness” (Guattari, 2001, pp. 219–220). Critical theory is gagged in a dangerous social pathological reason (Honneth, 2009). Underneath all reason, Deleuze (2001) argues, “lies delirium. Everything is rational in capitalism except capitalism itself ” (p. 219). The stock market, Deleuze (2001) adds, “is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious; it’s mad. The rational is always the rationality of the irrational” (p. 219). Fraser (1997) articulates her diagnosis of current momentum as a postsocialist condition, “a definitive negative verdict on the relevance and viability of socialist ideals, a skeptical mood or structure of feeling that marks the post-1989 state of the left” (p. 1). In Fraser’s (1997) words, such post-socialist condition is a kind of ‘morning after’ that shockingly confirmed “authentic doubts bound to genuine opacities concerning the historical possibilities for progressive social change” (p. 1). According to Fraser (1997), three major features framed such condition, namely “(a) the absence of any credible progressive vision of an alternative to the present order; (b) a shift in the grammar of political claims-making. Claims for the recognition for group difference have become intensively salient in the recent period, at times eclipsing claims for

152 Critical Curriculum Theory social equality: and (c) a resurgent economic liberalism” (pp.  1–3). Without minimizing Marx’s influences, she (1990) advocates for a new matrix for critical theory: To my mind, no one has yet improved on Marx’s 1843 definition of critical theory as ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.’ What is so appealing about this definition is its straightforward political character. It makes no claim to any special epistemological status, but rather, supposes that with respect to justification there is no philosophically interesting difference between a critical theory of society and an uncritical one. However, there is, according to this definition, an important political difference. A critical theory frames its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has partisan, though not critical, an identification. The question it asks and the models it designs are informed by that identification and interest. Thus for example, if struggles contesting the subordination of woman figure among the most significant of a given age, then a critical theory for that time would aim, among other things, to shed light on the character and bases of such subordination. It would employ categories and explanatory models that revealed rather than occluded relations of male dominance and female subordination. And it would demystify as ideological any rival approaches that obfuscated or rationalized those relations. (p. 113) In Balakrishnan (2005, p. 20) terms, “we lack a conception of politics even remotely adequate to the scale of the dangerous possibilities that lie ahead.” Such weak condition fosters “an inability and unwillingness to consider—sanza alcuo respeto—a transcendence of the dominant form of state and society which is potentially a very perilious situation” (Balakrishnan, 2005, p. 20) To designate the legacy of critical theory for the future, Honneth (2009) claims, would necessarily “involve recovering from the idea of a social pathology of reason” (p. 21). Such pathology fosters a “deficent rationality that forces one to question how can critical theorists trust that they will find a necessary degree of rational readiness for the conversion into practice if the socially practiced rationality turns out to be pathologically disrupted or distorted?” (Honneth, 1997, pp. 37–38). It must be said, that despite so many noteworthy accomplishments made by the counter-hegemonic tradition, Santos (199) Eagleton (2003), Jameson (2016), Ahmad (2008), and Fraser (1997), Honneth’s (2009) approaches fit rather well in so many avenues in our field, as I have examined extensively in other contexts (Paraskeva, 2011; 2014; 2016a). The move away from “the mechanistic and positivist conception of modern science along with the repudiation of Enlightenment optimism, faith in reason and emphasis in transcultural values and human nature (Best and Kellner, 2001, p. 6), which could have

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framed a postmodern turn, proved to be insufficient to the establishment of a hegemonic critical theory of society. A web of multifarious complexities underpins the difficulties and ‘impossibilities’ social scientists faced and face in edifying a critical theory. Beyond the arrogant position that there is only one possible matrix of social transformation, as we examined earlier, modern critical theory also ends up in another fatal error: the way industrialization was packed and unpacked. Industrialization doesn’t equate necessarily with progress and development (Santos, 1999, p.  203). Modernity, and its modernization greedy creed, proved that it “is neither necessarily the motor of progress, nor the promoter of development” (Santos, 1999, p. 203). The industrialization matrix propelled by modernity “is based on a retrograde conception of nature, incapable of seeing the relation between its degradation and the degradation of society, and for two-thirds of humanity, industrialization did not bring development” (Santos, 1999, p. 203). Thus, it is crucial to look “for new models of alternative development[;] it may be time to start creating alternatives to development” (Santos, 1999, p.  203). While “the single principle of social transformation as well as an equally unique collective agent” (Santos, 1999, p.  201) is a refined example of what I called elsewhere the epistemicide within the epistemicide, the way the nexus ‘industrialization-development’ was built makes it more difficult to craft a wellrounded critical approach. Santos (1999) speaks to the difficulties of building a critical theory today. The promises of modernity, he (1999, p. 204) argues, because they have not been fulfilled, have become problems for which there seems to be no solution. However, the conditions that produced the crisis of modern critical theory have not yet become the conditions for overcoming the crisis. We face modern problems for which there are no modern solutions. Santos advances somehow two irreversible critical antagonist postions to challenge the impasse facing the critical. One position “which we may term by recomforting postmodernity (postmodernidade reconfortante) the fact that there are no modern solutions and indicative that there are probably no modern problems, just as there were no promises of modernity before them. Therefore, accept and celebrate what exists” (Santos, 1999, p. 204). Another position, which is the one Santos (1999) subscribes, and which he defines as “disquieting or oppositional postmodernity (posmodernidade inquietante ou de oposicao), that is the disjuncture between the modernity of the problems and the postmodernity of possible solutions must be fully assumed and must be transformed into a starting point to face the challenges of constructing a post-modern criticism (Santos, 1999, p. 204). Dean (2017) reinforces Santos’s (1999) claims. The very revolutionary dynamics of change ‘changed.’ Revolution, Dean (2017) argues, as a philosophy of praxis, poses more problems than solutions. The idea that revolutionary change could only be possible if it framed ‘just’ and ‘only’ through a ‘party’ is, in fact,

154 Critical Curriculum Theory one of the major challenges, especially when we witness the successful victories accomplished by countless social movements in interrupting and defeating the capitalist ‘power matrix’ (Quijano, 1992; 2000) and its ‘faked’ crises, innovations, and transformations. Also, the crisis of critical theory brought with it an iconic crisis in which the same icons began to be shared by previously antagonistic fields. That is “the opposition capitalism/socialism was replaced by the icon industrial society, post-industrial society and, finally, information society” (Santos, 1999, p. 203). Moreover, the opposition between imperialism and modernization was replaced by the intrinsically hybrid concept of globalization. The opposition revolution/ democracy was almost drastically replaced by the concepts of structural adjustment, by the Washington consensus, and also by the hybrid concepts of participation and sustained development. (Santos, 1999, p. 203) While the crisis of capitalism contains in itself enzymes to promote revolutionary change—and in this regard, Dean (2017) is quite insightful—the truth of the matter is that such crisis makes a myriad of challenges for critical theory and pedagogy as well. The crises of capitalism did not come wrapped up without dangerous and puzzling traps—it was quite the opposite. Naturally, as Santos (1999) argues, “the conditions that produced the crisis of modern critical theory have not yet become the conditions for overcoming the crisis” (p. 204). Nor is the idea that revolutionary change, as examined by Lukács (2009), can only occur by having the proletariat as the only agents to understand how to mobilize change is accurate. The idea that change is confined to a party, and only to a collective agent, not only diminishes and strangles the potential for revolutionary change in postmodern times in the sense of ‘acting’ beyond capitalist modernity but also still persists in ignoring the transforming capacity, for example, of global and local social movements. But more than that, it boxes the notion and praxis of change as the only way to foster revolutionary change, a kind of papal bull to be prescribed all over the world. The challenge is not just to reconcile the incongruity between the sagas of modernity and the solutions required by postmodernity. That is to say, the task is not to reconcile this chasm. Rather, the task is to challenge the very pillar upon which modernity was sustained and which imposed a specific noninclusive totalitarian power matrix, wholeheartedly based on a eugenic epistemological framework that aimed to wipe out all other epistemological realities (Santos, 1999; Paraskeva, 2018). Santos (2014) termed this nightmare ‘the epistemicide.’ Hence, the way forward is not to assume a kind of ‘truth and reconciliation position’ between the frustrations of modernity and challenges of post-modernity. In fact, it is precisely by calling all arms to walk on a ‘disquiet or oppositional postmodern track’ that Santos (1999) concomitantly gives

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the final blow to modernity. Critical theory promotes a totalizing knowledge, a “knowledge of order over chaos” (Santos, 1999, p.  201). At the end of the twentieth century, he (1999, p.  201) adds, “we saw both the disorder of social regulation and the disorder of social emancipation.” Today, we are part of societies that are both authoritarian and libertarian. It is in this sense that Foucault’s postulate gains strength, since there is no chance of emancipation within a regime of truth since resistance itself becomes a disciplinary power, and therefore a consensual oppression because internalized. (Santos, 1999, p. 201) In a way, the interdisciplinary/supradisciplinary theoretical approach championed by the demiurgues of das Institut was inefcient in the struggle for a just world. Modern critical theory “imagine[s] humanity as a given, rather than an aspriration, believing that all humanity could be emancipated through the same mechanisms and according to the same principles” (Santos, 2018, p. 19). Critical theories and pedagogies are thus faced with a gigantic challenge: a kind of dead end if—to adapt Sloterdjik’s (1988) framework—it persists in what I would call the ‘cynicism of theory.’ That is, critical theories and pedagogies of society need to openly assume not only the need ‘to reconcile the incongruity between the sagas of modernity and the solutions required by postmodernity’ but, also, the crude fact that, in a way, they are an integral part of such incongruity. Admitting this will not shadow all of their major noteworthy accomplishments. It’s quite the opposite. Denying such ‘incongruity’ is actually undermining their accomplishments. I argue that the attempts to create an interdisciplinary/supradisciplinary theory of society failed not just because the lack of attention paid to the “communicative sphere of social everyday practice” (Honneth, 1987, p. 358). While this constitutes a huge dent within the critical platform, which cocoonized critical approaches with a “functionalist interdisciplinary materialism” (Honneth, 1987, p. 358), I argue that such interdisciplinary/supradisciplinary materialism was doomed to fail as it refuses to pay attention not just to diferent forms of domination and resistence but to completely diferent epistemological ways—beyond the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological framework—to perceive the world. In Santos’s (2018) terms, it “reveals a strong and fatal elective afnity” towards precisely what it was criticizing. A question needs to be raised, though. Does critical theory, in the parameters in which it emerges and develops, have an end, thus opening up space for more efective critical alternatives? Following Saramago’s (2009) metaphor, there is no future as the following day, no one died—does the future of critical theory go through its death—not in the Eurocentric sense—in itself as the enzyme of the future? To be more precise, what exactly needs to die/ end within the critical platform? Will the end of this critical theorizing be the best way to do a truthful supradisciplinary critical theory? While provocative,

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the question is not begging for an end, in Eurocentric terms. It begs something radically diferent. It begs ‘the otherwise.’

Whose Supradisciplinary Materialism! We know nothing about Asia. (Adorno, 2011, p. 34)

The question that drives this volume remains thus powerful. How come such a sophisticated and seemingly accurate approach fails to be hegemonic? How come a theoretical approach that gave us so much, that helps us to move into positive directions, and that maintained the utopia of millions alive, has failed to concur a hegemonic position? A variety of commonsensical arguments have been colonizing the field, and I believe we have all heard them, and we are challenged to address them. Some argue that critical theory and approaches sank within an irreversible abstractness, thus moving away from being able to constitute itself as a field of solutions and being seen as a quagmire of problems. In an era where dissent is dangerous, what’s the point of being critical if at the very end, it doesn’t move the emancipatory process? I have heard countless times and not only in the United States that between Ralph Tyler’s Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction and other works, such as Michael Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum, Henry Giorux’s Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, William Pinar’s What Is Curriculum Theory, Peter McLaren’s Life in Schools, Antonia Darder’s Culture and Power in the Classroom, not to mention Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the vast majority of teachers prefer Tyler’s oeuvre as it is the only one that addresses teachers’ fundamental concern insightfully grasped by Holt’s What Should I Do on Monday? We all have faced arguments like this—or even worse—in graduate programs, working with teachers, principals, superintendents, community groups, and legislators, for example, between ‘practitioners’ and ‘scholars.’ When we ask where does John Dewey, Angela Davis, or bell hooks stand, an imperial silence ‘occupies’ the cacophonic contentious. Others claimed that the lack of unity and the ‘inner’ battles within the critical modern theory and approaches don’t help to establish a dominant hegemonic position. I am confident that we all heard this ‘trivial’ argument. Such lack of unity and uniformity blurs the main focus. Such differences are quite visible and are healthy, justifiable thought. Since the works and thought of Grünberg—the second director of the Institut—to the latest generation of critical intellectuals, such as Heller, Honneth, Fraser, Seyla, one can easily perceive different ways of approaching social issues from ‘a critical theoretical interdisciplinary standpoint.’ Certainly, the multidimensionality of the very nature of the social havoc they were trying to address triggered and unproportionally accelerated such lack of uniformity as well. Momentarily in exile, and although scholars of das Institut “continued to work in political economy, philosophy, sociology, psychology, literature, music, and other disciplines” (Held, 1980, p. 34),

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the truth of the matter is that, “the differences between the intellectual traditions which informed German and U.S. scholarship [not only] reinforced the feeling of dislocation” (Held, 1980, p. 36), but also ended up promoting more disparities within the field. Members of das Institut reacted negatively towards the scholarship produced in the United States, finding “the Anglo-American philosophy lacking in depth and insight. Adorno and Neumann saw the U.S. scholars as uncritical and overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the benefits of empirical research” (Held, 1980, p. 36). Such U.S. idiosyncrasies were, in fact, a powerful catalyst for das Institut’s heterogeneous lines of thought. Not only does critical theory lack a uniting matrix, but also the influences between critical theorists constitute a complex entanglement of sociological, political, philosophical, psychological, and spiritual veins. There is an intricate kind of healthy epistemological proximities and distances, encounters and disencounters, as well as bumps among themselves that played a crucial role in contributing to what eventually became a materialistic supradisciplinary critical theory of society. Precisely due also to such intricate interplay, this group of intellectuals from das Institut “rarely shared a readily identifiable collective position and the differences between them often overshadowed the similarities” (Kellner, 1989, p.  1), a lack of univocity that pervades all historical metamorphoses of das Institut, namely, “the interdisciplinary materialist phase of 1932– 37, the critical theory approach of 1937–40 and the critique of instrumental reason characterizing the period from 1940 to 1945” (Benhabib, 2012, p. 67). Moreover, the absence of a clear common approach was also triggered by the multitude of social chaos. Thus, the historical metamorphosis took shape in the wake of historical experiences of this turbulent period; the prospects of the working class movement on the Weimar Republic, the appraisal of the social structure of the Soviet Union, and the analysis of fascism give rise to fundamental shifts in theory. These developments led to reformulations in the self understanding of the critical theory: the relation between theory and practice, between subjects and addresses of the theory, are defined while the interdependence of philosophy and the sciences, critical theory and Marxism are reconceptualized. (Benhabib, 2012, p. 67) The divergences were quite clear also at the very core of the political as one can see from the correspondence between Marcuse and Adorno (1999) on April 5, 1969, about the students revolt at the Institut. Marcuse (1999) questions the way das Institut (and Adorno) reacted to the students’ revolt and the ‘occupation’ as ‘business as usual,’ which prompted a violent reply from Adorno (1999). In Adorno’s (1999) mind, “the students’ demands of a public self-critique were pure Stalinism” (p. 90). Would it be possible that such a lack of theoretical unity, while undeniably constituting a major asset and strength, also ended up creating difficulties for constructing a ‘hegemonic-dominant’ critical theory of society? Might

158 Critical Curriculum Theory one be able to nonetheless develop a robust theoretical approach to society with such different and sometimes antagonistic perspectives? How deep such fragmentation within the critical terrain fertilized its incapacity to assume a hegemonic position? Also, what would be the nexus between such theoretical multitude and the challenges faced by the critical terrain to establish itself as hegemonic? How can one relate such multitude of avenues and its inability of being hegemonic in its battles with hegemonic tradition? Also, and this is no less important, how can one relate such multitude of avenues and its inability of being hegemonic in its battles within counter-hegemonic traditions? Was critical theory ever hegemonically counter-hegemonic? When? How? Where? Also, how come a so healthy disperse and multivocal approach challenging systems of dominance can claim a unique way of social transformation? Where is the strength of the critical hypothesis? What does such hypothesis entail? Socialism? Communism? And, if so, which and whose socialism? Socialisms? The very earlier Eurocentric one influenced by the “works of Grotious and Putendorf, who were accused of claiming that the legal order of society should be founded on the human need for sociality rather than divine revelation” (Honneth, 2017, p.  8)? The one attached to the French Revolution and its motto “freedom, equality and fraternity” (Honneth, 2017, p.  8)? The one championed by intellectuals, such as Owen in England and Fourier in France, who saw in socialism the way to radically change the working class condition, described as “degrading, shameful, immoral”? (Honneth, 2017, p. 9). Or even Saint Simon’s and Marx’s socialist ideal of a classed society built through the wreckage of capitalist crisis (Honneth, 2017)? The one shouted through the lungs of the the May ’68 rebellion? The most current ones implemented in post-colonial nations, such as Mozambique, Angola, Ghana? I guess the question is what is the epistemological color of the reason behind the reasoning of socialism? Depending on the answer, for example, Nkrumah’s communialism and other Africans’ very earlier ways of community, solidarity, and plurality cannot be produced as ‘non-existent’ (Santos, 2014). In examining the communist hypothesis, Badiou’s pen (2010) travels through the metamorphoses of failure, questioning “what really remains of the great ideological machinery of freedom, human rights, the West and its values?”(pp. 10–11). In his terms, “it all comes down to a simple negatve statement that is as bold as it is flat and as naked as the day it was born: socialisms, which were the communist Idea’s only concrete forms, failed completely in the twentieth century” (p. 11). However, he (2010) argues, while the failure “of the idea leaves us with no choices it is crucial to examine if the causes of such failure were on the form, or on the path it explored” (pp. 11–12), or, through its incapability to run away from the creed as a unique hypothesis, Eurocentric and odd as it might be, neugenic as well. With that said, clarification is needed between the communist hypothesis—and what and who failed—and if communism is a hypothesis. One thing is so painfully clear though. One is so far away from such socialist and communist ideals herculeanly championed by and fought by the Grotiouses and Putendorfs and

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movements of the world. One regresses so far away from the May ’68 and civil rights ideals, that shockingly begs the question: “does the suns of Marx and Proudhon should bend miserably before the suns of Tocqueville?” (Touraine, 1995, p. 32). The challenge is not to seize power, but to understand that there is a “need to change the way power occurs, and it is structured, recreated society, and invent a new political framework” (Touraine, 1995, p. 32). While I maintain that these are a set of very powerful questions—that merit more attention—I argue that the inabilities of critical approaches to assume a hegemonic position both within the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic chessboard are on a different angle and level, inabilities whose roots one can perfectly identify precisely right at the sunrise of das Institut’s intellectuals. That is its profound insensibility with epistemes above and beyond Modern Western Eurocetrism. The insensibility towards a de-colonial matrix was appaling, especially if one considers the commitment and solidarity of critical approaches with the anti-colonial struggles. This is a tough claim, as critical theory aimed to be theory of social justice. The lack of unity, which is not in my view the reason critical theories have been unable to gain hegemonic power, paradoxically created a unity paced by its oblivious perspective regarding non-modern, nonWestern, and non-Eurocentric reasoning. Indubitably, the different metamorphoses exhibited by the different phases and generations of critical theorists explain and reveal the battles within and beyond their own turf, a cantankerous evolving process of a complex struggle for a more just and equal society. Along with Nobre (2012; 2004), I argue that critical theory “must be able to understand how the emancipatory social struggles are configured. With the decline of socialism as a common horizon of emancipation in the second half of the twentieth century, this task required a critical account of the critical field with the thought of Marx, who inaugurated it” (p. 23). Critical theory emerged and imposed itself as “a theory of society against domination in all of its forms” (Held, 1980, p. 35); however, as I had the opportunity to examine before, such “domination is also propagated by the dominated” (Adorno, 2005, p. 183) and masochistically legitimized “thorough whole ages of history in the interests of those who were ruled” (Horkheimer, 1999, p.  70). This is an issue that frames critical pedagogy and the work and thought of most of the scholars within a specific stream of a radical critical curriculum river (Paraskeva, 2011; 2014; 2016)—a river populated by what I have defined as the generation of the utopia. Critical theory attempts to be ‘the’ praxis towards emancipation (Horkheimer, 1999). In challenging the dialectic of Enlightenment and its racialized epistemological matrix, critical theory breaks with the bonds and frontiers of the disciplines of knowledge and imposes itself and spreads itself in a territory that is inherently ‘indisciplinary’ or ‘adisciplinary’: The critical theory of society begins with the idea of the simple exchange of commodities and defines the idea with the help of relatively universal concepts. It then moves further using all knowledge available and taking

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suitable material from the research of others as well as from specialized research. (Horkheimer, 1999, p. 226) Critical theory, is thus ‘supradisciplinary’ and not ‘interdisciplinary’ (Kellner, 1989). That is, “it has refused to situate itself within an arbitrary or conventional academic division of labor. It traverses and undermines boundaries between competing disciplines, and stresses interconnections between philosophy, economics, and politics, and culture and society” (Kellner, 1989, p. 7). That is, critical theory distances itself from traditional theoretical approaches towards society by “its multidisciplinary perspectives and its attempts to develop a dialectic and materialistic social theory. A project that requires a collective supradisciplinary synthesis of philosophy, the sciences and politics” (Kellner, 1989, p. 7); a “supradisciplinary materialistic social theory as a response to the inadequacies within both classical Marxism and the dominant forms of bourgeois science and philosophy” (Kellner, 1989, p. 22); a materialistic supradisciplinary social theory as its ideological vein, coining its journey since its inception (Benhabib, 2012). However, a question that jumps before our eyes immediately is the way such ‘supradisciplinary’ stands. Before Western Eurocentric systems of domination that imposed their social, political, cultural, economic, and spiritual matrix at the expense of the blood, sweat, bodies, and tears of the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet, before a social matrix of domination and segregation based on slavery, genocide, and epistemicide, any theoretical platform that is self-titled as a promoter of social justice cannot find answers only in the epistemological terrain itself, which is precisely the incubator and manager of such system of domination. As Santos (1999) argues, “the identification of critical thinking with your society is always full of tensions” (p. 199). However, I argue that these tensions could never have been resolved by ignoring a vast set of epistemes beyond the Eurocentric matrix. In other words, the tensions that have been created began, at one point, to be inconsequential. Critical theory fails greatly as it creates a supradisciplinary theoretical approach that ignores and completely silences theoretical approaches beyond its Western Eurocentric platform. As Santos (2018) argues, “modern social sciences including critical theories, have never acknowledge[d] the existence of the abyssal line, a zone of nonbeing” (pp. 19–20). Curiously, the lack of unity around the very rich critical movement triggered a eugenic uni(formi)ty around the marginalizing ways of interpreting the real and producing knowledge beyond the modern Eurocentric Western epistemological platform. Hence critical theory is also about a unity within a segregated non-uniformity. Adorno’s (2011) confession that “we know nothing about Asia” further multiplies the complexity of the problem (p. 34). If we accept as correct the argument that this ignorance is not innocent, the critical pillars and model do not go well with this picture. I do not go that far, nor do I think it’s intellectually honest to go that far. Since “dialectics is a critical reflection upon a context” (Adorno, 2004, p. 141) and since the ‘context’ was contaminated by aspects that were severely

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produced as “non-existent” (Santos, 2014), the dialectical process became compromised, tainted, and egregiously missed that the context is just ‘cont(w)est.’ The lack of knowledge about Asia, for instance, should have triggered at least an attempt to learn from Asia, with Asia, and going to Asia, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) would put it. In fact, such Eurocentric ‘supradisciplinary’ totality is openly confessed by Jürgen Habermas. Santos (1995) captures the issue:. When Jürgen Habermas was asked “if his theory of communicative action, namely his critical theory of advanced capitalism could be of any use to the socialist forces of the Third World, and if, on the other hand such forces could, in turn, be on any use to democratic socialist struggles in advanced countries, Habermas replies: ‘I’m attempted to say ‘no’ in both cases’. I am aware of the fact that this is a Eurocentric limited view. I would rather pass the question. (p. 507) Modernity, as an unfinished project, as advocated by Habermas, was not unnoticed by Mignolo (2018) as well. It is actually an unfinished project as there is the Middle East to fully conquer and “to control the enormous natural resources of Russia and to contain ‘China’ from committing the heresy of developing on its own, all of this, palpable examples of the unfinished project of modernity in its rewesternizing stage” (Mignolo, 2018, p 107). As Nak-Chung (2015) highlights, “as the struggle for material equality becomes more urgent and central not only to the battle for democracy but to the very survival of human civilization, we need to envision a new way of organizing an egalitarian society” (p. 78). Such a society, Nak-Chung (2015) adds, “will have to be based on self-education, or rather the mutual education of people with unequal degrees of knowledge and reflective experience—yet not in the manner of philosopher-kings guiding the rest, and not even in the approved modern form of meritocracy, which merely provides for an element of personal mobility within a familiar fixed hierarchy” (p. 78). While East Asia “has not produced such a society on any large scale, any more than have other civilizations, its thinkers have entertained a conception of truth that is to be diferentiated from ‘the truth’ as propositional validity; which, in its combination of the true, the good and the beautiful may serve as the measure to determine varying degrees of wisdom, or enlightenment to dao—always provided elsewhere to carry out the double project in accordance with the given conditions of particular countries and localities” Nak-Chung (2015, p. 78). In neglecting the epistemological critique of modern critical supradisciplinary theory, “despite claiming to be a form of knowledge-emancipation, eventually became knowledge-regulation” (Santos, 1999, p. 205), since not only does it refuse to go beyond the Eurocentric epistemological platform—a fundamental reason of the social sagas that society confronts—but also it imposes a unique vision of social transformation, which forces one to question “which

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side the critical theorists are” (Santos, 1999, p.  200). It goes without saying that such question is quite divisive. While for some the question “has become legitimate and for others either irrelevant or even an unanswerable” (Santos, 1999, p. 200), the truth of the matter is that it is crucial to understand, not just which side ‘the critical’ stands and, in doing so, to “identify alternative positions on which to take sides” (Santos, 1999, p. 200), but also how deep it intends to go and to unpeel, rejecting vehemently celebratory positions. While the nexus of society and modern supradisciplinary critical theory was always framed by endless tensions (Santos, 1999), such tensions have nevertheless been inconsequential and didn’t pay a deserved attention to the indigenous and subaltern struggle towards social, cognitive, and intergenerational justice (Paraskeva, 2018; 2016; Santos, 2014; Innerarity, 2012). Critical theory has to decolonize. The entire dialectical archeology that frames modern supradisciplinary critical theory—quite powerful, yet so incomplete—needs to be decolonized. Decolonizing dialectics, as Ciccariello-Maher (2007) argues, implies “excavating a largely subrerranean current of thought, a counterdiscourse, that constitutes a radicalization of the dialectical tradition while also opening outward toward its decolonization” (p. 6). By persisting in its existence within a dialectical yarn woven by the very source of the social sagas that it intends to destroy, critical theory’s attempts to radically change society became inconsequential. Just as any attempt, Ciccariello-Maher (2007) adds, “to systematically grasp the conflicts and identities that structure our world requires that we rupture the binderies of European thought, we cannot grasp the parameters of decolonization as a profound and ongoing process without recourse to some modified understanding of that dynamic and combative motion that many give the name ‘dialectis’” (p. 6). To challenge the Eurocentric yoke of modern supradisciplinary critical theory requires a new philosophical carpentery that respects, not just the undeniable epistemological diversity of the world, but also the fact that precisely due to the legitimacy of such rich epistemological diversity and its multifarious forms of privilege, exploitation, segregation, inequality, genocide, racism, classism, genderism, casteism, it is impossible to even draft—let alone implement—a theoretical avenue that doesn’t respect epistemological diversity. The ‘lack of knowledge’ about realities beyond the West, is not innocent; that is “there is no knowledge in general, as there is no ignorance in general. What we ignore is always the ignorance of a certain form of knowledge, and vice versa, what we know is always knowledge in relation to a certain form of ignorance” (Santos, 1999, p. 205). In a way, as Eagleton (1991) would argue—relying on the framework of both Sloterdjik and Žižek respectively—critical theory and theorists were actually facing an “enlightened false consciousness not only knowing very well what they are doing, but they carry on doing it even so, but also they know that in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it” (p. 40). Such biased ‘supradisciplinary’ deeply taints the matrix that structures the riverbed of the radical critical curriculum river, as we will see in the next chapter, contaminating its own utopia. The issue of ‘supradisciplinarity’ must be raised as it opens the door for many other questions, to really help us to perceive,

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based on the path taken by critical intellectuals, what really happened with critical theory. I thus argue that some of the difficulties experienced by critical theory and theorists are also related not only with the paleolithic habitude of the sovereignty of the Western Eurocentric disciplinary knowledge. Western hegemonic scientific pastoral(s) were able to instigate and foster the cult of a paradigm anchored in “its strict and narrow divisions among disciplines, its positivist methodologies, that do not distinguish objectivity from neutrality, its bureaucratic and discriminatory organization of knowledge into departments, laboratories, and faculties that reduce the advance of knowledge to a matter of corporatist privilege” (Santos, 2005, p. xix). As I have stated at the beginning of the chapter, I have tried, in the best and briefest way possible, to bring to the table the structural arguments that lie at the basis of the emergence of a critical social theory as opposed to traditionalist dominant theoretical models. I have been able to reveal how the struggles for an interdisciplinary approach that could promote a more just and equal society have been developed and deepened over the three generations of intellectuals directly or indirectly associated with das Institut. To be more precise, while das Institut’s intellectuals did not renegade the importance of the Marxist platform, they knew fully well that they were facing a massive challenge, which is that the utopia to challenge any system of dominance towards social emancipation could not be based on more of the same Marxism. That process towards social emancipation unpacks the veins of the systems of dominance and also allows them to smash the bunker structure of Marxism, re-mapping it through a supra-disciplinary materialism, one that “rests upon the three bases of economic, psychological and cultural disciplines” (Honneth, 1991, p. 25). As I have argued previously, while we are facing one of greatest advances of das Institut intellectuals—the very idea of materialistic supradisciplinary theory of society opens up the hegemonic canon of doing theory—it is right at the core of such ‘supradisciplinarity’ that lies one of the key weaknesses of the critical armada. That is, in their attempt to debunk dominant traditional theoretical approaches as dated, inaccurate, and selective, das Institut intellectuals ended up moving towards another selective position, one that completely ignored other epistemological formations above and beyond Modern Western Eurocentrism, a pathological tsunami that affected the curriculum field. Again, the question that needs to be raised is ‘whose’ supradisciplinary materialism is one actually referring to? Such question is not a minor issue and further sharpens the theoretical problems of critical theory so well raised by Santos and others. Again, the question that remains to be asked is ‘whose superdisciplinary’ one is talking about? Somehow the future forces a painful encounter with the past, a past that has been filled with great achievements, but the fact is that such achievements— many of them—did not sufficiently persist to crush the power of capitalist modernity. Given this context, how does curriculum theory respond to this challenge of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and other decolonial intellectuals? What is the way forward? What rivers, streams, and adjacent rivers will we swim in? What is the future riverbed of the radical critical curriculum river?

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Where should the radical critical curricular river lead us? Should we abandon the river? Should a dam be built? Why? If so, who should build it? Maybe it was built already? That is why we are living a nightmare. How to duel with a past, which is also full of achievements? How to face the curriculum epistemicides? How to examine the role of curriculum theory and theorists in such epistemicide? How do we explain how we could be so inattentive to our ‘own’ functionalism, a functionalism that we paradoxically weave in our struggle against the dominant functionalist theories? What is our response as a field of study? What is the role of curriculum theory in an era in which truth is post-truth? How to address one of the current Modern Western Eurocentric ‘human-post humannon-human’ shrapnels, or as Grusin (2015) calls, ‘the non-human turn’? It is obvious that none of these questions allows an easy answer; but, it should make us think seriously about the importance of critical theory and pedagogy, particularly in terms of its contributions tied to social and cognitive justice. I argue though that modern supradisciplinary critical theory, the way it has been edified and developed—while allowing some crucial gains—has been counterproductive in the struggle for a just society; it cannot offer any future as it is missing completely its own present. The solution to break up a system of dominance cannot be found within the same matrix that creates and maintains such system. Nor it can be found only within matrixes that historically have proved to be incapable of destroying such systems. That is, an alternative matrix to the sagas of WesternEurocentric Modernity—poverty, segregation, exploitation, and genocide—cannot be found within Western Eurocentric Modernity frameworks (be it dominant or counter-dominant) since they are the very cause of such sagas; their very existence is only possible through such sagas. The existence and visibility of modernity is through the existence and visibility of such deplorable sagas. More to the point, if “another world is really possible (and we do believe that it is), it cannot be built with the conceptual tools inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment” (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018, p.  7). Echoing Lorde’s rationale, Walsh and Mignolo (2018) argue that such a world “cannot be built with the master’s tools” (p. 7), that is, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, they may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde, 2007, p.  112). Critical theory, Santos (1999, p.  210) sharply argues, needs to evolve towards a “social construction of rebellions and nonconformist subjectivities” quite sentient that, within the context of our millennium, it faces some tough challenges. First, there is a “discrepancy between experiences and expectations. The non-coincidence between experiences and expectations is the great historical novelty of the paradigm of modernity” (p. 210). In Santos’s (1999) exegesis, “critical theory was a privileged message of this discrepancy, and if anything distinguished it from conventional theory, it was precisely its predilection for amplifying that excess, and with it, the discrepancy between mediocre experiences and exalting expectations” (p. 210). However, with the advent of “neoliberal globalization and neo-savage capitalism such condition changed. For

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the majority, the discrepancy between experiences and expectations remains, but reversed: expectations are now negative and deficient in relation to experiences” (Santos, 1999, p. 210). That is, “today’s experiences, however mediocre, are feared to follow others in the future even more mediocre. In this context, the critical theory sees itself in the contingency of defending the experiences of today against the deficient expectations and with that its program of social transformation may end up in defending the status quo” (Santos, 1999, p. 210). The second major challenge resides within the “dichotomy consensus/resignation” (p. 211). To be more precise, “critical theory played a central role in denouncing the repressive character of ‘consensus’ and the ideological mystification on which it rested.” And, in doing so, “it aroused greater social conflict and opened the way for social and political alternatives beyond hegemonic consensus” (Santos, 1999, p.  211). However, what is new “is that the dominant classes have become disinterested in consensus, such is the confidence they have in that there is no alternative to the ideas and solutions they defend” (Santos, 1999, p.  211). Thus, the challenge begs the following question: “how can we proceed in a situation where consensus is no longer necessary and, therefore, its demystification ceased to be the spring of nonconformity? Is it possible to fight against resignation with the same theoretical, anarchistic and political weapons with which one fought against consensus? This challenge is enormous” (Santos, 1999, p. 212). Third is the contentious dichotomy wait/hope. Our current era, Santos (1999) argues, is paced by “individual and collective indeterminacy and risk responsible for the return of the idea of cyclical time, decadence, millenarian eschatology” (p. 212). It corners the individual and society towards “an attitude of waiting without hope. As risk is totally right and uncertain individuals and societies just have to prepare to wait without being prepared. It’s an attitude without hope because what comes is not good and has no alternative” (Santos, 1999, pp. 212–213). Hence, does critical theory—the way we know it—have to die, in order to start a new critical theoretical path? Do we need a ‘theorexit’? Recapturing Saramago’s (2009) theoretical yarn raised before, I argue that the very counterdominant orthodoxy logic of doing critical theory ‘needs to die.’ As he (2009) adamantly claims, ‘there is no future without death.’ Drawing on the sage Hegelian Alexandre Kojève’s readings of the 1968 events, Petit (2002) in his foreword of Kristeva’s Revolt She Said, echoes the same leitmotiv—“nobody died, so nothing happened” (p. 7). Nobody died, Petit (2002) adds, as “the spoilt children of the bourgeoisie just aimed at the wrong target” (p. 7). In a way, critical theories need to metamorphosically face a Tupac Amaru II effect. I want to be very clear here. I am not claiming that critical approaches need to die. I am stating that the logic—Eurocentrically saturated—through which critical theory opearates needs to die; the way the ‘critical critique’ has been theorized must die so that another critical theoretical river course starts. Probably the future of critical theory rests not on the death of criticism and theory, but on the death of what has been the critical theory, on how critical theory has

166 Critical Curriculum Theory been made fully—Westernized and Eurocentricized—and on the critique of critical theory. Honneth (2009) again presses the right button, arguing for the need for “a new language that can make clear in the present terms what critical theory intended in the past” (p. 21). To rely on Eagleton’s (2015) sharply viperine statement, it looks as if critical theory reflects “the malnutrition of the socialist imagination, an alarming intellectual bulimia” (p. 93). Resistance to such state pushes the critical path to “an eternal return of the same” (Han, 2017, p. 4). It seems that the Modern Western Eurocentric logic which constitutes the riverbed of critical theories “[has] altogether lost the sense of the right time, a right time that gives away to non-time” (Han, 2017, p.  2). It looms as if such lack of sense, became “immunological” (Han, 2015, p.  2). And, fortunately, Han (2017) adds, the “right time or the right moment only arises out of the temporal tension within a time that has a direction. The decay of time disperses dying into perishing” (p. 3). Dangerously—yet not irreversibly—“the decay of time de-temporalizes death” (Han, 2017, p.  3). And, “whoever cannot—or refuses to—die at the right time must perish in non-time” (Han, 2017, p. 2). We need indeed a theorexit from such theoretical toxic logic, towards a deterritorialized space, a decolonized zone. We need a theoretical fasting of the kind of theory we have been doing. Thus, in moving towards a decolonial path, critical theory promotes the end of its inner eugenic logic. To carry on within a theoretical framework in which ‘the next day no one dies’ (Saramago, 2009) is to mortgage the future. This death, Gil (2008) would put it, is also “the death of the ‘I/Self ’ and its metamorphoses. It is the death of the critical I/Self as revealed to this day” (pp.  93–94). In Gil’s (2008) terms, when “death turns against death produces thy two-sided Event; on the one hand the dissolution of the I/Self, on the other the emergence of an I/Self still without qualities. Thus, death ensures the beginning of a dynamic of the alphabet of thought, the beginning of selective repetition, the emergence of the absolutely new” (p. 93). Needless to say, I am not advancing here the end of critical theory. I am arguing for the end of the logic in which critical theory has been operating, though. After all, “living is a permanent dying” (Gil, 2008, p. 96). I want “the death of dying” (Gil, 2008, p.  96) of the way critical theory is fading daily. I argue that critical theory, the way it persists in existing, is not a just interlocutor, as Dabashi, (2015) would put it. Gil (2008, p. 96) adds: If the death of dying is part of what is the thought of life, then it is not our empirical death that matters, but impersonal death, the ever-future death, which in us always exists as the source of thought and therefore of life. There is always ‘a dying’ deeper than ‘I die.’ As the Event of all Events, death is thus “the unthinkable from which all thought is born and made possible” (Gil, 2008, p. 96). Thus the future—an anti-decolonial one—a non-abyssal future (Paraskeva, 2016; 2014)—is the matrix of what Santos (1999) calls postmodern critical theory, one that assumes that “the whole critical knowledge must begin with the critique of knowledge, hence postmodern critical theory is built on

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a marginalized and discredited epistemological tradition of modernity, the knowledge-emancipation. In such form of knowledge, ignorance and colonialism and is the conception of the other as an object, and consequently the non-recognition of the other as subject” (Santos, 1999, p. 205). Modern supradisciplinary critical theory, by ignoring an endless multiplicity of epistemological platforms beyond Modern Western Eurocentric epistemologies, eugenically contributes to the denial of the other as human, thus recognizing it as an ‘it’, a sub-human. To know, is to recognize and is a fundamental principle of solidarity (Santos, 1999). In other spaces (Paraskeva, 2016; 2014; 2011), I have suggested possible paths to our theoretical field. Respecting both our past and the crucial contributions of intellectuals like Dwayne Huebner, Maxine Greene, Henry Giroux, Michael Apple, William Pinar, Madeleine Grumet, Janet Miller, and so many others, I contend there is the need for a deterritorialization tout court and to assume an itinerant theoretical curriculum perspective—an imperative for the project of decolonization. The truth is that many oppressed groups that detour and depart from critical theory are due to the fact that it does not speak to these traditions in the way it should or should be expected to. At the root of this gap are the most violent attacks—justifiably one would argue—on critical theory, which come from indigenous groups and non-Western southern and decolonial theories. Although the critical model is mired in a chilling functionalist logic and to some extent eugenic, the fact is that one cannot ignore its great achievements in the struggle for a more just and equal society and education. Also, one cannot marginalize the important fact that critical theory (its theorists, pedagogues, and educators) has been one of the greatest producers and promoters of the path towards one of the greatest (im)possible utopias, designed by and within reach of the human being—the certainty of the possibility of another world more equitable with everyone. Critical theory was one of the great catalytic and aggregating fields of a utopia that stubbornly survives, especially at the dawn of a viral fascism. However, in failing to realize that the utopia of a more just and equal world was only possible through a multiple plethora of rivers—given the multiple metamorphoses of oppression—in failing to realize that had little (or, as some clain, nothing) to say to an overwhelming majority of oppressed movements and groups, and by self-proclaiming itself as the holder of a ‘possible single path and solution’ for a better world, the critical approach was naturally losing ground, not only within a global dissidence complex matrix, but especially within the Modern Western Eurocentric platform. Once one of the greatest catalysts and aggregators of a strong dissent in relation to any system of domination, critical theory by ignoring the impossibility of a single model of social transformation—due to its isufficiency to recognize the legitimacy of epistemological diversity beyond Modern Western Eurocentrism—mortgaged its own social capital. And because the utopia remains today more desired and important than ever—and has never been as endangered as it is today—and because critical theory alone does not provide a fair and equal river (itself is an integral part within the epistemicide) for the attainment of this utopia, it is vital to re-think its own logic and decolonize it.

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The utopia of a world we all wish to see (Amin, 2008) or of a school we wish to have towards a humanity we wish to see (Paraskeva, 2018) has had a huge impact in our educational and curriculum fields. It was championed by leading scholars—directly, indirectly, deeply, moderately—influenced by the logic of modern critical approaches. I call such group of scholars the ‘generation of the utopia.’ In what follows, I will examine the impasses and in most cases the setbacks that we have seen in our field after the great achievements of progressive and critical groups, during the heyday of neo-Gramscianism, championed by such ‘generation of the utopia,’ which at the dawn of 1970s and 1980s, who led successful struggles for a more relevant and just curriculum. I will examine how such generation—to whom we all owe so much—despite its immense notable accomplishments, ended up falling into the dangerous functionalism that they were fighting against. In doing so, I will also claim how critical theory and pedagogies were involved and bogged down in a gullet framed by an antifunctionalist functionalism, contaminated with a severe Occidentosis and thrown into a kind of involution metamorphoses, which currently permeate the field.

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Fraser, N. (1997) Justice Interrupts: Critical Reflections on the Post-Socialist Condition. New York: Routledge. Fraser, N. and Honneth, A. (2003) Redistribution or Recognition? A Political–Philosophical Exchange. New York: Verso. Freire, P. (1985) The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. Westport: Bergin and Garvey. Fromm, E. (1941) Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt. Fromm, E. (1973) The Anatomy of Human Destruction. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fromm, E. (1982) The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology “subtitled Notes on Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism.” In A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (Eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, pp. 477–496. Geissler, H. (2018) Seasonal Associate. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Gil, J. (2008) O Imperceptivel Devir da Imanencia. Lisboa: Relogio D’Agua. Gil, J. (2009) Em Busca da Idenitidade. O Desnorte. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água. Gil, J. (2018) Caos e Ritmo. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água. Ginsberg, B. (2011) The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giroux, H. (1981) Ideology, Culture & the Process of Schooling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Giroux, H. (2011) On Critical Pedagogy. New York: Continuum. Gramsci, A. (1999) Antonio Gramsci: Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited by Q. Hoare and G. Smith. New York: International Publishers. Greene, M. (1974) Cognition, Consciousness and Curriculum. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Heightened Consciousness, Cultural Revolution, and Curriculum Theory. Berkeley: McCutchan, pp. 69–84. Grosfoguel, R. (2010) Epistemic Islamophobia. Colonial Social Sciences. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 8(2), pp. 29–39. Grosfoguel, R. (2011) Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality. Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1), pp. 1–38. Grusin, R. (2015) The Non-Human Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Guattari, F. (2001) Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium. In C. Kraus and S. Lotringer (Eds.), Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 215–220. Habermas, J. (1971a) The Theory of Communicative Action (Vol. 2). Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1971b) Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1976) A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism. In T. Adorno et al. (Eds.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. London: Heinemann, pp. 198–225. Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action (Vol. 1). Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas. J. (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action (Vol. II): Lifeworld and System. Boston: Beacon. Hall, S. (1985) Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debate. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 2(2), pp. 91–114. Han, B.-C. (2015) The Burnout Society. Stanford: Stanford Universiy Press. Han, B.-C. (2017) The Scent of Time. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harris, W. (1889) The Intellectual Value of Tool Work. Journal of Proceedings and Addresses (National Education Association), pp. 167–175. Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2007) Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610, pp.  22–44, NAFTA and Beyond: Alternative Perspectives in the Study of Global Trade and Development.

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5

The Generation of the Utopia ‘Don’t Shoot Them!’

Social life becomes a swarm and in a swarm it is not impossible to say ‘no.’ It’s irrelevant. (Berardi, 2012, p. 15)

As I was able to examine in other contexts (Paraskeva, 2018; 2017; 2016a; 2016b; 2014), during the 1970s and 1980s, the curriculum field was swamped by a plurality of battles led by scholars exhibiting a myriad of distinct critical approaches, although fundamentally based on a Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix (some of them severely Marxists), with tremendous repercussions within and beyond the ‘Global North,’ especially in Europe and Latin America.1 Needless to say, such battles needed to be situated in the context of a rich and powerful counter-hegemonic progressive historic tradition in the field that since the end of the nineteenth century believed that the ideal of another just world relied unequivocally in a radically different educational and curriculum framework. That struggle of this generation follows the remarkable historical legacy of struggles for a just curriculum, since Parker, Addams, Dewey, Bode, Rugg, Counts, DuBois, through the Civil Rights Movement, the student revolts, the Romantic critics, the Black Power movement, anti–Vietnam War and anti-nuclear war as well as anti-colonial wars campaigns, women’s rights, among others (Kliebard, 1995; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman, 1995; Schubert and Lopez Schubert, 1980; Watkins, 1993; Paraskeva, 2007a; 2011a; 2011b). One witnessed an explosive cocktail of national-world events that profoundly influenced new cultural and social perspectives, pushing for radical transformations. Gradually, universities “became the cockpit of culture as a political struggle” (Eagleton, 2003, p.  25), and society was faced with an educational architecture that was probably “at odds with the tasteless, clueless philistines who run the world and whose lexicon stretches only words like oil, golf, power and cheeseburger” (pp. 25–26). While social dissatisfaction was at its highest level, “there was a visionary hope” (Eagleton, 2003, p. 24), though, one that curriculum scholars are so undeniably responsible to champion in our field. Some of the intellectuals of these generations of the utopia were also notoriously influenced by a very disperse multitude of epistemological avenues and the works of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Sigmund Freud, Raymond Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Jacques Lacan, Paulo Freire, among

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others, and made the neo-post-Marxist approach in education more accurate by paying close attention to issues, such as ideology, culture, power, hegemony, identity, and discourse; others were trying to go beyond the intricate complex ‘schools-society-self ’; and others were reacting against such platforms, which they saw as trapped within dangerous ideological and cultural compromises and mortgaged to eugenic economic interests and a (n)eugenic view of the scientificity of science and its questionable objectivity. We witnessed what I have called the heyday of neo-Gramscianism (Paraskeva, 2011a; 2014; 2016a), in which the works of Freire, Giroux, Simon, Aronowitz, Apple, Pinar, and others gained prominence. Forming an armada equipped with this new semantic artillery, especially neo-Gramscian scholars pushed the critical in the curriculum field in a different direction, pioneering approaches pillared in dynamics such as hegemony, ideology, reproduction, resistance, transformative pedagogy, hidden curriculum, conflict versus consensus, culture, identity, power, and discourse. At a later stage, as some critical theorists were blasting the field with this new politically coded vocabulary, race, gender, and sexuality became entangled with class and identity. Arguing that such categories and dynamics have relative autonomy, neo-Gramscianism coded the field politically. In doing so, they fatally clashed irremediably with the reductive and atrophied Marxist dogma of the base/superstructure model, a perspective that Antonio Gramsci (1971) saw “theoretically as primitive infantilism” (p.  43). Curriculum, they claimed, should be framed within the dynamics of ideological production, but they also clashed with other progressive segments of the field not ready to compromise on what was perceived as the fundamentalism of the political, let alone the dominant positivist traditional positions. To promote a better understanding of the work of this divergent group of critical scholars, (i.e. neo-Gramscianism), I (2011a; 2014; 2016) conceptualized a map for charting their theoretical contributions—what I referred to as the critical curriculum river. This metaphor, drawn from Vincent Harding’s novel There Is a River, is an ideological card used to reveal the various critical tributaries that have taken critical curriculum theorists in many different directions. Although this non-monolithic group of scholars has never occupied a dominant position in the field, it is undeniable how much they have contributed to the laudable utopia for a more just curriculum. Like any river, this one “doesn’t separate anyone, quite the opposite it weaves the destinies of the living” (Couto, 2008, p. 89). The struggles fought by such generation needed to be understood, not only within a rich context of great social tumult, but also within the emergence of powerful social movements and organizations that challenge both the dominant and counter-dominant status quo (Paraskeva, 2014; 2011a). As Dowd (2017) argues, “the 1960’s were the critical years for the emergence of radical organizations and caucuses in all the professions in the academic crannies of the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences, as well as in the practicing professions of architecture, engineering, law, and medicine” (p. 4). Also associated with all these organizations are radical spaces, such as the Socialist Review (1950), Science & Society (1936), the weekly (National) Guardian (1948), and Monthly Review (1949), which “served the diverse and vital functions of keeping left ideas

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alive and spirits warm through several decades in which that was a difficult and often risky job” (p. 4). More to the point, Dowd (2017 p.  4) claims, “altogether these and other publications not cited were vital in making the radical efflorescence of the 1960s possible.” Moreover it is also crucial to note that “as the list of radical organizations and their publications and readers lengthened during the 1960s and 1970s, feeding and being fed by them was an ever-growing number of radical books, published by conventional and by a few radical publishing houses (Dowd, 2017, p.  4). Undeniaby, Dowd (2017, p.  4) adds “by the 1970s radical ideas, whether chic or not, had found a viable market.” In a very Horkheimerian way, for such a group of scholars, education and curriculum were crucial components within the historical struggles for a just society, and “it was in such historical struggles that ideas and theories were tested” (Held, 1980, p.  192). Critical curriculum theory had no existence out of history. We are facing a generation of scholars who fought vigorously for a just education and curriculum, who never failed to see the conquest of social justice, equality, and freedom on the horizon as a concrete possibility. I am talking about a group of intellectuals who dared to dream, who challenged institutionalized (n)eugenic powers in which many of them never enjoyed areas of academic comfort and in some cases faced fascist dismissals. We are before a generation that in so many ways was instrumental in belligerent battles for the civil rights that we enjoy today—inclusively within the academia—a fact that so many of us ignore or marginalize. I am talking about a group of thinkers that notably refused to accept that “the future of a generation was to be the preceeding one” (The Invisible Committee, 2009, p. 18)—a group of intellectuals and social activists that dared to open their chests to the bullets for a ‘world we all wish to see’ (Amin, 2008), who, in order to have justice for the worlds of the world, the curriculum, the way it has been produced, needed to face a radical overhaul. Such a dispersed cluster of intellectuals, as Ondjaki (1992) would say, “gave themselves the task of inventing a struggle against an education that already existed and one that had to come into existence” (p.  9); a group of scholars within and beyond our own field that manifested social justice and equality as the horizon and worked against all odds towards such horizon. I am talking about a generation of intellectuals who were “born in a time when time does not happen” (Couto, 2008, p. 23), who knew fully well that what “really matter[ed] was the journey” (Couto, 2008, p.  32), and that they needed “to believe that there was a noble cause, a reason why it was worth living” (Couto, 2008, p. 95). I call this handful group of fighters, following Pepetela’s (1992) political novel, The Generation of the Utopia. In Pepetela’s (1992) exegesis the generation of the utopia unpacks the role of Angolan intellectuals and its intricate nexus with other African intellectuals as well as Portuguese anti-fascist individuals and groups and the mythical Communist Party in the struggle against five hundred years of bloody Portuguese colonialism towards freedom and justice. It is an exegesis that examines the accomplishments, frustrations, and defeats of a generation who pursued the utopia for the end of colonialism and the

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edification of an independent nation and a just world forged by a new ‘human being’; a generation that fought tenaciously towards such utopia and got lost almost three decades later in a painful dystopia of a totalitarian regime with all its consequences. This group of African intellectuals were based at the Casa dos Estudantes do Império in Lisbon, “right at the core of the Empire” (Pepetela, 1992, p. 21). This generation, Pepetela (1992) argues, “soon understood, right at the heart of the Empire, that the batuques (drums) that they heard in childhood pointed to another journey that was not the journey imposed by the Portuguese fado” (p. 22). Having not just Paris “as the Babel were all the rebellious of all quarters and the humiliated of all generations converged” (Pepetela, 1992, p. 100), this generation of the utopia dwells acutely in natural dialectics between nationalism and internationalism, Marxism and Communism, indigenous and Eurocentric epistemes, a utopia that forced painful purges within class, race, gender, and caste dynamics. It is possible to establish a clear parallel between the generation of utopia treated in Pepetela’s political novel and the generation of utopia to which I refer as an integral part of a radical curriculum river. Both generations tenaciously and obsessively chased the utopia of just education and a just world. They both “fundamentaly committed with human dignity thus kmowing fully well that they were cutting radically against historical grain” (West, 1999, p.  554). First, for both generations, the educational field was no stranger. The Casa dos Estudantes do Império was a place where intellectuals from the socalled Portuguese former colonies had to stay when they were brought to the capital of the Empire to pursue their higher education. Like the generation of our field, they have fought firsthand, not just the indoctrinating character of the colonial empire through education and its political nature, but the unquestionable fact that there was no Empire without ‘such repressive educational’ apparatuses. Second, they both challenge dominant power and struggle towards the utopia of a just world at the very epicenter of the Empire. In this regard, Che Guevara would envy them as both generations ‘were lucky and fought the most important fight of all—you live in the belly of the beast’, as he would have put it. Third, and echoing the revolt of generations and generations of the oppressed, they both were able to trigger and solidly spread the possibility of the impossible within a vast generation, framing the utopia as a possibility within a generation—a utopian generation. There is a slight difference between ‘utopian generation’ and ‘generation of the utopia.’ The generation of the utopia reflected the intellectuals and educators of the utopia that embodied and embraced the dream of a just world and how to accomplish such dream through education and curriculum. They championed and unpacked the role of the educational apparatuses in edifying a ‘just world we all wish to see,’ and, in so doing—together with the conditions created by the sub-humanity and the non-humanity of the oppressed—collectively tried to frame the utopia as hope and possibility, thus helping and mentoring huge segments of a ‘utopian generation’ as well. They were/are the pedagogues of the utopia, and they build on the utopia that a massive generation of the oppressed

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refused to give up. I am talking about a generation, as Pessoa (2002) would say, that “found a world devoid of support for those with brains and heart” (p. 163). In a sense they were, to rely on Couto’s (2008) exegesis, the Naparamas, “avenger of my people’s sorrows, fighters against those who make war, warriors of justice” (p. 27). It is crucial to clarify that the generation of the utopia of our field is not just confined to what I call neo-Gramscians. The generation of the utopia incorporates a vast multifarious contribution of what I have called radical critical curriculum river, a river in which the neo-Gramscianism are just one of the streams, although a crucial one. Fourth, in pursuing such utopia—and thus challenging repressive systems— they ended up exposing more clearly the sub-humanity of such repressive systems. By re-escalating the struggle against the Empire through its ‘ideological and repressive apparatuses,’ both generations of the utopia ended up unpacking how systems of dominance and how education and curriculum were at the very root of (n)eugenicism. I consider this generation as the ‘generation of the utopia’ as they exemplified the possibility of another world through education, and a more just and relevant curriculum, as the way to make this dream become closer to realizing. Having social justice as the magnet in the horizon, the ‘generation of the utopia’ walked towards it and in so doing helped to clear the path and pave new streams for the struggles for a more just and equal society, placing education and the curriculum as the epicenter of such collective journey. Fifth, needless to say, both generations of the utopia for a just world faced accomplishments and frustrations and their struggles overtly exhibit a painful historical process from a glorious march towards utopia to a collapse into dystopia with its consequent frustrations. In our field, as I will examine later on, we went from utopia to what I have called an involution momentum (Paraskeva, 2018). Despite that, it is crucial to understand how much we owe to these generations. As Pessoa (2002) would argue, “some have a big dream in their lives and they miss this dream. Others do not have any dreams in their lives and they lack that too” (p. 141). The generation of the utopia refuses to miss its dream. Our debt will be undeniably forever open. Last but not least, decades have passed and they both are profoundly scattered, and many of them struggle against the unjust frustrations created by a struggle that has led to so many victories but not to an irreversible achievement. They look in pain for moments of unbelievable regression and, in many cases, the loss of so many gains and rights gained after so many battles. Many—in many cases unjustly ignored and disrespected—insultingly were labeled as passé and part of a past that must be forgotten. Today in Angola (the same could be said about Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, and East Timor), the discourse and practice against capital and towards an equal society does not have any space. Some of these naparamas are now advocates of a capitalism ‘but’ with a human face. They fought against what they now stand for. I argue that both generations in their spirited struggle against oppression and social injustice, despite the numerous battles won, did not pay careful attention to specific issues, such as the crucial

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differences between capitalism and capital (Mészáros, 1996) and colonialism and coloniality (Quijano, 1992). Looking closely to the generation of the uto­ pia within the curriculum field, with some ease, it comes to one’s mind what intellectuals, such as Huebner and others, have predicted for the field. In a metaphoric sense, while the emergence of these generation meant the zenith of the political maturity translated into decades of great successes, it is undeni­ able that “the end is near, so let us acknowledge its demise, gather at the wake, celebrate joyously what our forebearers made possible—and then disperse to do our work, because we are no longer members of one household” (Hueb­ ner, 1976, pp.  154–155). While a just utopia remains crucial, somehow the generation has been struggling—arguably like never before—to come to grips with such utopia and to inaugurate a thoroughly curriculum pluriversal episte­ mological renascence, to complexify Schwab’s (1978) approach. Persisting “in forgetting what existence is it will remain moribund until it remembers” (Pinar, 1975, p. 396). Decades have passed and undeniably one should be grateful to both gen­ erations for the erosion created within the capitalist matrix and the help in the interruption of colonialism. It will be up to us now not to give up the new contours of the utopia. That is the possibility of winning the battle against capital—the way it is iniquitously constructed—and the irradicalization of coloniality. To these generations we owe such a task, at least. I will return to this theme later on. Although the struggle for a just and democratic society has always been a utopia pursued by previous generations, the truth is that this generation of the utopia that runs through the second half of the twentieth century has char­ acteristics that distinguish it from its predecessors. A true and comprehensive people’s history of the curriculum field (which is yet to be written) reveals that in the first place this generation was/is directly or indirectly (in)formed and influenced (or at least not insensitive to) bythe contributions produced by criti­ cal theories and pedagogies; secondly, this generation flooded the field with a multitude of new concepts and vocabulary, a new semantic thus inaugurat­ ing a new way of debating the curriculum; thirdly, they definitively coined the field politically, as a field of (c)overt political battles; fourthly, the field has never been converted with such a diverse, dispersed, and multifaceted group that working in different Western epistemological arenas would break new ave­ nues of thought and curriculum; lastly, this generation successfully framed the struggle for social justice and curriculum relevance within the complex social racial struggles led by students, social and political activists, the Civil Rights Movement, the Romantic critics, the Highlander Folk School, the Black Power movement, anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear war campaigns, among other groups. They drove the battle to a more sophisticated arena and pushed the debate into a total new level. Such generation of utopia reflects an era in which “the conflict broke out on the streets over the uses of knowledge” (Eagleton, 2003, p. 25), sparking bellig­ erent battles between those who “wanted to turn knowledge into military and

180 The Generation of the Utopia technological hardware or into techniques of administrative control, and those who saw in it a chance for political emancipation” (Eagleton, 2003, p. 25). The impetus for social emancipation propelled the very “idea of cultural revolution that migrated not just from the so-called third world to the well-heeled West” (Eagleton, 2003, p.  25), but also from other Parthenons of the Western modern hegemonic power in a “heady mélange of Fanon, Marcuse, Reich, Beauvoir, Gramsci and Godard” (Eagleton, 2003, p. 25). The unsustainability of Modern Western Eurocentric oppression, segregation, and exploitation was the organic compost feeding a collective belief about the possibility of impossibility yet possibility. The utopia of a world one wished to see (Amin, 2008) was naturally sustained on the streets in a web of major resistance against colonialism and imperialism battles from Southern Africa and Northern Africa, the Middle East, Asia, South and Central America, East and West Europe to the United States. To the question, “where did all the sixties radicals go?” (Buhle, 1991 as cited in Gottesman, 2016, p. 1), the just answer should be “neither to religious cults nor yuppiedom, but to the classroom.” Needless to say that in these battles, “humanities lost their innocence” (Eagleton, 2003, p. 26)—with predictable future consequences queued to happen. While “the students revolt were not able to prevent higher education to become locked even deeper into structures of military and industrial exploitation, and working class militancy ended up being onslaught” (Eagleton, 2003, pp. 26–29), it is undeniable that these mélanges of social cultural events flipped the table, reminding even those on the left that battles between production and consumerism required a more sophisticated left equation. The generation of utopia not only gave sequencing to the struggles held by predecessor generations for a just and democratic curriculum, but they were also able to meet the complex battles for a more equal society carried out by intellectuals, groups, and social movements such as Civil Rights movement, students revolts, and the Romantic critics, thus helping galvanize and materialize social justice and curriculum relevance as the utopia within and beyond a generation of educators. In this context, both the generation of utopia and the utopian generation emerged as mutually inclusive social phenomenon and, in such inclusiveness, relied for decades on the power of ‘utopia.’ The generation of utopia was able to wisely address the echoes of revolt within and beyond our field for a just and relevant education and curriculum, and planted, scrubbed, watered, and stimulated a utopia in a whole generation. That is, such generation did not just draw a utopian picture in the lost horizon; they actually dared to draw multiple epistemological paths—although fundamentally within a Western Eurocentric matrix—that would lead to that horizon. The utopia was wrapped as real. The impossible was—so—real. The infinite was bravely conquerable. The generation of utopia was responsible for helping to frame and stimulate a fantastic and more than just utopia in a given utopian generation, a generation that, while quite sentient that “the only reality is the eternal present, the undying now” (Pessoa, 2006, p. 47), refused and challenged the ‘chaos and its rhythm’ (Gil, 2018) of such a present and foresaw another “infinite as then

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the possible” (Pessoa, 2006, p. 58). That is, the “infinite then, in realizing itself, realizes itself as itself by itself, in becoming other than itself it does but return to itself ” (Pessoa, 2006, p. 58). However, like any political battle, the struggles waged by the ‘generation of the utopia’ had advances, retreats, contradictions, victories, and defeats that would eventually lead to the weakening and crisis of the utopian generation. The turning back between the generation of utopia and the utopia generation would prove fatal to critical theories and pedagogies. Despite enormous and evident successes, it was a tough road for the advocates of critical theories and pedagogies. Its zenith did not last long. Such prominent collective leadership would face severe criticism, not only from the dominant tradition but also from the very core of the progressive tradition itself. I will focus my point on the devastating challenges from within its own ranks. Along with Jorge (2018) I would argue that we are before a group of memorable figures, that cannot be forgotten.

The Heyday of Neo-Gramscianism The Marxist base/superstructure model must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism. (Gramsci, 1971)

Forming an armada equipped with this new semantic artillery, these “neoGramscian” scholars, especially Wexler, Apple, and Giroux, pushed the critical curriculum field in a radically different direction. This “neo-Gramscian” stance had several main elements. The first was a basic understanding of individual relations as something organic rather than mechanical. Second was a view of culture as the foundation of new modes of labor, production, and distribution. Hence the belief that the working class should have agency in both the economic and political fields, and that specific cultural elements will lead to the construction of a working-class civilization. Therefore, the aim of the working class is not only to achieve political and economic power, but also—and this is important—to gain intellectual power, since the ways are grounded in a complex mosaic of economic, political, and cultural issues. The third element was the need to understand concepts, such as hegemony and commonsense, and how they operate in society. Hegemony was perceived as a balance between coercion and consent, and it implied an intricate and complex set of compromises that played a key position within the framework of the state. The final and fourth element was the impossibility of disconnecting Homo faber (working man) from Homo sapiens (wise man). This is one of the main concerns expressed by scholars both within and beyond the socalled critical progressive curriculum river. It actually fueled an unfortunately irreparable fracture within the field, despite Pinar’s (1979) several attempts to invite “disenchanted Marxists to participate in the process of definition of the reconceptualization”—attempts that probably deserved a different reaction

182 The Generation of the Utopia from critical scholars. We have examined this issue in a previous volume (Paraskeva, 2011a). By simultaneously expanding and complexifying the view of how hegemony operates, neo-Gramscianism promoted not only a vision that the cultural, political, religious, and economic beliefs of each individual are a point of both departure and arrival for a specific hegemonic articulation, but they are also a good way to seek a new commonsense (see Eagleton, 1994, p.  199). Furthermore, this political perspective clashed irremediably with the reductive and atrophied Marxist dogma of the base/superstructure model; something that Gramsci (1971) saw “theoretically as primitive infantilism” (p. 43). For Gramsci(ans) and neo-Gramscianism, education was a crucial path, not to help the oppressed classes gain more cultural tools but only, and this is important, to build a more powerful political and social consciousness. As I stated elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2004), one shouldn’t be naïve in thinking that Apple’s critical hermeneutics—which can be found in works such as Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum (the towering piece that I coined “Apple’s Trilogy”; see Paraskeva, 2004) and Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling—emphasizes a concept, such as hegemony, for no particular reason. In examining “On Analyzing Hegemony,” a chapter from Ideology and Curriculum, one not only sees that Apple takes a huge step beyond issues raised in McLure and Fisher’s (1969) research, but also gains a clearer understanding in which he presents a new key to secular social and educational problems. In doing so, Apple introduces to researchers and scholars new lenses as well as windows of opportunity to examine societal issues. This connection of hegemony with the secular reality was also explored in Giroux’s (1981a) initial material, in which he claimed that “hegemony is rooted in both the meanings and symbols that legitimate dominant interests as well as in the practices that structure daily experience” (p. 94). In addition, he claims that one can perfectly perceive how hegemony functions in the school system by paying attention to: (1) the selection of culture that is deemed as socially legitimate; (2) the categories that are used to classify certain cultural content and forms as superior and inferior; (3) the selection and legitimation of school and classroom relationships; and (4) the distribution of and access to different types of culture and knowledge. (Giroux, 1981a, p. 94) Thus, it is crucial to understand that “as the dominant ideology, hegemony functions to define the meaning and limits of common-sense as well as the forms and content of discourse in society” (Giroux, 1981a, p. 94). Secular dominant ideologies quite structural within the dynamics of ideological production of a capitalist system created a commonsensical commonsense assemblage that somehow poverty, inequality, class, race, ethnicity, and gender segregation is immutable and inherent and not a consequence of a eugenic system of wealth distribution and unequal power (Darder, 2012) utterly connected with the modes and conditions of production in which schools and curriculum

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play a major role. In her radical take on culture, pedagogy, and power, Darder (2011) underlines the importance of hegemony as a praxis within the multifarious project of critical theory and pedagogy. The praxis of hegemony is crucial in order to demystify the asymmetrical power relations and social arrangements that sustain the dominant culture. Hegemony points to the powerful connection that exists between politics, culture, ideology, and pedagogy. As such, teachers are challenged to recognize their responsibility to critique and attempt to transform those classroom conditions tied to hegemonic practices that perpetuate the oppression of subordinate groups. (Darder, 2011, p. 208) In a clear Gramscian way, Darder (2012) strips the political and economic— although education and curriculum are not innocent—webs camouflaged within a so-convenient culturally muddied terrain to show “with the rise of modern science and technology social control has been exercised less through the use of physical deterrents and increasingly through the distribution of an elaborate system which control[s] norms and imperatives” (p. 32). Hegemony plays a major role in McLaren’s (1986) Schooling as a Ritual Performance as well. In trying to understand schooling from the perspectives of culture and performance, McLaren relies on the concept of hegemony and how particular rituals “reinforce or reproduce the political and economic dominance of one social class over another” (p. 86), and, in so doing, he attempts to examine “who benefits most from the [hegemonic] ritual structures and who is marginalized” (p.  83). As Wright (1994) would also claim, the arguments of Apple, Giroux, Aronowitz, Wexler, McLaren, and many others were based on the urgent need to completely change the “game board”—that is the curriculum platform—to dramatically transform the very idea of schooling and curriculum and to initiate a new platform for the field of curriculum theory that would have the potential for making schools more relevant in this selfproclaimed democratic society. To accomplish this, one needs to look at the role of ideology within schools and society. Watkins (2001; 2010) states sharply that ideology plays a key role in the nexus of the education and industrial order, because it is “the currency of those dominating the culture, [is] imparted subtly and made to appear as though its partisan views are part of the ‘natural order.’ The dominant ideology is a product of dominant power” (p. 9). However, these changes and views were not accepted by all scholars. Pinar et al. (1995) claim that Wexler “emerged [in the seventies as] the most sophisticated critic on the Left of Apple and Giroux, and quite possibly the most sophisticated theoretician on the Left in [the]contemporary field” (p. 44). Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the dominance of Apple and Giroux. As Pinar et al. (1995) argued: The effort to understand curriculum as a political text shifted from an exclusive focus upon reproduction of the status quo to resistance to it, then again, to resistance/reproduction as a dialectical process, then again—in

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the mid-1980’s—to a focus upon daily educational practice, especially pedagogical and political issues of race, class, and gender. The major players in this effort continued to be Apple and Giroux, Apple through his voluminous scholarship and that of his many students, and Giroux through his prodigious scholarly production. (p. 265) Championed by both Apple and Giroux, the turbulent waters of the critical river reached the heyday of neogramscianism flooding the educational and curriculum debate with a new language—a critical linguistic turn—to understand the educational phenomenon. Such zenith won’t last though. The challenges, especially from within, were devastated though.

A Functionalist Counter-Functionalist Critical Flow Classism undermined feminism. (hooks, 2000, p. viii)

Such prominent neogramscian leadership would face severe criticism, not only from the dominant tradition, but from the very core of the progressive tradition. For instance, Liston and Zeichner (1987) expressed the urgent need to accurately perceive the meaning of radical or critical pedagogy within the critical education platform. Nor was Wexler (1987) shy in expressing his frustrations, not necessarily with the political approach per se but with the path that the approach had taken. In mercilessly criticizing the emphasis on reproduction and resistance, which made “the new sociology of education historically backward-looking and ideologically reactionary” (p. 127), Wexler claimed there was a need to incorporate post-structural and postmodern tools to better understand schools and curriculum—a juicy epistemological avenue that scholars, such as Giroux and McLaren, did not ignore. Wexler’s claim should not be seen as a detour but as an upgrade of the political. While warning that the challenge of knowledge neutrality has been espoused by rightist intellectuals as well, Wexler (1976) doesn’t devalue knowledge as a political issue per se (p. 50). Wexler (1976) clearly voices his political space and place, arguing that during the 1960s the purity of science had been put in question due to its promiscuous relation with the military agenda (p. 8). Naturally, not only “Western science had begun to lose its meaning [but also one witnessed] a turn from science as the single standard of knowledge in favor of a plurality of equally valid ways of knowing” (Wexler, 1976, p. 8). In sum, Wexler (1976) was not shy in unveiling some of the puzzling limits of the critical theoretical framework. He argued that too much emphasis had been put on the social effects of schooling and not enough on the study of the nature of school knowledge. It seems that to Wexler, the study of school content or knowledge was somehow dangerous for sociologists. Despite the fact

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that a number of sociologists have studied school knowledge, their approach, according to Wexler, is bounded by social images and outdated paradigms. The lack of consensus about what should be taught in the schools highlights the need for a serious debate about curriculum content. Liston (1988) too is quite clear about the puzzling and unacceptable silences within the critical progressive curriculum river. He argued that the works of a particular radical Marxist tradition within this river (including the works of Apple and Wexler) exhibit a “functionalist approach and have neglected crucial empirical investigations” (p. 15). Such criticism is undeniably severe and probably deserves much more attention than received from the field. Oddly, Liston’s claims that particular radical critical Marxist approaches that were criticizing functionalist dominant and counter-dominant traditions relied precisely on a functionalist approach. Greene (1973) also raise her concerns related with the overt absence of female teachers’ thoughts and works within the ‘political.’ In Greene’s (1973) mind, the struggle for social justice and transformation was gender segregated. The discomfort with the patriarchal impulses of the ‘political’ was also ferociously championed by scholars such as Mitrano (1979), Wallenstein (1979), Miller (1980), Grumet (1981), Taubman (1982), and Pinar (1974). A severe and sharp critique of the reactionary impulse of the political (related with the functionalist approach) was also, in a way, implicit in poststructuralist feminisms advanced by scholars such as Luke (1992), Gore (1992), Walkerdine (1992), Ellsworth (1989), Lather (1992), and others. Critical approaches, in their view, in their commitment to liberate and emancipate, ended up solidifying and multiplying relations of dominance as well as being egregiously silent against patriarchy. Ellsworth’s (1989) critique needs to be seen in such context. Before the nationwide eruption of racist violence in communities and on campuses in 1987 to 1988, including the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Ellsworth took the opportunity to discuss this kind of turmoil in the course Curriculum and Instruction 608: Media and Anti-Racist Pedagogies at UW. According to Ellsworth, particular concepts of critical pedagogy, such as empowerment, student voice, dialogue, and even the term “critical,” are representative myths that perpetuate relations of domination. In claiming the need to fight for a pedagogy of the unknowable, Ellsworth (1989) was acknowledging the prominence of the post-structural and postmodern approaches. Ellsworth (1989) argues that, on the basis of her interpretation of C&I 608, “key assumptions, goals, and pedagogical practices fundamental to the literature on critical pedagogy—namely, ‘empowerment’, ‘student voice’, ‘dialogue’, and even the term ‘critical’—are repressive myths that perpetuate relations of domination” (p.  298). Moreover, she (1989, p.  208) claims that “our efforts to put discourses of critical pedagogy into practice led us to reproduce relations of dominations in the classroom [discourses that] were ‘working through us’ in repressive ways, and had themselves becomes vehicles of repression.” Thus, as we detached from such issues and moved into a different way, “we ‘worked through’ and out of the literature’s highly abstract language

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(‘myths’) of who we ‘should’ be and what ‘should’ be happening in our classroom, and into classroom practices that were context specific and seemed to be much more responsive to our own understandings of our social identities and situations” (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 298). Educational researchers, Ellsworth (1989) adds, “who invoke concepts of critical pedagogy, consistently strip discussions of classroom practices of historical context and political opposition. What remains are definitions [such as empowerment,’ ‘student voice,’ ‘dialogue,’ and even the term ‘critical’] which operate at high level of abstraction” (p. 300). In her belligerent critique over the shortcomings of critical pedagogy, Ellsworth (1989, p.  301) argues that advocates of critical pedagogy “fail to provide a clear statement of their political agendas.” Ellsworth (1989, p. 301) adds that the effort is to hide the fact that as critical pedagogues, they are in fact seeking to appropriate public resources (classrooms, school supplies, teacher/ professor salaries, academic requirements and degrees) to further various ‘progressive’ political agendas that they believe to be for the public good— and therefore deserving of public resources. (p. 301) For Ellsworth (1989) it was crucial to ask the question: “What diversity do we silence in the name of liberatory pedagogy?” (p. 299). In hooks’s (2000) terms there is a urgent need not only to rethink ‘where one stands’ as “classism undermined feminism” (p. viii) but also to unpack feminist traditions that persist in working within dominant and counter-dominant patriarchal notions of power, ignoring that the “feminist movement would have had, and will have, a greater appeal for the masses of women if it addresses the powers women exercise even as it calls attention to sexist discrimination, exploitation, and oppression” (hooks, 2015, p. 95). Undeniably, “struggles for power perpetually undermine [the] feminist movement and are likely to hasten its desmise” (hooks, 2015, p. 91). Also, as we will see later on, Pinar (1974), Mitrano (1979); Wallenstein (1979), Grumet (1981), Miller (1980), Lather (1987), Taubman (1982), and others express the same discomfort with the course of ‘the political.’ While acknowledging that radical educational theory and theorists “never adequately escape from an overtly orthodox concern with the relationship between schooling and political economy and as such refused to engage the complex and changing traditions that have informed the diverse formations and projects in which cultural studies has developed” (Giroux, 1992, p. 201), Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) warn about the dangers of understanding critical pedagogy’s political project as uniform and detached altogether from the crude realities of daily life. Giroux (1992) challenges Ellsworth’s (1989) reasoning and defends the importance of cultural studies for critical educators. According to Giroux (1992), cultural studies are crucial to educators, because:

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(1) it offers the basis for creating new forms of knowledge, by making language constitutive of the conditions for producing the meaning as part of the knowledge/power relationship; (2) defines culture as a contested terrain, a site of struggle and transformation [offering] the opportunity for going beyond cultural analyses that romanticize everyday life or take up culture as merely the reflex of the logic of domination, [in fact] a more critical version of cultural studies raises questions about the margins and the center, especially around the categories of race, class, and gender; (3) offers the opportunity to rethink the relationship between the issue of difference as it is constituted within subjectivities and between social groups. This suggests understanding more clearly how questions of subjectivity can be taken up, so as not to erase the possibility for individual and social agency; (4) provides the basis for understanding pedagogy as a form of cultural production rather than as the transmission of a particular skill, body of knowledge, or set of values. (pp. 201–202) Giroux (1992) openly challenges radical educators to “learn from the theoretical shortcomings [and] begin to rethink the relationship among diference, voice and politics as a way to strengthen the pillars for a liberatory theory of border pedagogy,” calling for us to pay close attention to the cultural politics of language, diference, and identity (p. 209). In addition, Giroux (1992) argues that, while language “cannot be abstracted from the forces and conflicts of social history, that is the historicity of the relationship between dominant and subordinate forms of language offers insights into countering the assumption that the dominant language at any given time is simply the result of a naturally given process rather than the result of specific historical struggles and conflicts” (p. 203). Resisting difference tuned to identity politics “offered a powerful challenge to the hegemonic notion that Eurocentric culture is superior to other cultures and traditions by offering political and cultural vocabularies to subordinate groups by which they could reconstruct their own histories and give voice to their individual and collective identities” (Giroux, 1992, p. 208). Such claims and counter-claims deserve a properly deep and detailed analysis. As some of us are claiming, perhaps a composite approach that incorporates critical and post-structural perspectives, or, as I will describe later on, a deterritorialized approach is possible and needs to be done in the near future. These scholars not only showed how the field maintained its tradition within a place and time of intense struggles and heated conflicts, but they also unveiled the tensions, clashes, and ruptures within a particular critical curriculum river, in which particular scholars swim and whose source, as I was able to examine elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2011a) needed to be contextualized back at the turn of the nineteenth century.

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Addressing Functionalist Counter-Functionalism From Within Critical pedagogy needs to create new forms of knowledge through its emphasis on breaking down disciplinary boundaries and creating new spaces where knowledge can be produced. (Giroux, 1996, p. 691)

Despite the severe criticism faced by many critical theorists and critical theory itself, one cannot deny that early in their intellectual development, many critical scholars struggled with both the limits and possibilities of their critical theoretical approaches as a way to analyze social formations. This is visible, for instance, in both Giroux’s and Apple’s organic intellectualism. However, the construction of a strong critical approach to challenge the contemporary educational hegemonic bloc led some of the elements of such critical river to realize the limitations of their approaches. That is, in criticizing the functionalism of dominant educational theories, they end up falling into a functionalist trap framed by a functionalist counter-functionalist approach, as previously noted in Liston’s (1988) critique. As I claimed elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2004), in his early intellectual growth, Apple (1990) struggled with both the limits and the possibilities of critical approaches. Although Ideology and Curriculum showed a deep intellectual concern for class analysis and sympathy towards the reproductive approach, one cannot ignore the fact that Apple’s analysis is keenly sensitive to the fact that “reproduction” alone cannot explain the intricate dynamics of schooling. In fact, Ideology and Curriculum opens the door for both Education and Power (Apple, 1995)—I maintain that the two books could be published in a single volume—and Teachers and Texts (Apple, 1986),2 as well as the rest of his vast intellectual work. So, for Apple, the “traditional” critical theoretical tools were clearly insufficient to allow an acute interpretation of social formation and its consequential transformation. Later on, Apple, together with Weis and McCarthy, claims the need to move beyond a reductive platform. While Apple and Weis (1983) called for the need to perceive the structure of school’s ideological formation, thus arguing that the cultural sphere was relatively autonomous, McCarthy and Apple (1988) introduced the non-synchronous parallelist position to promote better understanding of race, class, and gender issues in education. Following this, Apple and Weis (1983) added that “there is a strong relationship between ideology and the knowledge and practices of education. Ideology does have power; it is shown both in what school material includes and in what it excludes. It does position people within wider relations of domination and exploitation. Yet, when lived out, it also often has elements of ‘good’ sense as well as ‘bad’ sense in it” (p. 23). Examining the dynamics of ideological production, Apple and Weis (1983), argue that (1) rather than a unidimensional theory in which economic form is determinate, society is conceived of as being made up of three interrelated

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spheres—the economic, cultural/ideological, and political; (2) we need to be cautious about assuming that ideologies are only ideas held in one’s head. Nor are ideologies linear configurations, simple processes that all necessarily work in the same direction or reinforce each other. Instead, these processes sometimes overlap, complete, drown out, and clash with each other. (pp. 23–27) That is “ideological forms are not reducible to class” (Apple and Weis, 1983, p. 24), and categories, such as gender, race, age, and additionally ethnicity, “enter directly into the ideological moment” (Apple and Weis, 1983, p. 24). It is indeed “out of the articulation with, clash among, or contradictions among and within, say, class, race, and sex that ideologies are lived in one’s day-to-day life” (Apple and Weis, 1983, pp. 24–25). Each category has “its own internal history in relation to the others [and] it is impossible to completely comprehend class relations in capitalism without seeing how capital used patriarchal social relations within organizations” (Apple and Weis, 1983, p. 25). McCarthy’s slow yet powerful position helped swirl the waters between and within the critical and post terrains. As he argues (1988), “as an Afro-Caribbean writer, I find myself, perhaps, permanently, out of sync with racial and social science accounts of the human condition which marginalize third world people[; that is] we are simply deprived of structural positions to speak within the new wave strategies of periodization associated with post-modernism and poststructuralism now being forced-marched into the field” (p. 8). McCarthy (1988) vehemently reacted against pitfalls of critical perspectives with neo-Marxist impulses by ignoring racism as an endemic reality in preand post-capitalist societies, challenging the reductionism of understanding race (and one could add ethnicity) as a mere add-on category. If one wants to understand the dynamics of ideological production that frame pre- and postcapitalist societies, in general, and education, in particular, class and gender dynamics cannot subalternize race and vice versa (McCarthy, 1988). Other critical approaches such as the ones put forward by scholars such as Darder (2012), Leonardo (2013; 2009), Gillborn (2008), and others allow one to understand the dangerous reductionism of reification metamorphosis just corraled in class consciouness, arguing “false class consciousness as true racial consciouness” (Leonardo, 2013, p. 69). Later on, Apple and Carlson (1998) defended the need for a combined critical-post-structural platform, adding that “Gramscian discourse has highlighted the roles that economic and technological forces as well as ideological struggles played in reshaping the post-Fordist cultural landscape. Foucault’s work focuses our attention on the role of the State and expert knowledge in constructing normalized citizens and subjectivity” (p. 6). Posteriorly, Hypolito (2001) complexified McCarthy and Apple’s (1998) approach by calling for a spiral, non-parallelist, non-synchronous position to better understand class, race, and gender issues in education.

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Giroux was also responsive to the silences and possibilities of critical theory. In Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, Giroux (1981a) claims that “the task of radical educational theory is to identify and move beyond those classroom structures which maintain an oppressive hidden curriculum” (p.  82). Giroux was actually raising the flag regarding the theory-reality abyss in too many critical approaches, thus subjugating reality to a particular theoretical framework completely delinked from the tangible, messy, spontaneous, cacophonic daily life in the classrooms. As he (1981) argues, “while many radicals have used the term ‘hidden curriculum’ to categorize the unstated but effective distribution of norm, values and attitudes to students in classrooms, few have provided more than a one-sided analysis of this important phenomenon” (p. 72). However, to make sense of the hidden curriculum, Giroux (1981a) maintains that: schools have to be analyzed as agents of legitimation, organized to produce and reproduce the dominant categories, values and social relationships necessary for the maintenance of the larger society. This should not suggest that schools simply mirror the interests and wishes of the rulingclass. Nor should it be denied that schools have an immense power to manipulate the consciousness and actions of students, and function to pass on selected aspects of the dominant culture. The process of legitimation is clearly much more complex than most radical educators have suggested. (p. 72) The radical core of any pedagogy, Giroux (1981a) argues, “will be found not in its insistence on a doctrinal truth as much as in its ability to provide the theoretical and structural conditions necessary to help students search for and act upon the truth” (p. 86). Moreover, as we examined earlier, Giroux was quite aware that “the perception of hegemony redefines class rule, and also reveals a relationship between ideology and power, which is viewed not simply as one of imposition, but as Foucault points out, a ‘network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege one might possess. . . . [[P]ower is exercised rather than possessed’” (p. 25). Giroux later crystallizes the need to pay attention to postmodern and post-structural insights and argues that the reinvigoration of critical theory depends on such a move. For example, in Towards a Postmodern Pedagogy (Giroux, 1996), he summarizes the need to overcome the towering vacuums within the very planks of the critical epistemological armada. It is worth quoting him at length: Critical theory needs a language that allows for competing solidarities and political vocabularies that do not reduce the issues of power, justice, struggle, and inequality to a single script, a master narrative that suppresses the contingent, historical, and the everyday as a serious object of study. Critical pedagogy needs to create new forms of knowledge through its emphasis on breaking down disciplinary boundaries and creating new spaces where knowledge can be produced. It is not an epistemological

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issue, but one of power, ethics, and politics. The Enlightenment notion of reason needs to be reformulated within a critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy needs to regain a sense of alternatives by combining a language of critique and possibility. Postmodern feminism exemplifies this in both its critique of patriarchy and its search to construct new forms of identity and social relations. Critical pedagogy needs to develop a theory of teachers as transformative intellectuals who occupy specifiable political and social locations—rather than defining teacher work through the narrow language of professionalism. Central to the notion of critical pedagogy is a politics of voice that combines a postmodern notion of difference with a feminist emphasis on the primacy of the political. (Giroux, 1996, pp. 691–695) Giroux is insightfully reaching out to post-structural approaches, not in denial of the political, but precisely to reinforce the political and, in doing so, to strengthen the critical stance. As Giroux (1981a) adamantly argues, the U.S. educational left “often appears bafed over the question of what constitutes radical educational theory and practice. Beneath the plethora of pedagogical approaches, that range from deschooling to alternative schools, one searches in vain for a comprehensive critical theory of education which bridges the gap between educational theory on the one hand and social and political theory on the other” (p. 63). The U.S. educational left fractured—analytically speaking— into two major groups, namely the content focused and the strategy-based radicals, experiencing severe inconsistencies in their struggle for a more politicized educational phenomena. That is, while the latter, acknowledges “the power of the dominant social order to manipulate students into docile, obedient members of society, [in fact this] does little to help them to move beyond a cherry spontaneity” (Giroux, 1981a, p. 66). In contrast, the former “does not move beyond their static notion of knowledge as a set of radical ideas to be transmitted to students” (Giroux, 1981a, p. 68). Education, as Freire (1990) notoriously argues, is subversive. That is, despite its conservative bone framed by a “narrating subject (teacher) and patient listening objects (the students)” (Freire, 1990, p. 71), critical theorists and pedagogues must show the ability to go beyond such deterministic framework without falling into another one. The banking concept of education—that, odd as it might be, keeps reinventing itself not just at the curriculum level, but currently more than ever before at the level of teacher preparation programs—that turns students into “containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher” denies the fact that “knowledge emerges only through the invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Freire, 1990, p. 72). In an almost radical sense, Giroux (1981a) argues, knowledge should be viewed as a shared process, a mediation between teachers and students, a creative political exchange that forges commodities

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and the kind of critical reflection that allows all to be seen as both teachers and learners. Under such circumstances, knowledge is not treated simply as problematic, it becomes the vehicle for teachers and students to discuss its problematic grounding and meaning. Knowledge in this instance becomes situated in ideological and political choices; in other words, knowledge becomes de-reified in terms of both its content and the social context in which it is mediated. (p. 66) Quite sentient of particular natural flaws of liberal and radical intellectuals, Giroux (2011, p. 4) re-emphasizes his challenge of the dogmatic trap in which crude radical intellectualism fell. While some radical intellectuals and educators, Giroux (2011) claims, “do make the relations among schools, power, and society an object of critical analysis, they do so at the theoretical expense of falling into either: a one-sided idealism or an equally one-sided structuralism” (p. 4). That is “there are radical educators who collapse human agency and struggle into a celebration of human will, cultural experience, or the construction of happy classroom social relations, [as well as] radical views of pedagogy that cling to the notions of structure and domination” (Giroux, 2011, p. 4). A great example of how hegemony and ideology operates in the daily life of schools and society is the current state, national, and international embarrassments created with the termination of La Raza Studies in the state of Arizona and the new backward—to say the least—evaluation of teachers. In 2010, Arizona Revised Statutes § 15–112 was passed and was used to ban Mexican American studies (MAS) in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD).3 Tom Horne, who was the current superintendent of Public Instruction, declared TUSD to be in violation of the statute, and this charge was supported by his predecessor, John Huppenthal. The MAS program, or La Raza Studies, contained the philosophy of a well-known Brazilian communist Paulo Freire who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In light of this, Horne claimed “one really understand Freire’s influences from communists such as Marx, Che, Engels, Lenin and that instead of teaching minorities that America is a country full of opportunities for all, we teach them that they are oppressed and that America is a racist country.” According to Horne (who at the time was running for, and was elected, Arizona attorney general), ethnic studies are revolutionary, and students only realize they are oppressed in such courses, and all this is a pure abuse of the taxpayers’ money. In the annals of the history of America ‘is a law enforcement that prevents people’ from being violent, aggressive and somewhat tolerant because one day they read a book [among many] and realized that they are oppressed” (Horne, 2010). The tragedy doesn’t stop here though. As if this were not enough, the state of Arizona will target the accent of its faculty. Teachers who show a pronounced accent in English (whose English anyway, one would argue) will be penalized and removed from the teaching of the ‘mother tongue’ and might even be sacked (Jordan, 2010). Ethnic studies

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(i.e. La Raza Studies), ensures Horne, “go against the ideal of Martin Luther King Jr., who in his famous march on Washington, challenged the nation to judge people by their character and not by skin color.” Horne challenged the nation to follow the example of King because, he says, “we are not the person who reveals the color of the skin.” To top it off a substantive part of the population does think that Horne has a point. Basically, the governor of the state of Arizona and Horne worked to conceal the ‘thought to oppress the oppressed.’ In the midst of certified genocide, it is said that not all ethnic studies are prohibited. What was prohibited was not necessarily the teaching of particular ethnic groups’ heritage group knowledge but precisely what was called ‘dangerous knowledge,’ systematically silenced by mainstream curriculum traditions due to its critical veins and transformative capacity. Certainly Freire could never imagine to have written such a perfect oeuvre; and certainly Martin Luther King Jr. could not have the foggiest idea that his whole social justice ideal— which helped to free millions from oppression and racism—would be used, years later, to legitimize policies that the civil rights leader fought against and was killed for. By anchoring his policy in racist discourses that have a maternity and a context precisely opposite, Horne does nothing more than to act at the level of commonsense (in which hegemony operates) domesticating, de-ideologizing, and naturalizing more than a concept, an ideal that stirred the world; in doing so Horne managed to neutralize the historicity of the concept, or better, giving it, in the act, another historical process. Fortunately, history does not belong to the one who writes it. Indeed, this whole process of domestication and ahistorization, which is basically an attempt at ideologization, is the backbone of the strategy of hegemonic neo-radical centrist movements to control the commonsense. This battle has much to do with what goes on in classrooms (form and content) and it is not just a cultural battle (Hall, 1988). It is also economic and unfortunately for a long time, the majority of critical theorists downplayed the importance that the financialization of capital has in the context of educational policies and curriculum (cf. Foster, 2008). Nor it is a coincidence that today we are witnessing the resurgence of research in the field of ‘economic policy and education,’ an area of research much ignored in the curriculum field (Huebner, 1977). Enguita (2008) challenges us to re-think what ‘we’ mean by ‘economy,’ not to clarify its degree of immaturity with regard to categories such as culture, but its relative autonomy to the various social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics within the dynamics of ideological production (cf. Apple and Weis, 1983; McCarthy and Apple, 1988; Paraskeva, 2007a; 2007b; 2012). Especially in an age in which education is placed on the axis of ‘cost-return’ as a way to combat social economic waste, the economic dimension in educational policies, curriculum, and teacher preparation cannot be minimized. The new evaluation of teachers gives credibility to our concern. If one considers the new teacher evaluation and its request for teachers to provide evidence of cultural sensitivity and respect for differences, one overtly understands how blurred such assessment is. How can one possibly document ‘cultural

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sensitivity’? Even the phrasing that can be seen in Massachusetts’s new “Educator Evaluation Standards and Indicators of Effective Teaching Practice” “Consistently uses strategies and practices that are likely to enable students to demonstrate respect for and affirm their own and others’ differences related to background, identity, language, strengths, and challenges.” How can a teacher materialize such complex liquid dynamics to produce an ‘honest’ assessment? Can such dynamics be reduced to a binder of pieces of pedagogical evidence? What does this prove? Giroux (2011) adds to these questions, because what is problematic is that “such views not only argue that history is made behind the backs of human beings, but also imply that within such a context of domination human agency virtually disappears” (p. 4). Such reproductive correspondence theoretical platform collapses into a pale functionalism. Giroux (2011) engages in a conscious self-critique of the vulnerabilities of some radical theoretical tools. Giroux (2011) and others (see Young and Whitty, 1977) argue that theories of reproduction have exhibited a “one-sided determinism[, a] simplistic view of the social and cultural reproduction, and their often a-historical mode of theorizing” (p. 77). He also adds that radical intellectuals failed “to abstract and develop partially articulated and potentially valuable elements within existing theories of reproduction” (Giroux, 2011, p.  77). According to him, the correspondence and reproduction of exhausted narratives portrayed a dangerous deterministic cult that shows an overtly determined model of causality, its passive view of human beings, its political pessimism, and its failure to highlight the contradictions and tensions that characterize the workplace and school [as well as] they do little to provide a qualitatively different level of analysis regarding the relationship between schools, the workplace and the dialectical role these two institutions have to other agencies of social and cultural reproduction. (Giroux, 1981a, pp. 93–94) The inadequacy of certain critical tools is crystal clear in Giroux’s (1981a; 2011) reasoning. However, theories of resistance (1) “have not adequately conceptualized the genesis of the conditions that promote and reinforce contradictory modes of resistance and struggle” (Giroux, 2011, p. 102); (2) showed a supreme inadequacy “to take into account the issues of gender and race” (Giroux, 2011, p. 104); (3) minimized the importance of situating “the notion of resistance within specifically political movements, movements that display resistance in the arts and/or in concrete political action” (Giroux, 2011, p. 105); (4) “under-theorized the point that schools not only repress subjectivities but are also actively involved in their production” (Giroux, 2011, p. 105); and (5) “have not given enough attention to the issue of how domination reaches into the structure of the personality itself ” (Giroux, 2011, p. 106). In addition to these theories of resistance, Giroux (2011) persists in valuing a “pedagogy informed by a political project that speaks not only to the interests of the individual freedom and social reconstruction, but also has immediate relevance for educators

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as a mode of viable praxis” (p. 77). In a sentence, critical theory really needs a more comprehensive theory of cultural hegemony. It is in this context that he argues that we need a new direction for radical educational praxis implicit in the work of a growing number of educational theorists who have helped to strip the correspondence principle of its reactionary trappings while preserving its radical core. Both theoretically and empirically they have attempted to show how the organization, distribution and evaluation of selected aspects of the culture function as reproductive mechanisms within schools. Moreover, by examining knowledge stratification and its relationship to social stratification, they have begun to illuminate the often-subtle political connections between economic power and ideological control (Giroux, 1981a, p. 71). Needless to say, for Giroux (1981b; 2011) this is an ideological battle. However, Giroux (2011) points out the dangers of an ideological frame reduced to an analytical tool (p. 142). That is, while “schools are cultural apparatuses involved in the production and transmission of knowledge” (Giroux, 2011, p. 142), one cannot mince the “distinction between ideological struggle and material struggle” (Giroux, 2011, p. 72). In other words, one cannot confuse the “struggle at the ideological level of meanings, discourse, and representation, with struggles over the concrete appropriation and control of capital, territory, and other such sources” (Giroux, 2011, p. 142). As he argues, it is one thing to talk about the school as a site where conflicting ideologies are fought over, and another issue altogether to view schools as political and economic institutions, as material embodiments of lived experience and historically sedimented antagonistic relations that need to be seized and controlled by subordinate groups for their own ends. (Giroux, 2011, p. 142) Freire too in one of his masterpieces, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, raised concerns regarding a dangerous puzzling sectarianism at the very core of the critical pedagogical approaches. Freire (1990; 1985) saw that as a clear straightforward incapability of some critical scholars to understand the importance of both the elements of good sense and bad sense in the conservative platform, which, in his view, was an obstacle to the project of emancipation. Clearly, the answer for inequality and social injustice could not be achieved just by looking to the belly button of critical pedagogy, ostracizing other epistemological platforms. In the struggle against the functionalist reductionism, critical theory slipped into an obsolete position. To avoid this, counter-functionalist functionalist approaches must be relentlessly fought without compromising the commitment to deconstruct the eugenic theory of cultural hegemony. Such battle is indeed an ideological battle, with two clear objectives. On the one hand, it is against functionalists in which the counter-hegemonic doctrines fell, which paradoxically bestowed the combat against the hegemonic theories of functionalism; on the other hand, it is against the dominant theories of functionalism itself. Somehow, we witnessed a commendable mea culpa and, in a way, a

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clearly neo-Gramscian attempt to begin from the beginning, not because critical theory failed greatly, as Badiou (2010) and Žižek (2009) explain so well, but because it is urgent to address new questions of old social problems with new tools. As indeed we shall see throughout this book, to begin from the beginning implies totalitarianism still to confront the Cartesian model of modernity. This is, indeed, the great challenge . . . The task is to examine ideology ideologically by struggling “not only with the question of what it is but also with the question of what it is not” (Giroux, 2011, p. 142). Apple (1990) was also sentient of the importance of understanding ideology ideologically. I have examined elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2004) that, by defining both ideology by what it is and by what it does, Apple (1990) stresses the fact that we should indeed embrace an analysis that deals with the problem of ideology according to three specific characteristics: namely “(1) legitimation (the justification of group action and its social acceptance), (2) power conflict (ideology is linked to conflicts between people seeking or holding power), and (3) style of argumentation (a special rhetoric, and a heightened affect, mark the argumentation that takes place in the realm of ideology)” (p. 21). As Apple (1990) mentions, categories, such as legitimation, power conflict, and style of argumentation, can teach us a great deal, not only of dominant liberal educational traditions but also of education itself as a hegemonic form, since there is a close connection between how language and science are presented and the “abstract” individual action. In fact, according to Apple (1990), ideology does not exist in a social vacuum; something that can be displayed like produce on the shelves of a supermarket, which people can select according to convenience. Conversely, he highlights the need to comprehend ideology’s scope and function; that is to say, one has to be aware that ideology territorializes a set of meanings, deeply supported by its rhetorical artillery aiming at resources and issues of power. In addition, for Apple (1990), the most accurate way to think of ideology is to pay a close attention to the very concept of hegemony. Conceptualizing this approach to the curriculum field, Apple (1990), based on Wexler, argues that a truthful analysis of the notion of hegemony not only allows us to “weave curricular, socio-political, economic, and ethical analyses together in such a way as to show the subtle connections which exist between educational activity and [specific] interests [but also unfolds] how people can employ frameworks which both assist them in organizing their world and enable them to believe they are neutral participants in the neutral instrumentation of schooling” (p. 22). In a way, as inequality and poverty multiply astronomically, such connections became less subtle, especially for students and teachers. For instance, Massachusetts has begun the new teacher evaluation system in which students see the principal parading around with an iPad and all state-of-theart technology devices to monitor and evaluate teachers, yet they have to read from books that have no covers and are missing pages (imagine studying from a book and missing twenty pages)—consequently, such connections are not that subtle. Or, imagine, during the administration of a high-stakes test required

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for graduation in Massachusetts, teachers couldn’t even give kids complete dictionaries, so, if a kid needed particular words, the teacher needed to find the dictionary that had it, because the dictionaries themselves were missing words. These crude wounds become uglier with the current cult of the Common Core, which presents a fallacy of a universal and equal curriculum based on neutrality. As Darder, Baltodano, and Torres (2002) stress in the introduction of their Critical Pedagogical Reader, “Giroux’s work is credited with repositioning the education debates of the ‘New Left’ beyond the boundaries of reproduction theories and the hidden curriculum” (p. 24). In a way, Apple’s and Giroux’s positions demonstrate a credibility check of the accuracy of some of the criticism thrown at critical theory. However, it seems that Giroux was more willing than Apple to engage fully with a vast and complex postmodern and poststructural literature. Despite this difference, both Apple and Giroux allow one to trace a series of discontinuities in their intellectual journey; that is, their voyage did not remain fixed in the reproductive approach toward the educational process. Instead, the reproductive approach served as a launching point that allowed them to go beyond reproduction. Arguably, they are more neoGramscian than neo-Marxist and their work on ideology, hegemony, and language revealed and created new currents within the critical river. One of such currents provoked a healthy major cataclysm that would implode at the very core of the neogramscianist thought. Intellectuals such as Pinar, Taubman, Slatery, Reynolds, Doll, Grumet, Miller, Mitrano, Wallenstein, and others, while not denying the importance of the Marxist Orthodox and Cultural approaches and their successful theoretical advances, advocated for a more sophisticated examination of the educational and curriculum phenomena in lieu of the intricated social problems. Deeply influenced by critical literary theory, Freudianism, psychoanalysis, feminism, theology, and phenomenology, such group of intellectuals started pushing for a theory that won’t just be confined to Marxist and neo-Marxists lenses. Lather’s (1987) claim over the “need to be sure that we do not become ‘good wives’ of a Marxist partriach” (p. 33) echoed a broad commitment within and beyond the feminist movement within the field. While such approaches were crucial to move the debate out of the straitjacket of positivism, they claimed curriculum as a historical text that could not produce the subject as non-existent. Marxist and neo-Marxist politicality— while profound and crucial—ended up obliterating the individual (Pinar, 1981; 1980; 1979); while ideology was a crucial card with the grand mantra of social inequality, it could not minimize the importantce of the subject; in this context, they championed the autobiographical and biographical research, and feminist autobiography, as it was crucial “to understand teachers and teaching biographically and autobiographically” (Pinar et al., 1995, p.  516; 1994). Sentient of the power of the person, Pinar (1998, p. xvi) alerts that “our understandings about identity matters are very much situated in the Western notions of self ” though, and framed in specific structures of subjectivity that obliterate

198 The Generation of the Utopia “spirituality and sexuality as two sides of the same cultural coin” (Pinar, 2009, p. 4). In the Unites States, as I had the opportunity to examine before, the restructuring of subjectivity is not de-linked from a “suspicion towards science, susceptibility to propaganda, and submission to authority” (Pinar, 2009, p. 5). Autobiography thus relates to the Huebnerian view of curriculum as [human being’s] temporality, an “act of self creation and potentially of transformation” (Ayres, 1990, p. 274). The contribution of this group of intellectuals triggers unrivaled animosity so many times unjustly minimized and enveloped either in deep silence or contestation by certain segments of our field around the problematic concept of reconceptualization. This quarrel has already covered a lot of paper and space in national and international meetings (Paraskeva, 2011a). A polemical concept has to create controversy as it actually did. Nothing wrong with that at all. After all, this is nothing new in our field, as history proves (Kliebard, 1995; Schubert and Lopez Schubert, 1980). But I suggest that, as the African saying goes, ‘let’s not look for the key we lost under the wrong pole just because it has light, but look where we actually lost it.’ Curriculum, Slattery (1992, p. 2) argues, is a “healing dance, a spiral of creation, a yearning for wisdom embedded in the interrelationship of body, mind and spirit.” The autobiographical and biographical turn came to occupy a void that ‘the political’ had not paid attention to and, therefore, did not give due importance. To deny it is worthless, and again as another African says goes, ‘it’s not worth trying to straighten the shade of a twisted stick.’ The personal is pivotal, not only within the hermeneuticity of the social, but it is the social as well. In fact, Pessoa (2002) insightfully stated, “to understand is to destroy me” (p. 61), which is an intricate process in which curriculum plays a major role. Working from different epistemological platforms, this group of scholars, to rely on Pessoa’s non-ortonomic platform, not only attempted to place the subject and the individual at the center of the equation of capitalist phenomena of oppression and segregation, but also they did confront the individual—and I would add successfully—within the complex jungle of the subjective. Starting from the principle of the “perpetual imperfection of being” (Pessoa, 2002, p.  246), they attempted to unleash the notion of a pluri-heteronymous subjectivity, deeply aware of an unavoidable paradox: the more imperfection is undressed and the more promises of perfection and completeness are made, the subject is perpetually “a less other” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 139). These intellectuals were quite aware, that “in creating they were getting destroyed,” yet quickly understood how “delightful was the loss of themselves” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 226). Let me pause here and add another crucial argument. If there were doubts about the importance and complexity of the individual, the subject, and the self, the thought of Pessoa’s work would eliminate them altogether. In fact, the thought and work of Pessoa completely transfigures and sends to a higher plane the contribution of intellectuals like Huebner, Macdonald, Greene, Pinar, Grumet, Doll, Miller, Taubman, and others. The fact that Pessoa is not thought of, worked out, and discussed in the field of curriculum studies and its theorizing

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and so well-known internationally speaks volumes of how internationalization soon detoured from the course it should have had and became another phenomenon of imperial expansion of a certain segment of the academy ‘on this side of the abyssal line’ as Santos (2014) would say. While the Fernando Pessoa phenomena quasi exhausted the oxygen in too many fields of social sciences, occupying paramount position in academic publications, meetings, lectures, addresses all over the world, triggering a kind of intellectual sur ménage with scholars and reserachers using no euphemisms to describe how saturated they are with Pessoa—“enough Pessoa, if we do not decide to stop, we will never stop and we will be devoured by Pessoa” (Gil, 2010, p. 9)—in our field, that is not the case. The Pessoan self, or as Gil (2010) insightfully frames as ‘the about to be self ’ in Pessoa’s approach, and its heteronomy matrix as an organic tendency of a philosophy of praxis can lend much to the curriculum field. To rely on Pessoa’s arguments, curriculum as text—and as we know it—is a matrix of “subjugation, an anti-gregarious way of domination, and not an art of captivation” (Gil, 2010, p. 11); a matrix that cannot egregiously deny the power of the ‘self,’ or the ‘about to be the self,’ which “does not delimit only a great inner space. It is made up of several other embedded spaces, partially coincident, sometimes osmotic, sometimes fusion, internally divided and dividing without ceasing. Such perpetually about to be self—classed, raced, gendered—is a map that covers other maps as a palinpseto” (Gil, 2010, p. 22). Also, swimming on the critical river of her predecessors, yet radically ripping and clearing up new branches, tributaries and its concomitant riverbeds, Darder (2012) flips the debate into a radical stage. Darder’s neogramscian philosophy of praxis of an intellectual, in her view, was incoherently poisonous, inconsistently dangerous—or conveniently liberal, as she would probably say— if not committed with a more eclectic and holistic critical theory of cultural democracy, organically rooted in cognitive difference. In Darder’s take, any debate on political economy and education was frivolous and flooded with banalities if not focused on bicultural identity. In doing so, while respecting how the notion of biculturalism has been unpacked in the field, Darder (2012) brings to the table Charles Valentine’s (1971) bicultural model of human development, arguing that biculturalism “speaks to the process wherein individuals learn to function in two distinct social environments: their primary culture, and that of the dominant mainstream culture of society in whcih they live” (p. 45). Like racism, she (2012) adds, “biculturalism specifically addresses the different strategies of survival adopted by people of color in response to the dynamics of living in constant tension between conflicting cultural values and conditions of cultural subordination” (p. 45). In so doing, Darder (2012) challenges traditional psychological and anthropological theories of bicultural identity, arguing that “the political and economic aspects of the ramifications of the subordinate-dominant relations needed to pay close attention to issues related with culture and power” (p. 45). While some would precipitately argue that such cultural turn was already, in a way, visible in her predecessors, the fact is that, they provoke such move yet only within a very concrete Western

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epistemological platform. In this regard, Darder (2012, p. 73) alerted us to the different “generic and cultural predispositions,” challenging Modern Western Eurocentric neugenic views of psychology and anthropology and inviting a dialogue between critical theory, neurophilosphy, and indigenous knowledges. In her (2012, p.  72) terms, what is defined by cognitive justice (Paraskeva, 2017; Santos, 2014; Darder, 2012) couldn’t be barbwired by a Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platform, and the “synaptic connections” each one makes since birth would reflect, not just political economy or reductive cultural dynamics drawn within a canvas neugically produced, but also the prejudice produced by segregated cognitive institutionalized frameworks that produced unequal cultural power dynamics. The struggle for social justice and cognitive justice (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; Santos, 2014) could not be accomplished without a commitment to unpack the psychology of the oppressor, to free the slaves of the white myth (Gladwin and Saidin, 1980), the myth of a unique and one valid epistemological matrix in which dominant and counterdominant should operate. Critical democracy was hence a must, a must that could not be achived without an education and curriculum deeply sentient of the role of the intricate plurality of critical literacies (Lankshear and Noble, 2011; Lankshear and McLaren, 1993). Popkewitz (1976) was also one of the leading Western critical educators to move the debate out of straitjacket orthodoxies of critical approaches, alerting the field to the need to incorporate post-structural impulses, to better unpack systems of dominance and promote real reform and social change. Deeply concerned with educational reform, change, and social transformation (or lack of thereof), Popkewitz (1997) advocates a radically different historical tenet. His (1997) concern with history is to understand how the current problems of schooling, defined as school reform, become constituted as they are. How is it that we think about reform as we do? How is it that we pose problems of school knowledge, children, teaching and evaluation as we do? (pp. 131–132) These are not minor questions and undeniably “take the sociology of curriculum knowledge as a central problematic in the study of schooling. It makes the categories, distinctions and diferentiations of schooling into historical and social monuments that can be interrogated as embodying social patterns of power and regulation” (Popkewitz, 1997, pp. 131–132) While the critical debate was moving away from political economy, with scholars placing education and curriculum within the dynamics of ideological production, paying attention to the relative autonomy of categories such as culture, Popkewitz (1992, pp.  308–309)—although not denying the importance of such a move—was clearly concerned with how educators and pedagogues “like to pretend that the world can be made rational, that progress is an obtainable goal, and that policy is the instrumental piece of the modern

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version of salvation”; however, it is crucial to recognize that “we know little about social and educational change” (Popkewitz, 1992, p.  309). Popkewitz challenged such rationale back in the 1970s when he (1976) questioned “certain assumptions about social research that guide teaching and give power and authority to curriculum” (p. 317). In his (1976) terms, the field was shackled by “myths because they crystalize certain hopes, values, and beliefs into universal truths, yet upon closer examination of scientific communities, these interpretations are found to be incomplete and erroneous, distorting the very nature of disciplined inquiry” (p. 317). The idea “that social affairs have Jaws which reside outside of human control and thought” (Popkewitz, 1976, p.  318) falsely portrays social inquiry as non-ideological and detached from political dynamics. Popkewitz (1976) argues that such myths—“(1) science is a source of information and methods of inquiry”(p. 318); “(2) there is an explicit scientific method” (p. 319)”; “(3) generalizations are neutral statements”(p. 320); “(4) generalizations and social action are separate and distinct” (p.  321); “(5) concepts have fixed definitions which children should learn” (p. 322), and “(6) social science and natural science are similar” (p. 323)—need to be smashed, since “the problem of curriculum is a problem of meaning produced through participation in communities. Failure to recognize the complex social character of thought can account for much of the failure of recent curriculum reform” (p. 324). Popkewitz (1976) walked away from the reductive political economy parallax, challenged “new abstract universals” (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018, p. 1), and placed knowledge and the reason of reasoning at the very core of the critical agenda to better unpack the mechanics of inequality, injustice, and segregation perpetrated by curriculum, pedagogy and teaching. Interesting that this same concern is quite visible in some anti-colonial-decolonial approaches as well. As I have argued before, Mignolo (2018) made no euphemisms when he claimed that “what matters is not economics, or politics, or history, but knowledge” (p. 135), thus advocating the need to break with the bunker of a Westernized political economy. Needless to say that I am not arguing here that Thomas Popkewtiz was an anti-colonial and decolonial thinker avant la lettre; however, it is undeniable that, although swimming in a critical river, he was paying attention to other aspects above and beyond economy and culture, focusing on how knowledge and reasoning systems have been produced and legitimated. As a social construction, science responds to social and cultural commitmemts (Popkewitz, 1984); it is crucial not only to break up with forms of science “designed around normal rather than revolutionary” (Popkewitz, 1976, p.  319) impulses, but also to push the counterdominant critical platform to “a serious interplay of political, methodological, and epistemological issues” (Popkewitz, 1984, p.  6). Precisely because “the language of research does not ‘sit’ as a logical artifact, outside social discourse and devoid of human interpretation and manipulation” (Popkewitz, 1984, p.  8), the imperative of a “critical approach is in the irony of social inquiry” (Popkewitz, 1976, p. 324). That is, Popkewitz (1984, p. 325) claims, its modes of analysis

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are themselves socially constructed meanings, not immune from the pretensions, misconceptions, and self-deceptions that cloak human actions. While we can say that social inquiry does provide ways of increasing autonomy, without understanding its basically human roots, these modes of analysis can easily be subverted into new forms of mysticism and control. Thus, any critical approach in curriculum worthy of its name could not minimize two dynamics. One is related with the fact that the concept of inquiry “must incorporate social processes as intrinsic to thought” (Popkewitz, 1976, p. 325). A second dynamic deals with the fact that “the perspectives to social study should include aspects of ‘revolutionary’ as well as ‘normal’ science to prevent the stagnation and rigidification of ideas” (Popkewitz, 1976, p. 325). Thus, “the contexts, expectations, and activities of school should allow students to work in a variety of ways that reflect the totally human characteristics of inquiry. (Popkewitz, 1976, p. 325). This requires, Doll (2005, p. 55) argues, a “certain pedagogy, not the pedagogy of mimesis, but a pedagogy of practice wherein the practice is not mere repetition, but the practice of doing, reflecting, visioning, doing yet again with a diference.” In Popkewitz’s (1980) terms, the claim that “the rituals and ceremonies of technical expertise obscure the nature of social inquiry as a particular activity of an occupational community” did not waive critical impulses (p. 28). It is precisely such technical cult that blocks any attempt to develop a dialetcial conception of consciousness (Au, 2012). Such dialetcial conception of consciousness, in Greene’s (1998, p. 126) terms, to acknowledge that “given the dangers of small-mindedness and privatism, it is not sufficient to develop even the most variegated, most critical, most imaginative, most ‘liberal’ approach of education.” That is, “it is also important to find a way of developing a praxis of educational consequence that opens the spaces necessary for the remaking of a democratic community” (Greene, 1998, p. 126). As we will examine later on, such praxis could never be a just praxis if it ignores that reason is not just confined to the limits determined by the Modern Western Eurocentric matrix. Another major wave of concern within (and with) the ‘orthodox’ matrix of critical approaches was the undermining of race as a fundamental category to understand oppression. Critical race intellectuals shook the field by placing racism as the very eye of the eugenic havoc that fuels capitalism. Frustrated with the outcome of racial struggles in the United States and with the sub-emphasis on race within critical legal studies, intellectuals such as Bell (1980; 1992), Guinier and Torres (2002), Delgado (1995), Kennedy (1990), Williams (1991), Crenshaw (1988), Matsuda (1987), and others during the 1970s, deeply influenced by the successful accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement (Delgado and Stefancic, 2001), duly fought to place race at the critical studies table. Deeply influenced by such struggle, leading critical educational and curriculum scholars such as Ladson Billings (1995), Tate IV (1997), Solórzano (1997) and others re-emphasized the claim that education, curriculum, and

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teaching were/are fundamentally a racial political project; thus, race should be framed as the very core of such eugenic project. Race needed to be seen as the very center of the daily life experiences of people of color. Deeply influenced by critical legal studies and radical feminism, critical race theorists also pay close attention to intellectuals, such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida, Cesar Chavez, and Martin Luther King Jr. Critical race theory in education, understands race as endemic and ordinary. As Ladson-Billings and Tate IV (1995) argue, in a society based on property rights, “race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States, since the intersection of race and property creates an analytic tool through which we can understand social (and, consequently, school) inequity” (p. 48). This position triggered severe critique from within the counter-dominant platform. Against what they saw as quite functionalist, Darder and Torres (2004) build a critique, arguing against the centrality of race as ‘unique’ to understand inequality and oppression. Categories such as class, race, and gender have relative autonomy, and oppression can’t be accurately unpacked by ignoring such condition. The ‘fundamentalism of race’ was viewed not only as an attack and nullification of the relative autonomy of categories, such as class, gender and race inclusively, but also above all a kind of functionalism that radical critical intellectuals, justifiably, will never accept and triggered major havoc at the very core of the critical platform. Respecting the gains achieved by such group, neogramscian intellectuals, such as Darder and Torres (2004), place the debate on racism within a different axel. Poverty, exploitation, and segregation dynamics so structural in the epistemicide cannot be detached from the capitalist modes of production and stripped from its ideological bone. Darder and Torres (2004) alert us about the dangerous of the use of “race as the central unity of analysis of racialized oppression and racism” (p. 98). Such centrality squashes ideological dynamics that fertilize capitalism’s unequal social structures. That is, “the failure to engage the political economy and its impact on class formations” (Darder and Torres, 2004, p. 4; hooks, 2000) situates the debates around critical issues, involving class, race, ethnicity, and gender in a dangerous vacuum— what one would call autonomy nullification, a kind of perpetual short-circuit in agency dynamics—for any counter-hegemonic agenda. The fallacy of the centrality of race, Darder and Torres (2004, p. 5) claim in examining the eugenic bone of the epistemicide, produces a “circularity of race logic” that legitimizes the erroneous cult that “racism exists because there such thing as race” (p. 100). Concomitantly, they (2004) add, such circularity not only ignores that “notions of racism are fundamental ideological constructions of race” (p. 100), but also attempts to weave (and in so many ways successfully) what I would coin as a zero-ideological ideology orbit, which fertilizes the ‘coloniality zone’ that “obscures and disguises class interests behind the smokescreen of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently whiteness” (Darder and Torres, 2004, p. 1). What is crucial is to perceive how the “empire is fueled by an ideology of racism” (Darder and Torres, 2004, p. 100). Many critical race theorists

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“operate with a narrowly US-centric view of race, delinked from global historical processes and comparativist genealogy” (Mills, 2017, p. 234) Critical race theory was also challenged by Blackcrit as being “a general theory of racism, and limited in its ability to adequately interrogate what we call the specificity of the Black (Dumas and Ross, 2006, p. 417; also, Wynter, 1989). CRT, they (2006, p.  426) add, which reinforced the “repressive Black/White paradigm” is not intended “to pointedly address how antiblackness—which is something different than White supremacy—informs and facilitates racist ideology and institutional practice” (Dumas and Ross, 2006, p.  417). Also, “it cannot fully employ the counterstories of Black experiences of structural and cultural racisms, because it does not, on its own, have language to richly capture how antiblackness constructs Black subjects, and positions them in and against law, policy, and everyday (civic) life.” Advancing BlackCrit, Dumas and Ross (2006, p.  417) argue, “helps us to more incisively analyze these “more detailed ways” that blackness continues to matter, and in relation to CRT, how blackness matters in our understanding of key tenets related to, for example, the permanence of racism and whiteness as property. Complexifying the argument, Baszile (2015) advances critical race feminist theory currere as an attempt to de-link from Eurocentric patriarchal patterns. Simply put, critical theory faces severe challenges from deep within its ranks. There is no doubt that the reinvigoration of critical theory depends on its ability to go beyond its own silences, although this is not an easy task. Contemporary works by Gore (1993), Watkins (1993), Pedroni (2002), Paraskeva (2018; 2017; 2016a; 2016b; 2007a; 2007b), Macedo and Frangella (2007), Lopes (2007), Baker (2009), Quantz (2011), Au (2012), Andreotti (2013), Cho (2013), Darder, Mayo, and Paraskeva (2016), Malewski (2010), Grant, Brown, and Brown (2016), Au, Brown, and Calderon (2016), and others reinforce the pain with the noisy silences produced by cirtical theory. These works posit the need to overcome some of the loose ends of the critical theoretical platform by advancing an inclusive approach that incorporates critical and post-structural dynamics. Pedroni (2002), in a deeper and more detailed analysis, unveiled not only the need to address some puzzling blockages within critical theory but also the possibilities for a collaborative framework, meanwhile noting the importance of paying attention to positive elements of both epistemological spaces. He argued that not only was “neo-Marxism in a need of a post-structural reworking [but also that] post-structural educational research would also benefit from a neo-Marxist reworking” (p. 26). The task was not simplistic in any sense of the word. Relying on Fraser and Fiske, Pedroni (2002) argued that the task at hand was neither a function of juxtaposing the critical with the post-structural nor an effort to “Gramscianize Foucault while Foucaultianizing Gramsci,” but, rather, to precisely and “simultaneously Gramscianize and Foucaultianize our own analyses” (p. 7). Moreover, as Santos (2018) sternly claims, “the meaning unsaids that emerge from the abyssal line dividing metropolitan and colonial societies and sociabilities in Western-centric modernity was ignored by Foucault” (p. 3). That is, Foucaultianism, regarding its tremendous

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accomplishments, is also about the “Foucaultian cultural unsaids” (Santos, 2018, p. 3). The task, Baker (2007) accurately claims, is to master a new wave of research, thus making visible the eloquent silences that were petrified (and sometimes ossified) by secular occlusions. In The Struggle for Pedagogies, Gore (1993) denies any attempt to formulate a prescriptive guidance. According to Gore, the best way to deal with the ongoing debates within radical pedagogies (specifically between critical and feminist theories) is to avoid any attempt to map out the entire field of radical pedagogy, as “such aims would be impractical” (p. xiii). Instead, one should “capture the dangers and gaps in the ongoing struggles for radical pedagogies” (p. xiii). Gore (1993)—in a way, echoing Ellsworth’s critique—challenges some critical intellectuals for the lack of examples and analysis and verification of their own critical theories in their own classrooms, a critique aknowledged by intellectuals, such as McLaren (1998, p.  361), admitting “the aporetic status of critical theory” and highlighting the level of sophistication as well as the importance of feminist theory in challenging the inconsistencies, silences, and incompleteness of critical approaches. In Gore’s (1993)—and McLaren’s and others’ too— critical approaches urged a new—theoretical—logic. An attempt to do just this appears in some interesting and powerful curriculum research platforms emerging in Brazil (cf. Alves, Sgarbi, Passos, and Caputo, 2007; Amorim, 2007; Bellini and Anastácio, 2007; Eyng and Chiquito, 2007; Ferraço, 2007; Garcia and Cinelli, 2007; Lopes, 2007; Macedo and Frangella, 2007; Pessanha and Silva, 2007; Rosa et al., 2007; Veiga Neto et al., 2007; Vieira, Hypolito, Klein, and Garcia, 2007). These scholars argue that the issue clearly is not about claiming a particular fixed critical or post-structural posture or assuming a kind of mixed position, but about a move from the critical to the post-critical or the post-structural perspectives. The new curriculum research platform or radical pedagogy detours from those platforms without denying them, sliding constantly within those approaches while in the midst of a friendly crossfire. In a way, it goes beyond a composite approach. It is unstable in that very position, and it assumes an idiosyncrasy that is sentient of the intricate dynamics of issues, such as hegemony, articulation, emancipation, identity, image, sounds, spaceless, timeless, and the (multiplicity of the) biosocial (multitude) self. In fact, the point is to be aware of assuming any position that is more complex than a hybrid position, one that cannot be atrophied by any claim of hybridity. It is not a hybrid position. Bhabha (1995) helps a great deal here: Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the “pure” and original identity and authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the recitation of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and

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domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power. (pp. 38–39) The point is to assume a posture that slides constantly among several epistemological frameworks, thus giving one better tool to interpret schools as social formations. Such a theoretical itinerant posture might be called a “deterritorialized,” rather than a composite device, as I lay out in Conflicts in Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva, 2011a), where I argued for the need for an Itinerant Curriculum Theory(ist) (ICT), a framework that I will examine later on as well. Conceptualizing it in this way can profoundly help one to more fully grasp concepts, such as hegemony, ideology, social emancipation, and power. When facing the nightmare of the present, as Pinar (2004) puts it, assuming this posture is quite valuable and necessary. Taking this posture is a powerful way not only to challenge the hegemonic way of thinking that gave to the English word a privileged position in scientific writing (Alves, Sgarbi, Passos, and Caputo, 2007), but also—and this is crucial—to challenge and overcome what Gore (1993) accurately denounces as U.S.-centric discourses or, as Autio (2009; 2006) put it “curriculum superdiscourses.” This is the case of policies such as ILEP—a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. ILEP is in affiliation with IREX that has its own interesting list of sponsors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Popkewitz (2001) did not minimize the strategies used in the production of reason and social progress, stating that “modern empirical methods in the social and educational sciences are largely predicated on the eye as giving truth” (p. 245). He maintained that qualitative studies, also, make the discipline of the eye a central repository of truth. Methodological discussions in education, for example, often discuss ethnographies as “naturalistic” studies. Such discussions pose the observation of “natural” events as directly visible through the eye and therefore more truthful than the vicarious methods of surveys. (p. 245) Gore (1993) argues further: “Since the U.S. is the location of much of the critical and feminist pedagogical discourses, one needs to question if that reflects an ethnocentrism or U.S.-centrism that ignores important pedagogical work going on elsewhere” (p. 45). Recently, Au’s (2012) critical reasoning reinforces the ideological card within what he calls “critical re-turn of curriculum studies” (p. 98). Sentient of the shortcuts of traditional counter-hegemonic forms, Au (2012, p.  9) challenges Wraga and Hlebowitsh’s (2003) call for a practice without ideological blinders. While expressing serious reservations about the mud surrounding critical and

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post-structural theories, Au (2012) argues that the revitalization of the field cannot turn its back on the practices that “exist in the context of the complex social, political and cultural relations of the material world,” in sum, within the dynamics of ideological production (p. 9). Another great contribution to address the shortcomings of the critical terrain was made by a leading contemporary curriculum scholar that challenged the field’s raceless embarrassment, William Watkins. Watkins not only (1993) championed race as the substantive card to understand a capitalist curriculum (quite crucial in the social metamorphosis of the financialization and culturalization of capital), but he also discloses the non-monolithic idiosyncrasies of Black curriculum. Such non-monolithisms well espoused in his six orientations regarding Black curriculum: functionalism (“fundamentally basic, oral with a substantive emphasis on the folklore” [p. 324]); accommodationism (“a more politically [coded] curriculum [for] a racially segregated industrial nation” [p. 324]); liberalism (“designed to develop the students’ analytical and critical faculties, and to help students become worldly, tolerant, and capable of significant societal participation” [p. 328]); reconstructionism (paced by the commitment with “a collectivist, egalitarian and reformed society” [p. 333]); Afrocentrism (challenging Eurocentric totalitarian epistemes) and Black nationalism/separatism (a radical position that challenges the shortcomings of the liberal orientation by advocating the need to return to the source, the mother land, and a cultural revolution that will lead to change). Admitting curriculum as ‘currere,’ Baszile (2010), without any euphemisms, argued for autobiography as a counter-history, or history proper, claiming for a critical race feminist currere (Baszile, 2015), thus echoing, as I have examined previously, McCarthy (1998), Ladson Billings and Tate IV (1995), among others, challenges against the condition of race within the field. The history of education, curriculum theory, and educational development since its emergence in the West in general and in the United States in particular is also the history of the capitalist system. That is a eugenic history at the very core of capitalism and crucial for the consolidation and development of what Arrighi (2005) calls the three hegemonic periods of capitalism, the last one being marked by the current neoliberal deluge. Thus, the dynamics of race and ethnicity cannot be marginalized, when applied to the curriculum phenomenon, either as a field of study or practice that fills the classroom. Influenced by McLaren’s classic Schooling as a Ritual Performance (1986), Quantz (2011) develops what he calls ritual critique, thus “moving away from the social sciences assumptions embedded in ethnography”; in so doing, he shows his debt to both the humanities and the social sciences “by recognizing that detailing and exploring ritual is as much about the reading of texts as it is about uncovering the patterns of lived culture” (p. 16). Such ritual critique, he stresses, has the potential to “find and illuminate the way in which material power is institutionalized into non-rational practices of our schools and lead us to replace them with new practices designed to celebrate democracy and justice” (p. 19). Thus, ritual critique is an ensemble of a political position that “can

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uncover the covert processes that construct and distort commonsense” (p. 19). Quantz (2011) brings to the fore a complex mix of rituals—transition rituals, identity rituals, rituals of solidarity, rituals of deference, rituals of respect—to reveal how those often ignored interfere with the dynamics of ideological production in schools. According to Quantz (2011), the biggest obstacle to recognizing the importance of ritual results from a larger problem: The assumption that the most important part of schooling is located in the rational intentions inscribed in the curriculum and pedagogy. Never has rationality been stressed more than under the No Child Left Behind policies that emphasize explicit outcomes, precise numbers, and research based instruction. The assumption that humans act rationally is one of the earliest and most fundamental flaws of much of educational policy. (p. 5) While currently the emphasis has been put in Race to the Top (RTTT) Policies, it would be easy to admit that RTTT is just NCLB on steroids. Before we move on with examining Quantz’s reasoning, it would be wise to contextualize the new evaluation of teachers within the cultural politics of rituals. Teachers need proof with pieces of paper and photos that ‘certain things really happen.’ Thus, ridiculous as it might be, teachers, for example, take a picture of the kids saying the pledge of allegiance, so that it can be used as evidence of certain requirements in the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) for new teachers. Reflecting on this in light of the question of (ir)rationality so eloquently raised by Quantz obviously brings forward a myriad of questions, namely, how do we define rational, and who does(n’t)? For instance, is it rational to expect a child who has only been learning English for two years to perform at the same level on a standardized test as a child who has been speaking English for 16 years? Or, for a child who goes hungry and doesn’t know whether his father is going to beat him when he gets home to have an equivalent performance as a child who has a safe and warm home to return to every evening? These are the realities that have been rationalized and normalized in today’s schools. The irrational is disguised in a cloak of rationality. What the dominant hegemonic pedagogic tradition wants is a lean, mean, and packageable pedagogic environment, not something that pays serious attention to what is naturally messy, spontaneous, unpredictable, non-technical. As a way to challenge dominant traditions and to look for “an alternative approach to the problems of critical theory that provided the benefits of poststructuralism without its pitfalls” (p.  ix), Quantz and O’Connor (2011) rely heavily on the conceptual legacy of Mikhail Bakhtin (1973), and the so-called Bakhtian circle, to avoid the ways that dominant and specific counter-dominant traditions misrepresent how crucial rituals are to understanding the dynamics of ideological production portrayed in schools and the curriculum (Apple, 1979; Giroux, 1981a; 1992) and to understanding multifaceted dimensions of

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cultural life in social institutions, such as schools. Quantz and O’Connor (2011) argue that Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia, dialogue, multivoicedness, and carnival are crucial in weaving such a theoretical quilt. Following the rationale of Miami University cultural studies intellectuals, Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia recognizes and implies that culture, society, and individuals are constituted by a multiplicity of voices. In other words, the concept of heteroglossia entails not only “multiple dimensions of cultural life [but also concomitantly] legitimates difference of opinion and restores the individual’s voice in the creation of their cultural patterns” (p. 46). It is in this context that one needs to understand the Bakhtian wrangle of language—utterance, a theoretical tussle that recognizes language as “a social process instead of as an individual object” (p. 49). Quantz and O’Connor (2011) argue further that “since meaning can only be constructed in the concrete utterance, language only makes sense as a social concept” (p. 49). They claim that such human utterance not only “is formed within historical constraints” but also exhibits concurrently “a dialogic consciousness that is socially as well as ideologically located within specific material and symbolic realms” (p. 49). While the concept of dialogue helps one to understand the clashes between and within “legitimate and non-legitimate voices” (p. 50), Quantz and O’Connor (2011) stress that the concept of multivoicedness helps one to grasp accurately the “complexity and contradictions that mark the lives of minority group members [and] prohibits a unified individual or a consensual society” (p.  51). In fact, as Bakhtin (1973) states, the human being always has “something that only [s/he] can reveal in a free act of consciousness and discourse” (p. 58). Bakhtin’s particular “something” cannot be (un)covered by an “externalized second hand definition” (p. 58). It is in this context that Quantz and O’Connor (2011) highlight Bakhtin’s (1973) use of carnival to understand the less visible dynamics underpinning the oppressed. As they argue, the study of the medieval carnival can provide an example of one site where the non-legitimated voice can find communal expression and establish the potential for legitimation and eventual collective action and suggest carnivalesque possibilities for our contemporary times. Carnival is a public occasion marked by festivity, laughter, licentiousness, excess, and grotesqueness. (pp. 52–53) In fact, Quantz and O’Connor (2011) note that “carnival acts to release social tensions and to permit the formation of nascent counter hegemony [that] contains the conditions necessary for the creation of class consciousness, that is, the social legitimation of silenced voices” (p. 53). In this regard, both Quantz and O’Connor (2011) see carnival as a transformative and revolutionary practice, a victory of laughter over fear, an open defeat of power through “grotesque humor, its emphasis on feasting, defecating, disembowelment, coitus, and other body related actions” (p. 53). It is a democratic, spontaneous, creative,

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unrepeated set of actions. This multitude of concepts and practices is profoundly important, Quantz and O’Connor (2011) argue, in a Bakhtian way for what they call a “polyphonic ethnographer” (p. 62), or one who understands dialogue as ideological and “listen[s] carefully for evidence of the multivoicedness that characterizes their informants’ consciousness” (p. 63). They (2011) argue further that polyphonic ethnography is crucial when listening to the disempowered[, since one] must listen closely to the multiple voices with which they speak. This is especially true for those ethnographers interested in discovering how the dominant cultures have penetrated the consciousness of the disempowered and given them a voice that leads them to participate in their own oppression. (p. 63) In terms of carnival, Quantz and O’Connor (2011) claim, the polyphonic ethnographer needs to understand how individuals maintain ambivalence “in their ideological communities” and how, by being aware of the contradictions between inward and outward speeches, the polyphonic researcher will “reveal that the high status of the class clown, the ribaldry found in making a fool of a teacher, the decidedly festive atmosphere of school cafeterias serve as carnivalesque moments” (p. 65). The ethnographer, they say, needs to reveal where the unofficial consciousness of the carnival in educational leadership and policy and where the medieval carnival in the field of educational and curriculum studies are located. In her systemic analysis on critical pedagogy, Cho (2013) unveils some concerns related with critical education as well. Cho (2013) reveals the following: First, we “need to clarify just what critical pedagogy is, particularly because there is a de-politicize[d] version/view of it” (p. 156); second, ideas, such as social change, social transformation, emancipation, liberation, democracy, equality, diversity, and social justice, “have been so contaminated by the right and commercialized by market economy that it is hard to take them a face value” (p. 157); third, “the core issues of education are understood and defined as moral/ethical problems. Critical pedagogy has become, essentially, a moralizing project, or, more specifically, about moralizing individuals” (p.  157); fourth, the real problem of critical pedagogy is not “too much culture and postmodernism but rather their misunderstanding and misuse” (p. 158); fifth, the focus on the microlevel “loses track of the prize [and] the prize is social change” (p. 159); sixth, critical pedagogy “tends to be underpinned by localist/ particularist politics” (p. 159); finally, the “tendency of idealism is quite problematic [that is] when critical pedagogy concentrates on ideals without presenting concrete pragmatic projects, it can become idealistic, even speculative” (p. 159). As we will see later on, several critical thinkers and pedagogies from a Marxist/neo-Marxist perspectives, despite a notorious challenge against the hegemonic dominant traditions, are in the face of a major yet inevitable

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challenge: the need to decolonize. Make no mistakes. The ‘generation of the utopia’ achieved many accomplishments. When the generation to “which they belonged was born, they found a world devoid of support for those with brains and heart” (Pessoa, 2002, p.  163). We are talking about a generation that has revolutionized the way we think about education and curriculum, a generation that has invaded the educational and curriculum phenomenon with a new vocabulary, a new language also proving that “there are metaphors that are much more real than many people who walk on the street” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 149). A generation who also confessed that “to know is to err” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 143) and who dared not only to “dream in prose” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 147), but have tried through the construction of a collective prose to project a collective utopia. The richness of the historical legacy of this critical radical curriculum river is unquestionable. We owe to the tributaries of such river the fact that not only the current educational dialogic cannot run away from the ‘epistemicide’, but also that such dialogic has flowed into belligerent wrangles between North and South Global advocates. Looking at the terrain of this generation (of utopia) and dissecting without complexes and euphemisms what was possible and impossible to realize, and the reasons for such possibilities and impossibilities, could be a first step in understanding the reasons such a sophisticated movement could not interrupt a secular epistemicide and impose itself as dominant. This is also the best way to continue to do critical theory. We owe them a great deal. Also, I argue that the quality of the work in the field did not diminish; however, “the conditions that prompted and informed so much pioneering work have either disappeared or come to be reformulated on different terrain” (Jones, 2013, p. 3). It is undeniable that in the process of challenging dominant traditions, specific critical approaches not only ended up being functionalists as the functionalism they severely and rightly so criticized, but also, in seeking alternatives just within the Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix, they ended up not helping in the battle against the epistemicide. They have been incapable of interrupting the epistemicide. This is not a minor issue and establishes a clear line between critical poststrucutural and post-modern and feminist theories and decolonial and anti-colonial intellectuals that saw critical poststructural and post-modern and feminist theories as fundamentally part of the Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix contaminated with the same virus that produced and legitimized other non-Western Eurocentric epistemologies as ‘non-existent’ (Santos, 2014). Painful as it might be, radical and critical theories and pedagogies not only were inconsequential in interrupting and destroying the epistemicide perpetrated via curriculum, but they inadvertently perpetuated its tentacles. To say that radical and critical theories and pedagogies are ‘part of the epistemicide’ might be read as a loaded statement; but the truth is they were incapable of smashing it, despite their efforts to contravene. Again, I would like to be very clear here to avoid any misreading. Critical radical theories and pedagogies offered our field a tremendous contribution. They achieved unquestionable theoretical victories. They coined the field politically and completely transformed the way one thinks of curriculum. These theories

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allowed us to perceive the importance of examining curriculum issues in light of the dynamics of ideological production, underpinned by class race, gender, and sexual orientation—dynamics that intersect with categories, such as economics, politics, culture, and one could add spirituality. Moreover, they helped us to realize how these dynamics and categories have relative autonomy: shaking the throne of positivism, placing emphasis on the power of the person, the autobiographical, and the body at the center of curriculum debate. They alerted us to examine curriculum in context, and to place it in the great picture of the powerful social movements of each time. Thus, I repeat, the works of Greene, Huebner, Mann, Apple, Giroux, Pinar, Miller, Grumet are precious to understand this crucial contribution. However, despite their valuable contribution, the fact that this progressive radical critical curricular river—which has never been monolithic—has always exhibited difficulties in going beyond a certain epistemological framework defined by ‘the’ modernity that they were fighting. Herein lies one of the anathemas that is urgent to dismantle. Moreover, scholars steeped in the critical tradition such as Greene, Huebner, Mann, Apple, Giroux, Pinar, Miller, Grumet have always been aware of this anathema (Paraskeva, 2011a; 2014; 2016a). There is then a clear self-criticism solidly built by this critical radical curriculum river. In this context, my argument is built on a deep respect for these intellectual conquests—which, after all, have allowed us to arrive to this point in the debate. The functionalism that ended up corroding critical theory and pedagogy was also dissected by myself (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; 2014; 2011a; 2007a; 2007b) within the framework of the non-Western and non-Eurocentric global decolonial matrix. In another contexts (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; 2014; 2011a; 2007a; 2007b), and influenced by work of Santos and other critical decolonial intellectuals, I denounced what I called the curriculum epistemicide and examined how critical counter-hegemonic movements were not only incapable of interrupting such epistemicide but were also in many cases—given its functionalist character—complicit. I named this moment by an epistemicide within the epistemicide. I have examined and challenged the incomprehensible incapacity of counter-hegemonic movements within Western Eurocentric Modernity in stripping themselves of the armor of Eurocentric Modernity and rendering and recognizing legitimacy to a vast plurality of non-Western and non-Eurocentric epistemes within and beyond the Western Eurocentric platform. In this context, and as a way of responding to the inoperativeness of the critical and post-critical Western Eurocentric platforms, I formulate “itinerant curriculum theory” (ICT) (Paraskeva, 2011a; 2011b; 2007a) as a future theoretical path for our field. I will return to this issue later on. While I fully agree that the lethal nature of the functionalist character swamped critical and post-critical approaches, I argue that subsumed in such functionalism relies a frightening incapacity to respect and recognize epistemological diversity within and beyond Modern Western Eurocentric terms—in some cases non-Western, non-Eurocentric epistemological platforms become exoticized.

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Nevertheless, I have encouraged “radical critical intellectuals to challenge and decolonize the totalitarianism of the platform in which most of them operate” (Paraskeva, 2016a, p.  13; 2011a; 2014). Despite attributions made to Freire’s work by major exponents of the field, Darder et al. (2016) argue that “the field in general has been presented with a decidedly North American ring to it. Stretched further, it incorporates insights from an Anglo-dominated world, which includes USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom” (p. 2). That is the southern voices incorporated, although important voices in the majority world, still are those ensconced in the intellectual traditions dominated by Western North-American scholarship. And yet we would argue that there is an international dimension to the field that extends well beyond these limited geographical contours. It includes radical intellectuals from different parts of the world, some of whom make no bones about subscribing to critical pedagogy; while others, including historical revolutionary figures and social movements, who have addressed similar issues concerning education and power, would not have called themselves so, particularly since they anticipated ‘critical pedagogy’ by several years, and, in certain cases, a century or more. (Darder et al., 2016, p. 2) Although on the one hand, the emergence of the neoliberal hegemonic bloc at the end of 1970s, with all its innovative and transformative metamorphoses (which made it extremely dangerous, since neoliberalism almost reinvents itself everyday day), was in a way (un)expected, and the generation of the utopia fought it tenaciously and vigorously and with manifested successes, the fact is that it mercilessly ignored that the struggle against the dominant groups and specifically against neoliberalism could never be completely victorious by working only within a Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platform itself, after all the first and ultimate responsibility for the major atrocities committed historically. There is clearly an unconscious connivance that is urgent to interrupt. It is undeniable though that through curriculum in its form and contents, neoliberalism is increasingly imposing itself as a public pedagogy that has been responsible for the production of what Berardi (2012, p. 15) calls “swarms” which increasingly makes our task more complex. A swarm, he (2012) states, is a plurality of living beings whose behavior follows (or seems to follow) rules embedded in their neutral system. Biologists call a swarm a multitude of animals of similar size and bodily orientation, moving together in the same direction and performing actions in a coordinated way, like bees building a hive or moving toward a plant where they can find resources for making honey. (pp. 15–16)

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Within social havoc, that is “in conditions of social hypercomplexity, human beings tend to act as a swarm. When the infosphere is too dense and too fast for conscious elaboration of information people tend to conform to shared behavior. Power becomes all about making things easy” (Berardi, 2012, p. 15). To be more precise, “in a hypercomplex environment that cannot be properly understood and governed by the individual mind, people will follow simplified pathways and will use complexity-reducing interfaces. Social life becomes a swarm and in a swarm it is not impossible to say no. It’s irrelevant” (Berardi, 2012, p. 15). The failure of a working-class triumphalist moment, Aronowitz (1973) argues, was due to the success of capitalism in providing the material requirements for life. Workers may go so far as to support trade unions and even socialist parties. However, socialism in the West has become a means by which workers obtain a redress of grievances within capitalist society, rather than an instrument for its transformation. Although the rhetoric of revolution serves to provide militant symbols that arouse social action, there is no doubt that the would-be revolutionary elements that are present in all Western countries, including the United States have failed to connect themselves with decisive sections of the population. Underlying the view that in the absence of economic crisis that would affect the material conditions of the working class, capitalism will succeed in maintaining itself for the foreseeable future, is the idea that great historical changes can only occur when the prevailing economic system and the institutions of political power have broken down. (p. 51) However, notwithstanding the violence and cruelty of neoliberalism that we should not minimize in our analyses, we must also realize the contradictions that emerge at the very heart of counter-dominant platforms; that is, in the battle between dominant and counter-dominant groups regardless of accomplishments from the latter, it would also end up producing a surge within the very own counter-hegemonic tradition exposing the wounds created, among others, by a myriad of critical, poststructuralist, postmodernist, feminist crucial wrangles. Such wrangles would end up being proved insufficient. I argue such insufficiency as one of the enzymes to help us forward. The battle between traditional hegemonic movements and ‘the generation of the utopia,’ despite noteworthy accomplishments of the latter, tended to create a diffuse and opaque zone, a kind of theoretical putrefaction, a theoretical pitch, a profound impasse. Dangerously, such impasse of the present “everywhere in evidence is everywhere denied” (The Invisible Committee, 2009, p.  28). Paradoxically, the great and unmistakable advances of the generation of the utopia created a long and hesitant moment. The great and massive theoretical evolution and development—dominant and counter-dominant—led to an involution, a curriculum involution. Evolution meant involution, a state of regression that

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delays our epistemologically just walk towards the utopia. Should the field’s utopia be anchored in a utopian theory? What a great avenue to be itinerantly explored in the future.

Notes 1. The examples are countless. While in Spain the critical river flows into the education and curriculum field through the works of Jose Gimeno Sacristan, Julia Varela, Mariano Enguita, Jurjo Torres Santome, and many others, and in Brazil through the works of Paulo Freire, Tomaz Tadeu da Silva, Antonio Moreira, Nilda Alves, Dermerval Saviani, Gaudencio Firgotto, Alfredo Veiga Neto, and more recently Elizabeth Macedo and Alice Lopes, and others, in Argentina Adriana Puigros, in Mexico Alicia de Alba and in South Africa Jonathan Jassen, In this regard see Darder, Antonia; Mayo, Peter and Paraskeva, Joao (2016) The Internationalization of Critical Pedagogy. An Introduction. In Antonia Darder, Peter Mayo and João Paraskeva (Eds) International Critical Pedagogy Reader. New York: Routledge, pp., 1–14 2. As I have examined elsewhere (2004), these three volumes structured the first part of Apple’s trilogy, a concept quite crucial to understand Apple’s cartography. 3. Although TUSD has three other ethnic studies courses besides MAS, which are in violation of at least Section 3 of the statute, they are not accused of being in violation, nor have they been told that they need to be terminated. Superintendent Horne received complaints only for MAS; “therefore this finding is as to that program alone” (p. 2). The evidence besides the testimony of Huppenthal and Horne seem to be lacking to support this. Even the language of Horne’s report is discriminatory or prejudiced writing about a teacher in the ethnic studies program “TUSD teacher named John Ward, despite his name, is Hispanic”(Horne, 2010, p.  4). Mr. Horne’s language is associating that there are certain linguistic markers through names that enable us to label people as being “Hispanic,” which the term “Hispanic” itself denotes the colonial power/oppression of the Americas. However, Horne doesn’t seem to care, because he also said, “They divide kids by race, they have La Raza studies for the Latino kids, African American studies for the African American kids, Indian studies for the Indian kids, Asian studies for the Asian kids, it’s just like the old south [sic] and they’ve got everybody divided up by race” (emphasis added, KVOA). He doesn’t understand the histories of these ethnicities, which he claims to being helping to educate. Horne clarifies his statements saying, “I think it’s overdue, The Department of Education will now have the authority to put a stop to extremely dysfunctional practices in Tucson Unified School District” (KVOA).

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6

Curriculum Involution. Severe Occidentosis

“Capitalism needs a human being who has never yet existed—one who is prudently restrained in the office and widely anarchic in the shopping mall.” (Eagleton, 2003, p 28)

As I was able to argue elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2017), such clashes between dominant and specific counter-dominant traditions and within each of these traditions fueled what I would call, drawing from Gil (2009), a ‘curriculum involution.’ The (n)eugenic struggles for the U.S. curriculum always were the battles between, on one side, the so-called non-monolithic dominant groups that throughout the centuries (end of the nineteenth, twentieth, and beginning of the twenty-first centuries) fought for a curriculum archaeology (Kliebard, 1995; Doll, 1993; Schubert and Lopez Schubert, 1980; Watkins, 2001) that perpetuated and legitimized a specific Modern Western Eurocentric eugenic epistemology based on a racial scientificity of science and society (the yoke of white, blond, blue-eyed, heterosexual male and Christian) and, on the other side, the so-called non-monolithic counter-dominant groups that also throughout the centuries fought tenaciously to smash the dominant tradition and establish a more progressive non-eugenic, non-racial educational and curriculum culture (the very seed of the preparation on the new human being). Needless to say, the lines of such wrangles are quite fuzzy, constituting a blur zone that invalidates any attempt to dichotomize it. However, while the former openly championed the epistemicide, the latter ended up being incapable of interrupting such epistemicide and, in many ways, ended up helping the scientific and social perpetuation of such anathema. In fact, non-monolithic counter-dominant groups, in general, were unable to understand that they were working on an epistemological platform that was indeed the source of the problem that was trying to be addressed, thus constituting an exhausted, maxed-out platform. Dabashi (2015, p.  11) helps great deal here: From modernity to postmodernity, from structuralism to poststructuralism, from constructivism to desconstructvism, European philosophers chase after their own tails; and what was called postcolonialism in and of itself

224 Severe Occidentosis was a product of European colonial imagining that wreaked havoc on this earth and finally ran aground. We are no longer postcolonial creatures. Moreover, in many ways, specific counter-dominant traditions were actually crucial enzymes of the epistemicide as well. As I examined before, and as we will see later on, in criticizing the functionalism of the dominant traditions, counter-dominant traditions became as functionalist as the functionalism they criticized. For example, advocates of the counter-dominant traditions saw the production of the ‘new man’ (i.e. ‘new human being’) within an alternative path, yet within the Western Modern Eurocentric platform, not beyond. In such sometimes ruthless struggles, neither the dominant nor the counterdominant traditions were able to claim full victory; thus, we keep experiencing an increasing void between, on one hand, the absence of the solifidication of a fully racialized curriculum—we do have countless examples of counterdominant victories—and, on the other hand, the full absence of the emergence of the new human being. In Gil’s (2009) terms, ‘transformation’ did not happen out of such battles. Paradoxically, or maybe not, there was no tragedy, Gil (2009) would argue. And within such impasse, the epistemicide keeps being perpetuated. There is thus a void defined by a paradox between ‘the old man’ that did not die completely and the promise of a ‘new human being’ that never emerged. Neither the old social order remained safe nor the new social order emerged. To recapture Gramsci’s (1999, p. 276) arguments raised before, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” To be more precise, neither the ‘old human being’ died nor the ‘creation’ of the new human being was fully accomplished. Such vacuity is a feature of our “anxiogenic times fertilizing the return to the themes of ontological difference” (Mbembe, 2019, p. 64); an anxiogenic time which is the incubator of the ‘necropolitical momentum.’ Such involution stages have blocked countless attempts to at minimum interrupt such “necropowers, i.e. new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (Mbembe, 2019, p. 92): a necropolitical momentum fostered by a necropolitical curriculum. To draw on Gil’s (2009) rationale, “the emptiness caused by the promises of the revolutions that were either underway or those that were in the making were filled by the bad habits of the past” (p. 11). The wrangle old-new human being was based on a Cartesian delusional paradox of the possibility of a perfect immaculated human that doesn’t exist (Pessoa, 2002). Counterhegemonic approaches could not provide a full-blast liberation theory; or better say the liberation theories provided by the rich counter-hegemonic approaches were unable to fully liberate. To recapture what I flagged previously, instead of a Tupac Amaru II momentum—“a deserved death for the oppressor and oppressed theoretical approaches” (see Walker, 2014; Gates, 1928; Means, 1919)1—one witnesses an involution. That is, while capitalism needs and seeks “a human being who has never yet existed—one who is prudently restrained in the office and widely anarchic in the shopping mall” (Eagleton, 2003, p.  28)—counter-hegemonic movements

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and groups, while able to deconstruct the lethal nature of such capitalist social casserole, they have been unable to break the modes and conditions of production propelling the capitalist matrix, and, to catalyze the emergence of a new autonomous human being free from the social and cognitive chains of oppression, segregation, and inequality. The inability to dominantly establish ‘their human being’ is the malaise affecting dominant and counter-dominant platforms. Both dominant and counter-dominant traditions were working within the coloniality frameworks of being, power, knowledge, and labor. However, in many ways counter-dominant movements were unable to fully destroy the dominant tradition and impose not just an alternative curriculum platform but a non-abyssal curriculum that respects non-Western Eurocentric epistemological frameworks. In fact, counter-dominant positions seemed to somehow be lost, and adress the following question in a “waiting chamber of the present, to what texts should we turn in determining a critical stance adequate for our situaton”? (Balakrishnan, 2005, p. 6). Marcuse (2000, p. 7) has pressed the right buttons when he argued that unless a human being “possesses concepts and principles of thought that denote universally valid conditions and norms, their thought cannot claim to govern reality.” To rely on Gil’s (2009) framework, these battles represented no ‘real’ tragedy as they were stripped of their tragic dimension. Instead a curriculum involution occurred (Gil, 2009), a kind of non (all) human beings space and time that, in too many ways, points into a ‘regression.’ The improvement drove into regression. In fact, such curriculum involution is quite in sync with the contemporary ‘retrogressive anthropogenesis’ I have dissected previously. That is, these great accomplishments of the past and present are not just at risk of stagnation but of nullification. Such involution state promotes a crisis in education with “political, social, ethical, and spiritual consequences” (Giroux, 2011, p. 11). And, in such eugenic regression process, shockingly, as we examined before, one witnesses our time as a time of alarming decay and social sagas that we had thought had been completely eliminated, a “modern time without modern solutions” (Santos, 2009) that is infected by strong questions and weak answers. [This] discrepancy seems to be everywhere. Strong questions address not only our specific options for individual and collective life but also the social and epistemological paradigm that has shaped the current horizon of possibilities within which we make our options. Weak answers are those that don’t challenge the horizon of possibilities, the still dominant paradigm, [but] not all weak answers are the same. There are both weak-strong and weak-weak answers. Weak-strong answers represent the maximum possible of a given people. Weak-weak answers take the current paradigm or horizon of possibilities as a given and refuse to admit its historical, political and cultural aims. (Santos, 2009, p. 3) Berardi (2012), relying on Wiener’s parlance, puts forward the notion of “positive feedback” to define the hypercomplex epistemological environment of our

226 Severe Occidentosis times. Contrary to negative feedback, positive feedback “increases the magnitude of a perturbation in response to the perturbation itself ” (p. 12). Furthermore, In conditions of infoaccelaration and hypercomplexity as the conscious and rational will becomes unable to check and to adjust to trends, the trends themselves become self-reinforcing up to the point of final collapse. Look at the vicious circle. Right-wing electoral victories and dictatorships of ignorance. (Berardi, 2012, p. 12) These belligerent battles that opposed hegemonic and counter-hegemonic movements, and also the wrangles within such movements, promoted a kind of theoretical coup d’etat, an attack on the space and time of theory, a theoretical agony, a theorycide, paving the way for a dangerous anti-intellectual intellectualism, one of the enzymes of the de-skilling of teachers. Anti-intellectualism is the new form of intellectualism forcing educators to comply with corporate models of schooling, and partnering with the dangerous cult of trivializing teaching as a mere technical skill. In such dangerous spiral of social and pedagogical disaster, one witnesses overtly concerted attacks on theory—honestly of any kind—in a field populated by thirsty rationales based on buzzwords such as ‘turn around models.’ Intellectualism is becoming a rare collectable in school settings (Paraskeva, 2013). To echo Sloterdijk’s (2011) reasoning, wrapped within such new forms of anti-intellectual inellectualism, educators face challenges not just in situating themselves, but in grasping how to exist by enacting epistemological diferences. With the consolidation of the newfar-right agenda, facilitated with political leaders such as Donald Trump and others, such new intellectualism, or thin-intellectualism, becomes more solidified. In fact, by stripping theory from its social and ethical matrix, dominant groups have been able concomitantly to create and legitimize the dangerous notion that “knowledge is value-free” (Giroux, 2011, p. 26), a towering aspect of modernist curriculum. Such curriculum, in Autio’s (2006) terms, is rooted in a eugenic empiria; that is, “truths and pragmatic efectiveness are stripped out of all metaphysical and moral considerations, and form a a kind of circular curricular reason in curriculum planning, where educational goals are constantly revised in the light of ‘scientific findings’ and ‘needs’ of society” (p. 114). The attack on the space and time of theory, the theorycide, needs to be framed and unpacked within what Gil (2009) delineates as the antinomy of power. Such curriculum involution (Gil, 2009), I argue, forces us to examine not just critical theory, but the very future of theory in our field within what Gil (1998) calls “antinomy of power”; in doing so, and being a “theory of society against domination in all of its forms” (Held, 1980, p. 35), as we stated previously, critical theory and pedagogies of society “are a discourse of power and on power” (Gil, 1998, p. 58.9). Placing critical theory within Gil’s (1998, p.  56.9) fourth antinomy of power—“on the limits of power”—equips us with better arguments to unpack what I diagnosed as ‘curriculum involution.’ Gil (1998) scrutinizes the limits of power within a thesis and antithesis yarn; that is the limits of power needed to be

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contemplated between and within a thesis, which states that “all power has a beginning and an ending in time and has limited spatial territory” (Gil, 1998, p. 56.9), and an antithesis, which states that “power has neither a beginning nor an ending in time nor does it have spatial limits” (Gil, 1998, p.  56.9). That is, the proof of the thesis relies on the fact that “if the power had neither a beginning nor an ending in time, each power, at any given time, could only constitute of or be a link in a vaster power that would have preceded it and would follow it” (Gil, 1998, p. 56.9). As for the antithesis, “if power had an absolute beginning and an end in time, there would be time preceding this beginning, and time after the end, when there could be no power” (Gil, 1998, p. 57.9). I argue that curriculums scholars need to deal with both ‘contradictory definitions.’ That is, there is a fundamental contradiction on the definition on the limits of power in both thesis and antithesis. As for the antithesis, one could not see from what source each power would get its foundation and origin which are essential elements for a source to become a power. Nor could we see the outcome of any power, given that, inevitably having to end, it contains its negation in itself as an internal feature. (Gil, 1998, p. 57.9) As for the thesis, if power has a beginning and an ending “then each power would carry some element of impotence or weakness” (Gil, 1998, p. 56.9), which is a contradiction as well. However, Gil (1998) argues, that “the efects of such antinomy [are] felt everywhere and [help] one to see that both thesis and antithesis understood power as existing in time and doing its work on space” (p. 58.9). To better understand the accomplishments, frustrations, and failures of critical theories and pedagogies of society, one needs to understand in which way critical impulses fit and respond to such antinomy. That is, what is the palpable finitude of critical theory? Is critical theory a framework designed out of finitude? Whose finitude? Can we divagate on the infinitude of the critical? How big is such infinitude? Whose infinitude? Who defines such finitude? What constitutes such finitude or the lack thereof ? Is it really important or not to figure that out? How can one explore both time and space of such critical framework even if it is ‘finiteless’ or ‘infiniteless’? In which space and time can we explore the what/whose continuity and discontinuity of critical approaches? Are the Modern Western Eurocentric counter-dominant traditions completely exhausted? Exploring the (in)finitude of critical theory will allow one to understand what kind of “elements of impotence or weakness” (Gil, 1998, p. 56.9) it carries, as well as the real colors of space and time “preceding its beginning and its end” (Gil, 1998, p. 56.9). That is, knowing fully well that “there is no future without death” (Saramago, 2009), and knowing that critical approaches are not dead and very far from that state, I guess I don’t want to ask “what is its future?” but I would state that it is important to understand and examine what actually died within the multitude of the critical platform. Sentient of Santos’s (1999) examination challenging critical theory that reveals the contradictions created by and during the heyday of neo-Gramscianism

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and its contradictory antifunctionalist functionalism, I argue that one needs to pay close attention to Gil’s (1998) ‘metamorphoses of power.’ That is, and to rely on Gil’s (1998) rationale, if power “is understood as power over a territory (and I would add time, as well), any definition beyond its limits will always be precarious” (p. 58.9). To place critical theories and pedagogies in such matrix is to question the real colors of the way power over an epistemological time and space have been examined as well. That is, to unpack the knots of the involution that our field faces, one has to understand the real limits of critical theory and pedagogy. One of the fundamental limitations relies on its incapacity to break from the heavy chains of the Western Modern Eurocentric epistemological platform. Although critical theories and pedagogies understood fully well that any given (counter)power produces naturally “another space of power” (Gil, 1998, p. 58.9), the truth is that the debates and challenges and battles occurred only within Western Modern Eurocentric epistemological agora. Pundits within both dominant and counter-dominant traditions wield arguments based just on a particular Eurocentric framework, which proved to be part of the problem, i.e. the epistemicide (Santos, 2014), the curriculum epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2016a; 2016b; 2016c; 2017). That is, while Gil (1998) is accurate when he claims that “any power that has territorial frontiers must always cross them to better assure its power” (p. 57.9), the truth is that most critical theory and pedagogies repeatedly fail to recognize that a sustainable and just cross of such frontiers will never happen in a sustainable way, if they will not strip themselves from the totalitarian cult of Western Modern Eurocentric epistemological rationale. Critical theory and pedagogies’ antinomy of power needs to explode with the chains of its coloniality shares (Santos, 2007a), a colonial zone that is now paved by such involution(ary) momentum that produces a dangerous ossification of the hypertrophy of theory of any kind, as odd as it might be. I would argue that the (in)finitude of critical approaches needed to consciously assume not just such curriculum involution, but also, importantly, its very own ‘skin in the game,’ an involution that by not creating a ‘transformation and tragedy’ (Gil, 1998) ended up solidifying the matrix, the lethal impact of the colonial zone. Curriculum involution is a current perpetrator of the epistemicide, “par excellence, the realm of incomprehensible beliefs and behaviors which in no way can be considered knowledge, whether true or false” (Santos, 2007b, p. 51). The other side of the line, Santos (2007b, p. 51) adds, harbors only incomprehensible magical or idolatrous practices. The utter strangeness of such practices led to denying the very human nature of the agents of such practices. On the basis of their refined conceptions of humanity and human dignity, the humanists reached the conclusion that the savages were sub-human. Such involution triggers a fatigue of abstract reasoning “which is the most horrible fadigue out of all fadigues” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 60). Dangerously at the yoke

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of such involution the transformative capacity of theory gets nullified, as curriculum theory, to rely on Baudrillard (2001a) words, erroneosly assumes “to be a pale reflection of the real the pious vow of a perpetual Enlightentment” (p. 129); its ‘healthy’ destructive dimension gets irremediably annihilated. Such field’s involution fuels a new normalcy of ‘new chaos and rhythm’ or rhythm within chaos (Gil, 2018) in the field. Looking in the field “there is not just chaos; there are multiple regimes of chaos” (Gil, 2018, p. 293), with all its own rhythms, all very unique, specific and many of them unpredictable—yet uninterrupted. Chaos and its rhythm colonize space and time; it is “contagious, attracts, mines, contaminates, congeminates and drags moving bodies” (Gil, 2018, p. 296). Space, Pessoa (2006) says, “if [it] exists, it must exist somewhere. Where? In space, but space cannot exist by itself. Space cannot be the reason for its own existence” (p. 41). The challenge, or one of the challenges is that “the rhythm of chaos does not have the same plane as the rhythmic” (Gil, 2018, p. 297), and the only way out of chaos is through the rhythm of chaos (Gil, 2018, p. 297). Our field faces a herculean task as “there are no theoretical formulas or procedures that guarantee that one leaves the chaos, its rhythms” (Gil, 2018, p. 296). Chaos and its rhythms become social habitus, and there is no possible existence out of such rhythm of chaos, a chaos that “cannot be defined or closed or even imprisoned in the rigor of words; it has no tonic accent on what it is not; it inaugurates the appearance of things not because it engenders them, but because it removes them (Gil, 2018, pp. 375–376). In our curriculum involution momentum, “chaos and its rhythm stopped the unthinkable” (Gil, 2018, p. 376), thus legitimizing what Pinar (2004) calls presentism or what I called momentism (Paraskeva, 2016a; 2014)—a momentum in which, among other things, everything has become contemporary: It is no longer ‘contemporary of ’; one is simply contemporary, by essence. Everything became contemporary because everything gained an empirical sense, reality has been reduced to what you see, the transparency of the technical-scientific sense that is yours. We cease to be ‘contemporaries of ’, creators of our time, to be all coexistent in the same plane in which each one is only exclusively contemporary. (Gil, 2018, p. 404) In such state, “moment shrinks to a fleeting point in time, devoid of heirs and free of goals” (Han, 2017, p. 5). Being ‘contemporary of ’ in Gil’s (2018) terms, is to “reduce the present to a point of currentness” (Han, 2017, p. 5); it drains the ‘already-not yet’ dialectial tension (Han, 2017). Being ‘contemporary of ’ (Gil, 2018) is ‘the totalization of Here and Now, that disinvests the in-between spaces of any meaning” (Han, 2017, p. 37). Such ‘contemporary of ’ (Gil, 2018) leaves only two conditions, “nothing and the present, there is no in-between” (Han, 2017, p. 38) Although “the perception of a thing is not limited to its visible content defined by the outline, nor to that content plus its context” (Gil, 2018, p. 379),

230 Severe Occidentosis the truth of the matter is that “globalization has made the empirical present of ubiquity extend to the entire planet, absorbing more and more the other dimensions of time” (Gil, 2018, p. 405). That is, the past and the future “seem to disappear in a single present that finds in itself all the other dimensions; we are already contemporaries of the dinosaurs and soon we will be contemporaries of the Big Bang as well, while futurology brings to the present an ever more distant future” (Gil, 2018, p. 405). Curriculum involution reduced space and time to an “undying now” (Pessoa, 2006, p. 47). Furthermore, [r]educing time to the present, making absolute and planetary ubiquity totally controls time. As we are contemporaries of everything—past and future— and everything is present, we are just ‘contemporaries’ because everything is contemporary and present. Being ‘contemporary’ became a redundancy and so the ‘of ’ disappears. The only world is that of empirical images and it is because everything has become an image that everything has become empirical. Reality as an image can be condensed into the single present; the past is a purely archived image, just as the future will be. The present— all-encompassing planetary ubiquity—is a universal library of images. (Gil, 2018, p. 405) Such presentistic reductionism creates quasi irreversible dents on utopia(nism) as a way of living as “the word futuristic becomes a parlance to mean a description of the present, not of that which will supersede it” (Eagleton, 2000, p. 36). That is, “it as though the present can only be grasped in its lack of self-identity” (Eagleton, 2000, p. 36). To make things worse, it is a ‘present’ with a Faulknerian flavour, that is an unfinished past, “as the past is never dead, the past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Faulkner, 1951). Thus, what is hodiern is always “itself but a moment of vision, a vision of the freedom not yet come” (Mbembe, 2019, p. 91). Such curriculum involution—its contemporary yoke of chaos and rhythm— is a vivid example of an exhausted Modern Western Eurocentric epistemologic platform, what Lourenço (2005) would call heterodoxia. Lourenço draws on the German myth of Migdar to explain “the way a serpent bites its own tail in a circle, a symbol of perpetual suggestion” (Lourenço, 2005, p. 9). While in Lourenço’s (2005) terms, “this myth can configure the permanent parable of a terrestrial condition where honesty is honest for the dishonesty of the dishonest and the vicious vice for the virtue of the virtuous” (p. 9), the fact is that the Migdar myth is also a heterodoxy. That is, the conviction that the real is not only the snake’s head biting its tail without hesitation, nor the tail devoured without resistance, but the whole movement of biting and being bitten, the circular passion of life itself. The movement of the head devouring with certainty that there is only one way, can be called orthodoxy, just as the inverse conviction that there is no way can be called nihilism. The heterodoxy is not the opposite of orthodoxy or nihilism but the constant movement of thinking them both. (Lourenço, 2005, p. 10)

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Our field, in so many ways, is quite cornered by such movements and representatives of such multiple sides. As we live in “an open space that imprisons us” (Gil, 2018, p. 406), to address such curriculum involution its chaos and rhythms, its contemporary heterodoxy as I argued elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2011; 2014; 2017), implies that critical theories and pedagogies needs to decolonize, to de-link. Such process pushes one for an itinerant curriculum theoretical path. Such itinerant move, to challenge the dangers of a putrefied involution momentum, calls for “exfoliation processes” (Gil, 1998, pp. 127–128.9), a metamorphosis that helps one to understand how the critical and pedagogical impulses unfold and occupy (or not) certain spaces. This process of unpeeling, splitting, breaking, inflating, and shrinking paces and paves a ritual that opens the door for an infralanguage that “opens passageways between heterogeneous spaces” (Gil, 1998, p. 139.9). Those passageways needed to be sentient that there are huge and rich diverse epistemological veins beyond the Western Modern Eurocentric one in which critical theories and pedagogical persist in operating. Such ‘infralanguage,’ or as Gil (1998) argues an infra(sensual)language, explodes out of the clash, touch, wrangle, between theoretical turfs. Critical and pedagogical approaches need to take advantage of such momentum to challenge the ur-fascism (Eco, 2017) and the severe Occidentosis facing the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix.

Severe Occidentosis Diversity is the hallmark of freedom. (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 113)

One of the great consequences and symptoms of such “random regression” (Geiselberger, 2017, p.  10) or “paradoxical time” (Santos, 2005) is the emergence of a ferocious “populism” (Mouffe, 2005; Laclau, 2005; Panizza, 2005), that has been able to complexify fascist and extreme-right impulses, what Eco (2017) calls ‘ur-fascism or eternal fascism,’ which is the “return of dangerous last century authoritarian forms in different historical circumstances” (Eco, 2017, p. 14). Contrary to fascism “which was a fuzzy totalitarianism, an orderly rudeness, a structural confusion, philosophically clumsy, but emotionally quite articulated with specific archetypes” (Eco, 2017, p.  20), ur-fascism is pillared in a set of aspects that “cannot be confined into a single system; actually many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism” (Eco, 2017, p. 21). Such pillars deserved to be listed in length: 1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers.” 2. The rejection of modernism. “Enlightenment is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.”

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3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection.” 4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.” 5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.” 6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.” 7. The obsession with a plot. “The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.” 8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” 9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.” 10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.” 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm.” 12. Machismo and weaponry. “A disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.” 13. Selective populism. “TV or Internet populism.” 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” (Eco, 2017, pp. 22–29) Ur-fascism, Eco (2017, p. 22) maintains, awakens a “Nazi gnosis nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.” It is thus “racist by definition and reacts violently against modern culture of the scientific community which praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge” (Eco, 2017, p. 24). It defines “thinking [as] a form of emasculation” that propels pathetic cults “of heroism a cult that is strictly linked with the cult of death” (Eco, 2017, p. 26). It goes without saying that, today, ur-fascism uses tabloidism and social media populist impulses “in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People” (Eco, 2017, p. 28). Ur-fascism, or better say, ‘ur-eugenicism,’ not only took advantage of a massive set of unsystematic regression phenomena that paves our current momentum, but also fosters it as a sine qua non condition of its own existence and development; in so doing, it reinforces the eugenic hegemony of modern Western Eurocentric ‘abyssal matrix’ (Santos, 2014). It is a matrix fertilized and pollinated by curriculum content and form, teacher education and evaluation, thus becoming increasingly cruel and brutal in the sedimentation and development of an overt epistemicide. Such set of random regression impulses triggers

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what Laclau (2005) calls a chain of equivalences. That is, populism impulses emerge aggressively when a multiplicity of demands cohabits with the (in)comprehensive incapability of dominant blocs and its concomitant social structures to either address or diffuse such demands. Populism implies the production of populist subjects (Panizza, 2005), which are determined and determine simultaneously, by specific “social actions in which demands tend to reaggregate themselves on the negative basis” (Laclau, 2005, p.  37). It implies a “logic of equivalence on which all the demands, in spite of their differences of character, tend to reaggregate themselves, forming, what we will call and equivalence chain” (Laclau, 2005, p. 37). Populism is fascism and extremism with a smiley face that takes advantage of “a political breakdown that derives from a gap that exists between the leaders and the led and the difficulties encountered by political organizations in mediating between them effectively” (Panizza, 2005, p.  14). Before a clear short-circuit within the social and political matrix, “an anti-status quo discourse emerges that simplifies the political space by symbolically dividing society between ‘the people’ and its ‘other’, political constructs symbolically constituted by relations of antagonism” (Panizza, 2005, p.  2). These short-circuits paved the way for the emergence of “regressive movements” (Porta, 2014, p. 73). Populism closely breeds tribal nationalism, which always insists that its own people is surrounded by a world of enemies, one against all, that a fundamental difference exists between this people an all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used do destroy the humanity of man. (Arendt, 1958, p. 227) In this sense, Arendt (1958, p. 234) argues that “nationalism and its concept of a ‘national mission’ perverted the national concept of mankind as a family of nations into a hierarchical structure where diferences of history and organizations were misinterpreted as diferences between men, residing in natural origin”; that is,“national sovereignty lost its original connotation of freedom of the people and was being surrounded by a pseudomystical aura of lawless arbitrariness” (Arendt, 1958, p. 231). In the words of Laclau (2005), “a society in which demands tend to reagregate themselves on the negative basis that they all remain unsatisfied” is at the mercy of the emergence of a dangerous “political articulation called populism” (p. 37). Authoritarianism, uncivilized nationalism, and tribal populism disconnect the individual from his or her historical subject, thus promoting a kind of historical amnesia, a culture of civic illiteracy, an Orwellian machinery of organized forgetting (Giroux, 2018), thus promoting the construction of alter realities in which “facts [speak] altogether different language[s]” (Arendt, 1958, p. 494). Language normalcy is thus defined by ambiguity, instability, a wrangle of ‘floating-sliding signifiers’ (Laclau, 2005), transforming the dialectical of what is real(ity) to the point that the ideal subject of a totalitarian rule is “not

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the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. standards of thought) no longer exist” (Arendt, 1958. p.  474). Since “historical consciousness plays a great role in the formation of national consciousness” (Otto Bauer, cited in Arendt, 1958, p.  271), one can easily perceive how a society propelled by a dangerous partial consciousness triggered by appalling levels of fabricated ignorance desensitizes the individual by taking away its autonomous agency capacity (Arendt, 1958). Such ideological language ambiguity creates more than alternative realities; it interferes in a new cultural politics of the commonsense pillared in a “psuedomystical nonsense enriched by countless and arbitrary historical memories provided an emotional appeal that seems to transcend in depth and breadth the limitations of nationalism” (Arendt, 1958, p. 226). Populism, Gil (2018) sternly argues, “is not a political doctrine, nor an ideology, but a view of the world” (p. 456). Its narrative “does not draft a program, yet it is not limited to mere slogans of propaganda. It presents fragments of ideas, promises, slogans, moral judgments, invectives, threats or appeals to struggle, with words of hope.” Such carte is presented either in a very dispersed way or blended “into a heteroclite yarn” (Gil, 2018, p. 456). Populism has specific feaures aiming to combine three elements, namely (1) destroy the existing order, (2) heal the disease of society, and (3) build a new order (Gil, 2018). It is a narrative of salvation, that introduces a political discourse in all its nudity, constituting itself as a political proto-discourse based on seduction, multiple strategies of persuasion, demagoguery, unrealizable promises, imitating specific messages populist leaders intend to communicate according to the rules prescribed by the messages themselves. (Gil, 2018, p. 456) Such proto-discourse is quite clear though what populist/authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump do—through Twitter—or what the Fuhrer did in Germnay. Populism presents itself as an outsider, an exterior inorganic force that “announces the subversion of the political system, reacts against the establishment, promising to establish a new order, installing hope—a kind of utopia—dragging elements of messianism and prophecy with them” (Gil, 2018, p. 456). Such messianism is overtly marketized, as the latest claim from Sarah Huckabee Sanders shows, when she identified President Donald Trump as a call from God to lead the United States. In reacting against the establishment, populist leaders’ natural tendency is “to erase any kind of mediation that stands between the leader and the people” (Gil, 2018, p. 458). The attack on the establishment (i.e. Washington, Brussels) is propelled by the need to defend ‘nation,’ the ‘national identity,’ of the immutable values inaugurated and conveyed by a history that preserved them” (Gil, 2018, p. 458). By emphasizing “the motherland, the soul, the people, the race, appealing to a mythical

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past not only the idea of an ideological purity is promoted, but also the natural image of politics is devalued” (Gil, 2018, p. 460). Populism is supported and it sucks indentiary material to structure its demagoguery. It does not steal ideological elements from the system, because it searches them in its interstices. It acts in the interstices of democratic systems, building new political practices not covered by law and with media support. It subverts jurisprudence, masks habits and ways of being in identity masks, transforming them into a political weapon. (Gil, 2018, p. 460) Notwithstanding being anchored in a narrative of salvation—i.e. “a past mythical time and space, a transformative critical present, and a mythical future” (Gil, 2018, p. 461)—the fact is that populist discourse “does not trace the full path of salvation of a people, as actually it doesn’t need it, since because the people have already been captured, a capture prompted by the failure of democratic promises and by the seductive adornments of populism” (Gil, 2018, p. 462). Morever, populism exhibits a plastic identity—one that has been capable of not necessarily destroying threatening forces, but “simply captures, assimilates, and annuls them” (Gil, 2018, p. 462). By imposing a Manichaeist view of the world—us vs. them—and taking advantage “of the confusion that results from the coexistence of cultures that populism draws its capacity of attraction” (Gil, 2018, p. 463), populism successfully overrides theoretical contradictions and impasses. Looking closely to a recent past history, there is no doubt how populism and authoritarian impulses have been the gateway to fascism and more aggressive political fanaticism (Gil, 2018). In an era of great cultural and social regression, and with a fragile democratic fabric, “populism has an easy life” (Gil, 2018, p. 467). Fascism “is right here” (Pawson, 2018, p.  45). Taking the Brexit as a vivid example—although the same could be said about Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s presidencies—“the referendum was not democratic. It was fed by the white supremacist media who, either deliberately aroused racial hatred or were so deluded by their own whiteness that they did not know the hatred they had helped to mobilize. This is not democracy, but the infrastructure of fascism” (Pawson, 2018, p. 44), that is germinating within the democratic environment. In a way, we face democracies against democracy (Ranciere, 2011). The possibility of fascist impulses erupting out (and despite) of historical democratic platforms and habitus is due to a multitude of issues, one of those, the incapability of the inclusiveness of democracy. Badiou (2011) helps a great deal here. In his (2011) terms, democracy is an emblem and “in the world we’re living in tout le monde doesn’t make any sense without the emblem, so ‘everyone’ is democratic; it’s what you call the axiom of the emblem” (p.  7). However, Badiou (2011) argues that one should be concerned with le monde: the world that evidently exists, not tout le monde where the democrats (Western folk) hold sway and everyone else is from another world which being

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other, is not a world properly speaking, just a remnant of life, a zone of war, hunger, walls, and delusions. In that world or zone they spend their time packing their bags to get away from the horror or to leave altogether and be with whom? With the democrats off course who claim they run the world and have jobs they need doing. Democracy? Sure but reserved for democrats, you understand. Globalization of the world? Certainly, but only when those outside finally prove they deserve to come inside. (Badiou, 2011, p. 7) That is, the “socialization of a democratic subject begins with the illusion, that everything is available” (Badiou, 2011, p. 10). So far unfortunately, historically, Ranciere (2011, pp. 78–79) argues, and in a Jacotinian way, under the neoliberal capitalist guise, democracy has proved that equality—and one could add other towering categories, such as freedom and emancipation—“is a presupposition, not a goal to be attained, and the problem is that there is no other reality of equality than the reality of equality” (pp. 78–79). Fascism is thus rationalized within a le monde–framed democracy. That is, “everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself ” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2001, p. 215). Underneath all reason lies delirium. Drift. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious; it’s mad. The rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Yet capitalism and fascism remain desirable, While the former remains a “formidable desiring machine, that is, the monetary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, which are all a flow of desire,” the latter assumes “the social desires including the desire of repression and death; it seems that capitalism has been tied from birth to a savage repressiveness” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2001, pp. 219–220). Authoritarianism, nationalism, and fascism through their populist subjects and subjectivities attempt not just to maintain such abyssal epistemological framework, but also to increase it, grounded in a eugenic cult of Western scientificity of science and the ‘only science’ in which schools and curriculum are its prime boilers. When right-wing parties win, Berardi (2012) argues, “their first preoccupation is to impoverish public schooling and to grow up media conformism, [and] the result of the spread of ignorance and conformism [is a] a dark blend of techno-financial authoritarianism and aggressive populist action” (p. 12) a lethal device aimed to perpetuate a chirurgical epistemological cleansing that has been updgraded during the current neoliberal consulate. Within such consulate, “in which truth is simply irrelevant” (Giroux, 2018, p. 223), one witnesses the escalation of fascist impulses subsumed within a commonsensical pastoral sub-humanizing and beastializing the other, and of making the economy strong again, a crusading rationale that is an attack on human rights, democracy, and dissent (Giroux, 2018, p. 89).

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One of the enzymes of such compost of cleansing is what Al-l-Ahmad (1984) calls Occidentosis, a plague from the West, an illness like tuberculosis “that closely resembles an infestation of weevils” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 27). In his (1984) words, Occidentosis has two poles or extremes—two ends of one continuum. One pole is the Occident, by which I mean Europe, Soviet Russia, and North America, the developed and industrialized nations that can use machines to turn raw materials into more complex forms that can be marked as goods. The other pole is Asia and Africa, or the backward developing and non-industrialized nations that have been made into consumers of Western goods. (p. 27) Raw materials, Al-l-Ahmad (1984) adds, are, “not just iron ore and oil, or gut, cotton, and gum tragacanth, but also myths, dogmas, music, and higher worlds” (p. 27). One of the myths that the West(erners) was able to build, consolidate, and perpetuate was a very concrete vision of society, science, culture, economy, religion, spirituality, war and peace, societies based on dichotomous views of the real, pillared and perpetuated by political devices such as education and curriculum. These devices inculcate, and rattle more than the notion of the West as historically a superior civilization, and in many cases unique, a eugenic cult where genocide, suffering, oppression, segregation, racism, genderism and classism are officially taught in the classrooms as a natural and therefore inevitable part of the human development. West and East are no longer geographical and political concepts but an economic concept. (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 28) This economic frame confers with the West(erners) an arrogant way of thinking and being based on raw materials that come from developing nations; that is “Oil from the shores of the Gulf, hemp and spices from India, jazz from Africa, silk and opium from China, anthropology from Oceania, sociology from Africa. These last two came from Latin America as well: from the Aztec and Inca peoples, sacrificed by the onslaught from Christianity” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 27). An x-ray of the abyssal matrix (Santos, 2014)—solidified and developed by socio-political devices such as curriculum in its forms and contents (Paraskeva, 2017)—shows two worlds apart, “one producing and exploring machines, the other importing and consuming them and wearing them out” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 30). Modern Western Eurocentric artillery is not confined just to the military and its massive mechanisms of production and markets, but it is spread through world global terrains, such as “UNESCO, FAO, UN and ECAFE, which constitute the basis for the Occidentosis for all non-Western nations” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 30).

238 Severe Occidentosis Situating his analysis on Iran, Al-l-Ahmad (1984) denounces a corrosive dilemma facing non-Western nations. On one hand, there is a need to ferociously challenge the Occidentotic state infesting non-Western nations, by grabbing the control of the Modern Western Eurocentric machine building it. On the other hand, if non-Western nations build the machine, “we will become mechanotic, just like the West, crying out at the way technology and the machine have stamped out of control” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 31). History has an unpitying record in this regard. As he argues (1984) “Japan presumed to rival the West in mechanosis and to deal a blow to the Czars (in 1905) and to America (in 1941) and, even earlier to take markets from them. Finally, the atomic bomb taught them what a case of indigestion follows a feast of watermelons” (p. 31). As a plague, Occidentosis, which started when the West began the production and cleansing of the ‘Other,’ exhibits different symptoms in different non-Western nations. While in Africa, “its people served as raw material for every sort of Western laboratory—anthropology, sociology, ethnology, linguistics—and Professors owe their chairs to these peoples” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 233). In the Middle East, the “Islamic totality seemed unsusceptible to study, and in ‘encountering’ us, the West not only attacked this Islamic totality, but strived to hasten the dissolution from within of a totality only apparently unified. It sought to reduce us to raw material like Africa” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 33). Despite such differences, Occidentosis is the “aggregate of events in the life, culture, civilization, and mode of thought of a people having no support tradition, no historical continuity, no gradient of transformation, but having only what the machine brings them” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 34). It characterizes [a]n era in which we have not yet acquired the machine, in which we are not yet versed in the mysteries of its structure. Occidentosis characterizes an era in which we not have yet grown familiar with the preliminaries to the machine, the new sciences and technologies. Occidentosis characterizes an era in which the logic of the market place and the movements of oil compel us to buy and consume the machine. (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 34) In examining such puzzled ‘mechanosis’ that infects the non-Western and Western abyssal matrix, Al-l-Ahmad (1984, p. 35) turns to education to understand the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ in which non-Western nations failed to build the machine and grow up Occidentotic. The Iranian society, Al-l-Ahmad (1984, p. 112) argues, is sustained by an education system that fosters the plague, that reinforces Occidentosis: From an educational standpoint, we resemble wild grass. The final aim of education is to foster occidentosis, to award worthless certificates of employability to those who can only be the future fodder of the administrative organization and need a diploma to be promoted to any position.

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In the school programs there are no traces of reliance on tradition, no imprint of the culture of the past, nothing of ethics or philosophy, no notion of literature—no relation between yesterday and tomorrow, between home and school, between East and West, between collective and individual. (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, pp. 112–113) Diversity that should be viewed as a “hallmark of freedom” is negatively tainted; the diversity in the way our schools operate is the diversity of wild grasses” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 113). Moreover, such Occidentosis is also pumped by “Occidentotic intellectuals” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 35), what I called elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2016d) the Sepoys of Coloniality. I claim (Paraskeva, 2016b; 2016c) that as the field globalizes, so some say, the state of the curriculum field beyond the Western Eurocentric Global North platform cannot operate as a mere gas station. Furthermore, I (2016c; 2016c) argue that the Souths of the Global Souths and of the Global Norths have a lot to ofer to the battle for a more just world. The Sepoys of Coloniality (2016d)—so many of them in academia— are the amplifiers and loudspeakers of a noisy silence about the richness of the very non-Western epistemological perspectives and quite responsible for the fact that “there is no original research, no discovery, no invention, no solution, just these repairman, start-up men, operators of the Western machinery and industrial goods, calculators of the strength of materials, and such absurdities” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p. 115). Additionally, [o]ne can but rarely find Iranian painters or architects who do not imitate Westerners but whose work is distinguished by artistic authenticity and originality who add something to the sum of the artistic endeavor of the world. Things have reached a point that we bring critics and judges from Europe to judge our painters’ work. Not only is literature in its real and universal sense ignored, but even contemporary Persian literature remains unseen and unknown. The thinking of Abbas Iqbal, who ordered that only works hundred years or more be read, studied and assessed remain predominant. The result is that we only train archeologists of literature. The products of such education have no effect on society. (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, pp. 116–117) Education and curriculum are clearly at the very root of such Occidentosis, a pandemic that feeds a eugenic abyssal matrix, which is oxygenated by ‘the’ abyssal line; this abyssal line, to recapture Al-l-Ahmad’s (1984) approach, reflects more than just material commodities, but also “myths, dogmas, and cultural artifacts of a very concrete vision of society, science, culture, economy, religion, spirituality, war and peace, societies based on dichotomous views of the real” (p. 27), sustained and spread through political devices such as curriculum, teaching, and evaluation. Despite noteworthy achievements, critical

240 Severe Occidentosis approaches by and large have been unable to at least interrupt the eugenic functioning of an educational and curriculum framework that instills a despicable cult of Modern Western Eurocentric uniqueness, which worships genocide, oppression, racism, classism, sexism, genderism through curriculum, teaching, and evaluation forms. Modern scientific and rational knowledge “is the self-existent storehouse of truth and it is sui generis, the only one of its kind; the rest is charmingly called ‘ethnoscience’ at best, and false superstition and dark ignorance at the worst” (Uberoi, quoted in Santos, 2018a, p. 7). I argue that critical approaches, despite significant conquests, ended up developing a matrix with some crucial silences, as Foucault (1994, p. 31) would put it. Such silences prompted clear insufficiencies and were incapable of stopping the mass production of ‘Occidentotics’ and smashing curriculum ‘mechanotics.’ Occidentosis, ICT unpacks, is the sublime eugenicism of the Eurocentric cult “that there is one kind of science, modern Western Science” (Uberoi, quoted in Santos, 2018a, p. 7). Some of the insufficiencies that are structural were addressed in the course of the historical processes towards a more just and equal society, education, and curriculum. Displacement, migration, and close attention to post-critical (post-structural, postmodern, feminist) perspectives provided a good signal in the quest for a more just and comprehensive theoretical framework. Paying attention to indigenous platforms and theories and methodologies is also proof of an intellectual migration to previously unrecorded lands. The problem is that these migrations—like all—if on the one hand solved or mitigated certain issues, on the other they exposed other deficiencies. Admitting them and solving them is also to celebrate the great achievements, to honor our intellectual references, but also to subscribe that the present (and not the future) of critical theory implies realizing that the problem does not stem solely from the effects created by the global neoliberal minotaur (Varoufakis, 2011). If we continue to dig in this hole, we do not shed a dangerous ‘partial consciousness,’ as we still follow in a direction away from other fundamental issues propelled by a set of insufficiencies that I will describe. To keep denying these insufficiencies is to assume a comfortable position, jamming curriculum theory, or what remains of it, into the mud of the involution and regression. Such insufficiencies are an overt capitis diminutiu (limitation), triggering a hypertrophia theoricae: 1. Insufficiency of getting out of the functionalist trap, which they timely and rightly challenged so ferociously as a feature of the positivist dominant traditions; that is, “one of the weaknesses of modern critical theory was that it did not recognize that the reason it criticizes cannot be the same as that which thinks, constructs, and legitimates what is critical” (Santos, 1999, p.  204)— and in a way fosters an incapacity to avoid a critical “eternal return of the same” (Han, 2017, p. 4). That is “the core problem is that the epistemological permisses of both Eurocentric critical thinking and Eucocentric conservative thinking have strong (and fatal) elective affinitives.” In fact, “they represent two different versions of the epistemologies of the North” (Santos, 2018a, p.  viii). Such functionalism is quite intriguing in a movement that, as McLaren, 1998)

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sternly argues, laudably and justly affirms in a non-negotiable way that what was crucial was to understand not “who are we, but ‘where’ are we” (p. 355). The need to situate (Apple, 1979) as a sine qua non condition advocated by the generation of the utopia, regarding the politicality of education, should have triggered countless red flags that could help prevent such functionalist fall. Hence, as Santos (1999) argues, “as a result, the question that has always served as the starting point for critical theory—which side are we on? it became for some an illegitimate question, for others, an irrelevant question, and for others still an irresponsible question” (p. 200). That is “if some feel that they do not have to take sides, they stop worrying about the question and criticize who cares about it, others, perhaps the younger generation of social scientists, although they like to answer the question and take sides, see, sometimes with anguish, the seemingly increasing difficulty of identifying the alternative positions on which to take sides” (Santos, 1999, p. 200). While it is undisputably accurate that education and curriculum should be understood within the complex web of the dynamics of ideological production (Apple, 1979; Giroux, 1981; Wexler, 1976; McLaren, 1980), and that one “can’t locate difference outside of the social relations of production which produce exclusion and exploitation” (McLaren, 1998, pp. 367–368), it is also unquestionable that the struggle against exclusion, exploitation, and segregation could not succeed by relying only on the same epistemological platform that actually rationalizes such sagas. The struggle to locate and dissect difference, inequality, segregation, exploitation, and (n)eugenicism “in a historically material way—within a system of exploitation” (McLaren, 1998, p. 368) should have been careful not to romanticize the dynamics of the oppressed as a totalizing category. Whereas in the struggle against oppression, one must not lose sight of its global collective dynamics—after all, capital has been a global philosophy of praxis—to assume that oppression is a monolithic dynamic and therefore causes the same damages and effects to the oppressed in the same way is a functional suicide. Critical theories and pedagogies should never have been confining its circulation only within the rational framework of the rationality they criticized. The reason they criticized could not itself be the basis for the critique they have attempted to construct. In doing so, it was like the kiss of death that they set out to do what they were trying to do. The ‘cries from the corridor’ (McLaren, 1980), the belligerent battles for the recognition of ‘street corner knowledge’ (McLaren, 1980) should have triggered, McLaren (1998) posits, a radically different ‘here I stand,’ one that fully perceives the (n)eugenicist dimension of Eurocentrism: Euro-American concepts of agency, value, self-worth, and citizenship are often not very hospitable to other cultural articulations of identity and subjectivity. The autonomous, stable, ideal self of modernity is profoundly Eurocentric in its attempt to speak from a particular standpoint and for all humanity. (McLaren, 1998, p. 366)

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Such ‘anti-functionalist functionalism’ pushed the critical path to a perpetual dystopian balance between subjugation and captivation metamorphoses—that is, a Pessoan metamorphosis that “captures and vampirizes” (Gil, 2010, p. 29) its own subjects, subjugating them. In other words, the subject “is transformed into a kind of agent that is called to end, to close a space left open and unfin­ ished” (Gil, 2010, p. 29), yet only possible within an epistemological atmosphere that betrays her/him. The subject is swallowed up, devoured by this interior (un)balanced space/time between abstraction and subjugation paradoxically in violent contradiction with the very nature of the critical matrix. It goes without saying that this dystopic (un)balance prompts violent mechanisms of resistance and rejection. With the subject permanently pushed to “a vertigo of absolute nothingness” (Gil, 2010, p. 29), critical platforms—despite their profound and almost unmatched theoretical sophistication—face serious challenges to justly promote organic osmosis between what they denounce and what they prom­ ise, constructing a plurality of “null selves” dangerously desensitized from the “multitude self ” (Gil, 2010, p. 29). This dystopia is a defining hole that ‘doesn’t empower’ (Ellsworth, 1989) due to, what Gil (2010) would define—in Fernando Pessoa’s terms—the absolutism of nothing; the critical quilt begins to be very short, to help the oppressed and the oppressor out of a sub-humanity with­ out limits, created by the latter. Critical approaches were inadvertely oblivious that they were confined and produce “with a rationality of the same, that is a logic of a constitutive and constituting inside, a constitutive and constituting subject, which exclude, indeed excludes, all others to the outside” (Lash, 1999, p. 1). In this sense, and we will see later on, it seems that like the utopias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, our counter-dominant approaches “with honourable exceptions have been absurdly incapable of imagining any world definitely different from their own” as Eagleton (2000, p. 32) would put it. 2. Insufficiency to understand that Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking (Santos, 2014). Modern social sciences (Santos, 2018a) “including crit­ ical theories, have never acknowledged the existence of the abyssal line” (p. 19). This failure of perception on the part of the critical radical platforms—which led them to work with and in the rationality to which they were opposed—would come to corral its powerful theoretical construction in the rational framework that renders legitimate and official only what is ‘on this side of the line’ (Santos, 2014), and simultaneously making critical platforms conniving in the produc­ tion of the ‘non-existences on the other side of the line’ (Santos, 2014). That is, and as I have had occasion to analyze earlier, radical and critical platforms were incapable at minimum to interrupt the invisibility and non-existence of the ‘one side,’ which are the roots of visibility and existence of the ‘other side.’ By reasoning fundamentally from a segregated reason, they adamantly criti­ cized radical and critical movements and groups as well as were incapable of short- circuiting the invisibilities produced by the (n)eugenic yoke of certain visibilities, or non-existences produced by specific existences (Santos, 2014). As such, the functionalist anti-functionalism of radical and critical movements and groups also stands out for its share of responsibility in the production and

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perpetuation of the epistemicide, or what I call the epistemicide within the epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2016a). The incapacity to go above and beyond Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platforms was fatal for the radical critical movement and blocks the possibility to envision and move towards a post-Eurocentric phase, which implies the need to be non-Eurocentric; another knowledge is really possible (Santos, 2007a); yet, as I have argued previously, it cannot be built “with the conceptual tools inherited from the Renaissance and Enlightenment” (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018, p. 7). As Gilroy (2005) advocates, the struggle for “a world free of racial—and I would add, gender, caste and class—hierarchies implies the reconstruction of the history of ‘race’ in modernity” (p. 30). Such reconstruction, as I argued earlier, cannot be successful by just relying on “the master’s tools” (Lorde, quoted in Walsh and Mignolo, 2018, p. 7); in fact, one cannot forget that slaves in fact “used those tools, developed additional ones, and built houses on their own, that is transcending instead of dismantling Western ideas through building our own houses of thought” (Gordon and Gordon, quoted in Walsh and Mignolo, 2018, p. 7). In doing so, they put into question “the hegemony of the master’s house—in fact mastery itself—that ceases to maintain its imperial status” (p. 7). As Mignolo (2008) insightfully argues, “intellectual decolonization “cannot come from existing philosophies and cultures of scholarship. Dependency is not limited to the Right; “it is created also from the Left” (p. 232). While there is a solid prolific post-critical tradition challenging sociological approaches “for occluding the history of imperialism and colonialism, reproducing imperial epsitemic structures and Eurocentrism, and failing to provide a critique of Western colonialism and racial dominantion” (Go, 2017, p. 66), it is undeniable that such critique failed for not reaching out to a non-Western, non-Eurocentric matrix. Also, such abyssality also genderized and racialized counter-dominant approaches, an issue that I examined elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2011) and is sowell denounced by scholars, such as Grant, Brown, and Brown (2016). As they insighfully argued, it is crucial to understand why “African Americans were absent from prominent theories of curriculum and pedagogy” (Grant et al., 2016, p.  169). As they (2016) claim, everywhere “we turned within this discourse of critical theory was the overwelmimg domain of [dead and old] white males, most of whom gave little attention to the education of African Americans and other people of color except to marginalize them or to indicate them or to indicate they did not fully belong through words and/or deeds” (p. 169). In Grant et al.’s (2016) minds, radical critical theories fabricated an alternative discourse, yet a master’s discourse as well, a canon, one in which “black people were not present as the predecessor of critical educational thought” (p. 170). Such abyssality was structurally racially genderized, wiping out a huge legacy of black female intellectuals, such as Anna Julius Copper, Septima Clark, Fanny Lou Hamer, and others, who through an “endarkened feminist epistemology [challenged] culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities, and the contexts of oppressions and resistance for African American woman” (Dillard, 2006, p. 3).

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3. Insufficiency to acknowledge that while we should celebrate noteworthy accomplishments, the truth is that the theoretical counter-hegemonic terrain has been stretched to its exhaustion. As I have examined earlier, Modern Western Eurocentric counter-dominant movements and groups have showed a crucial insufficiency in understanding that the epistemological platfrom in and through which they were working was exhausted, maxed out. Feminist and postcolonial perspectives, Smith (1999) posits, while pushing dramatically the bounderies within the counter-hegemonic terrain, they were incomplete to address historical eugenicism and epistemicism produced by Modernity. Postcolonialism, Smith (1999) argues, “was viewed as the convenient invention of Western intellectuals which reinscribes their power to define the world” (p. 14). Postcolonialism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism also faced aggressive challenges from within the counter-hegemonic ranks as regressive (Epstein, 1997) and corrupted theories (Sanbonmatsu, 2006). One of the most vigorous criticisms of the postcolonial came from Chibber (2013, pp. 2–3), arguing that postcolonial theories “stepped quite consciously into the vacuum left by the decline of Marxism yet facing the same challenges, that is to generate a theory adequate to the needs of a radical political agenda.” Postcolonial and subaltern studies “fail on both theoretical and normative grounds as [they] cannot adequately explain the patterns of historical development in the advanced and late developing parts of the capitalist world. [They] insist that the defining characteristic of the Global South is its deep and abiding structural differentiation from the advanced capitalist world, a difference so deep, so fundamental that it requires an entirely different set of categories.” Also, subscribing to a subaltern approach, Chibber (2014, p. 311) claims, implies “to overhaul much of what is currently practiced in the social sciences and humanities, roll up our sleeves, and craft entirely new frameworks for understanding the evolution of much of the world”; that is “the foundational basis of our criticism of modern capitalism has to be rejected and new political theories have to be crafted that have no truck with Enlightenment universals” (p. 312). Delinking—a powerful must with the struggle for social and cognitive justice—becomes an impossible through the gateway of the postcolonial. It seems that the critical theorists, in their more than just battle against systems of domination, where they scored remarkable victories, did not realize that they were committed to building a lagged theory of reality. And many of them have somehow mistakenly assumed a very Leninist position on the basis of which if theory and reality do not combine, reality must change. Critical theory somehow ignored its own reader. Critical theory, Sloterdijk (2011, p. 61) claims, “is unable to go on due to its own theoretical misdirect investments”— for the reader of the late twentieth century is a different social animal from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Readers, Eagleton (1988, p.  181) argues, “are as less and less seen as non-writers, the sub-human other or flawed derivative of the author; the authors need us, we don’t need the authors.” If Thompson (1978) and Anderson (1987) are accurate, and I believe they are, such gap reflects a poverty of strategy which is profoundly ideological.

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Postmodernism, Fricker (2007) stresses, “far from opening a theoretical space in which to explore questions of justice and power in epistemic practices, and so what it had to say to an epistemological bearing did not ultimately lead in a progressive direction at all, but was if anything oriented towards conservatism” (p.  3). The modes of knowledge and production in the postcolonial register, Dabashi (2015) claims, “have in fact exhausted themselves” (p.  6). Thus, for example, philosophy carries on “being mental gymnastics performed with and received particulars of European philosophy in its postmodern and poststructuralist registers—exciting and productive to the degree they can be” (Dabashi, 2015, p.  6). Instead of trying fearlessly to seek and draft solutions beyond the Modern Western Eurocentric platform, instead of humbly ‘learning to unlearn to re-learn’ (Tlostanova and Mignolo, 2012) with crucial non-Western nonEurocentric epistemologies, radical and critical approaches overtly exhibit a massive epistemological blindness—which is not innocent—in promoting a pluriversal matrix of ‘seeing’ (Saramago, 2007) with “the other side of the line” (Santos, 2014). Quite the contrary, radical and critical approaches plunged into the depths of the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological swamp, digging to the limits. They were exhausted in the course of this process. Undeniably, the battles to develop a robust critical and post-critical platform were successful in many ways; however, it “seems to have achieved affluence without fulfillment” (Eagleton, 2003, p.  25). That is, in many ways, “theory overshot reality in a kind of intellectual backwash to a tumultuous political era” (Eagleton, 2003, p. 29). The insufficiency to realize that the solution to a more robust critical approach was to go beyond Modern Western Eurocentric approaches was allied with the romantic frenzy of not realizing that the post-critic alone, despite having put crucial issues on the table, was unable to respond the great questions related to the segregation, exploitation, and inequality of humanity. Within such process, odd exaggerations occurred that would weaken the historical legacy of the critical terrain—some of them noisy noises in the field still. That is to say, in a way, critical approaches unfortunately also fell into a pit of epistemological awkwardness that created conditions for embarrassment, such as the Sokal hoax (Sokal, 1996a; 1996b; also Lingua Franca, 2000) from which it is important not to marginalize and to debate it—despite the justifiable revolt of how this theoretical clock bomb was constructed and placed in our field. As critical theorists, we should all be quite concerned that crucial issues that shook the field have became insivisible, a non-issue, a taboo. A critical history of the field requires to unpack such invisibilities. As critical scholars, we need to understand that there are analyses that need and must be done precisely from critical scholars. Another example, is Enguita’s 1980’s master piece Sera Publica la Escuela Publica, another example of an approach that deserved the just attention from all of us. In Hewitt’s (1993) terms, the postmodern legacy, despite its emancipatory intents, triggered “regressive implications” (p. 79). In her (1993) reasoning, one of the postmodern regressive stances relied in its “dismissal of subjectivicty and the Enlightentment values assoociated with it” (p.  89). By reducing “human

246 Severe Occidentosis agency to the status of a ‘trace’ threatens to ultimately relocate women within the old, debilitating associations that have traditionally undermined their full humanity” (Hewitt, 1993, p.  83). Postmodernism is an illusion of freedom (Hewitt, 1993). Undeniably, postmodern, post-structural, feminist, queer, and critical race theory, among other approaches, exemplify enormous achievements of and within the true core of the critical platform but have been overtly incapable to create by itself the collapse of coloniality. For example, from the agora of feminist educators came some of the most powerful critical approaches in our field as they begin to understand the egregious “absences in the master texts” (Luke and Gore, 1992, p.  3) of critical pedagogy. To deny this seems to be an act of cruel convenience that refuses to understand that a utopia of social emancipation needs to break with a predominant male coloniality, which, as much as it does, allows such coloniality to exist, an existence that implies the blunt genocide of the overwhelming majority. Frustrations with such exaggerations came from countless angles within the field. One such discomfort was championed by Pedroni (2002) when he yelled a la Wittman about the need to work in a new logic that will help ‘to go beyond criticism and post-criticism’ addressing its own severe contradictions and break up with ‘comfortable’ juxtaposed critical and post-critical compromises. The way to sharpen our theoretical knives means to go well beyond the crucial wrangle of ‘Gramscianizing Foucault and or simultaneously Foucaultinizing Gramsci” (Pedroni, 2002, p. 7) and to pay attention to other powerful non-Western epistemological perspectives. Needless to mention, the task is not to trash postmodern avenues. After all, as Cahoone (1996) argues, “postmodernism deserves careful, sober scrutiny, devoid of trendy enthusiasm, indignant condemnation, or reactionary fear. Its appearance is unlikely & either to save the Western world or destroy it” (p. 2). As Santos (2018a) would certainly put it, postmodern moves are in essense “a modern invocation aspiring modernity otherwise” (p.  30). I am not arguing that such counter-dominant platforms are passé. That would be a misreading of my claim. After all, “a theory is dead if all it can perform are monologues” (Sloterdijk, 2011, p.  61). They need to evolve beyond their own Eurocentric matrix, otherwise, as Santos (2018a) would put it, “a self-reflexive scholar rather than becoming a learned ignorant will persist in being arrogantly a self confident knower” (p. 27). While “the contributions of post colonial studies’ decolonial scholars have argued for an expanded analyis of colonialism and its production of the other, it is undeniable that such approaches maintain Europe and European history as the point of reference for understanding the globe” (Garcia and Baca, 2019, p. 2). 4. Insufficiency to place capitalism and colonialism within radical nonWestern, non-Eurocentric reasoning to help untangle the nexuses of ‘coloniality-colonialism’ and ‘capital-capitalism.’ It is crucial to grasp the difference between capitalism and capital. Capitalism wasn’t the central equation in Marx’s oeuvre, but rather it was ‘capital.’ While capitalism, Mészáros (1996) maintains, “is a relatively easy object and one can in a sense abolish capitalism

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through revolutionary upheaval and intervention at the level of politics” (p. 54), it is an indisputable fact that the power of capital might remain uncrushed regardless of a supposed end of capitalism. One might be in a position to terminate capitalism, yet “have not touched the power of capital when you have done it” (Mészáros, 1996, p.  54). Capital, he (1996) adds, “is not dependent on the power of capitalism and this in important also in the sense that capital precedes capitalism by thousands of years” (p.  54). Capital can thus survive capitalism—“hopefully not by thousands of years, but when capitalism’s overthrown in a limited area, the power of capital continues even if it is in a hybrid form” (Mészáros, 1996, p. 54). As history documents, both capitalist and non-capitalist states were massively subjugated by capital; capital is a world command system “whose mode of functioning is accumulation-oriented, and the accumulation can be secured in a number of different ways” (Mészáros, 1996, p. 54). It is, he (1996) adds, a “metabolic system, a socio-economic metabolic system of control and while one can overthrow the capitalist system the factory system remains, the division of labour remains, nothing has changed in the metabolic functions of society” (p. 55). Education and curriculum are a crucial component in such metabolic system of control formatting the subjects as enzymes of such metabolism. Like never before, it is crucial to redirect our foci on ‘capital.’ Under the current viral fascism, and as I have argued before, one is facing a structural crisis. Contrary to the crisis identified and described by Marx during his time, the current crisis is one that dangerously shows “precipitations of varying intensity, tending towards a depressed continuum” (Mészáros, 1996, p. 57). Modern Western Eurocentric patron colonial de poder (Quijano, 1992) has reached a new limit, one paced by the structural crisis of capital (Mészáros, 1996, p. 57). Intimately connected with such phenomena, it is crucial to understand the importance of making a distinction between colonialism and coloniality. Coloniality “claims the necessity of five hundred years’ macronarratives of the colonial matrix of power that modern macronarratives disguised and postmodern philosophy ignored” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  106). Coloniality supersedes and unpacks colonialism. It exposes “the darker side of Western Modernity and it is a decolonial concept thus the anchor of decolonial thinking and doing in the praxis of leaving” (Mignolo, 2018, pp. 106–107). In such context “it is not a modern theoretical proposal, nor a postmodern conceptual introduction in the sense of rejecting macronarratives” (Mignolo, 2018, pp. 106–107). It is a foundational concept of the decolonial way of living (Mignolo, 2018). It is hence “a consequence of decolonial thinking and decolonial thinking came into being through the concept of coloniality” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 112). It implies “seeing two sides of the story modernity/coloniality and it is not reducible to a concept that could be applied or an entity that could be studied in the existing social sciences or humanities to investigate certain historical facts or issues” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  113). It is not an application, a cognitive gadget, “but rather always already calls for decolonial thinking and forges the disciplinary regulations of social sciences and humanities thinking” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  113). Different

248 Severe Occidentosis from colonialism yet a consequence of it, coloniality implies a “thinking and doing otherwise” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  113), a palpable decoloniality; that is the “exercise of power within the colonial matrix to undermine the mechanisms that keep it in place requiring obeisance. Such a mechanism is epistemic and so decolonial liberation implies epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 113). Hence, decoloniality is a “contextual, relational, practice based and lived, and it is intellectually, spiritually, emotionally and existentially entangled and interwoven” (Walsh, 2018, p.  19). Thus, “it is not a static condition, an individual tribute or a linear point of arrival or enlightenment; instead it seeks to make visible, open up, and advance radically distinct perspectives and possibilities to displace Western rationality as the only framework and possibility of existence and thought” (Wash, 2018, p.  17). Coloniality, not colonialism, “names a complex management and control” (Mignolo, 2018, p.  141) put into place by the metabolic logic of capital (Mészáros, 1996). There is no modernity without coloniality. Since colonialism is a crucial component within modernity, the visibility of coloniality was framed by the invisibilities produced by colonialism. It “names a coloniality of power and implies demodernity” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 138). 5. Insufficiency to get out of the moorings of the ‘institutionalization and academization’ of the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix that they fought so energetically. Paradoxically, radical and critical theories were institutionalized and academicized in a reasoning matrix that was the riverbed for ‘knowledge-regulation’ (Santos, 1995) an irreversible obstacle towards ‘knowledge-emancipation’ (Santos, 1995). As Keucheyan (2010, p. 22) claims, rare are those critucal scholars who are fully fledged members of political or social organizations.” The academy functioned as the crematorium of radical critical utopias. Completely institutionally academicized, Keucheyan (2010, p.  22) claims, “critical thinkers in no way form an intellectual counter society.” Deprived of this powerful dimension, radical critical theories were bookshelved like all other theories in the worst sense, it never got to the point of being able to impose itself as a way of living and and thinking. The Modern Western Eurocentric academic platform was not designed to house theoretical impulses that promoted social emancipation. Thus, radical and critical theories—although they fought tenaciously to move towards social emancipation, they ended up plunging irremediably into the pace of social regulation (Santos, 1995)—despite its conquests. I am not claiming here an “anything can go” theoretical approach. But, it is unquestionable that radical critical theories revealed their incapacity to contaminate the Modern Eurocentric Western academic matrix by transmuting it. They were actually irremediably contaminated. Such institutionalized and academicalized virus has corroded critical theories and pedagogies. Critical theory became an ‘insider’ as Pinar (1998) would put it. Educated academics, Collins (2019, p. 5) argues, “are not the only ones who produced critical social theory, but they are the ones who are more likely to claim it and benefit from them.” Critical theories and pedagogies are infected with the condiments that propel el patron colonial de poder (Quijano, 2000)—coloniality matrix of power, being,

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knowledge, and labour (Mignolo, 2018; Grosfoguel, 2018; Maldonado-Torres, 2018)—that frames the social apparatuses designed precisely to perpetuate such coloniality that keeps multiplying the dynamics of oppression and the oppressed and is mutually exclusive with any of the pillars of critical theories and pedagogies. The survival of any form of struggle for social emancipation needs to break up with such academicism (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; Santos, 2007a; Saucier, 2016). In Smith’s (1999) terms, “research is highly institutionalized through the disciplines and fields of knowledge, through communities and interest groups of scholars, and throughout the academy” (p. 127). Also, research “is also part of political structures: governments fund research directly and indirectly through tertiary education, national science organizations, developmental programmes and policies” (Smith, 1999, p.  127). Thus, “it seems rather difficult to conceive of an articulation of an indigenous research agenda on such a scale” (Smith, 1999, p. 127). Such academicism, institutionalization, and disciplinarity of critical theory, irrespective of its common aims, has diminished and even negates the possibilities of the critical field to function as a beehive. The beehive reveals how one by one bees with different itineraries work for the common purpose. Research documents a great sense of mutual aid, solidarity, and loyalty towards a common process and objective, although by different ways (i.e. flights). And the killer bees do not rest while the prey is not dead, if it is necessary. In the case of critical theory, regardless of the fact that critical theory has never been constituted as a unitary approach (in my view being one of its strongest predicates), and despite its great achievements, the fact is that it has never revealed the characteristics that one could identify in a beehive. I argue that this hesitant course is due to the fact that critical theory became academicized and institutionalized, which, in a fatal way, has ended up preventing critical theory to constitute itself as a way of life and as a way of free thinking towards an emancipated society (and not necessarily only a social democrat or a socialist nature). Its academicism blocks critical theory from being able to constitute itself as a killer theory, and like the bees, exterminating the hegemonic power of the dominant forces. Such academicism cornered critcal approaches into a lethal tacticism, as Jorge (2018) would insighfully put it. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994, p.  3) terms, “every discipline produces and determines its own illusions and hides behind its own smokescreen.” In academicizing and institutionalizating itself within a (n)eugenic matrix that was actually challenging, it absorbs all the harmful impulses of the matrix of the coloniality of power, knowledge, being, and labor—tacticism, careerism, intellectual rape, academic murder, academic capitalism, and so on. In fact, under the guise of predatory neoliberal authoritarian educational leadership and management forms, in which every social academic relation is commodified, such lethal impulses mutilate crucial issues for the critical project such as solidarity, and comradeship; some of ushave learned the hard way that “anyone but not everyone can be a comrade” (Dean, 2019, p.  67). Pinar (1998, p. 109) echoing Said (1996) argues that intellectuals have a problem when they want “to become insiders,

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because they are obligated to be those who question insiders privilege, especially when they are based, and they so often are, on class, race or gender.” Echoing and adapting Santos’ (2018b) reasoning, the academy has long understood and made it overtly known that it is not compatible at all with the critical spirit. As an insider—or infected by ‘the insider’—its counter discourse condition becomes weak. By this I mean, its dialogics ‘langue-parole’ (Saussure) or ‘langue—usage—parole’ (Terdiman, 1985) are framed within a contaminated epistemological matrix that imposes a dominant hermeneutic. As an insider, critical theory abdicates one of its most important characteristics that should frame its research program, that “its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan though not uncritical identification” (Fraser, 1985, p. 97). By academicizing and institutionalizing itself, critical theory and critical theorists—and this is so convenient for the dominant powers—exist in a straitjacket, finding themselves perpetually blocked from an infinitely undisciplined terrain of creativity, and theory only happens—when it happens—in a tolerant mode, beyond which those who dare to defy—and we have some great examples in our history—have paid a heavy price and been framed as inconvenient, emotional, rabble rousers, and eventually marginalized, and pushed into academic exile. Some institutions function as living museums, hosting living samples of leftist intellectual ‘rabble rousers’ as testimony of institutions that are open to all ideologies and perspectives of knowledge. With the emergence of viral fascism swiping through so many nations, such living samples of intellectual rabble rousers are actually becoming rare collectable species. Such academicism framed within the yoke of Modern Western Eurocentric epistemologies was also responsible for the functionalism—both at the level of the form and content—that sank the radical and critical approaches. Western disciplines “are as much implicated in each other as they are in imperialism”(Smith, 1999, p. 11). Radical and critical intellectuals couldn’t and can’t academically exist (i.e. survive) within a community and disciplinarity that oddly is the source and aim of its own critique. Popkewitz (1976) sternly unveils this contradiction. In his words, a scientist is socialized into his community; that is, he becomes loyal to certain types of problems and methods as the legitimate concern of science. To challenge a disciplinary belief-system is not only a challenge to one’s way of research, but a challenge to one’s basic premises about how reality is actually organized. As a result, drastic change in scientific outlook seems to come slowly and with deep conflict within a discipline. (Popkewitz, 1976, p. 319) That is, scientists conduct research “within a scientific community, a context which both encourages and controls scientific imagination and scientific communities involve commitments to certain lines of reasoning and premises for

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certifying knowledge” (Popkewitz, 1984). Critical theory really swings within the circuits of cultural production (Johnson, 1986), circuits designed and epistemologically panopticalized to promote and legitimize the reasoning critical theories vividly oppose. Critical theories were quite able to pay attention to the importance of the self-determination matrix of indigenous and non-Western, non-Eurocentric ways of (un)knowing, a matrix paved by four directions: “decolonization, healing, transformation and mobilization” (Smith, 1999, p. 120). Thus, radical critical theories got trapped in “the bureaucratization and professionalization of knowledge a framework that has in turn shaped the content and form of knowledge itself.” The institutional life in academia counters any radical critical impulse. As Jacoby (quoted in Sanbonmatsu, 2006) observes, Universities hire by committees: one needs degrees, references, the proper deference, a pleasant demeanor. As such, they ‘encourage a definite intellectual form’. Serious authors today are obliged to precede their tomes with ‘a dense list of colleagues, friends, institutions, and foundations’, as if to suggest ‘that the author or book passed the test, gaining the approval of a specific network, which filtered out the unkempt and unacceptable’. The result is cautious scholarship heavily cloaked in the armour of authority— a book inspected by scores of scholars, published by a major university, and supported by several foundations. (p. 201) Also, as I have examined previously, functionalistic impulses are profoundly propelled by the Eurocentric academicism and its disciplinary grid, a disciplinarity that only occurs in specific Western Eurocentric linguistic formations. For example, the fact that “none of the existing languages at the time (Mandarin, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Russian) are relevant in any of the disciplinary formations confirms that Eurocentered knowledge asserts itself at the same time that disqualifies the vocabulary (and logic) of other knowing praxis and knowledge and believe systems.” Modern Western Eurocentric triviumlized and quadriviumlized academicism produced, and it was/is produced particular logics of thought, reason, and inquiry “that shape social inquiry within patterns of social conduct. These social patterns contain rules, norms, and values that emerge from the internal debates within a discipline, debates which concern the nature and purpose of the discipline itself ” (Popkewitz, 1980, p. 28). For example, “the rules of social science, in particular, are also related to larger social issues and strains that give direction to the problems of inquiry” (Popkewitz, 1980, p. 28). However, while recent eforts “at understanding sexism in school, racism and efects of poverty are examples of social issues as they penetrate the problems and theories of social science,” it is unquestionable that under a (n)eugenic Eurocentric academicism, not only such rules are severely compromised, but also the given ‘direction to the problems of inquiry are severely compromised for one who fights for epistemological justice. Such (n)

252 Severe Occidentosis eugenicism radically flips the foci of the debate, and “far from being neutral, social science as act of social afliation and commitment” (Popkewitz, 1980, pp. 28–29) is a major source of the “epistemicide” (Paraskeva, 2017; 2016a; 2016b; 2014; 2011; Santos, 2014). Also, due to such institutionalization, critical curriculum theory, Pinar and Grumet (1992, p. 99) quite often “has been tainted with the self-conscious complexity of academic work, disdaining practical activity in order to maintain the class privilege that clings to the abstract in order to aggrandize its status.” 6. Insufficiency not just to stop talking on behalf of the other, but also to show the best knowledge about otherness. Žižek’s example provided at the Oxford Union Society is quite graphic. One day, Žižek states, in Montana, one Indian refered to himself as Indian. Immediately, a white, well-meaning liberal interrupted him and said: No, you are Native American, don’t you know you are humiliating yourself ? The Indian, Žižek adds, gave a perfect answer. No, I am sorry, Native American is for me much more racist. Native American means part of nature and part of your own culture. I prefer to be called Indian; in this way at least, my name is a sign of white man’s stupidity as they thought they were in India when they arrived in my land. At a conference in San Diego a couple of years ago, there was a symposium made up of U.S. radical critical intellectuals—who I respect tremendously— some of them an integral part of what I called the generation of utopia. The room was full, as the panel was quite promising. All the theoretically very sophisticated talks—with the exception of one—dealt with the consequences of neoliberal policies in Latin America and how the oppressed communities in such nations reacted to and attempted to defy such policies. During the debate—which almost completely changed the dynamics of the event—an intellectual from Latin America got up and went to the table and asked for the microphone. This intellectual—in my opinion, one of the most notable Freireans I know of—was visibly, understandably, and justifiably altered, and drew a very violent critique of the panel. He challenged what he called without any euphemisms, the academic arrogance and imperial take of a panel consisting of U.S. intellectuals—only one was not—at a major conference in the United States talking about realities that they ‘did not know.’ What they knew, he stated, was from stays in five-star hotels paid by the oppressed communities from his and other Latin American nations, when these and other intellectuals go to give lectures and ‘supposedly’ work with communities and oppressed groups. After such luxurious stays, they return to their beautiful homes in the United States and academicize the pain of the ‘other,’ speaking as ‘the other,’ teaching critical courses, producing lectures, writing beautiful papers and books to be translated in those nations talking about their own problems—as if they did not know—and the miserable oppressed stays where s/he belongs—within the same context, and better be ready as more research is coming. According to him, instead of talking as ‘the other,’ they should talk about the United States and poverty, starvation, exploitation in the United States and the creation of these conditions—financial and cultural—so that audiences like the one at the

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conference could have access to the voice, work, and language of intellectuals and social activists from those Latin American countries. Needless to say, that this critique was not well accepted and digested. In a way, as Santos (1999) says, “silence speaks, but speaks the hegemonic language that intends to make it speak” (p. 206). As Smith (1999) argues, the oppressed is the most researched subject on the planet. As Dabashi (2015) claims, such intellectuals “have no clue about my or anyone else’s work beyond their European nose, for that they have no interest or reason to do so” (p. 5). In a way, the academization of critical theory turns it into just another commodity. Moreover, the academization of radical critical theory, and hence its institutionalization within the framework of Modern Western Eurocentric academia, correlates radical critical theories like any other discipline, that is, “theory of theory, mental masturbation that doesn’t even reach an orgasm, instead of making a political change in theory” (Guillén, quoted in Walsh, 2012, p. 11). The massive majority of Modern Western Eurocentric academia “does not know (and if they do know, they do not value) the scientific knowledge produced in the semiperiphery or periphery; it is considered inferior in everything; and it is easily cannibalized and converted into a resource or raw material by core science” (Santos, 2005). In some cases, it has become common to “use” indigenous realities, and scientists have co-opted and wrapped such realities in Western concepts, what Sousa Santos (2005) calls “the proletarianization of semiperipheral and peripheral scientists” (p. xxiv). Why, Dabashi (2015) argues, “Europeans should not be able to read even when we write in the language they understand?” (p. 5). Additionally, They cannot read because they (as ‘Europeans caught in the snare of an exhausted but self nostalgic metaphor) are assimilating what they read back into the snare and to what they already know—and are thus incapable of projecting it forward into something they may know and yet might be able to learn. (Dabashi, 2015, pp. 5–6) Spivak (1995) also challenges the ability of particular intellectuals to edify credible narratives based on the daily experiences of individuals “among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of urban sub-proletariat who have been visited by the epistemic violence of the colonial encounter” (p. 28). One should not forget, Guha (1983) argues, that sub-alternity is “materialized by the structure of property, institutionalized by law, sanctified by religion and made tolerable—and even desirable—[thus] by tradition, to rebel [is] indeed to destroy such signs” (p. 1). The fact that critical theory unfolds itself within academic communities in accordance with contexts and controls of scientific creativity and production imposed by a rationality that was in essence the true object of its criticism speaks volumes to the fact that there has never been a moment where critical theory has assumed a dominant position within the academia, although there were/are notable critical intellectuals with fantastic

254 Severe Occidentosis work done in the field. As Santos (2018a) agues, “subaltern eyes are bound to be diferent eyes because they are trained in another culture” (p. 175). Also, needless to say that in such quarrels, crucial issues such as academic freedom become obliterated (Doumani, 2006). 7. Insufficiency to destroy, not just the quasi totalitarian cult of Modern Western Eurocentric scientificity of science—and its monumentalization of written and archival knowledge (Santos, 2018a)—but also that such insufficiency relied on their incapacity to understand that Western critical and postcritical approaches although powerful are not enough to push the battle against segregation, inequality, and exploitation to a flipping point. Such scientificity is deeply ingrained within the designs of the real world, as Escobar (2017) would put, driven by consumerism, individualism, environmental insensibility, and economic profitability. There is a need for more autonomous forms of designs for the world that respect the social matrix of indigenous communities and individuals sensible to social sustainability framed through the written and archival yoke (Santos, 2018a). As Santos (2018a) writes, “from the point of view of the epistemologies of the south abyssal science is a monumental science; doing science and being science are two incommensurate realities united by a belief, a a faith in science regardless of what it does and how it is done” (p. 186). Modern scientific knowledge, Santos (2018a) adds, “abhors oralization, it accepts only in a very limited way and in highly controlled contexts” (p. 186). Oralization doesn’t “only affect knowedge but also affects the person of the scientist, both as a scientist and as a citizen” (Santos, 2018a, p.  186). Colonialism defined “orality as inferior to textuality, and thus had considered societies wth different record systems as ‘primitive’ and ‘inferior’” (Mallon, 2012). Also, Modern Western scientificity of science legitimizes the cult and idolatry of vanguard intellectuals, instead of rearguard intellectuals, which coherently assures “the transportation and translation of scientific knowledge into cognitive contexts not controlled by the scientist” (Santos, 2018a, p. 186). Moreover, such monumentality has been able to be solidified and perpetuated through eugenic cultural politics of archivism. In Santos’s (2018a) words, “dominant archive is the modern abyssal way of producing knowledge under the guise of storing it” (p. 197). Rather “than appearing an exercice of power, storing is justified as compliance with a cutural duty. There is a clear inability to demonumentalize Modern Western scienficity of science (Santos, 2018a) and go above and beyond the reductive Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platform that frames its counter-hegemonic criticism and post-criticism matrixes and to dialogue and to incorporate crucial non-Western epistemological platforms within and beyond the West. ICT is the critique of the ‘monumentality’ of curriculum reason. Again Popkewitz (1984) helps a great deal here. In his terms, “each scientific field has particular constellations of questions, methods and procedures, constellations which provide shared ways of ‘seeing’ the world, of working, of testing each other’s studies” (Popkewitz, 1984, p.  3). As people are trained to

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participate in a research community, the learning involves more than the content of the field. While rightly so, “learning the exemplars of a field of inquiry is also to learn how to see, think about and act towards the world and individuals are taught the appropriate expectations, demands and consistent attitudes and emotions that are involved in doing science” (Popkewitz, 1984, p. 3), the truth of the matter is that such institutionalized academic socialization is only possible and legitimated within the fixed borders accepted by conventions stamped by Eurocentric views of what constitutes knowledge and science. In fact, “socialization into a disciplinary field involves social, emotional, and political elements as well as cognitive ones and political elements as well” (Popkewitz, 1984, p.  4). Some concrete examples might be worth the reader’s attention. For instance, isn’t it quite odd to have within our public higher education institutions undergraduate and graduate programs with their foci on critical theory and pedagogies but (1) having such programs functioning within a matrix that it is actually the crux of their criticism? (2) and being evaluated based on grids and through mechanisms, organizations, and bodies that are actually the first and foremost advocates of a eugenic conventionality? (3) and being evaluated by a committee so many times constituted by progressive intellectuals that kafkanianly assess a given critical program—which ideally appeals to creativity, freedom of thought, spontaneity, utopianism—based on a matrix that actually denies the very existence of being critical as a way of leaving? (4) and being rubber-stamped by accreditation bodies that are the guardians of knowledge-regulation, quite far from being democratic, progressive and totally insensible to alternative forms of knowledge and knowledge-as-emancipation (Santos, 1995)? (5) and accreditation bodies that are incapable of understanding that to be critical one cannot not compromise the possibility of fully engaging in a ‘ruthless critique of every epistemology that exists’ (Marx, 1844)? These accreditation bodies that are indeed armed arms of el patron colonial de poder (Quijano, 2000), completely oblivious that another knowledge and forms of science are possible (Santos, 2007a). What is quite odd also, I argue, is that we have countless critical programs that get final approval from such accreditation bodies by ‘not doing what actually they claim they aim to do on their mission statement.’ However, countless others were torpedoed. One wonders why. To be more precise how many radical critical programs could ever exist— and survive—under the ‘monologue of modern western Eurocentric reason’ (Bautista, quoted in Walsh, 2018, p. 69). The answer is ‘they can’t.’ Cases such as the Amawtay Wasi—the Intercultural University of Indigenous Nationalities and Peoples of Ecuador—are graphic examples. Founded in 2000 as an epistemological space to “respond from epistemology, ethics, and politics to the decolonization of knowledge” (Walsh, 2018, p. 69) this ‘House of Wisdom’ got shut down from state accreditation bodies due to reasons such as “lack of academic departments and lack of a centralized campus and faculty” (Walsh, 2018, p.  70). Amawtay Wasi’s failure was a clear evidence of how the institution’s design was not based on—and thus supportive of—non-Modern Western

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Eurocentric epistemological and ontological views and ways of reading the wor(l)d. To recapture Popkewitz’s (1984) argument, while one of the features of critical thinking—among others—is its creative nature, the fact that such creativity emerges but is not recognized within a scientific community context and within the limits drawn by general standards and ethical and moral codes of what constitutes science, subjugated to the yoke of knowledge regulation, nullifies its very creative characteristic. Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological and ontological forms of science “provide and create the general standards which guide individual pursuits” (Popkewitz, 1984, p. 3). Since such standards are (n)eugenically driven, Modern Western Eurocentric science is endemically eugenic, nullifying any attempt to produce any theoretical experiment that will defeat such eugenicism. Insufficiency to understand that arguably truthful radical critical programs would require a radically different public higher education institution, a pluriversity subversity polyphonic University (Santos, 2018a), a University “whose committed voice is not only composed of many voices but, above all, is composed of voices that are expressed in both conventional and nonconventional ways, both diploma-oriented and non-diploma-orienteded processes” (Santos, 2018a, p. 277). Both Walsh’s (2018, pp. 69–70) and Santos’s (2018a) decolonial excavations teach a great deal here. Drawing on Simpson’s rationale, Wash (2018) challenges for the need to “indigenize the academy” (p.  71). She dissects the Amawtay Wasi’s political pedagogical project in an indigenous Higher Educational institution that confronts and endeavors the traditional model of higher education based “in the reason of Western Eurocentric thought” (Walsh, 2018, p.  70). Amawtay Wasi, she (2018) adds, “finds its ground in a renewed comprehension and use of ancestral science, that is of Abya Yalean cosmology and philosophical theory of existence centered on relationality and connectedness, symbolized in the concept of Andean chakana” (p. 70). Amawtay Wasi is a ferocious challenge to the “epistemological privilege granted to modern science which made possible the technological revolutions that consolidates white supremacy” (Santos, Nunes, and Meneses, 2007, p. xi), but also it is palpable evidence that ‘another knowledge is not only possible but real’ (Santos et al., 2007). In this sense, it shows hope and possibility in the struggle to open the ‘canon of knowledge and recognition of difference’ (Santos et al., 2007) by challenging the “monoculture of scientific knowledge through an ecology of knowledges” (Santos et al., 2007, p.  xx). All knowledge is intra-knowledge (Santos, 2005) and coknowledge (Santos, 2018a), and an ecology of knowledges is an invitation to the promotion of non-relativist dialogues among knowledges granting equal opportunities to the different kinds of knowledge engaged in ever broader epistemological disputes aimed both at maximizing their respective contributions to build a more democratic and just society and at decolonizing knowledge and power. (Santos et al., 2007, p. xx)

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Amawtay Wasi by “renewing the comprehension and use of ancestral science” (Walsh, 2018, p. xx) addresses such challenge through the promoting of an indigenous way of being, i.e. chakana that guides the educational philosophy of praxis based on “complementarity, reciprocity, correspondence, and proportionality of knowledges, practices, reflections, lived experiences, and cosmologies or philosophies” (Walsh, 2018, p. 70). As a way of re-existence (Walsh, 2018), chakana calls for a ‘pluriversity’ anchored in intercultural knowledge, that is an “intercultural co-construction of theory, reflection and practice—of praxis—that seeks to facilitate a diferent understanding of global, national and local realities, and at the same time, articulate diverse rationalities and cosmologies” (Walsh, 2018, p. xx). Amawtay Wasi brings to the table the legitimacy of emancipatory forms of science (Walsh, 2018; Meneses, 2007). While indigenous universities are a necessary space in the United States and “not just as simple alternatives within the academia, but as places that embody, enable, engage, and support a distinct project of existence-and-as-life, and as-knowledge” (Walsh, 2018, p. 71), it is impossible not to notice that such battle was not present in the agenda of the massive majority of radical critical movements and groups. The new utopian logic should thus focus on a “polyphonic university which moves towards a pluriversity and subversity” (Santos, 2018a, p. 277), which reacts to university capitalism and colonialism, committed to an ecology of knowledges. This must be a fundamental feature within the radical critical platforms to win the battle for social and cognitive justice (Santos, 2014). As “theory enters a world in which there are predefined institutional arrangements, linguistic conventions and established priorities, and through a language that contains assumptions and visions that are influenced by the strains and struggles of the larger world” (Popkewitz, 1976, p. 325), it is crucial to make such theory a co-construction based on a radical of pluriversal epistemological perspectives (Santos, 2005). Žižek’s “Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’” (1998) unleashed one of the most important wrangles between a specific segment of European and non-European thinkers, though. Žižek opened his argument in the piece without any euphemisms: When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture—to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of proto-fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. (p. 988) Unapologetically, Mignolo (2013) counter-argued: When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting decolonial intellectual has not as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture—to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of proto-fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism.

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Moreover, Mignolo (2013) added that a self-respecting decolonial intellectual will reach instead to Fanon reasoning: Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of night, which has enveloped us, and reach, for the light. The new day, which is dawning, must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. So, my brothers, how could we fail to understand that we have better things to do than follow Europe’s footstep. Since relevance is not universal, Mignolo (2013) claimed, “we decolonial intellectuals, if not philosophers, ‘have better things to do’ as Fanon would say, than being engaged with issues debated by European philosophers.” Žižek’s “what is politics proper?” is challenged by Mignolo’s “what is philosophy proper?” In Mignolo’s (2013) terms, one needs to be quite careful in “the use of the term ‘philosophy’ to identify thinkers whether European and non-European.” It’s importance varies: I would say that while Zizek may be the most important European philosopher today, his work is less relevant for many people than the work of Jamaican philosopher Lewis Ricardo Gordon; Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr; Chinese philosopher Wang Hui; Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi; and Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel. (Mignolo, 2013) In this context, “relevance is not universal, but depends on the universe of meaning and the belief system under which relevance is determined” (Mignolo, 2013). “We have here a pluriversal world of thinkers and philosophers in the process of de-westernising and decolonising the imperial legacies of Western philosophy” (Mignolo, 2013). Žižek’s and Mignolo’s approaches are vivid examples of what one would define as exhausted (post)modernity. While modernity “has been always associated with the notion of progress” and development (see Wagner, 2012, p. 28)—a quite problematic concept or philosophy of praxis, as I was able to examine elsewhere (see Paraskeva, 2011)—and crisis as well as criticism is also at its very core, the truth of the matter is that decolonial thinkers, in a way, unveil the functionalist wound in which (post)modernity coexists. Modernity (Wagner, 2012) or successive modernities (Arnason, 2005) cannot be understood outside of the multisecular process of Westernization. Modernity is, in many ways, an overtly failed theorem (Paraskeva, 2017). It is an exhausted philosophy of praxis, more and more swamped in processes of revamping Western Eurocentric ways of thinking, that have been challenged and decolonized “in all spheres of life, politics, economy, religions, aesthetics, knowledge and subjectivity” (Mignolo, 2013). One of the most efcient weapons of the preservation and promotion as well as restoration of Western philosophy of praxis is the school, in general, and curriculum, in particular, and how schools are quite guilty of what Santos (2014) defined as the epistimicide.

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In this sense, I argue that the ‘fuck you, Mignolo’ positions assumed by Žižek (Dabashi, 2015) are somehow missing the point. I do concur with Žižek and understand that in criticizing Eurocentrism there have been and there continue to be many exaggerations and missrepresentations. I accept that in many criticisms of Eurocentrism there is a lethal dose of romanticism on nonEurocentrism. I even understand—that many circuits of intellectual production are scorned to hear, read about coloniality. However, Žižek and others need to come to grips—and I believe they will—that Modern Western Eurocentrism has helped to create the global pandemonium we live in, built a (n)eugenic notion and practice of humanity only possible through a sub-humanity—an issue so eloquently dissected by Žižek. However, we are faced with an ‘involution’ and the outcome is to re-think how we think about to promote a radical co-presence of epistemological pluriversity. In the course of this process, purges will occur and the metamorphoses inherent in the process itself will eliminate the romanticisms of any of the angles of that same pluriversity. As a philosophy of praxis, the radical co-presence advocated by Santos (2007a) is not a kind of ‘truth and reconciliation tribunal.’ It is the recognition on an equal epistemological term of endless non-Western, non-Eurocentric epistemological platforms that need to sit down face-to-face on equal footing. And yes, some have to assume their role—either in leadership or inability to interrupt this leadership—in the epistemicide. Such radical co-presence respects and fosters “an indígena subjectivity geographically rooted and historically placed” (Grande, 2004, p. 116). This new philosophy of praxis does not happen—nor can it—in the pattern constructed by Eurocentric Western Modernity. My sense is that Žižek knows fully well that one of his crucial interlocutors is not necessarily within the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platform—which speaks volumes about his epistemological framework and contradicts his open honest remark on Mignolo’s approach. Dabashi (2015) could not have another reaction. 8. Insufficiency to admit that in a world that is epistemologically diverse it is impossible to understand and transform it from one and only one fixed epistemological position. Knowledge, Foucault (1972, p.  184) claims, “is not an epistemological site that disappears in the science that supersedes it. Science—or what is offered as such—is localized in a field of knowledge and plays a role in it,” a field that cannot be framed just within Eurocentric terms. The “unique principle of social transformation underlying modern critical theory which rests on the inevitability of a single socialist future generated by the constant development of productive forces and by the class struggles in which it translates” (Santos, 1999, p. 202) is unsustainable. There is indeed a “multitude of oppressions, resistances, agents” (Santos, 1999, p. 204), and struggles against the oppressor and against the oppressed—as well as dynamics of oppression within the oppressed by the oppressed. Reducing all this complexity to a single transformative principle is a manifest error. The counter-hegemonic creed that the matrix that produced and supplied the ‘trash of social chaos’ could be alone the riverbed for an alternative just world was inaccurate. Modernity, Mignolo (2018) argues, “recasts a horizon of life and history that was

260 Severe Occidentosis devised long before. In its previous guises, it had other names, renaissance, progress and the civilizing mission. The catch 22 was to make believe that modernity is something beyond the narratives that invented the world and the imaginary the word invokes” (p. 110). The fact that radical critical platforms in general had never paid careful attention to the existence of non-Western, non-Eurocentric epistemologies—tirelessly seeking answers to inequality, segregation, oppression, and exploitation only within the Modern Western Eurocentric platform—was pushing the radical critical platform away from a correct sensibility to certain theoretical frameworks and concepts whose matrix emerged out of the Modern Western Eurocentric matrix and that in many ways could have helped not only the analysis of the dynamics of exploration and oppression but also presented valid future alternatives. Concepts such as coloniality, Mignolo (2018) argues, had not “emerged in Europe to account for issues of European concern—its economy, sensibility and history—but [were]a concept created in the Third World responding to the needs prompted by local histories of coloniality at the very historical moment when the Three World division was collapsing” (p. 110). In Europe, he (2018) adds, “the concerns were with modernity, postmodernity and globalization, not on coloniality, the darker side of modernity, postmodernity and globalization” (p. 110). In this context, coloniality—and the entire non-Eurocentric epistemological platform—cannot be framed within Eurocentric epistemological parameters. Thus, coloniality, decoloniality, decolonization, should not be defined “as an academic discipline yet it doesn’t mean it cannot be enacted in the academia as an attempt to reverse the trend and take decoloniality as a disrupter in the academy” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 106). As Pessoa (2002) would put it, “there are ways to understand that there are ways to be understood” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 279). Full blast epistemological pluriversity implies “the move from studying about to thinking with” (Walsh, 2018, p.  18), knowing that “there are ways of knowing rather than knowledges and while knowledge appropriates reality ways of knowing embody reality” (Santos, 2018a, p. 3). It is our task, as curriculum scholars, to dissect how different individuals, groups, and communities ideologically produce and re-produce multiple raced, gendered, and classed knowledge forms in very specific contexts (Au, Brown, and Calderon, 2016). I argue that we will not do justice to Freire’s (1998, p. 39) claim—that “no one knows it all; no one is ignorant of everything. We all know something; we are all ignorant of something”—if we will not conscientiously assume that the Freirean challenge to the wrangle ‘to know ignorance and the ignorance of knowledge’ implies the sublime respect for both Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric ways of knowing and ignorance. 9. The lack of a well-defined massive left radical critical movement to whom the radical critical platform is organically related and connected, produced insufficiencies within the radical critical pedagogical platform. In other words, it is not only an absence of a social political platform of the left but also the academicism in which we have fallen that in some way led us progressively to move away from broader and more structured social movements which, in some way, would blur the utopia that was pursued. Contrary to the

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sixties, Epstein (1997) argues, “cultural radicalism has been recast, particularly by the academic left, as desconstructionists stance that pursues criticism for its own sake, regards truth as an illusion and values matters of reference” (p. 7). Such cultural radicalism “has little conncetion to movements for or visions of social change, and it is mostly driven by internal pressures of the academia” (Epstein, 1997, p.  7). It is crucial, Touraine (1995) argues, “that intellectuals become interested again in public issues instead of closing in on a purely critical thought, or a purely instrumental action” (p. 7). It is crucial to renew the intellectual debate that seems to be bewildered (Touraine, 1995). In Dowd’s (2017) terms, “the major obstacle to effective political work in the United States is the absence of a mass-based political movement on the left, for which radical intellectuals are only minimally responsible” (p. 1); undeniably, “there has been so little progress toward building a bridge between radical analyses and the daily lives of our people, that this gap would seem to be the problem for U.S. radicals. The fault does not lie entirely in our stars; notwithstanding the undoubted contributions the left has made in holding back the dark in recent years, it has the responsibility of confronting and diminishing its persisting inadequacies” (Dowd, 2017, p.  8). Furthermore, Dowd (2017, p.  8) advances, “the years up to and through the 1950s were rife with difficulties for those who sought radical analyses to read, or outlets for their own ideas, whether in classrooms or in print.” According to Dowd, Such difficulties still exist, but they are of lesser proportions. For at least ten years now, the left could not reasonably complain that its ineffectuality has been caused by its inability to be read or heard. The reasons, at least some of them within our reach, lie deeper. (Dowd, 2017, p. 8) This is not a minor issue as such de-connectivity rusted the critical platform. The value of theory “is not decided alone by the formal criteria of truth. The value of theory is decided by its connection with the tasks which in the particular historical moment are taken up by progressive social forces” (Held, 1980, p. 192). Historical conditions “are the bedrock of ideas” (Dabashi, 2015, p. 6). That is, theory “is intertwined with history” (Held, 1980, p. 191) as “its concepts and categories refer to the development and formation of social relations practical human activities and historical struggles” (Held, 1980, p. 191). Having historical struggles as a fundamental source of any theoretical platform—the heyday of neogramscianism as I have had the opportunity to examine in detail elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2011) is not detached from a major social radical progressive movement exemplified in the Civil Rights, student revolts, and Romantic critics—by not being able to articulate the struggle for a just world with a well-defined nonmonolithic radical critical platform—due to the absence of ‘mass-based political movement on the left’ (Dowd, 2017)—radical critical platforms unfortunately not only became balkanized, but did not pay attention to how such historical struggles could not be defined and framed just in terms of the Modern Western

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Eurocentric epistemological tools. In such context, I argue that our radical critical approaches misperceive the place of enunciation. As Walsh (2018) claims, “the challenge is not look for theory first” (p. 21). That is, one needs to move beyond a simple reading of and about, toward a thinking from and with, a thinking-doing that requires contemplation of one’s own place of enunciation and relation (or not) with the so called universality of the Western thought. I am referring to the thinking-doing that delinks, that undoes the unified—and universalization—centrality of the West as the world and the beings to push other questions, other reflections, other considerations, and other understandings. (Walsh, 2018, p. 21) As I have argued before, critical pedagogy is in “an aporetic status” (McLaren, 1998, p. 361). It is one that, in Deleuze’s (2001, p. 219) terms, was created by the erroneous foci on ideology and not on organization of power—in fact, one of the towering arguments raised decades ago by who is in my view the most important figure of the U.S. curriculum field, Dwayne Huebner. What matters, Deleuze (2001) argues, is “not ideology, not even the ‘economico-ideological’ distinction or oppositions, but the organization of power, that is the manner in which libido invests the economic, haunts the economic and nourishes political forms of repression” (p. 218). The “specificity of educational power makes it appear as an ideology, but it’s pure illusion” (Deleuze, 2011, p. 217). 10. Insufficiency to anticipate the global emergence of inorganic groups, movements—some of them deeply connected with right extremist impulses and ferocious nationalisms. Others, such as those led by indigenous peoples “began to emerge as autonomous political actors who were not content to be ventriloquized by non-indigenous politicians and intellectuals” (Webber, 2017, p. 153). The lack of answers and acceptance of non-Western non-Eurocentric views led to the rise of inorganic movements from civil society, movements not connected at all neccessarily with progressive or critical platforms. Movements of oppressed groups across the globe have somehow been saturated with the lack of concrete answers from the overwhelming majority of radical critical platforms. That is, radical and critical approaches have long ceased to be the only unifying space for resistance and to struggle against oppression, inequality, and exploitation. As a result, inorganic popular movements began to emerge everywhere, a dangerous social avalanche, and the overwhelming majority of the radical critical platforms revealed an inability to foresee their emergence. Such movements are dangerous as they end up echoing and promoting what extremist movements most want—nationalism and populism. Such movements exhibit a turbulent congregation of demands before a sense of loss and despair that permeates the daily life of the massive majority of the oppressed. The rage against dominant traditions and power blocs, as well as the frustrations with counter-hegemonic traditions triggered the rise of an inorganic revolt, as is the case with the yellow vests in Paris. However, despite the legitimacy of such

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rage, such movements, Žižek (2018, no page) adamantly argues, fall into an acute—and arguably fatal—contradiction. That is, the ‘solution is not just to change the entire system a lit bit so that these demands will be met.’ That is, ‘its demands cannot be met unless one changes the entire system.’ The contradictory nature of such inorganic rage is well grasped by Žižek (2018): They care about ecological issues, but the first demand was lower taxes on gasoline, on fuel for cars; they want lower taxes for their income, but they want better healthcare and so on. This is typical populist demand. It’s probably an authentic outrage, fury, but literally quite literally impossible to meet. Impossible at least with the existing system. That is why such protests are important. Because we have in them a confrontation of popular unrest, dissatisfaction with the existing system at its best. If protesters, Žižek (2018) argues, come to power within the current existing system, that would mean another crisis. The contradiction showed by these inorganic movements raises yet another troubling issue. It seems that once again—as we have discussed in Chapter 3—as in the past, one notices difculties within the global oppressed movement to take advantage of ‘the crisis of the capital’ and destroy the oppressive platform, imposing a new social model. Instead one sees “a clash between their demands and what the system can ofer” (Žižek, 2018, no page). Along with Žižek (2018, no page), I argue that “the protesters are important since they signal that we are approaching a deadlock.” In Žižek’s (2018, no page) terms, the solution implies to change somehow gradually the entire system, the way of life, so that such demands would no longer be meaningful, as the system is reaching its limit, and the solution is neither populism nor better technocracy, which works within the existing system. We need today creative politicians who would present a new vision, how to radically change things. It is it is horrible to say it, but we need an enlightened leadership, and I am not afraid to say this. While I do agree with Žižek (2018) that the system needs to be changed radically, I diverge from him before the claim that such change will happen through any enlightened leadership regardless from which epistemological location one is referring in. In fact, el patron colonial de poder (Quijano, 2000) cannot be transformed by relying on the reasoning matrix that nurtures such patron. Creativity without a just sense of cognitive justice is judiciously epistemidical. Socialism’s next momentum, Aronowitz (1990b) claims, needs to address “both theoretically and practically, the cultural as well as economic and political issues that divide peoples” (p. 100). This is crucial as it will help also Modern Western Eurocentric counterdominant platforms to accurately come to grips with the ‘nationalist question.’ For several reasons, Aronowitz (1990b) argues, “reformers, including the socialists, have first tackled questions of state power and have, in pursuing the

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democratic alternative, a classic popular front policy which frequently, if not invariably, entails suppressing cultural differences.” Moreover, he (1990b) adds, “new social movements, identified in the West with democratic struggles— feminism, ecology and racial justice—also embrace nationalism and cultural autonomy which are not always compatible with the aims of the other movements.” On the contrary, “the debate concerning nationalism, long suppressed by Marxism’s consensus, after the first world war, that national liberation was ‘progressive,’ must return with a vengeance” (Aronowitz, 1990, p. 100). Future alternatives will not emerge in a sustainable way if based on platforms that intend to go back to old socio-economic models that in the past have provided the path for inumerous rights. The very logic of change has changed. Such platforms can no longer hold and provide any sustainable viable alternative (Žižek, 2016). The left, Žižek (2016) argues, doesn’t have a model still, it is lost in empty praises, and a new forum of the left needs to be invented. While I agree with Žižek’s (2016) claim, that one should avoid going back to the same old problematic matrix, regardless of how crucial it was to help accomplish so many victories, I do reiterate though that such such invention implies metamorphoses to de-link from the hydra of the Cartesian framework. For two centuries, Touraine (1995) argues, “the Left has promised that social progress is the other face of economic progress and that implies the liberation of the productive forces” (p. 30). It did not happen. In a political terrain of debris, “it is important that the left appears with a new model of social control of the economy, a new image of society” (Touraine, 1995, p.  30). Such new image cannot be achieved without the recognition of non-Western non-Eurocentric epistemological views of the world as equal in the battle for a just society. Thus, “the great question is not to seize power but to re-create society, to invent a new policy to prevent blind struggle between over-open markets and overclosed communities, and the laceration of societies in which the gap between the included and the excluded widens” (Touraine, 1995, p.  37). Also, radical critical approaches need to radically detach from epistemic suppression. While experience is crucial, in that it both reveals the lived realities of oppression and of resistance and helps to re-think social change and revolution, the truth of the matter is that it is not the voices or intellectual production of those who have lived oppression and resistance that have generally been of interest to leftist thinkers, but rather the interpretation and utility of this ‘experience.’ That is to say, it is the intellectual practice of “speaking for” the subalternized and oppressed that has generally characterized leftist politics and leftist thought, particularly in Latin America; a practice that tends to reproduce and maintain subalternization. The problem, then, and with regard to the discussion here, is with the ways “leftist critical thinking continues to disparage, obscure or negate the intellectual production that derives not from modernity itself but from its other face, that is, from coloniality and from the subjects who have lived the colonial wound” (Walsh, 2012, p. 14). Such epistemic suppression is also quite visible in the ‘invasion’ of dominant and counter-dominant Western epistemological forms in non-Western spaces and places. Ibarra Colado (2007) unveils such epistemic colonization through the translation processes

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of ‘Latin American’ authors that have acquired the ability to think like Americans to the point of ignoring their native reality by abdicating their own identity. Furthermore, we must not forget the international bestsellers of the management gurus whose books occupy the largest spaces in the study programs and classrooms of Latin American universities. 11. Insufficiency in perceiving and interrupting with certain forms through which the internationalization of the field of curriculum studies has taken place. Instead of learning from the South, we should be going south and with the South (Santos, 2014). Internationalization has served, in most cases, to promote a unidirectional perspective, not recognizing epistemological representations of the Global South. To complexify Eagleton’s (2000, p.  33) ideological claim, “the point is precisely not just to use elsewhere, but to use elsewhere as a reflection on where we are” Echoing Balakrishnan (2009, p.  16), the internationalization of the field has been an epic of the self-trascendence of the West towards an Oriental horizon.” To be more precise, the internationalization of the field of study—in many cases not consciously, I admit—has produced and supported itself in what I have termed as the sepoys of coloniality (Paraskeva, 2016d); these sepoys are no more no less than true ambassadors of the causes of the Global North. The strategy is not news and goes way back to the emergence of colonialism and imperialism. In the former African colonies, for example, British, French, and Portuguese imperial powers produced and served an armed military and intellectual force constituted by elements of indigenous populations as vehicles of oppression. That is, there was a native ‘crème de la crème’ eugenically prepared and armed—both militarily and intellectually— with the aim of ensuring respect and compliance with the so-called moral values of colonialism. Needless to say, this strategy also helped promote tribalism, one of the aces of imperialist power. In India, the phenomenon of the sepoys was also quite fundamental in the colonial strategy of domination and oppression. The strategy was so efficient that, in India, “Indian troops conquered the country for the British” (Anderson, 2013, p. 11). Shockingly, the phenomenon of internationalization in our field in too many cases has been promoting a myriad of autochthonous individuals and groups, truly pastors of a specific modern Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix, thus championing the deepening of the abyss. The internationalization of the field, to contextualize Anderson (2013), has produced “a class of persons, autochthonous in blood and color, but Modern Western Eurocentric in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (p. 15). The internationalization of curriculum studies cannot be about imposing the U.S. field’s matrix beyond the United States but creating the flipping point in which at the table a just and complicated conversation— not solipsistic soliloquies, cryptic monosyllabic (Pinar, 2004, p. 207)—occurs. 12. Insufficiency to grasp that there is no social justice without cognitive justice (Santos, 2014), which fatally implies a non-negotiable ‘recognition and representation’ (Fraser, 2003) commitment to anti-celebratory dialogues with and within non-Western epistemological platforms, within and beyond the West. We need to place the success of the struggles for social and cognitive justice in

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a new conception and praxis of power and dominance and not a mere power replacement of dominant traditions for non-dominant traditions. With critical theory as a crucial platform against all forms of domination, this is a crucial issue, as examples throughout the world documented such suicidal path. Also, domination dynamics have been systematically so metamorphosized during the last decades—after all, one of the reasons neoliberalism is so powerful— which requires alternative ways of thinking about alternatives (Santos, 2014) to help produce new approaches to interrupt and smash them. In our field, it is crucial to understand that only a curriculum of absences and a curriculum of emergences will recognize and respect that recognition precedes cognition (Santos, 2018a). The struggle for social and cognitive justice forces one to confront the hydra of epistemologies of the North in its ‘unsaids,’ making them visible, exposing them. Such battle for cognitive justice towards the end of the cognitive empire (Santos, 2018a) implies two pedagogical avenues. On one hand, a pedagogy of the sociology of absences “that would be geared to show the measure of the epistemicide caused by northern epistemologies and, on the other hand, a pedogogy of the emergences that would be oriented to amplify the meaning of the latent and potentially liberating sociabilities” (Santos, 2018a, p.  276). Modern critical platforms were incapable of smashing—even to mitigate—curriculum and pedagogical formations in which the presences and existences were tailored on the presences of non-presents, the existences of non-existences. However, a pedagogy of the sociology of absences and a pedagogy of a sociology of emergences (Santos, 2018a) implies fatally a curriculum of a pluriversal epistemological absences and a curriculum of pluriversal emergences. The latter preceeds the former within a process that materializes an itinerant curriculum theory. There is no decolonized pedagogy without a decolonized curriculum. 13. Insufficiency either to understand that everything that is Eurocentric is neither diabolical nor acceptable, and to consciously perceive the ideological differences between a “preservative and conservative mode” (West, 1999, p.  214). There is, Muthu (2003) argues, during and before Enlightenment a huge platform of European political thinkers—not just Bartolome de Las Casas—that reflected “a truly anti-imperialist political philosophy that rejected imperialism outright as unworkable, dangerous or immoral, thus defending non-Europa people against the injustices of the European imperial rule” (pp.  3–4). Again, one is not romanticizing such anti-imperial sphere within Enlightenment. Needless to say that such platforms were a minority and, as Tibebu (2011) argues, well-known Western European intellectuals, such as Hegel, Kant, and others, espoused a cult of European white racial superiority. In Tibebu’s (2011) words, for example, Hegel is responsible for a “racialized philosophical anthropology that informs Hegel’s philosophy of world history” (p. xii). I argue though that while Tibebu’s (2011) claim is accurate, Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platforms cannot be reduced to such a racial vein in Hegel, and others’ work, nor can such racial vein be the only crucial feature—although deplorable—to define them and their work. While

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the eighteenth century should be seen as “as anomalous due to its significant anti-imperialist strand, the nineteenth century European and political philosophical discourse on empire marked a return to the frequently held imperialist sentiments of pre-Enlightentment-era political thought” (Muthu, 2003, pp. 5–6). Also, The latter half of the eighteenth century is an anomalous period in modern European political thought, for it is only then that a group of political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism. In contrast, throughout the nineteenth century, virtually all prominent political philosophers were either agnostic on the issue of imperialism or, like John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, Hegel, and Marx, explicitly defended European rule over non-European peoples. (Muthu, 2003, p. 259) While I argue that Muthu’s (2003) examination on certain perspectives of the nineteenth century is debatable (see, for example Marx’s writings ‘On Colonialism’), it is undeniable that “truly anti-imperialist political philosophy emerges in the late eighteenth century in which a significant group of European political thinkers—Bentham, Condorcet, Diderot, Herder, Kant, Smith—rejected imperialism outright as unworkable, dangerous and immoral” (Muthu, 2003, p. 4). They vehemently reject Enlightenment imperial cultural insensibility that defines people from the New World since the fifteenth century as subhumans (Muthu, 2003). As Englightentment’s anti-imperialism is understudied (Muthu, 2033), it is one’s task to unpack and dissect it. 14. Insufficiency to avoid romanticizing everything that is non-Eurocentric as pure and thus avoiding what I have called elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2016a) indigenistude. That is, there is an understandable tendency to romanticize non-Western epistemological platforms, values, and cultures before and after the white European onslaught that took place in the 1600s. Both societies had before the invasion and genocide their own modes and conditions of production and degrees of inequality and social class, race, and gender injustice. Flannery and Marcus (2012) examine accurately how the creation of inequality feeds humanity well before the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platform became bloody hegemony. Also, Milanovic, Lindert, and Williamson (2007) documented how ancient inequality, although not so severe as it is in modern times, was a key feature in ancient societies. Approaches such as these allow one to be careful in romanticizing non-Western epistemological platforms, values, and cultures both of the past and present times. Also, it is crucial to not ignore that one of the most sanguinary events in the history of ‘capital’ i.e. slavery, revealed how the hunting and ensuing slave trade orchestrated by el patron colonial de poder blanco (Quijano, 2000) was greatly facilitated and expeditious, not only by the imperial power of the white guns, but also with the ‘connivance’ of several African tribes (Hurston, 2018). Indigenous peoples and communities, Smith (1999, p. 135) argues, are not claiming that all that is

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indigenous and non-Eurocentric was pure until touched by white humans, and all that is white and Eurocentric is bad by definition. Indigenous communities, in fact, “want their members to gain Western education and higher level qualification, but they do not want this to be achieved at the cost of destroying people’s indigenous identities, their languages, values and practices.” Such tendency to romanticize, also pushes for a monolithical reading of everything that is indigenous. As Kovach (2012) insighfully explains, “nehiyaw epistemology is a clear example of a very concrete tribal epistemology both aligned and differentiated from a broader discussion of indigenous episemology” (p. 63). That is, while “place and language are similar they are manifested through a multitude of different customs and practices” (Kovach, 2012, pp. 63–64). 15. Insufficiency to understand and respect that ‘this’ is not just physical, it is also metaphysical and that in a world epistemologically diverse, it constitutes a major category that deserves a better examination; this implies more attention not just to the insights promoted by the theology of liberation and black theology of liberation (Hopkins, 1999) paths, but also concurrently a clear understanding that despite its undeniable merits, theology of liberation is not enough to understand the conundrums inherent to epistemological diversity. As Pessoa (2002) argues, “whether we know it or not, we all have a metaphysics” (p. 188). With modernity, Autio (2006, p. 126) argues, “one witness[es] the birth of individuality” as we know it. The Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological paradigm created and solidified the “myth of the self-production of truth by an isolated subject” (Grosfoguel, 2018, p.  132). Such myth, a constitutive feature of modernity, reveals a “self-generated and insulated Europe, which develops on its own without depending on anyone else on earth.” Solipsism is, thus, “constitutive of Cartesian philosophy, as without it there can be no myth of a subject with universal rationality that confirms itself as such. Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platform created the illusion, of the possibility of a has called zero-point philosophy (Santiago Castro-Gómez, quoted in Grosfoguel, 2018, p.  132). Subsumed in such zero-epistemological-point—or zero-point philosophy” (Mignolo, quoted in Grosfoguel, 2018)—“relies a hidden and camouflaged eco-politics of knowledge” (Grosfoguel, 2018, p.  132). One is dealing with a philosophy in which the epistemic subject has no sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, class, spirituality, language, or epistemic location within power relations, and a subject that produces truth from an interior monologue with himself without relation to anyone outside him. We are dealing with a deaf philosophy, a philosophy without a face, which feels no gravity. (Grosfoguel, 2018, p. 132) Such epistemic subject is a “faceless subject which floats through the sky without being determined by anything or anyone” (Grosfoguel, 2018, p. 132). Human reasoning cannot be framed just within the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platform, be it hegemonic or counter-hegemonic. To

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be this delusional is to be committed to full epistemological fascism. As Santos (2005) argues, every knowledge is ignorance, it reveals some level of ignorance, which implies not only an “understanding of how knowledges are produced, how they relate to power and how they may shape subjectivities and relationships in conscious and non-conscious ways” (Andreotti, 2018, p. 186), but also that “the halfway between faith and criticism is the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith. But it is a faith yet because understanding involves presupposing that there is something understandable” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 165). The metaphysical and spiritual is not a minor issue and Modern Western counter-hegemonic traditions need to understand that a just dialogue with indigenous knowledges and methodologies and with non-Western, nonEurocentric epistemological platforms cannot ignore spirituality and the metaphysical; within the dialogues with the rich indigenous epistemological platform crucial terrains such as spirituality cannot be marginalized, ignored, ‘voodonized,’ or keep being produced as simply ‘non-existent’ (Santos, 2014; Smith, 1999). Being that such terrains are quite towering in specific epistemologies, to ‘voodonize’ it is just but one feature of how the epistemicide works; it is interesting to see overt contradictions within specific Modern Western Eurocentric counter-hegemonic traditions regarding sensitive issues related with spirituality and metaphysics, despite being profoundly sensible and involved in Boff and Freire’s theology of liberation. The other was always either ‘non-existent’ (Santos, 2014) or devoided from any reasoning, voodonized entity (Smith, 1999), incapable of “creation and crushed by the force of nature” (Diop, 1987, p.  130). Indigenous methodologies, as well as non-Western, non-Eurocentric epistemologies cannot be fully respected and recognized unless the Modern Counter hegemonic Cartesian matrix admits its insufficiency to grasp such richness. As the Angolan novelist Agualusa (2017) unwaveringly claims, “what/ if Europeans don’t know it is because it doesn’t exist” (p. 18). One’s soul, in so many ways “an asylum of caricatures” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 210), is also “a hidden orchestra. I do not know what instruments tanging and grinding, ropes and harps, timbales and drums inside me. I only know myself as a symphony” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 260). The rejection of any form of reasoning above and beyond the physics (n)eugenic territorialized by Modern Western Eurocentric matrix, is the vivid example of what Santos (2005) calls epistemological blindness, muzzled by and within delusional pillars of a scientificity of science—the same one that by the way, among other things, is opioidizing a nation (Drisko, 2017)— promoting and legitimizing and socialized generations and generations into “wrongs caused by such epistemic privilege” (Andreotti, 2018, p. 186). Interesting to notice how ‘dominant’ and ‘counter-dominant dominant’ forces within the Modern Western Eurocentric matrix marginalized for decades the calls made by Huebner and Macdonald regarding spirituality and transcendence. With very few exceptions—Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman (1995) and a few others—not only the works of Dwayne Huebner and James Macdonald have been erroneously—yet understandably—sidelined, but also especially

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their call within and beyond the physical, i.e the call against the pale mundane, have been marginalized. Huebner’s (1966) call—“how can one talk about education, specifically, curriculum and also talk about the spiritual?” (p. 1)—while it is a challenge on the dominant semantic asphyxiating the field, it is also a challenge on one’s very own language to challenge such dominant semanticism that frames the curriculum phenomena, a semanticism that was/is highjacked by learning theories. The language of education is full of “dangerous and non-recognized [and unchallenged] myths” (Huebner, 1966, p.  9), which makes it impossible to question whether the “technologists maybe were going in the wrong direction” (Huebner, 2002, Tape 1). This becomes much more complex and alarming in a society that is facing the fact that “the problem is no longer one of explaining change, but of explaining nonchange” (Huebner, 1967, p. 174), and that a human being, by his transcendent condition, “has the capacity to transcend what he is to become, something that he is not” (p. 174). Furthermore, [f]or centuries the poet has sung of his near infinitudes; the theologian has preached of his depravity and hinted of his participation in the divine; the philosopher has struggled to encompass him in his systems, only to have him repeatedly escape; the novelist and dramatist have captured his fleeting moments of pain and purity in never-to-be-forgotten aesthetic forms; and the [man] engaged in the curriculum has the temerity to reduce this being to a single term—learner. (Huebner, 1966, p. 10) Although the generation of utopia has introduced a new language in the curriculum field which helped us in so many advances and conquests, they have been unable to go beyond the epistemological matrix of Modern Western Eurocentrism and promote an ecological semantic as Santos (2007a) would put. That is, Macdonald’s (1986) concerns of how shall we live together could not be fully and justly address without opening up the canon of knowledge (Santos, 2007a) of Modern Western Eurocentrism. Curriculum theory, in Macdonald’s (1975) terms, was a study about “how to have a world” (p. 12), an exciting venture and a creative act, asked for a transcendent momentum, and could not be barbedwired by political and economic categories (Macdonald, 1966). Huebner’s (1976, p. 154) alert that “the end is here” was actually arguably not just his ‘final words’ to the field. As a sublime intellectual avant la lettre, Huebner (1976)—undeniably the most important figure within the field—probably foresaw the entire desideratum of modernity as “an aged enterprise” (p. 154). 16. Insufficiency to perceive that the just battle against Modern Western Eurocentric hegemonic literacies are not destituted of contradictions. One of such contradictions is to see attempts to deconstruct the hegemony of English only not just relying on non-Latino approaches, but also translating, for example from Spanish to English non-Latino intellectuals. Needleless to say, that exceptions emerge in the works of leading critical scholars, Darder, Valenzuela,

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and others. As I had the opportunity to examine before, Darder (2011, p.  20) was one of the neo-Gramscianism dissidents that championed the struggle for “bicultural identity” (Darder, 2011, p.  20). However, her sharp critique was not targeting just the dominant tradition. Together with Torres, Darder (2004) alerts us about the dangers of the use of “race as the central unity of analysis of racialized oppression and racism” (p. 98). Such centrality quashes ideological dynamics that catalize capitalism’s unequal social structures. The fallacy of the centrality of race, Darder and Torres (2004) claim, in examining the eugenic bone of the epistemicide produces a “circularity of race logic” (p. 5) that legitimizes the erroneous cult that “racism exists because there is such thing as race” (p.  100). Concomitantly, Darder and Torres (2004) add, such circularity not only ignores that “notions of racism are fundamental ideological constructions of race” (p. 100), but also attempts to weave (and in so many ways successfully) what I would coin as zero-ideological ideology orbit, which fertilizes the ‘coloniality zone’ that “obscures and disguises class interests behind the smokescreen of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently whiteness” (p.  1). Hartman (2008, p.  13) also calls our attention to the fact that “the history of black counter-historical projects is one of failure, precisely because these accounts have never been able to install themselves as history, but rather are insurgent, disruptive narratives that are marginalized and derailed before they even gain a footing.” Hartman’s (2008) claim in a way constitutes an overstament; however, it is undeniable that it could give us a crucial insight over why in many cases it has been difficult to edify an hegemonic critical project. 17. There is a clear insufficiency to recognize the persistence of caste as a category of domination and oppression far beyond the dynamics of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Despite Horkheimer’s (1999, p.  65) close attention to caste dynamics related with a constructed “cultural lag,” the fact is that radical critical theory persistently sidelined such eugenic dynamics. Bourdieu (1958) places caste at the center of his examination on colonialims. In his understanding, as a system based on relations of domination, the colonialism matrix is a caste-based matrix which fades the preponderance of class. Colonialism is, in Bourdieu’s (1958) terms, a casteized reasoning that frames a casteized habitus, that is lethal social dispositions welded in “structured structues predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53; Go, 2017). As a subhumanizing category of the individual, the caste goes back to the times of feudalism in contexts like those of India, although Marxist impulses foresaw their end with the natural industrial and technological development of capitalism. However, the fact that not only such end did not happen, but also in the midst of neoliberal triumphalism, the segregated dynamics of the caste and its social atrocities multiplied in a vicious way not only in India but also in its own diaspora (Teltumbde, 2014). That is, the systems of domination cannot be deconstructed by looking only for categories such as class, race, ethnicity, and gender. One must face such hidden apartheid (Teltumbde, 2014) and place caste at the center of the debate, something that has been systematically marginalized

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by the overwhelming majority of the counter-hegemonic platforms. Caste is not race, and it is not just confined to India and its diaspora. As Diop (1987) adamantly dissects, caste in African countries, such as Senegal, Ghana, and Egypt, errupted with the division of labor and assumed a radically different segregational symbiosis than the one in India. While caste dynamics re-escalated with industrialization and became more intricate as capital became more and more aggressive, the truth of the matter is that one is before an ancestral social segregational category as one can see unpacked in the poems of the great Tamil Brahmin poet Sri Sivavakkiyar—tenth century CE or in Muktabai’s approach—a Dalit educated woman who ferociously challenged caste’s ‘double discrimination’ during the Ahmednagar period (Paik, 2014). A category so ancestral and so towerly ingrained in countless societies around the world cannot be produced as ‘non-existent’ (Santos, 2014). Moreover the noisy silence on caste drives our critical path towards imprudent approaches and sidelining key ideological aspects within individuals and groups. The wrangle between Anderson (2013) and Chatterjee, Kaviraj, Menon, and Ruparelia (2014) on The Indian Ideology—not only was avoidable, I think, but also documents vividely how in Chatterjee, Kaviraj, Menon, and Ruparelia’s terms, Anderson’s (2013) examination on the Indian historical process shows ‘serious structural flows.’ Chatterjee et al.’s (2014) response to Anderson is much more than a relentless criticism on Anderson’s (2013) distorted view of history that subalternizes Indian intellectuals. It also provides another reading of India’s historical process against British colonialism and underscores crucial aspects, such as Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s positions on varna vs caste: “How to bring about the reform of the Hindu social order? How to abolish caste?” (Ambedkar, 2018, p.  42). Conversely to Gandhi, Ambedkar (2018) claims that “caste had a divine basis” (p. 46) that needed to be destroyed. A “social endosmosis” (Ambedkar, 2018, p.  29) could not be achieved in a society “which caste has made public opinion impossible” (Ambedkar, 2018, p.  29). Menon (2014, p.  36) frames Anderson’s (2013) approach as “a crassly Orientalist analysis” (p.  36), using unreliable sources, a “pitiless exposure of Indian ideology, showing a method of engaging with non-Western modes of thought jeering like a schoolboy at funny foreign notions to make sarcastic jibes” (pp. 44–45). Anderson seems oblivious, Chatterjee (2014) adds, “to the need of distinguishing between the social conservatism of Gandhi’s own caste and woman on one hand, and on the other the radical effects of his practical injunctions, such as being one’s own scavenger, or asking woman to go to jail by publicly courting arrest” (p. 69). Like, class, race, and gender, caste as Ambedkar (2018) argues is an institution. 18. Insufficiency to co-lead the decolonial turn, to de-link from the power matrix of coloniality of being, knowledge, labor, gender, and sexuality, by dueling with its own insufficiencies and decolonizing it, thus disarticulating and concomitantly articulating and re-articulating with the post-colonial, decolonial, and anti-colonial. Speaking from and to the counter-hegemonic tradition Ali Shari’ati (1980)2 documents how Marxism and other fallacies are also at the

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very root that helps “the deformation and decline of humanity under two main headings, the social systems and intellectual systems” (p.  19). Both communist and capitalist societies experienced “a similar downward curve in human moral values.” They both “closely resemble the bourgeois West with respect to social behavior, social psychology, individual outlook, and the philosophy of life and human nature” (Shari’ati, 1980, p. 19). In this context, both “Marxist and capitalist societies present a single kind of man to the marketplace of human history” (Shari’ati, 1980, p.  19). Being this the case, and while the accomplishments of Marxist and neo-Marxist platforms are undeniably huge and profound in the struggles against oppression, segregation, and exploitation, it seems that they need to be pushed to non-celebratory decolonized approaches. This is a challenge, one that brings to the table the Marxist concern of Eagleton (1991, p. 65) “who is going to educate the educators?” 19. Insufficiency to address the indigenous question. While the struggle against inequality, injustice, exploitation, segregation, poverty from counterhegemonic movements, groups, and traditions is undeniable, they did not hesitate in denouncing social inequalities, economic and cultural segregation, and the miserable life of millions of individuals all over the world, and the way schools, in general, and curriculum, in particular, are not ‘innocent’ in that painful societal saga. It is also indisputable that, paradoxically, the way particular identities are persistently marginalized, or even obliterated from the ‘core,’ pushed to the margins, or even produced as ‘non-existent’ (Santos, 2014). While arguing for real social justice and against ways the less advantaged have been systematically silenced within our societies, thus highlighting particular ideologically gendered, raced, and classed identities such as Latino, Latina, Chicano, Chicana, women, people of color, African-American, the truth of the matter is that the indigenous question, and the continuous overt sub-humanization of native American communities, is massively absent from the overwhelming majority of the radical critical movement. The noisy silence of the American Indian Movement, its ideological interchange with broader anti-racist struggles and movements, such as the Black Panthers (Banks and Erdoes, 2004) is incomprehensible, especially when one sees radical critical intellectuals connected with indigenous groups and movements abroad. One is talking about a civilization that “doing time in jail is almost a traditional rite of passage” (Banks and Erdoes, 2004, p.  59). In a moment that the school-toprison pipeline—rightly so—occupies the central place with countless research framed within radical critical matrix, it is quite a paradox that a community that for example in the state of Minnesota represents “more than one third of prison inmates in a state that only one percent is American Indian” (Banks and Erdoes, 2004, p.  59). The fact that one cannot recall the name of an indigenous higher educational institution speaks volume to such lack of recognition. Arguably, it would have the same faith as Amawtay Wasi—the House of Wisdom—in Ecuador. Nor can one recall a belligerent struggle for such indigenous institution. Sometimes, as Pessoa (2002, p. 151) says, I feel that we pass a wrong perspective of our laudable struggle. As the Portuguese saying

274 Severe Occidentosis goes, sometimes we look like those who can’t see an ox in front of their nose but can see a speck in the other’s eye. That is, “impotent and unable to master our own attitude towards life, which is everything or our own being, which is almost everything, we run away from ourselves to modify others and the external world (Pessoa, 2002, p. 151). Unfairly, the critical subject looks like a “social and personal zero, a massive failure” (Gil, 2009, p, 15). Such zero momentum triggers “neurotic subjectivities and colossal, invasive and canibal egos only interested in themselves as it swallow the word, introject it” (Gil, 2009, p.  15). The subject lives as a social and personal zero, a loser, complains about everything from everyone, but never about himself. A paranoic visceral Ego drowns the I/Self and builds a monarchy of esquize, that is a gap, a wound within the I/Selfs of the critical theory, as Gil (2009) would put it. Such curriculum esquize frames the subject under onto-epistemological metamorphosis, in which the neurotic-delirium, as Gil (2009) would argue, totalizes his real. When will ‘the dialogue’ happen on an equal footing between the critic and the indigenous theory? When will ‘the dialogue’ happen between theories that are written with words and theories that are not written with words or that are written without written words—as Boone and Mignolo (1994) would put it—and which for that very reason are theories?  20. Insufficiency to realize that not admitting all the above makes them an integral part of the epistemicide—or at least they are not helping much in the struggle against the epistemicide—and it will not lead to an “epistemolgical shift” (Santos, 2018a, p.  viii). I would like again to make a parenthesis and reiterate that these insufficiencies—and arguably many others—do not in any way pinch or call into question the great accomplishments made by the critical theoretical platform. To begin with, for example, one of them, the very fact that we are at this moment sketching what we can call the critic of the critic, in the way we are doing it, shows how much we owe a great deal to the struggles and accomplishments made by the demiurges of our field. As I have examined in other contexts, the overwhelming majority of the great social transformations of the twentieth century are due to movements and intellectuals strongly influenced by (neo-) Marxist thought so structural in the critical platforms. I understand, however, that the best way to respect and celebrate this past, its struggles, frustrations, and achievements is to continue working within the critique, realizing the need for a different dialogues with other perspectives beyond the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological terrain that constituted the matrix of critical platforms. So that the past and the present of critical theories—which not only lead to belligerent battles, many frustrations, but also many conquests—have not been in vain, we have the duty to fight collectively so that, as Gil (1998) would say, “the critical theory does not become and petrify as a tribal theory”; critical theory is not devoid of infinity, and I hope we do not want to be ourselves to embark on the daydream of instituting it. To address such insufficiencies, as I have argued before, we need to be committed to “exfoliation processes” (Gil, 1998, pp. 127–128.9), which situates the complicated conversation (Pinar, 2004) into a totally different level. Critical

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approaches, reflect a combination of interactions with the concrete real(ity), relations “that imply exfoliations” (Gil, 1998, p.  126.7) within and beyond the Modern Western Eurocentric crono-space. Such curriculum exfoliations will help peeling and healing specific dogmatic and reductive armoires of the present/past, essential processes, which allow theory to “turn onto” a different just epistemological level of praxis (Gil, 1998, p. 126.7), fostering what Tibebu (2011) calls “polycentric egalitarian humanism that reflects the recognition and respect of human diversity on the basis of real equality” (p. xix). Exfoliation processes will allow just conditions for de-linking to decolonize, break, and dissolve the Modern Western Eurocentric matrix and its uniqueness; it will help the critical platform to be better equipped to challenge eugenic processes of defoliation that erupted right in the first “morning of the Occident in black Africa, that was spangled over with smiles, with cannon shots, with shining glass beds, a morning of accouchement: the known world was enriching itself by a birth that took place in mire and blood” (Kane, 1997, p. 154). This might well be a battle of the infinite, a battle for the infinite and within the infinite, yet not an infinite battle. The “infinite is then the possible” (Pessoa, 2006, p.  56), a present possible “as the only reality is the eternal present, the undying now (Pessoa, 2006, p. 47).

Notes 1. José Gabriel Condorcanqui—known as Túpac Amaru—was a Peruvian leader. Together with his wife, Micaela Bastidas and an army of 80,000 freedom fighters, they championed a war against Spaniards colonial forces. Captured by the Spaniards they were ruthlessly tortured. When they tried to extract information from him, his last words to his executor José Antonio de Areche Zornoza before he died, were: “there are no accomplices here other than you and I. You as oppressor, I as liberator, deserve to die.” 2. https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/ali-shariati-marxism-and-otherwestern-fallacies.pdf (1980) Mizan Press.

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To Be Continued ‘Don’t Shoot the Utopists.’ Decolonize It

It is in the nature of utopia not to be realized. (Santos, 1995, p. 481)

So far, I have been examining a complex multitude of questions undergirding the reasons radical critical theories have not been able to impose as a hegemonic bloc. I also worked on a concept that I advanced a couple of years ago (Paraskeva, 2007; 2011a; 2011b)—the critical curriculum river— and brought to the debate the way in which a certain group of radical and/ or critical intellectuals and social movements within and beyond that river tenaciously sought a very concrete utopia. I named this group as the ‘generation of the utopia,’ a generation that magnetized a utopian generation and allowed us to be where we are today. I also defended that the best way to respect them and celebrate their achievements would not be their ‘idolatry’ and ‘iconization,’ but rather to try to neutralize some of the nodes and frustrations they have encountered and deterritorialized, decolonizing and refining their approach. I maintain that regardless of the difficulties transpired by radical critical theories, a solution is to respond to the insufficiencies described previously, which implies the capacity to embrace an itinerant curriculum theory, a just theory that allows critical platforms—through processes of exfoliation—to delink and to decolonize and to be committed with the respect and recognition of non-Western epistemological perspectives within and beyond the Modern Western Eurocentric matrix. There is no complicated conversation without the ability to overcome the (n)eugenic anathema institutionalized by el patron colonial de poder (Quijano, 1992; 2000). I claim an itinerant curriculum theoretical path as the deterritorialized turn, the delink momentum in our field, a momentum that simultaneously allows one to understand the river’s multifarious flows, and how “through the river traveled hopes, and unfulfilled dreams” (Couto, 2008, p.  x). Sadly, for the massive majority of the world, ‘all the shortcuts in theirs dreams will probably lead to clearings of anguish (Pessoa, 2002)

284 To Be Continued Again, I don’t think the importance of the critical has passed. I am not as harsh as Keucheyan (2014) in his alias excellent analysis on the historical contours of the left hemisphere. A theory with a historical legacy that dates back to the French revolution, has in fact faced many defeats, frustrations, but it has not lost the war. It will however continue to race against history if it fails to overcome its blindness. Reality continues to begs for another critical, critique and critic, one that is not autophagic, non-derivative, non-abyssal. Critical theory must mutate respecting its past by looking at legitimacy and onto-epistemological power beyond Eurocentric Western Modernity epistemological matrix. We need to understand the need for a ‘theory now’. Welcome to the Itinerant Curriculum Theory.

Itinerant Curriculum Theory: An Epistemological Declaration of Independence ICT is meant to guide us in transforming our labor into a living praxis of global cognitive justice. This entails curriculum driven by emancipatory epistemologies of difference and resounding otherness that provide us the space in which to (re)imagine and transform the rigid, disembodied, fractured, and reductive ideologies that plague our teaching and our lives. (Darder, 2018)

A deterritorialized curriculum theory implies a commitment to fight for a different research platform, one that pushes research to a “level of instability, not stability, generating concepts also, in itself, unstable” (O’Brien and Penna, 1999, p.  106). In doing so, a deterritorialized curriculum theory increasingly becomes an itinerant theory, a theory of nonspaces (Auge, 2003). In essence, one needs to assume a rhizomatous approach that sees reality beyond dichotomies, beyond beginnings and endings (Gough, 2000); an approach that breeds from the multiplicity of immanent platforms and, from its centerless and peripheryless position, defies the myth of clean knowledge territories (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Eco, 1984). Such itinerant position should be seen as subversively transgressive. The “purpose of curriculum theory[ists], is to travel, to go beyond the limits, to move, and stay in a kind of permanent exile” (Said, 2005, p. 41). A theory of non-places and non-times is, in essence, a theory of all places and all times. The curriculum theorist is a constant migrant (Jin, 2008), a “permanent nomad of his own all multifaceted consciousness” (Pessoa, 2002, p.  113), who experiences a series of [epistemological] events (Khalfa, 1999). The itinerant theorist is a “real dinamogenus” (Gil, 2010, p. 13). Such migrant being and thinking situates the itinerant theorist, “it beckons us to recognize that how we perceive and experience the world (individually or communally), how we identify problems and name solutions, and how we locate ourselves in the world are all inseparable to the struggle for cognitive justice” (Darder, 2018, p.  xi), thus helping to short-circuit the functionalist trap that is sinking Western Eurocentric dominant and counter-dominant platforms (Süssekind, 2017; Oliveira, 2017; Moreira, 2017).

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In arguing for an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (hereafter ICT), I am claiming an atypical epistemological approach that will be able to deconstruct the images of thought thus re-thinking the utopia through re-utopianizing thinking fueling the emergence of radical collective and individual subjectivtities; ICT is such metamorphoses exhibiting “a double purpose though; (a) to reinvent maps of social emancipation and (b) subjectivities with the capacity and desire for using them; that is no paradigmatic transformation would be possible without the paradigmatic transformation of subjectivity” (Santos, 1995, p. 482). In doing so, ICT brings back to the fore social imagination (Berardi, 2012) but within a pluriversal matrix. Such an approach will unfold naturally into voluntary and involuntary creations (Merelau-Ponty, 1973). Furthermore, the curriculum worker and creator need to be seen as “an auctor, which is qui auget, or the person who augments, increases, or perfects the act (in fact), since every creation is always a co-creation, just as every author is a co-author” (Agamben, 2005, p.  76). To create, the theorist “needs a foothold” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 214), and the strength of such foothold comes from his/her “extraordinary exteriority” (Gil, 2010, p. 14), that is the “interior and exterior constitute a space of implosion” (Gil, 2010, p. 15). The core of ICT is the fact that it ferociously challenges any attempt of a bunker theory-practice, or a bunker praxis. In examining the complex conundrum of the Portuguese identity, the great Mozambican-born philosopher José Gil (2009) argues that identity matters are not detached from the cruelty of a “one and only one-dimensional way” (p. 38). That is, the cult of ‘the one best theorypractice’ “is intimately connected with all the commonsensical commonsense lack of evidence of so-called credible alternatives, that ‘cocoonizes’ the subject in invisible and visible bunkers” (Gil, 2009, p.  38). In a way, to upgrade Gil’s (2009) arguments, a palpable ‘selficide’ is systematically produced by blocking ‘truth’ from itself and from the very own self, a self that can only exist ‘in inner violence.’ In fact, I argue that our field doesn’t have a lack of identity; quite the opposite, it has a healthy excess of identity (Gil, 2009). Thus, ICT is not a bunker theory (Gil, 2009); it works under a pluralistic conceptual grammar (Jupp, 2017, p.  4) “emphasizing (a) the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being; (b) epistemicides, linguicides, abyssality, and the ecology of knowledges; and, (c) poststructuralist hermeneutic itinerancy”; such pluriversal grammar allows us to think about “a prudent knowledge for a decent life” (Santos, 2007a) defending the epistemological as political (Oliveira, 2017; 2014). ICT swims in a “conceptual grammar that relocates curriculum studies work within the arc of historical colonization rather than dyed-in-the-wool 1970s revisionist narratives” (Jupp, 2017, p. 4). In this context, ICT promises a sense of respect for epistemological diversity. While being an “occupying epistemology” (Santos, 2018, p.  2), its aim is not “to overcome the hierarchical dichotomy between North and South, but rather to overcome such normative dualism” (Santos, 2018, p.  7). Thus, it is the claim of a just theory that sees the collective struggle for knowledge as a struggle that must go far beyond the Western epistemological platform. ICT is

286 To Be Continued a clear appeal against the precariousness of any ossified and fixed theoretical position (Paraskeva, 2018). ICT walks towards knowledge emancipation, thus opening up the canon of knowledge regulation; it is not a great narrative of a great theory as “knowledge-emancipation does not aspire to a great theory, it aspires to a theory of translation that serves as an epistemological support for emancipatory practices” (Santos, 1999, p. 206). It is not a great theory, it is only a theory—perpetually itinerant—of great knowledge, fully aware that such great knowledge, as Chou1 (2017) argues, is reachable only through a “full consciousness that everything is continually transformed inside and outside our mind” (p. 66). Itinerancy thus is not real; it’s the real(ity). ICT is thus “an epistemic minga, a collective farming for the collective good” (Santos, 2018, p. 146). In this sense, ICT doesn’t just face the outside (Gil, 2010, p.  16) as it is indeed the outside—but not an outsider— yet steams discret sensacionism—the opposite of sensacionalism—“the only reality is the sensation of consciousness” (Gil, 2010, p.  65). ICT is a wordily theoretical approach, it is the theory of palavrar. It is an attempt to build a theory “que palavre e não que diga” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 226). In this sense, the itinerant theorist is always mining the meaning (Williams, 2013), knowing fully well that what is around is rather more crucial than the dust, noise, and the grain provoked by the mining. Thus, an itinerant curriculum theory is inherently “an exfoliation” (Gil, 1998, pp. 127) metamorphosis, a sill of “infinite mournings” (Couto, 2008, p.  105), a(n) anti- and post- “mechanotic” (Al-l-Ahmad, 1984, p.  31) momentum that will seek to create “a powder, gentle, maneuverable, and capable of blowing up men without killing them, a powder that, in vicious service, will generate a life, and from the exploded men will be born the infinite men that are inside him” (Couto, 2008, p. 68). In such context, ICT is a “pluriversal polyphony, a polylectal rather than ideolectal conception of cultural and political imagination” (Santos, 2018, p.  12), so crucial in an era paced by the death of imagination. I argue for a “new form of political affirmation grounded in a global pluriversal epistemological visions and interests to be favored and courses of action to be followed that are sustained in people’s history” (Popkewitz, 1978, p. 28). In this sense, ICT is a clarion call against both the curriculum epistemicide and reversive epistemicide. ICT, Jupp (2017, p. 6) states, requires both recognition of the US-centric and Anglophone curriculum river’s insights and advancements, yet simultaneously; it emphasizes the river as the very root of epistemicide and linguicide in extinguishing alternatives. It provides a hermeneutic for greater historical understanding of curriculum studies and for grappling with and critiquing curriculum studies’ violent past of epistemicide and linguisticide. That is, as Süssekind (2017, p. 8) argues, ICT is on a front line against epistemological totalitraianism/fascism, as in a word epistemologically so diverse, “both hegemonic uses of science and counter-hegemonic traditions (despite some major gains) functioned as part of the curriculum epistemicides.” That is,

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“while the hegemonic uses of science were overtly prejudiced and intentional in epistemicides, the fact that counter hegemonic traditions did not pay much attention in their arguments to epistemological respect and diversity makes these traditions complicit as well” (Süssekind, 2017, p. 8). The educational and curriculum theorist needs to be understood as an epistemological pariah who is challenging and challenged by a theoretical path that is inexact yet rigorous (Deleuze, 1990). It is, as we will see later on, a theory of frontier and baroque, in perpetual transitionality state (Santos, 1995). ICT is deeply sentient, as Beauvoir (1976) would argue, that “it is in the knowledge of the genuine [social constructed] conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.” ICT confronts ‘ambiguity—not absurdity’—as a fundamental condition of a social constructed being; ambiguity is doing an ethical matter, and the task is not to “dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it” (Beauvoir, 1976, p. 35). An itinerant theorist is immersed in a metamorphosis “so perpetually incomplete that even dreams dislike because they have defects” (Pessoa, 2002, p. 126); so perpetually deep that it hurts the imagination (Gil, 2010, p. 86), it hurts the “physical brain” (Pessoa, 2002, p.  234). ICT is the perfect utopia because it is conscious of the imperfection of what is perfect, conscious of the perfection of the imperfection. Hence, being perfect contradicts being complete, and yet the theorist is thirsty for being complete leaving him/her in a perennial state of useless pain. ICT reflects a subject that when “he/she thinks sees him/ herself in the process” (Pessoa, 2002, p.  73), and fully “understands that if one knew the truth one would see it” (Pessoa, 2002, p.  96). ICT “captures, vampirizes and calls on the subject to complete it” (Gil, 2010, p.  29). Such an itinerant theory(ist) provokes (and exists amid) a set of crises and produces laudable silences. The theory(ist) is a volcanic chain, showing a constant lack of equilibrium and thus is always a stranger in his/her own language. He or she is an itinerant theory(ist) profoundly sentient of the multiplicities of lines, spaces, and dynamic becomings (Deleuze, 1990). ICT, thus, echoes Huebner’s challenges of a radically different semantology, thirstily seeking for a new language. With the term epistemicide, Schubert (2017, p.  12) says, Paraskeva’s ICT “enacts the call for new languages for curriculum studies.” ICT does try to say something to the field. It presents new terrains and theoretical situations. ICT participates in the complicated conversation (Pinar, 2000; Trueit, 2000)—that cannot bend under the yoke of Western academicism— challenging Western curriculum epistemicides and alerting us to the need to respect and incorporate non-Western epistemes. Pinar (2012; 2013) acknowledged the influential synopticality of ICT: There are other discourses influential now, sustainability perhaps primary among them. Arts-based research is hardly peripheral. . . . One sign is the synoptic text composed by João M. Paraskeva. Hybridity is the order of the day. Pertinent to the discussion is that even Paraskeva’s determination

288 To Be Continued to contain in one “critical river” multiple currents of understanding curriculum politically floods its banks; he endorses an “itinerant curriculum theory” that asserts a “deliberate disrespect of the canon” (2011, 184). In Paraskeva’s proclamation, this “river” has gone “south” (2011, 186). That South is Latin America, where we can avoid “any kind of Eurocentrism” (2011, 186) while not “romanticizing indigenous knowledge” (2011, 187). Addressing issues [such as hegemony, ideology, power, social emancipation, class, race, and gender] implies a new thinking, a new theory . . . an itinerant curriculum theory. (Pinar, 2013, p. 64) ICT, as new influencial discourse, as Pinar (2012; 2013) put it, is highly relevant, Zhao (2019, p. 27) argues, as it opens up the eugenic colonial sociabilities (Santos, 2018) built on “language, knowledge, culture and educational” cleansing of the South. In this sense, doing ICT is “corazonar, that is to warm up reason, a reason that has been corazonada and thus provides intimate sufcicies for going fighting oppression against all odds” (Santos, 2018, p. 99). That is why ICT is a post/dispositional corazonar, one that doesn’t fit “the conventional dychotomies; it is feeling-thinking that brings together all that is separated by dichotomies” (Santos, 2018, p. 101); corazonar “cannot be planned as it occurs out of joined struggles building bridges between emotions’afections on one hand, and knowledges/reasons, on the other” (Santos, 2018, p. 101). It goes without saying how “spirituality is towering in corazonar converting it into a non-Western-centric form of insurgent energy against oppression and unjust sufering” (Santos, 2018, p. 100). In such sense, ICT “advances and refines notions of coloniality as educational project infused in public pedagogy and formal academic curricula” (Jupp, 2017, p. 4). In Jupp (2017, pp. 4–5), ICT helps better grasp ways to build ‘alternative alternatives’ to better challenge “the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being which emerge as militarized ‘free’ markets, ‘universal’ disciplinary knowledge, ‘individual’ consumers, and patriarchal northern ‘leadership’ toward a ‘developed’ world.” In challenging both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic Eurocentric traditions, Jupp (2017, p. 5) adds, ICT helps opening the veins of the “the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being, and how such eugenic matrix variously occlude, extinguish, and rid the world of local power structures, knowledges, and practices in advancing colonial projects and violating alternatives.” Such a theoretical course is defined by a cutting edge, a Malangatanian and Pollockian set of processes, not because it is abstract but because it is oppressive in its freedom. Its “vagueness should not be considered a flaw” (Schubert, 2017, p.  13). ICT is, thus, a theory of disquiet (Pessoa, 2002), challenging the “disquiet paralisis” (Gil, 2009, p. 20), yet knowing fully well that it is through the disquiet that subjectivities emerge (Gil, 2009). It is not a sole act; however, it is a populated solitude. This itinerant theoretical path, claims a multifaceted curriculum compromise, and “runs away” from any unfortunate ‘canonology.’ ICT, as Darder (2018) unpacks, claims

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for a political praxis that “must be both epistemologically fierce and deeply anchored in the sensibilities of our subalternity—the only place from which we can truly rid ourselves of the heavy yoke of Western sanctioned tyranny, which has wrought bitter histories of impoverishment, colonization, enslavement, and genocide” (p. x). Such an itinerant curriculum theory is an anthem against the indignity of speaking for the other (Walsh, 2012; Deleuze, 1990). ICT is a sociology of absences, as the only way to grasp “silences, needs and unpronounceable aspirations questions” (Santos, 1999, p.  206); it challenges “how can silence be spoken without it necessarily speaking the hegemonic language that intends to make it speak?” (Santos, 1999, p.  206); it is the curriculum praxis of the sociology of absences and emergences, as Santos (2018, p.  276) would put it; a curriculum “of the sociology of absences and emergences”; the former “would be geared to show the measure of the epistemicide caused by northern epistemologies, while the latter would be oriented to amplify the meaning of the latent and potentially liberating sociabilities” (Santos, 2018, p. 276) paving the way for a just pedagogy, one that foster southern epistemologies. In such sense, ICT is not an ortonimus theory—quite the opposite (Gil, 2010)—it is a heterotheory. The theorist multiplies her/himself to feel her/his own individual and collective subject (Gil, 2010); to be sincere, the intinerant theorist contradicts himself or herself every minute (Gil, 2010) as reality is massively contradictory. ICT is not a “diminished theory” (Pessoa, 2002, p.  230); nor does it diminish any other epistemological formation. The itinerary theory(ist) is much more than an eclectic approach; it is actually a profound (in)discipline, yet doesn’t correlate with any disciplinary grid that ossifies Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological platforms. It “reacts againt the vegetal academy of silence” (Pessoa, 2002, p.  270). ICT confronts and throws the subject to a permanent, unstable question, ‘What is it to think?’ ICT is a metamorphosis of the endless multifarious epistemological different “alphabet of thought” (Gil, 2008, p. 25). It is actualy a loaf theory. In this sense, ICT “reads differently because it is written and spoken in a different way” (Gil, 2010, p.  20); it produces and it is produced in a new language; it pushes for a new langauge (Schubert, 2017; Price, 2017). ICT pushes one “to think differently, but also to learn differently and to better understand what it means to learn, and what does it mean to think” (Gil, 2008, p. 35) epistemologically radically different; it is a new epistemological logic, one of excess so crucial to deterritoralize and delink, but above to reignite—in a radical way—the utopia for a just world. ICT, as Price argues, “could be that educational protein, needed to nourish and sustain our strength and vigor, as we pick ourselves back up and move decisively and with resolve forward” (Price, 2017. p.  11). However, ICT is not a mere next critical phase, or phase of the critical. Süssekind (2017, p. 10) states: Paraskeva, simply in a post-critical plateau: the fact is that his ICT pushes the debate on curriculum’s role in knowledge legitimization toward a

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different path and division of labor. In driving toward this different path, critical paradigms have to come to grips with their own role in epistemicides and the functionalist vacuum into which they often fall. Moreover, ICT pushes one to think in the light of the future as well as to question how can ‘we’ actually claim to really know the things that ‘we’ claim to know if ‘we’ are not ready specifically to think the unthinkable, but to go beyond the unthinkable and mastering its infinitude. In this contex, ICT challenges not just momentism (Paraskeva, 2011a) or presentism (Pinar, 2004) but, contemporaryism (Paraskeva, 2018; 2016). In Gil’s (2018, p. 404) terms, “never has a time been so contemporary as to appear to embody much more than the contemporary time. One is no longer ‘contemporary of,’ one is simply ‘contemporary’ in essence. Everything has become contemporary because everything has gained an empirical sense, reality has been reduced to what you see, the transparency of the technical-scientific sense that is yours. We are no longer ‘contemporaries of ’, creators of our time; we are all co-coexisting in the same plane in which each one is only exclusively contemporary. Globalization has made the empirical present of ubiquity extend to the entire planet, absorbing more and more the other dimensions of time. The past and the future seem to disappear into a single Present that concentrates all other dimensions within itself. We are already contemporaries of the dinosaurs and soon we will be contemporaries of the Big Bang, while futurology brings to the present an increasingly distant future. The trend is clear: It is about making the past and the future empirically present. Reducing time to the present, making absolute and planetary ubiquity totally control time. (Gil, 2018, pp. 404–405) Such cult nullifies any utopian dream that “dismantles the opposition between the future which is merely extraneous or supplementary to the present and the bleak of post-modern assumption that there is no outside at all” (Eagleton, 2000, p. 34). It deminishes the way one interrogates the present which unlocks its dominative logic by discerning the dim outline of an alternative already implicit within it” (Eagleton, 2000, p. 34). The ‘now’ time became a tout court way of existence. The yoke of the present-now—in which our field is sinking—is viral, a new barbarism that wipes out ethics of memory regarding a past—that was always a future for a given generation at a specific point. Han (2017b) teaches a great deal here: The present moment shrinks to a fleeting point in time devoid of heis and fee of goals. The present no longer trails things past and future along with it. Today, things linked to time become obsolete much faster than they used to. The present is reduced to a point of currentness. (p. 4)

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Each now is a now of an absent past or future. Each present-now is a presentnow of a particular now. Devoid from a future reality—diluted within the present—societal transformational impulses have been triggered by having the past as reference and naturally commonsensically one thinks about change in terms of “re-covering, re-building, re-habilitating” (Williams, 2013, p. 281). The human being produced by the democratic Cartesian matrix “leaves and exists for the pure present” (Badiou, 2011, p. 13), a present that is the only one, “the present of Europe” (Mignolo, 2018, p. 110). Modernity’s present time, Mignolo (2018) advances, “was understood to be the only present, the present of Europe” (p. 110). Gil (2018) adds that, as we are contemporaries of everything—past and future—and “everything is present, we are only ‘contemporaries’ because everything is contemporary and present. Being ‘contemporary of ’ became a redundancy and so the ‘of ’ fell. ICT, thus, reacts against the yoke of such contemporary cult, one that “the only world available is that of empirical images, and it is because everything has become an image that has become empirical” (Gil, 218, p. 405). As I have flagged before, such cult has a devastating impact on utopianism. That is, under such contemporary creed, the utopian thought, Eagleton (2000, p. 36) argues, is hardly in fashion, “a deceased fantasy that we no longer need to look to a future because the future is here already, in the shape of a perversely idealized view of the capitalist present.” In such context, ICT challenges “reality as an image that condenses into the single present, the past as an archived image, and an about to be archived future as well, thus making the present—that of the planetary ubiquity that encompasses time—a universal library of images” (Gil, 2018, p.  405). This dangerous cult of ‘the contemporary’ completely dilutes any utopian hypothesis—however, remote it may be—within commonsense. Not only does one cease to be ‘contemporaries of ’—which puts one in an existence and experience without historical parallel—but also, as I have had the opportunity to examine earlier, this contemporaneity, the now—Modernitus Hinc—is that of the contemporaneity of Europe (Mignolo, 2018), the Eurocentric, that continues to legitimize itself out of history. The context of contemporaneity is contemporaneity itself. ICT is to be (or not to be) radically unthinkable. Yet it is a theory of another humanity. It is this world. It is people’s theory. ICT is a metamorphosis between what is thought and nonthought and unthought but is fundamentally about the temerity of the colonization of the non-/un-/thought within the thought. ICT attempts to understand to domesticate how big is infinity, the infinity of thought and action. If one challenges infinity, ‘then it is chaos because one is in chaos’; that means that the question or questions (whatever they are) are inaccurately deterritorialized and fundamentally sedentary. ICT “thinks the movement of infinity” (Gil, 2008, p.  97), or the (im)possibility of finitudeness of the infinity. ICT implies an understanding of chaos as domestic, as public, as a punctum within the pure luxury of immanence. In such multitude of turfs, ICT needs to be understood as poesis. It plays in the plane of immanence. As immanence is ‘a life,’ ICT is ‘a life’; ICT “uses what it is not, like it is,” as Chou

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(2017, p. 67) would put it. A life paced by a poesis or a revolution? ‘Yes please’, in a full Žižekian way. ICT is, above all, the language for/of doing. Such language, Deleuze (1995a) claims, can’t be a homogeneous system, it’s something unstable, always heterogeneous in which style carves differences of potential between which things can pass, come to pass, a spark can flash a break out of language itself, to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the worlds, things we are hardly aware existed. (p. 141) ICT is a poesis that itinerantly throws the subject against the infinite of representation to grasp the omnitude of the real(ity) and the rational(ity), thus mastering the transcendent. In Han’s (2017) terms, it is a poesis towards sociability and not just towards the expression of a solitary soul, the poesis of viver justo (p. 36). Being more poesis than just theory (and not because it is less theory), its itinerant position epitomizes a transcendent nomadography, which is not transcendental. ICT challenges book worship (Tse Tung, 2007, p.  45). ICT encourages us to pay attention to the multiplicity of forms to read the wor(l)d. ICT, as Jorge (2020) would put it doesn’t emerge from the shelf, but from the floor, an epistemologically diverse floor, and triggered by social imagination. The verbalization of pain and oppression is quite visible in Africa, for example, in art forms such as dance and painting. Dance, Ela (2013) argues, in a country financially and economically moribund, is not just a way to face inequality and oppression. It is, he (2013) states, “the very best way to face discouragement” (p. 26). ICT is an attempt to help us to think in another form of human being. Corazza’s (2002) insightful framework is crucial here as well. As she claims, and I honestly think ICT addresses her claim, the challenge is to fight against what she coins as assentado curriculum towards a vagamundo curriculum; that is, “to create [or co-create] a vagamundo curriculum one needs to question how can one think about the unaddressable, the unthinkable, the non-thinkable of the curriculum thought, the exteriorities, the self-different, the self-other, the other self ” (Corazza, 2002, p. 140). Corazza (2002) adds, that a curriculum of such nature is pointless without the effective forces acting upon such thought, as well as without the effective indeterminations that force such thought [or forms of thought] to think otherwise, differently, through the creation of new concepts required by the real experience and not just by the possible experience, thus allowing new life experiences. (Corazza, 2002, p. 140) In fact, she (2002, p. 14) claims, “the strength of (an)other knowledge, as well as a new philosophy, will be measured by the concepts that it is capable of creating, or its capacity to renew meanings which impose a new framework on

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things and to assentados actions, shufe their syntax, and organizing its thought in a clumsy logic.” To be more precise, ICT, as Chou (2017) would put it, “awakens what will never end and is housed in it” (p. 104). To rely on Deleuze (1995b), “it is not death that breaks [the itinerant theorist] but seeing, experiencing, thinking too much of life. There’s a profound link between signs, events, life, and vitalism. It’s organisms that die, not life” (p. 143). Such inquiry implies, as Deleuze (1995b) felicitously unveil, an itinerant theorist that is not just as a war machine that judiciously collides with ossified truths and fossilized realities, but its itinerant existence is actually only possible in a permanent theater of war. Needless to say that ICT is not a cavalier way to grasp history. In this sense, it refuses to “walk backwards towards the future” (Williams, 2013, p.  281). Nor it is just a pale reaction against the way such history has been quasi suffocated by hegemonic and particular counter-hegemonic traditions. Although also a concept—arguably a geophilosophical one—it goes well beyond an aesthetic wrangle between sedentary theoretical hegemonic and particular counterhegemonic platforms, and nomad(ic) approaches free from walls, dams, and institutional regression. ICT implies a nomadic inquiry but one that the foci occupy the truly total itinerant capacity of space(less)ness, a permanent smooth itinerant position, a perpetual search that wholeheartedly aims at saturation yet the saturation of non-saturation. The nomadography of such theory is framed in the nonstop itinerant posture in which creators of poesis seemed to be part of the history of thought but escape from it either in a specific aspect or altogether. ICT challenges the irrelevance of Modern Western Eurocentric disciplinary knowledge as is. ICT attempts to turn curriculum theory against itself as well. It is a philosophy of liberation, which is sentient of the pitfalls of the internationalization dynamics within the curriculum field (Moon, 2015). The itinerant posture provides powerful space in which to engage in a global conversation that is attentive of the globalisms (Santos, 2008); profoundly aware of the multiplicities of public spheres and subaltern counterpublics (Fraser, 1997); truly attentive to the production of localities (Hardt and Negri, 2000) and militant particularism (Harvey, 1998), and to the (de)construction of new, insurgent cosmopolitanism (Santos, 2008; Popkewitz, 2007); conscious of the wrangle between the globalized few and the localized rest (Bauman, 1997); and yet profoundly alert to the dangerous hegemony of the English language. Such conversation needs to occur in languages other than English (Darder, 2012). ICT challenges Modern Western Euroentric abyssal thinking. It challenges one of the fundamental characteristics of abyssal thinking: the impossibility of co-presence of the ‘two sides of the abyssal line.’ A eugenic way of reasoning that obliterates for centuries crucial onto-epistemes beyond the Eurocentric reasoning as Moon (2015), Aletheiani (2015), and Price (2015) eloquently unpacked in their examinations of Chong Yag-yong, Ki Hadjar Dewantara, Raul Ferrer and Tao Xingzhi epistemological matrixes. Such theoretical approach is an itinerantology that addresses las heridas abiertas (Anzaldua, 2007) of the colonality of power. Such itinerantology is fully

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aware que las heridas abiertas cannot be addressed by ignoring “how compressed specific dialectical positions of Marxism are—or specific dialectical positions of specific Marxisms—thus obliterating fair and inclusive analysis” (Paraskeva and Süssekind, 2018). That is, “ICT is a form of decolonial thinking that recognizes an ecological co-existence of varying epistemological forms of knowledge around the world paying attention to knowledges and epistmologies largely marginalized and descredited in the current world order” (Zhao, 2019, p. 27). In ICT terms such radical co-presence is a full-blast isonomy (Karatani, 2017), that is a totalitarian absence of epistemological rulers and ruled, thus helping to decenter Eurocentric Modernity from within. ICT is also a curriculum isonomia metamorphoses, that “anticipate a just present and future without denying the past” (Zinn, 2003, p. 11). Such radical co-presence implies organically an alternative ‘currere’ one that that is not barbedwired by the dominant and counter-dominant Eurocentric canons, petrified in ex nihilo concepts and praxis as Wallin (2010) insighfully would put it. ICT is not merely an invocation or evocation (Schubert, 2017, p.  10). ICT touches the ‘real’ nerve (Dabashi, 2015) by challenging both dominant and specific counter-dominant traditions within the Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix as part of the epistemicide. However, as a future for the field, ICT alerts for the need to walk away from all forms of romanticism regarding the non-Modern non-Western non-Eurocentric epistemes. ICT is not a nationalistic theoretical platform. ICT fights any form of indigenoustude (Paraskeva, 2011a); it is about decolonizing native narratives by “considering the relationship of language to power and also to empowerment” (Mallon, 2012, p. 3). In so doing, it reacts against epistemological blindness, as it opens the veins of a complex beast, dissects its strokes and counterstrokes (Janson and Paraskeva, 2015), denounces and announces the involution phase of the field as well as its Occidentotic fungus, and offers just ways out of it, through a just pluriversal epistemological reading and doing of the wor(l)d. ICT reacts against the “the violent power of the identical that becomes invisible” as Han (2018, p. 10) would put it; it reacts against the fading of otherness in an era in which “the negativity of the other gives place to the positivity of the identical” (Han, 2018, p. 10). In ICT terms, the identical is pornographic; that is, in “pornography all bodies resemble each other, they break down into identical body parts. Stripped of all language the body is reduced to the sexual that knows no other difference than sexual” (Han, 2018, p. 15). ICT is a call against an “ontic deficit” that permeates society (Han, 2018, p. 13). Its pluriverse nature smashes “the obscene link between the identical and the identical” (Han, 2018, p. 16). ICT moves towards a just blend beween experiencies and expectations, an alternative logic of utopianism that re-directs towards a “possibility to wait with hope” (Santos, 1999, p.  213), thus making the new utopia—a decolonial one, utopian otherwise—the desperate realism of a waiting that allows itself to fight for the content of waiting, not in general but in the exact place and time in which it is” (Santos, 1999, p.  213). Thus, hope, in ICT terms, “does not lie in a general principle which provides for a general future. It resides instead in

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the possibility of creating fields of social experimentation where it is possible to resist locally the evidences of inevitability, successfully promoting alternatives that seem utopian at all times and places except those in which they actually occurred” (Santos, 1999, p.  213). Hence, ICT reignites the utopia, since “the existence does not exhaust the possibilities of existence and therefore there are alternatives susceptible of surpassing what is critical in what exists” (Santos, 1999, p. 198); yet it is a different utopian logic though not because “the utopian pragmatism disappeared, but because it is not what it used to be” (Gil, 2009, p.  18) nor it can’t be; an alternative frame towards alternative utopias cannot be framed—and subjugated—within a matrix that actually will never allow the materialization of such utopia. ICT is not a re-invention or a re-habilitation of past utopianist(s) logic(s), although such constitutes some of its pillars. In Darder’s (2018) terms, ICT is meant to guide us in transforming our labor into a living praxis of global cognitive justice. This entails curriculum driven by emancipatory epistemologies of difference and resounding otherness that provide us the space in which to (re)imagine and transform the rigid, disembodied, fractured, and reductive ideologies that plague our teaching and our lives. Through such emancipatory labor in schools and communities, we open ourselves and our students to new possibilities for working across our differences, as we name, resist, and disrupt old ways of knowing that formerly rendered subaltern lives silent and invisible. Hence, far from being solely an abstract, theoretical, or intellectual endeavor, cognitive justice is governed by critical epistemologies of action that aim to interrupt and dismantle unjust social and material conditions, particularly for those most afflicted by the devastating economic policies of the neoliberal financial class—capitalists par excellence, who have shirked accountability for the brutal consequences of their free market shenanigans, spoils of privatization, speculative schemes, and deregulatory policies, which have permitted them to wreak havoc on a global scale. (p. xiii) ICT implies one to “detheorize reality as the only way to reinvent it” (Santos, 1995, p. 513). It is, thus, the pluriversal rubber stamp of the death of the logic through which Modern Western Eurocentric platforms imposed a monoepisteme. ICT is not a drone theory though; it doesn’t speak for the other. ICT is chaos and its rhythms, a chaos that “inaugurates the appearance of things not because it engenders them, but because it withdraws” (Gil, 2018, p. 376). ICT ofers a way out of the volt of involution, out of Occidentosis. In Jupp’s (2017) terms, ICT is a call to “preserve and advance the historically specific and localized knowledges and languages that underlie cognition—and through cognition cultural practices and social relations—represent the fundamental struggle for social justice” (p. 5). ICT dissects chaos as normalcy that “presides over the order of the world; as what it establishes because it withdraws—and in

296 To Be Continued withdrawing, allows the emergence of thinkable things because they are discernible, diferentiated” (Gil, 2018, p. 376). Chaos, and ICT in this sense, “ends with the unthinkable” (Gil, 2018, p. 376). ICT is thus emancipatory inaugurating a paradigmatic transition from a reactionary (n)eugenic cosmic capacity towards a chaosmic capacity, one that imposed “alternative forms of sociability rather than one form of sociability” (Santos, 1995, p. x). Chaos is bipolar, a consequence and a beginning, so as curriculum. In this context, ICT challenges the cultural politics of denial, that produces a radical absence, the absence of humanity, the modern sub-humanity (Santos, 2009, p. 30). Such new theoretical task understands that modern humanity is not conceivable without a modern sub-humanity (Santos, 2014), and that the denial of a part of humanity is sacrificial, in that it is the condition for the other part of humanity, which considers itself as universal. Consequently, ICT aims precisely at ‘a general epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology.’ Such radical copresence, Santos (2007b) argues—the begin-anew (Darder, 2018)—pushes one towards a post-abyssal momentum, a post-abyssal epistemology, which spans an ecology of knowledges. Such ecology, Santos (2007b, p.  40) argues, “is a matter of Logos as well as mythos, that is, it requires a deeper understanding of human possibilities based on knowledges that, unlike scientific knowledge, favour interior rather than exterior force, or the natura naturans rather than the natura naturata”; it is through these knowledges, that “it is possible to nurture an enhanced value or concept of commitment that is incomprehensible to the positivistic and functionalist mechanisms of modern science” (Santos, 2007b, p.  39); it is through such ecologies that emerges a “new capacity for wonder and indignation, capable of grounding a new, non-conformist, destabilizing, and indeed rebellious theory and practice [based] on the richness of the non-canonic diversity of the world and of a degree of spontaneity based on the refusal to deduce the potential from the actual (Santos, 2007b, p. 40). Post-abyssal thinking implies a radical break with modern Western ways of thinking and acting. Post-abyssality “is always coknowledge emerging from process of knowing-with rather than knowing-about” (Santos, 2018, p. 147). While an overt challenge against the colonialism of English language (Darder, 2012), as well as a call to arms against all other forms of linguistic colonialism perpetrated by other modern Western languages (Paraskeva, 2011a), it is also an alert against what Ahmad (2008) coined as third world nationalisms and modern Western internationalization and internationalisms. Such radical break doesn’t mean slurring specific modern Western impulses. That is, “while forging credibility for non-scientific knowledge, [this] does not imply discrediting scientific knowledge” (Santos, 2007b, p. 31). It simply implies its counterhegemonic use. Such use consists, on the one hand, in exploring the internal plurality of science, that is, alternative scientific practices that have been made visible by feminist and postcolonial

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epistemologies and, on the other hand, in promoting the interaction and interdependence between scientific and non-scientific knowledges. (Santos, 2007b, p. 31) The ecology of knowledges needs to be seen as a “destabilizing collective or individual subjectivity endowed with a special capacity, energy, and will to act with clinamen experimenting with eccentric or marginal forms of sociability or subjectivity inside and outside Western modernity, those forms that have refused to be defined according to abyssal criteria” (Santos, 2007b, p. 41). ICT is a destabilizing epistemology that aims to defamiliarize the canonic tradition of monocultures of knowledge (Santos, 2014). What is crucial within the ecology of knowledges is what Santos (2007b) calls “action-withclinamen” (p. 40). Clinamen, he (2007b, p. 41) claims, “does not refuse the past; on the contrary, it assumes and redeems the past by the way it swerves from it. Its potential for post-abyssal thinking lies in its capacity to cross the abyssal lines.” In fact, [t]he occurrence of action-with-clinamen is in itself inexplicable. The role of an ecology of knowledges in this regard will be merely to identify the conditions that maximize the probability of such an occurrence and, at the same time, define the horizon of possibilities within which the swerving will “operate.” (p. 41) In claiming a commitment of the radical copresence, ICT is fully engaged in such ecology of knowledges, and the challenge of an itinerant curriculum theorist is to “unpuzzle” the nexus of physical-metaphysical. It goes beyond intersectionality, or, to expand Collins’s (2019) approach, a full blast just intersectionality, one that is non-derivative, implies ICT. In this sense, ICT is a just social theory “that is not just about ideas in an argument, but the practice of theorizing that produces those ideas.” ICT produces intinerant “intersectional frameworks” (Collins and Bilge, 2016, p. 16) from (and whithin) dominant and counter-dominant platforms within and beyond Modern Western Eurocentric perspectives. Such radical copresence is not necessarily about “contamination but just resonance” as well (The Invisible Committee, 2009, p.  12). We are bodies; we are not institutions, although a schizophrenic system institutionalizes us. Our task is to unmask why we do not teach this and how can we teach this. This ‘this’ is not just physical, it is also metaphysical. In that sense, ICT is an ethical take. I argue though that ICT pushes above and beyond post-abyssality towards a non-abyssal punctum since it not only challenges the modern Western cult of abyssal thinking but also attempts to dilute such fictional vacuum between lines. ICT is not just an act of resistance, but of re-existence (Walsh, 2018) at the metaphysical level. ICT is undeniably an epistemological

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declaration of idependence. It is a “liberated zone” (Santos, 2018, p. 31). In this sense, ICT is a dis/positional thinking concerned “for viewing educational phenomena from alternative perspectives that are not method driven, but instead derived from insights of a disposition that seeks to disentangle scholarship from its traditional dependence on formalities” (Reynolds and Webber, 2016, pp. 5–6). The struggle against modern Western abyssal thinking is not a policy matter. It is also above and beyond that. It is an existential and spiritual question so eloquently advocated by Huebner and Macdonald last century. That is, the struggle against the Western Cartesian model cannot become the substitution of a Cartesian model for another one. Also, the task is not to dominate such model or to wrap it with a more Eurocentric humanistic impulse. The task is to pronounce its last words, to prepare its remains for a respectful funeral. The task is not to change the language and concepts, although that is crucial. The task is to terminate a particular hegemonic geography of knowledge, which promotes an epistemological euthanasia. ICT’s non-abyssality is “informed by its epistemological rupture from the coloniality of power and disaffiliation with hegemonic dogma, a process that liberates our field of consciousness, opening the way for resurgences of subaltern perspectives, new expressions of solidarity, and the powerful regeneration of that political force necessary for transforming the social and material conditions of our present existence—not only in the mind but also in the flesh” (Darder, 2018, p. xiv). ICT is a “deliberate disrespect of the canon, a struggle against epistemological orthodoxy” (p. xxv), and it attempts “to bring scientific knowledge face-to-face with nonscientific, explicitly local knowledges, knowledges grounded in the experience of the leaders and activists of the social movements studied by social scientists” (p.  xxv). This is the very core of its nutritive faculty, to use Agamben’s (1999) Aristotelic approach. An itinerant curriculum theory is an exercise of “citizenship and solidarity” (p. xxv) and, above all, an act of social and cognitive justice. It is, as Žižek (2006) would put it, the very best way to understand how reality can explode in and change the real. ICT respects three fundamental pillars: (1) learning that the South exists, (2) learning to go to the South, and (3) learning from and with the South (Santos, 2009). In so doing, ICT is a commitment to an ecology of knowledges: a call for the democratization of knowledges that is a commitment to an emancipatory, non-relativistic, cosmopolitan ecology of knowledges, bringing together and staging dialogues and alliances between diverse forms of knowledge, cultures, and cosmopologies in response to different forms of oppression that enact the coloniality of knowledge and power. We need actually to learn from the South [since] the aim to reinvent social emancipation goes beyond the critical theory produced in the North and the social and political praxis to which it has subscribed. (Santos et al., 2007, p. xiv)

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That is, in order “to learn from the South we must first of all let the South speak up for what best identifies the South is the fact that has been silenced” (Santos, 1995, p. 510). Such epistemologcial respect swims in Han’s (2017a) terms as well. That is, it is a learning process which as “in Ancient Chinese artistic praxis implies copying as also a sign of respect, one studies, praises and admires a work by copying it, a praxis that is not unknown [for Europeans]” (Han, 2017a, p. 15). To be even more just, such learning process implies “copying Southern onto-epistemological frameworks, but copying in the sense of fuzhipin—the exact reproduction—and not fangzhipin—an imitation” (Han, 2017a, p. 60). Moreover such learning process ‘from-with-and-going-to-the South’ implies a commitment to unlearn the way one “sees, thinks, speaks, and writes” (Han, 2017b, p. 21). As an anthem of the radical co-presence of unlimited onto-epistemological perspectives, ICT, as theory now is also the death of the creed of the vanguard intellectuals that “write about the world, but not with the world” (Santos, 2020, p. 9). ICT is “theory now” (Surin, 2011, p. 30) momentum. The reality in which we find ourselves urgently begs for such theory. Within the very symptoms of critical curriculum theory as is – with all its accomplishments and challenges – relies in fact the very symptoms imploring for an alter curriculum theory ( Jameson, 2004) ‘now’, a theory that understands the “theory before and the theory after” (Surin, 2011, p. 30) respecting the onto-epistemological validity and legitimacy of non-western non-Eurocentric diagrammatic ways of thinking, as Deleuze (1987) would frame it, within and beyond the Global North. ICT reacts against “exceptional thinking in normal times and it is committed to think of the exception in exceptional times” (Santos, 2020, p. 9); it recognizes that that “the chaotic and elusive practice of days is beyond theorization and requires to be understood in a mode of sub-theorization” (Santos, 2020, p. 9). As theory now, ICT is a non-derivative pariah critique ‘now’ done by the critic ‘now’; ICT is poeisis of liberation that implies the liberation of the poeisis, challenging that intellectuals “must accept themselves as rearguard intellectuals, they must be attentive to the needs and aspirations of ordinary citizens and know how to start from them to theorize. Otherwise, citizens will be defenseless before the only ones who know how to speak their language and understand their concerns”. (Santos, 2020, p. 9). ICT as ‘theory now’ “is to put our categories and our language on the edge of the abyss” (Santos, 2002, p. 9). I am not claiming a way out that will please everybody. In fact, “a coherent theory is an imposed theory which falsely mythologizes a pseudo-scientific process that has no more to do with real science than astrology does” (Quantz, 2011). ICT is, however, a consequence of the perpetual lack of a dominant praxis of a “perfect just teaching and learning” as Chou (2017, p. 284) phrases it. An itinerant theoretical approach dares to violate the methodological canon and attempts to go beyond some interesting (counter-)dominant clashes to overcome some dead ends and screaming silences, yet it is an epistemological struggle within the insurgent cosmopolitanism platforms (Santos, 2008) both inside and beyond the Western dominant cartography (Paraskeva, 2011a). ICT

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is to de-link towards a polycentric world, as Amin (1990) would put it. There is no question, Darder (2018, p. xv) sternly claims, that the post-abyssal terrain of itinerant curriculum constiutes a complex and challenging political project, yet one that offers us political solace, philosophical inspiration, and pedagogical nourishment on a long and arduous journey. ICT entails navigating dialectically the often-murky realm of dominant/subordinate relations of power. Yet, it is precisely by consistently traversing the turbulence of this dialectical tension that we become politically primed to ruthlessly critique oppression in ways that prevent us from inadvertently collapsing back into oppressive binary contradictions, from which we ourselves must constantly struggle to emerge anew. And further, it is only through such sustained labor and unwavering commitment to denounce the epistemological totalitarianism of our times that we can garner together the moral indignation and political will to announce new ways of knowing, loving and being—beyond the abyssal divide of recalcitrant racisms and neoliberal devastation (Darder, 2018, pp. xiv–xv) In this regard, it is an itinerant theoretical path without floodgates because the best sentinel is always to have no floodgates (Couto, 2008). In so doing, the itinerant curriculum theory honors a legacy of accomplishments and frustrations, understanding that de-linking will always be to make theory, a just theory. To delink and decolonize, while honoring the legacy of the radical critical path taking it into a diferent level, it is also a decolonial attempt “to do critical theory” (Kellner, 1989, p. 2). ICT helps greatly to understand that to decolonize implies to grasp “what in the human condition can be changed through political process” (Balakrishnan, 2005, p. 7). Respecting the legacy of such generation of the utopia, such decolonial attempt needs to not ignore the rich legacy of such group of phenomenal utopists and needs to keep swimming through a radical critical river, yet reaching out and recognizing endless tributaries and other rivers and tributaries beyond the riverbed of such Modern Western Eurocentric river, and, in doing so, produce a new logic towards a new needed utopia. ICT is a just way “to ruthlessly problematize and rethink consciousness or to begin anew, by way of our subaltern engagements of Marx’s unfinished political economic project, in an efort to deepen and expand its emancipatory vision, namely, the liberation of our humanity—but only now through the complexity of multi-centered epistemological lenses able to withstand the ever-changing character our cultural formations and political manifestations” (Darder, 2018, p. xiii). ICT is a heretopian theory.

Towards Heteretopia Rather than the invention of a place elsewhere or nowhere, I propose a radical displacement within the same place: ours. (Santos, 1995, p. 481)

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A world so epistemologically diverse (Santos, 2014) necessarily brews an endless multitude of ‘inner and outer’ logics of utopianism. The current great regression that frames our world, the involution that our field faces, established the ‘end of utopia’ (Marcuse, 2005) as we know it, yet concomitantly triggers the need to search for new logics towards alternative ways to alternatively conceptualize utopianism. Such new utopian logics are not called because the possibility of the impossibility of the utopia framed within Modern Western Eurocentric matrix and by the minds of such matrix, but precisely because the impossibility became possible, real, a social vacuity. The great regression, the paradoxical time if nothing else paves the way for a pluriversal utopianism momentum after the end of the utopia (Jameson, 1991) a momentum that challenges the insufficiencies of the radical critical platform, shakes the drowsiness that frames the social regression and revives the possibility of another present and future (Jameson, 2016), thus bringing to the table another utopian way of being and doing. Another utopianism requires different utopists. In an epistemologically diverse world, the key word for the utopia towards an emancipatory society might not necessary be (only) through ‘socialism’ (Jameson, 1991). However, utopia needs to be de-linked from the coloniality matrix and decolonized as well. I also believe that, despite the shortcomings, the exit is not to underestimate both the generation of utopia and the need for utopia. The challenge is precisely not to give up the utopian construction; after all the magnetic has brought us here regardless of whether we have limped more or less at certain stages. New challenges may not necessarily import new utopias; yet new forms of constructing and pursuing utopias necessarily matter. What is the real color of such utopia? How can such utopia help better address a just epistemological wrangle in our field that “brings together rhetorical hopes and enacted practices”? (Grumet and Yates, 2011, p. 245). At the outset of this volume, I was able to argue that we live in a “crisis of social imagination about the future” (Berardi, 2012, p. 8) since “the future that was promised by modernity showed no future” (Santos, 1995, p.  479). While many “social theories have taken a futurecidal stance” (Santos, 1995, p. 479), it is undeniably possible to “reinvent the future by opening new horizons of possibilities mapped out by new radical alternatives” (Santos, 1995, p.  479). The dream on ‘another world’ is not merely a future-oriented utopia but it is already in motion teeming with alternatives we desire. Seeing the muck, dwelling in it, and finding ways to make it visible become important antidotes as presentpast ways to recognize and strengthen these alternatives (Gomez-Barris, 2017, p. 134) In this sense, the morning day (not after) is to not give up on the Utopia that grasps the exploration by imagination of new modes of human possibility and styles of will, and the confrontation by imagination of the necessity of whatever exists—just because it exists—on behalf of something radically better that is worth fighting for, and to which humanity is fully entitled; an utopia that is always unequally utopian and requires a deep and

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comprehensive knowledge of reality as a way of preventing imagination’s radicalism from clashing with its realism. (Santos, pp. 479–480) It seems that “Modern Cartesian doubt has taken the place of wonder” (Han, 2015, p. 14). In the face of a great regression powered by neoliberal impulses that triggered the return as well as new multiple social sagas, it is undeniable that the path towards Utopia as an answer needs to also to consciously assume that “after centuries of modernity, the absence of a future cannot be filed out by either the past or the present since the lack of the future is but an empty future” (Santos, 1995, p. 479). However, any utopian ideal though is barbed wire by the fact that one “can only speak of what transcends the present only in the language of the present and thus risking cancelling out our imaginings in the very act of articulating them” (Eagleton, 2000, p. 31). Utopianism has been thus defined as a perpetual horizon reachable yet not—necessarily—doable, as “it is in the nature of utopia not to be realized” (Santos, 1995, p.  481). Santos waltzes superiorly with Pessoa. As the latter (2002) would put it, only what one utopianly envisions is what one really is; as for the rest, because it is fulfilled, belongs to the world. Both the utopia and the multiple paths towards it cannot be wrapped and anchored only within the framework of modernity and its coloniality. Utopian’s legitimacy relies on a “new epistemology and psychology, which resides on the virtual archeology of the present” (Santos, 1995, p.  481). This implies moving from traditional hegemonic and counter-hegemonic utopian frameworks in which “utopia has been deferred in idealism” (Baudrillard, 2006, p. 61) and engage in what Santos (1995) defines as “heteretopia” Rather than the invention of a place elsewhere or nowhere, I propose a radical displacement within the same place: ours. From orthotopia to hetereotopia, from the center to the margin. The purpose of this displacement is to allow a telescopic vision of the center and a microscopic vision of what the center is led to reject, in order to reproduce credibility as the center. (Santos, 1995, p. 481) Such heterotopia is diferent. It implies, in a way, to censor our dreams as Žižek (2016a) brilliantly flagged, knowing fully well though, that to kill the dream is to kill ourselves. It is maiming our soul. The dream is what we have to be really ours, impenetrably and impregnably ours (Pessoa, 2002). It subscribes that the only authentic image of the future is the failure of present in its inability to redeem glimpses of our potential aforded by our own experience (Eagleton, 2000); however, it implies processes of de-linking from coloniality and modernity, decolonize it; it responds to Habermas’s (1981) challenge of modernity as an incomplete project with a commitment to decolonize it. In this sense this an

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ideal that couldn’t be “simply parachuted in society from some metaphysical outer space” (Eagleton, 2000, p. 34). Our task, is not to “shoot the utopist” (Santos, 1995) or the utopia that inhabits not just within us, but also bubbles out of the debris of modernity. The task is to de-link and decolonize it which helps in a just epistemological reading of the real. There is “no such word as impossible” (Sartre, 2006, xxvii). An heterotopia (Wallerstein, 1998, p. 1) walks away from more utopian visions “that have justified so many wrongs,” towards utopistics, that is the serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgmentas to the substantive rationality of alternative possible historical systems. It is the sober, rational, and realistic evaluation of human social systems, the constrains on what they can be and the zones open to human creativity. (Wallerstein, 1998, pp. 1–2) As curriculum scholars it is also in our hands to decide, not just to move towards a just world we wish to see as Amin encourages us, but to do in a way that respects and recognizes the equal importance of other epistemologies within and beyond the Modern Western Eurocentric framework. Precisely because “the utopia is the metaphor for a hyperdeficit that is formulated at the level at which cannot be fulfilled that is what it carries of importance is not what it says about the future, but the virtual archeology of the present that brings it forth” (Santos, 1995, p. 482), it is crucial a commitment towards a ruthless critique of every existent epistemology as a sine qua non condition for a just curriculum theory. In such sense, the task of utopists is not just “to criticize the dominant paradigm, though it is crucial, is not enough; it is important to define an emerging paradigm” (Santos, 1995, p. 1), one that is a double sorge, that is, “its object is the future we want and, above all, the future we don’t want” (Santos, 2995, p. 16). Such heteretopia, Santos (1995) claims, shifts “perspective and scale subverts the hegemonic combinations of all that exists, detotalizes meanings, deuniversalizes universes, disorients maps and its only objective is to upset the bed upon which subjectivities lie deep in an unjust sleep” (p. 4). Having the past as “a metonymy of all that we were and were not” (Santos, 1995, p.  17), heteretopia helps the emergence of radically different individual and collective subjectivities “competent enough to face the paradigmatic competitions and willing to explore emancipatory possibilities guided by three major topoi, namely, the frontier, the baroque and the South” (Santos, 1995, p.  17). The emergent subjectivicty sees the frontier as home, outside the “fortress in total availability to wait for whomever, including Godot, paying attention to whoever comes and their different ways, and to acknowledge, in difference, opportunities for mutual enrichment” (Santos, 1995, p.  20). Also, such the individual and collective subjectivities are baroque subjectivtities as they are in transition, a subversive transition towards “new, aesthetic common sense, an enchanted common sense as an integral part of the topic for emancipation”

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(Santos, 1995, p. 28). Finally the South, the emergent subjectivity “is a subjectivity of the South and flourishes in the South against human suffering caused by capitalist modernity” (Santos, 1995, p. 37). Along with Santos (1995) I argue that one needs to decolonize both the utopists and the utopias, knowing fully well that, as Žižek (2016b, p.  354) claims, the “true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative.” Thus, “the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice” as it functions as a fetish which prevents us from thinking through to the end the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction. (Žižek, 2016b, p. 354) In such sense such new logic of utopianism needs to put forward a “commitment to authentic emancipation” (Santos, 1995, p. 519) towards a just utopia that recognizes that “the subjectivity of the South struggles for an alternative world that does not produce reciprocal brutalization” (Santos, 1995, p. 516). In this sense, Santos (1995) is not way out of touch when he adamantly advocates the need to pay attention to specific Western modernity traditions that have been “flourish[ing] at the margins of the system of dominantion” (p. 514). Out of countless emancipatory avenues within Western modernity, “anarchism is surely one of the most discredited and marginalized traditions by the hegemonic political discourse, whether conventional or critical” (Santos, 1995, p. 514). What makes societies change, Santos (1999) claims, is “the excess of problems they raise in relation to the solutions they make possible” (p. 213). Utopia(n), otherwise, “lies not in proposing disproportionate solutions to the problems posed, but rather in the capacity to formulate new problems for which there are no or still no solutions” (p. 214). The challenge of heterotopia relies on the fact that ‘needs to reflect what we really are’, as Pessoa (2002) would put it. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s (2000) in their Transcending Pessism complexifiy the issue. They (2000, p.  6) shared a story of one of Barbara Kingsolver’s remarkable novels in which a woman asks her lover: “Did you ever dream you can fly?” “Not when I was sording peackens all day.” “But, really, did you ever fly in your dreams?” “Only when I was close to flying in real life” Your dreams, Panitch and Gindin (2000, p.  6) rightly adds, are “what you hope for and all of that is not separate from your life. It grows right out of it.” In here relies the strength of a just curriculum heretopia. To be continued.

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Note 1. Taoist philosopher from IV century A.C. also known as Chuang Tse, and author of the Taoistic classic ‘Chuang Tse’

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Santos, B. (1995) Towards a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge. Santos, B. (1999) Porque é tão difícil construir uma teoria crítica? Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociais, N 54, Junho, pp. 197–215. Santos, B. (2007a) Another Knowledge is Possible. London: Verso. Santos, B. (2007b) Beyond Abyssal Thinking. From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges. Review, XXX(1), pp. 45–89. Santos, B. (2008) A universidade no seculo XXI. Para uma reforma democratica e emancipatoria da universidade. In B. Sousa Santos and N. de Almeida Filho (Eds.), A universidade no seculo XXI. Para uma universidade nova (pp. 13–106). Coimbra: Centro de Estudos Sociais. Santos, B. (2009) If God Were a Human Rights Activist: Human Rights and the Challenge of Political Theologies. Is Humanity Enough? The Secular Theology of Human Rights. Law, Social Justice and Global Development, 1. Retrieved www.go.warwick. ac.uk/elj/lgd/2009_l/santos Santos, B. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm. Santos, B. (2018) The End of the Cognitive Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Santos, B., Nunes, J. and Meneses, M. (2007) Open Up the Cannon of Knowledge and Recognition of Difference. In B. Sousa Santos (Ed.), Another Knowledge Is Possible. London: Verso, pp. ix–lxii. Sartre, J. P. (2006) Preface. In H. Alleg (Ed.), The Question. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. xxvii–xliv. Schubert, W. (2017) Growing Curriculum Studies: Contributions of João M. Paraskeva. Journal for the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 12(1), pp. 1–20. Süssekind, M. L. (2017) Against Epistemological Fascism. A Reading of Paraskeva’s Itinerant Curriculum Theory. Journal for the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 12(1), pp. 1–18. Trueit, D. (2000) Democracy and Conversation. In D. Trueit, W. Doll Jr, H. Wang, and W. Pinar (Eds.), The Internationalization of Curriculum Studies. New York: Peter Lang, pp. ix–xvii. Tse Tung, M. (2007) Oppose Book Worship. In S. Žižek (Ed.), Slavoj Žižek presents Mao on Practice and Contradiction. London: Verso, pp. 43–51. Wallin, J. (2010) A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life. New York: Palgrave. Walsh, C. (2012) ‘Other’ Knowledges, ‘Other’ Critiques Reflections on the Politics and Practices of Philosophy and Decoloniality in the Other America. Transmodernity. Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(3), pp. 11–27. Walsh, C. (2018) Insurgency and Decolonial Prospect, Praxis and Project. In C. Walsh and W. Mignolo (Ed.), On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 33–56. Wallerstein, I. (1998) Utopistics. New York: The New Press. Williams, R. (2013) Long Revolution. London: Verso. Zhao, W. (2019) China’s Education, Curriculum Knowledge and Cultural Inscriptions. Dancing with the Wind. New York: Routledge. Zinn, H. (2003) A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Collins. Žižek, S. (2006) Bem-Vindo ao Deserto do Real. Lisboa: Relogio D’Agua. Žižek, S. (2016a) The Need to Censor our Dreams. In F. Jameson (Ed.), An Amercian Utopia. New York: Verso, p. vii. Žižek, S. (2016b). Addressing the Impossible. Socialist Register, pp. 339–356.

Name Index

Adorno, Theodor 10, 56, 69, 75, 116, 120, 127–129, 131–134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 157, 159, 160, 168 Agamben, Giorgio 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37, 61, 285 Agualusa, José Eduardo 269 Ahmad, Aijaz 151, 152 Aletheiani, Dinny 203 Ali Shari’ati, Ali 272–273 Al-L-Ahmad, Jala 14, 168, 231, 237–239, 286 Althusser, Louis 139 Ambedkar, B. R. 4, 15, 22, 272 Amin, Samir 28, 40, 87, 89, 95, 102, 104, 107, 168, 176, 180, 300, 303 Anderson, Perry 141, 147, 244, 265, 272 Andreotti, Vanessa 204, 269 Anyon, Jean 81 Anzaldua, Gloria 293 Appadurai, Arjun 26, 27, 34, 35, 56, 57 Apple, Michael 36, 37, 121, 123, 139, 156, 167, 175, 181, 183–185, 188, 189, 192, 193, 196, 197, 207, 208, 212, 215, 241 Arato, Andrew 114, 143 Arendt, Hannah 116, 233, 234 Aronowitz, Stanley 123, 134, 143, 175, 183, 186, 214, 263, 264 Arrighi, Giovanni 87, 207 Au, Wayne 204, 207, 260 Auge, Marc 284 Autio, Tero 2, 206, 226, 268 Bachelard, Gaston 133 Badiou, Alain 29, 158, 196, 216, 235, 291 Baker, Bernadette 204, 205 Bakhtin, Mikhail 208, 209 Balakrishnan, Gopal 26, 60, 152, 256, 265, 300 Balibar, Étienne 11, 56

Ball, Stephen 35, 44, 45 Banks, Dennis 273 Barata-Moura, José 3, 12, 14 Barthes, Roland 30, 90, 144 Battiste, Moses 99 Baudelot Christian 11 Baudrillard, Jean 15, 25, 229, 302 Bauman, Zygmunt 11, 20, 37, 293 Bell, Daniel 202 Benhabib, Seyla 114, 118, 119, 134, 135, 138, 139, 141–143, 157, 160 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 55, 108, 151, 174, 213, 214, 225, 236, 285, 301 Berman, Marshall 55 Bernal, Martin 71, 72 Bernstein, Basil 137 Best, Steven 152 Beyer, Landon 88 Bhabha, Homi 205 Bilge, Sirma 297 Blaser, Mario 20, 81 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo 81 Boone, Elizabeth 274 Bourdieu, Pierre 137, 271 Brown, Anthony 204, 260 Cabral, Amilcar 81, 108 Calderon, Dolores 204, 260 Castro-Gómez, Santiago 75, 268 Cesaire, Aimé 6, 71 Chatterjee, Partha 272 Cho, Seehwa 204 Chomsky, Noam 31, 79 Chou, C. 286, 293, 299 Ciccariello-Maher, George 162 Clarke, John 35 Collins, Patricia 83, 248, 297 Connell, Rayen 4 Couto, Mia 175, 176, 178, 283, 286, 300 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 202

310

Name Index

Dabashi Hamid 166, 245, 253, 259, 261, 273, 294 Darder, Antonia xii, 3, 4, 12, 121, 130, 156, 182, 183, 189, 197, 199, 200, 203, 204, 213, 215, 270, 271, 284, 288, 293, 295, 296, 298, 300 Davies, William 26, 36, 37, 39, 46, 52, 53, 58, 132 Dean, Jodi 153, 154, 249 De La Cadena, Marisol 20, 81 Deleuze, Gilles 151, 236, 262, 284, 292, 293 Delgado, Richard 202 Diop, Cheikh Anta 269, 272 Doll, William 197, 198, 202, 223 Dussel, Enrique xvii, 71–73, 80, 81, 103, 258 Eagleton, Terry 9, 22, 117, 121–123, 134, 135, 139, 143, 145, 146, 148, 152, 162, 166, 174, 179, 180, 182, 223, 224, 230, 244, 245, 265, 290, 291, 302, 303 Eco, Umberto 232 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 185, 186, 205, 242 Enguita, Mariano 193, 215, 245 Epstein, Barbara 244, 261 Erdoes, Richard 273 Escobar, Arturo 93, 254 Establet, Roger 11 Fairclough, Normand 35 Fanon, Frantz 69, 70, 75, 84, 97, 104, 180, 258 Foster, John 3, 4, 39, 40, 43, 44, 193 Franco, Marielle 21 Fraser, Nancy 39, 46, 57, 60, 114, 141, 142, 151, 152, 156, 204, 250, 265, 293 Freire, Paulo 13, 121, 156, 174, 175, 191–193, 195, 213, 215, 252, 260, 269 Fricker, Miranda 245 Fromm, Erich 116, 118, 120, 131, 136, 137 Galeano, Eduardo 18, 31 Gebhardt, Eike 114, 143 Geiselberger, Heinrich 10, 32, 56, 65, 231 Gewirtz, Sharon 35 Gil, José 9, 10, 14, 29, 37, 51, 53, 56, 132, 133, 140, 166, 180, 199, 223–231, 234, 235, 242, 256, 274, 275, 284, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 294, 295–296 Gillborn, David 189 Gilroy, Paul 243

Gindin, Sam 304 Ginsberg, Benjamin 123 Giroux, Henry 45, 46, 48, 63, 68, 83, 121, 132, 139, 167, 175, 181–184, 186–188, 190–192, 194–197, 208, 212, 225, 226, 233, 236 Gladwin, Thomas 200 Gore, Jennifer 185, 204, 206, 246 Gottesman, Isaac 180 Gough, Noel 284 Gramsci, Antonio 22, 60, 83, 91, 92, 109, 114, 134, 150, 175, 168, 178, 180–182, 184, 189, 196, 197, 199, 203, 204, 224, 227, 246, 261, 271 Grande, Sandy 101, 259 Greene, Maxine 139, 185, 198, 202, 212 Grosfoguel, Ramon xii, 52, 74, 76–78, 81–83, 86, 90–93, 147, 249 Grumet, Madeleine 185, 186, 212, 252, 301 Guattari, Felix 46, 151, 236, 284 Gudavarthy, Ajay 23 Guha, Ranajit 91, 253 Guinier, Lani 202 Habermas, Jürgen 128, 141, 147, 161, 302 Hall, Stuart 13, 35, 37, 126 Han, Byung-Chul 7–9, 25, 33, 51, 52, 105, 166, 229, 292, 294, 299, 302 Harding, Sandra xv, 85, 104 Harding, Vincent 175 Hardt, Michael 51, 293 Harris, William 88, 121 Harvey, David 19, 33, 37–39, 45, 116, 119, 127, 128, 203 Held, David 114, 115, 117, 118, 134, 135, 143, 145, 156, 157, 159, 176, 226, 261 Hlebowitsh, P. 206 Honneth, Axel 10, 56, 114, 121, 135–138, 141–143, 145–147, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158, 163, 166 hooks, bell 1, 79, 80, 99, 104, 121, 156, 184, 186, 203 Horkheimer, Max 5, 75, 93, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 125, 127–129, 130–134, 136–138, 140, 141, 144, 145, 147, 159, 160, 176, 271 Hountondji, Paulin 4 Huebner, Dwayne xvii, 5, 15, 130, 167, 179, 193, 198, 212, 262, 270, 269, 287, 298 Hung, Ho-Fung 21

Name Index Hursh, David 42 Hypolito, Alvaro 189 Ibarra Colado, Eduardo 264 Invisible Committee, The 52, 57, 58, 60, 214, 297 Jameson, Fredric 149, 150, 152, 301 Janson, Elizabeth 75, 294 Jessop, Bob 26, 37 Jin, Ha 284 Johnson, Richard 19, 251 Jones, Huw 129, 211 Jorge, Lidia 61, 292 Jupp, James 285, 286, 288, 295 Kalecki, Michael 58 Karabel, Jerome 170 Karatani, Kojin 34, 45, 294 Kaviraj, Sdudipta 272 Kellner, Douglas 1, 15, 114, 115, 120, 135, 136, 139, 143, 152, 157, 160, 300 Klein, Naomi 19, 27, 50, 54, 64 Kliebard, Herbert 88, 123, 174, 198, 223 Koczanowicz, Leszek 24 Kovach, Margaret 98, 208 Laclau, Ernesto 231, 233 Ladson Billings, Gloria 202, 203, 207 Lankshear, Colin 200 Las Casas, Frei Bartomole 80, 226 Lather, Patti 185, 186, 197 Lazzarato, Maurizio 25, 32–33, 36, 46–49, 58 Leonardo, Zeus 8, 189 Lipman, Pauline 40, 44 Lipovetsky, Gilles 61 Liston, Daniel 88, 183, 185, 188 Loewen, James 80 Lorde, Audre xiv Lourenço, Eduardo 230 Lugones, Maria 84, 85 Lukács, György 115, 117, 119–126, 129, 140, 154 Luke, Carmen 185, 246 Lyotard, Jean Francois 147, 148 Macdonald, James 5, 10, 198, 269, 270, 298 Macrine, Sheila 39 Mahmood, Saba 69 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson 52, 70, 71, 75, 79, 81, 90, 94, 99, 147, 249 Mallon, Florencia 91, 254, 294 Marazzi, Christian 20, 32, 41, 45, 55, 56

311

Marx, Karl 3, 19, 34, 50, 55, 56, 117, 119, 122, 129, 138, 140, 141, 143, 148, 152, 158, 159, 192, 246, 247, 255, 267, 300 Matsuda, Mari 202 Mazzucato, Mariana 38, 41, 42 Mbembe, Achille xvii, 4, 10, 12, 27, 28, 145, 224, 230 McCarthy, Cameron 188, 189, 207 McChesney, Robert 30, 34, 39, 40, 43, 44 McLaren, Peter 156, 183, 184, 200, 205, 207, 240, 241, 262 McLaughlin, Eugene 35 Menon, Nivedita 272 Merelau-Ponty, Maurice 285 Mészáros, István 31, 246–248 Mignolo, Walter xvii, 2–4, 21, 29, 51, 52, 60, 61, 69, 70, 72, 74–76, 81, 85, 87–89, 90, 91, 93–99, 103, 105–108, 128, 161, 164, 201, 243, 245, 247, 248, 249, 257–260, 274, 291 Miller, Janet 167, 185, 186, 197, 198, 212 Mills, C. W. 82, 83, 204 Mitrano, Barbara 185, 186, 197 Moon, Seungho 293 Moreira, Maria Alfredo 284 Moretti, Franco 13 Mouffe, Chantal 34–35, 231 Muthu, Sankar 21, 266, 267 Nak-Chung, Paik 161 Newman, Janet 35 Nobre, Marcos 141, 159 Noerr, Gunzelin Schmid 129 Nolan, Ginger 20 O’Brien, Martin 284 Oliveira, Francisco 22 Oliveira, Ines 284, 285 Olssen, Mark 34 Ondjaki 176 Paik, Shailaja 272 Panitch, Leo 304 Panizza, Franscisco 231, 133 Paraskeva, João xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 2, 4, 6–8, 13, 14, 19, 32, 33, 35, 39, 45, 48, 52, 61, 69, 72, 73, 81, 88, 89, 93, 99, 102–104, 114, 115, 122–125, 128–130, 132, 138, 143, 147, 152, 154, 159, 162, 167, 168, 174, 175, 178, 182, 186–188, 193, 196, 198, 200, 204, 206, 212, 213, 215, 223, 226, 228, 229, 231, 237, 239, 243,

312

Name Index

249, 252, 258, 261, 267, 283, 287–289, 290, 294, 296, 299 Parenti, Michael 11, 131 Patnaik, Prabhat 23 Pedroni, Thomas 204, 246 Penna, Sue 284 Pepetela 13, 176, 177 Pessoa, Fernando 28, 29, 31, 56, 59, 80, 103, 133, 140, 178, 180, 181, 198, 199, 211, 224, 228–230, 242, 260, 268, 269, 273–275, 283–288, 302, 304 Phenix, Philip 221 Pinar Wiliam 1, 8, 121, 130, 132, 139, 156, 165, 167, 174, 175, 179, 181, 183, 186, 197, 198, 206, 212, 229, 248, 249, 252, 269, 274, 287, 288, 290 Popkewitz, Thomas 200–202, 206, 250–252, 254–257, 286 Porta, Donatella della 26, 253 Poster, Mark 108 Price, Todd 289, 293 Quantz, Richard 204, 207, 207, 299 Quijano, Anibal xvii, 4, 11, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76–79, 84, 86, 87, 94, 101, 102, 128, 154, 179, 248, 255, 263, 267, 283 Rancière, Jacques 12, 116, 235, 236 Reynolds, William 174, 269, 298 Rodríguez Magda, Rosa Maria 102 Rorty, Richard 114 Roy, Arundhati 41, 43, 57 Ruparela, Sanjay 272 Said, Edward 95, 143, 249, 284 Saidin, Ahmad 200 Sanbonmatsu, John 244, 251 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa xvi, 2–10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 34, 43, 44, 51–53, 55, 58, 69, 84, 99, 100, 104–107, 109, 114, 115, 122, 123–125, 128, 134, 137, 141, 144, 145–148, 150–155, 160–167, 199, 200, 204, 205, 211, 212, 225, 227, 228, 231, 232, 237, 240, 241–243, 245, 246, 248–250, 252–260, 265, 266, 269, 270, 272–274, 283, 285–289, 293, 294–304 Saramago, José 145, 155, 165, 166, 245, 277

Sartre, Jean-Paul 15, 139, 174, 303 Sassen, Saskia 35 Saucier, P. Khalil 281 Schmitt, Carl 30, 36 Schubert, William 123, 174, 198, 223, 287–289, 294 Schwab, Joseph 179 Selden, Steven 126 Shohat, Ella 2, 11 Silliman, Benjamin 88 Slattery, Patrick 174, 198, 269 Sloterdjik, Peter 142, 226, 244, 246 Smith, Linda xviii, 3, 4, 89, 96, 101, 244, 249, 250, 251, 253, 259 Sokal, Alan 245 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 95, 253 Stam, Robert 2, 11 Stefancic, Jean 202 Steger, Manfred 22 Streeck, Wolfgang 18, 54, 56 Süssekind, Maria Luiza 284, 286, 287, 289, 294 Tate IV, William 202, 203, 207 Taubman, Peter 174, 186, 198, 269 Teltumbde, Anand 4, 5, 130, 271 Thernborn, Göran 104 Tibebu, Teshale 266, 275 Tillich, Paul 5 Tlostanova, Madina 96, 245 Todorov, Tzvetan 36, 80 Todorova, Maria 105 Tony, Negri 51, 293 Torres, Gerald 202 Torres, Rodolfo 197, 203 Touraine, Alain 21, 58, 159, 261, 264 Tse Tung, Mao 21, 292 Tyack, David 88, 121 Vanaik, Achin 23 Varoufakis, Yanis 30, 51, 55, 240 Virilio, Paul 20, 32 Wacquant, Lois 20 Walker, Corey 73, 224 Walkerdine, V. 185 Wallerstein, Sandra 87–89, 303 Walsh, Catherine 2–4, 20, 21, 29, 31, 72, 75, 81, 83, 86, 93, 96, 97, 104, 147, 164, 201, 243, 248, 253, 255–257, 260, 262, 264, 289, 297 Wang, Jackie 48

Name Index Watkins, William 174, 183, 204, 207, 223 Webber, Jeffery 262, 298 Webber, Julie 174, 269, 298 Weis, Lois 189, 193 West, Cornel 4, 177 Wexler, Philip 181, 183–185, 196, 241 Whitty, Geoff 194 Williams, Jeffrey 20, 43, 123, 146, 286, 293 Wolf, Naomi 4, 29 Wraga, W. 206

313

Wright, Erik 183 Wynter, Sylvia 106, 107, 204 Young, Michael 194 Zeichner, Kenneth 183 Zhao, Weili 288, 294 Zinn, Howard 79, 294 Žižek, Slavoj 1, 2, 4, 6, 21, 27, 29–33, 41, 43, 44, 51, 117, 126, 145, 162, 196, 252, 257–259, 263, 264, 292, 298, 302, 304

Subject Index

abyssal divide xiv, 3, 300 abyssality 105, 106, 243, 285 abyssal lines 7, 105, 160, 199, 204, 239, 297 abyssal matrix 123, 231, 237, 238, 239 abyssal thinking 8, 104, 107, 242, 293, 298 African intellectuals 3, 102, 177, 213 alarm state 61 anti-colonial 2, 13, 14, 95, 130, 174, 159, 201, 211, 272 anti-colonial intellectuals 211 anti-functionalist functionalism 109, 168, 228, 242 anti-mechanotic 286 antinomies of power 226, 227, 228 austerity xvii, 11, 20, 26, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52 authoritarianism xiv, 29, 57, 116, 117, 133, 233, 236 authoritarian populist 24, 33, 34, 37, 56, 132 blackcritic 204 black female intellectuals 243 border thinking 92, 98 capitalism xvii, 13, 18, 21, 26, 28, 33, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 54, 56, 59, 60, 61, 64, 70, 73, 78, 85, 87–89, 97, 100, 102, 104, 107, 110, 114–120, 122, 124–126, 133, 134, 136, 141, 144, 146, 149, 151, 154, 161, 164, 178, 179, 189, 202, 203, 207, 214, 219, 224, 233, 236, 244, 246, 247, 249, 257, 271 Cartesian model 196 caste xvii, 4, 5, 10, 69, 81, 82, 83, 84, 130, 132, 143, 162, 173, 177, 243, 271, 272

class iv, 5, 10, 22, 23, 26, 44, 49, 50, 51, 56, 57, 60, 80, 81, 85, 97, 100, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 143, 147, 151, 157, 158, 162, 165, 175, 177, 182, 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 199, 203, 210, 212, 232, 237, 238, 240, 243, 250, 252, 259, 267, 268, 271, 272, 295 class consciousness 117, 118, 121, 124, 125, 136, 141, 209 classism 126, 143, 162, 184, 237, 240 Clinamen 297 cognitive apartheid 104 cognitive empire xvii cognitive justice xvi, xviii, 2, 34, 44, 75, 89, 98, 99, 103, 164, 200, 244, 257, 263, 265, 266, 284, 295, 298 colonial xvii, 3, 4, 26, 69, 73, 74, 77–80, 85, 86, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 105, 128, 177, 204–206, 215, 224, 228, 247, 253, 255, 264, 275, 288 colonialism 69, 70, 74–76, 82, 84, 85, 90, 91, 97, 101, 104, 176, 179, 243, 244, 246–248, 254, 257, 265, 271, 272, 296 coloniality xvi, 21, 60, 61, 78, 79, 84–86, 90, 93–95, 97, 98, 101, 106, 179, 225, 228, 239, 246–249, 259, 260, 264, 265, 272, 302 coloniality of being 52, 69, 79, 98, 285, 288 coloniality of knowledge 69, 79, 285, 288 coloniality of labor 52, 69 coloniality of power xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, 69, 79, 90, 92–94, 285, 288, 298 coloniality zone 203, 271 colonial power matrix xvi, 3, 4, 69, 70, 85, 86, 96, 103, 105–107, 154 colonial zone 105

Subject Index common sense 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 43, 48, 50, 54, 75, 79, 83, 108, 116, 117, 126, 132, 137, 156, 181, 182, 193, 208, 234, 285, 291, 303 communism 23, 32, 58, 149, 150, 158, 177 Concientizacao 13 consciencism 13 consciousness 87, 120, 127, 131, 133, 139, 146, 190, 201, 209, 210, 284, 286, 298, 300 contemporary of 9, 229, 230, 231, 290, 291 counter dominant 8, 14, 44, 53, 75, 98, 124, 128, 147, 165, 175, 185, 186, 200, 201, 203, 208, 223, 224, 225, 227, 242, 243, 246, 263, 264, 284, 294, 297, 299 counter-functionalism 188 counter hegemonic iii, xv, xviii, 3, 5, 7, 12, 25, 29, 34, 52, 59, 75, 93, 106, 108, 116, 130, 132, 144, 152, 158, 159, 174, 195, 206, 209, 212, 214, 226, 228, 244, 254, 259, 262, 268, 269, 272, 273, 286, 287, 288, 293, 296, 302 counter historical 207, 271 critical intellectuals 118, 119, 156, 163, 202, 250, 252, 261, 273, 283 Critical Race Theory 202, 203, 204, 246 critical theory 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 31, 59, 92, 93, 95, 101, 107–109, 115, 116, 118, 119, 125, 130, 135, 136, 138, 140–149, 151–168, 176, 181, 183, 186, 188, 190, 191, 195, 197, 199, 200, 203, 205, 207, 208, 211, 212, 227, 228, 240, 241, 243–246, 248, 249, 250–253, 255–257, 259, 261, 262, 266, 270, 271, 274, 283, 284, 288, 289, 295, 298–300 curriculum epistemicide 52, 69, 115, 122, 124, 138, 164, 211, 212, 224, 228, 232, 243, 252, 266, 286, 287, 289 curriculum esquize 274 curriculum exfoliation 231, 274, 275, 283, 286 curriculum involution 14, 109, 168, 178, 214, 223–226, 228–231, 240, 259, 294, 295, 301 curriculum isonomia 294 curriculum mechanicity 14 curriculum mechanotics 14, 240 curriculum naparamas 178 curriculum Occidentosis 14, 104, 109, 168, 223–225, 237–240 curriculum of disquiet iii, 288

315

curriculum relevance 179, 180, 194 curriculum river xv, 2, 6, 7, 13, 103, 114, 115, 132, 138, 140, 143, 159, 162–165, 175, 177, 178, 181, 184, 185, 187, 188, 197, 199, 201, 211–213, 283, 288, 300 das Institut 116–120, 127–130, 133–135, 137–143, 146, 155–157, 159, 163 das Institut intellectuals 120, 128–130, 133–135, 137, 139, 143, 146, 157–159 das Kapital 121, 122 debt xvii, 11, 20, 30, 33, 39, 41, 42, 46–50, 54, 178, 207 decolonial xv, xvi, 29, 69, 76, 86, 130, 163, 166, 201, 211, 212, 246, 247, 300 decolonial excavations 256 decolonial critique 91, 92 decolonial intellectuals 212, 257, 258 decoloniality xvii, 69, 75, 76, 85, 94–98, 248, 260 decoloniality de-linking 94 decoloniality thinking 94 decolonial matrix 212 decolonial thinking 74, 75, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 103, 108, 147, 294 decolonial turn 94, 97, 98, 272 decolonization 75, 85, 86, 93, 96, 162, 167, 243, 251, 255, 260 decolonize 99, 162, 167, 211, 213, 231, 259, 275, 300–303 decolonize critical theory 162, 211, 300 decolonized education xvii, 69 decolonized Marxism 210, 211 decolonized pedagogy 266 decolonized rationale 78 decolonized western canon 92 decolonized zone 166 delinking 85, 93–96, 98, 244 deterritorialize 166, 187, 283, 284, 291 detranscendentalized concept of reason 142 dialect materialism 160, 161 ecology of knowledges 100, 256, 257, 285, 296–298 El Patron Colonial del Poder 128, 255, 263, 283 empire xvii, 21, 24, 25, 27, 51, 57, 71, 75, 96, 104, 177, 178, 203, 266, 267 enlightenment modernity 126–129, 133, 139, 143, 144, 147, 164 epistemic canon 92 epistemicides xvii, xviii, 2, 3, 6–8, 12–15, 17, 19, 28, 32, 51, 52, 66, 67, 69,

316

Subject Index

81, 99, 102, 104, 107, 115, 122–124, 129, 137, 138, 149, 153, 154, 160, 164, 167, 203, 211, 212, 223, 224, 228, 232, 243, 252, 62, 269, 271, 274, 285–287, 289, 294 epistemic privilege 69, 77, 78, 81, 91 epistemic racism 82, 91 epistemic sexism 83, 86 epistemological absences 266 epistemological blindness 69, 124, 245, 269 epistemological cleansing 50, 132 epistemological declaration of independence 297, 298 epistemological diversity 162, 268 epistemological despotism 1, 2 epistemological eugenicism 77, 121 epistemological faschosphere 76, 81, 82, 85 epistemological justice 251 epistemological matrix 3, 5, 7, 13, 52, 109, 159, 174, 211, 248, 250, 270, 284, 293 epistemological pluriversity 259 epistemological subversiveness 76 eugenic 1–8, 23, 25–28, 32, 46, 49–55, 57, 59, 60, 69, 72, 75, 77, 82, 83, 85, 90, 99, 104–106, 114, 117, 121, 123, 126, 128, 130, 131, 137, 138, 154, 158, 160, 166, 167, 175, 176, 178, 182, 195, 200, 202, 203, 207, 223, 225, 226, 232, 236, 237, 239–242, 244, 251, 252, 254–256, 259, 265, 269, 271, 275, 283, 293, 296 eurocentric xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 1, 3–6, 8, 13, 14, 25, 25, 50, 52, 58, 71, 72, 74, 77, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91–93, 96, 99, 100, 103–105, 109, 124, 130, 147, 148, 155, 158, 160–163, 177, 200, 204, 207, 232, 239, 241, 246, 255, 256, 262, 266, 268, 270, 288, 291, 294, 297–298 eurocentric intellectuals 103 eurocentrism 11, 51, 56, 69, 71–74, 76, 83, 86, 87, 91, 92, 101, 102, 104, 163, 167, 241, 243, 257, 259, 270, 288 false consciousness 136, 137, 162, 189, 234, 240 fascism 11, 28, 32, 46, 49, 50–52, 56–58, 69, 76, 90, 114, 117–119, 124, 157, 167, 232, 233, 235, 236, 247, 269, 286 full consciousness 286 functionalism 109, 144, 164, 168, 194, 203, 207, 211, 212, 224, 228, 240, 242, 250

functionalist 92, 164, 167, 184, 185, 188, 195, 203, 211, 212, 224, 240, 241, 251, 258, 284, 290 gender 10, 49, 51, 69, 77, 81–85, 96, 97, 130, 175, 177, 182, 184, 185, 187–189, 194, 293, 212, 243, 250, 267, 268, 271, 272, 288 genderism 81–83, 86, 126, 143, 162, 237, 240 generation of utopia xv, xvii, 6, 7, 12–14, 43, 109, 159, 168, 174, 176–179, 181, 211, 241, 252, 270, 283, 300, 301 genocide 10, 19, 21, 49, 53, 54, 72, 75, 79, 81, 82, 100, 104, 116, 143, 160, 162, 164, 193, 237, 246, 289 globalization 8, 20, 25, 28, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 50, 51, 69, 73, 74, 76, 103, 154, 164, 230, 236, 260, 290 Global South xvi, 93, 100, 105, 130, 149, 201, 239, 244, 265 great regression 10, 14, 26, 29, 56, 58, 59, 144, 148, 214, 225, 231, 235, 301, 302 hegemony 12, 22, 23, 33, 36, 51, 60, 74, 75, 78, 84, 107, 130, 134, 175, 181–183, 190, 192, 193, 195–197, 205, 206, 209, 232, 267, 270, 288, 293 heterotheory 289 heterotopia 302–304 historical consciousness 34, 130, 234 human rights 26, 34, 38, 52, 122, 148, 236 hunger 10, 26, 126, 148, 236 identical 4, 7–9, 50, 51, 138, 139, 294 Indian intellectuals 272 indigenous xvi, xviii, 73, 82, 84, 85, 99, 100, 101, 130, 162, 167, 200, 240, 249, 251, 253–257, 262, 265, 266–269, 273, 274, 288 indigenoustude 294 individual consciousness 30, 122, 125 inequality 10, 20, 21, 24, 51, 54, 100, 102, 104, 116–118, 130, 162, 182, 190, 195–197, 201, 203, 225, 241, 245, 254, 260, 262, 267, 273, 292 instrumental reason 87, 116, 129, 130–132, 134, 135, 139, 141, 142, 144, 157, 176, 261 insufficiency xiv, xv, xvii, 10, 14, 59, 102, 103, 108, 214, 240, 242, 244, 246, 252, 254, 256, 259, 260, 262, 265–274, 283, 301

Subject Index intellectuals xv, 2, 13, 21, 84, 114, 116, 141, 142, 147, 149, 167, 174, 176, 179, 180, 197, 198, 203, 249, 253, 261, 262 intersectionality 83, 248, 297 Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) xviii, 14, 15, 89, 92, 93, 103, 167, 206, 215, 231, 240, 254, 266, 283–289, 290–300 Latin American intellectuals 3 Lingua Franca 245 Marxism 2, 87, 116, 118–120, 129, 134–136, 143, 145, 149, 151, 157, 160, 163, 177, 204, 244, 264, 272, 294 Marxist 2, 5, 44, 50, 115–121, 126, 129, 130, 133–135, 141, 147, 175, 181, 189, 197, 210, 272, 273 memorable figures 181 metamorphoses of power 228 Middle East intellectuals 3 modernist curriculum 226 modernity xvi, 23, 28, 51, 56, 69, 71–75, 81, 84–87, 90, 93–95, 98, 99, 101–107, 126, 148, 149, 153–155, 161, 163, 167, 196, 212, 223, 241, 244, 246, 248, 258, 260, 264, 268, 270, 291, 301–303 modern western eurocentric 2, 7, 12, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 69, 70, 76, 78, 81, 84, 164, 166, 167, 180, 202, 231, 223, 224, 227, 228, 230, 231, 237, 238, 240, 244, 245, 247, 248, 253, 254, 260, 263, 265, 274, 275, 283, 289, 293, 295, 297, 301, 303 momentism 8, 132, 229, 290 nationalism xvii, 5, 23, 28, 29, 32, 46, 50, 52, 91, 92, 107, 177, 233, 234, 236, 262, 264, 296 Nazism 108, 117, 118 necropolitics 10, 224 necropower 10, 224 negative dialectics 134, 138 negative thinking 140 neo colonialism 20, 24 neo-Gramscianism 109, 168, 175, 178, 181, 182, 189, 196, 197, 204, 227, 271 neoliberalism 11, 13, 21, 23, 26, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 45–58, 62–65, 108, 213, 214, 266 neo-Marxist intellectuals 44, 115 neo-post-Marxist 175 neo-radical centrism 35–38, 49, 99 non-abyssal 15, 166, 255, 284 non-abyssal curriculum 225

317

non-abyssal thinking 7, 166, 284, 297, 298 non-eurocentric 3, 10, 106, 159, 211, 212, 225, 243, 246, 251, 259, 260, 264, 267–269, 299 nonoccidentalist westernology 14 non-western intellectuals 103 occidentotic intellectuals 239 onto-epistemological 274, 284, 299 oppressed xv, xvi, xvii, 1, 3, 6, 16, 19, 25, 30–32, 40, 48, 49, 60, 61, 73, 81, 90, 95, 115, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 128, 136, 156, 167, 177, 182, 192, 193, 195, 209, 224, 241, 249, 252, 253, 259, 262–264 ordoliberalism 36 orientalism 102 other xv, xvi, 2–4, 6–9, 12, 25, 26, 32, 33, 52, 72, 73, 75–78, 89, 95, 103, 105, 106, 126, 167, 194, 198, 233, 238, 252, 269, 274, 289, 294 otherness 6, 9, 103, 149, 252, 284, 294, 295 poesis 291–293 pluriversity 257, 259 populism 22, 32, 38, 49, 132, 133, 231–235, 262, 263 populist xiv, 28, 29, 49, 53, 55, 58, 133, 236, 263 positivism 83, 121, 130–133, 141, 197, 212 post-abyssal thinking 7, 296, 297, 300 post-colonial 58, 95, 96, 158, 224, 244, 272 post-colonialism 75, 223, 244 post-coloniality 95 post-critical 6, 14, 148, 151, 185, 205, 212, 240, 246, 254, 289 post-eurocentric 243 post-structural 59, 91, 93, 95, 128, 148, 155, 184, 185, 187, 190, 191, 197, 200, 204, 205, 207, 208, 211, 214, 240, 245, 246, 285 post-structural feminisms 185, 191 post-structuralism 93, 95, 96, 149, 151, 189, 192, 205, 208, 223, 224 post-mechanotic 286 post-modern 59, 91, 95, 128, 147, 148, 150, 153, 166, 184, 185, 190, 191, 197, 210, 211, 214, 245, 246–247, 267, 290 post-modernism 92, 93, 148, 189, 190, 210, 245, 246 post-modernity 13, 73, 76, 90, 95, 102, 103, 223, 258, 260

318

Subject Index

post-truth 126, 132, 133, 164 poverty xvii, 1, 10, 11, 20, 31, 46, 61, 103, 104, 126, 128, 143, 148, 164, 182, 196, 203, 244, 251, 252, 273 power 21, 23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, 43, 47, 48, 52, 53, 56, 57, 61, 72–76, 78, 81–84, 87, 88, 95, 97, 100, 101, 108, 116–119, 121, 123, 126, 127, 129–134, 136, 142, 143, 149, 159, 163, 174–177, 179, 181, 183, 187, 188, 190–192, 195–197, 199, 200, 201, 206, 207, 209, 212–215, 225–228, 244–248, 256, 262–269, 272, 285, 288, 293, 294, 300 presentism 8, 132, 290 race 10, 51, 69, 73, 74, 76–82, 84, 87, 97, 117, 130, 132, 143, 175, 177, 182, 184, 187–189, 194, 199, 202–204, 207, 208, 212, 215, 234, 243, 250, 260, 267, 268, 271–273, 288 racism xiv, 21, 26, 28, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 100, 102, 126, 143, 147, 164, 189, 193, 199, 203, 204, 237, 240, 251, 271, 300 radical centrism 34–35, 37, 38, 50 radical intellectuals xv, xvii, 192 rearguard intellectuals 254, 299 reification 119–122, 125, 126, 137, 141, 146, 189 reified consciousness 139 retrogressive anthropogenesis 18, 53, 225 reversive epistemicide xvii, 2, 6, 8, 13–15, 61, 286 segregation 3, 10, 46, 51, 61, 70, 81, 83, 118, 130, 143, 160, 162, 164, 180, 198, 201, 203, 225, 237, 241, 254, 260, 272, 273 social and cognitive justice 2, 44, 75, 98, 103, 104, 162, 164, 200, 210, 244, 257, 263, 265, 266, 298 social consciousness 48, 120, 123, 126, 134, 150, 182 social emancipation 29, 101, 120, 127, 133, 134, 155, 180, 206, 210, 236, 246, 248, 249, 285, 298 socialism 44, 118–120, 149, 150, 154, 158, 159, 214, 263 social justice xv, 3, 99, 114, 126, 132, 142, 159, 176, 178, 179, 185, 193, 264, 265, 267

sociology of absences 5, 7, 100, 266, 289 spirituality xvi, 5, 72, 97, 198, 212, 237, 239, 259, 288 State of Exception 30, 31, 33, 35–37 structuralism 149, 192, 233 sub-humanity 1, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 14, 32, 51, 52, 58–61, 70, 105, 107, 177, 178, 242, 259, 296 subjectification of debt 11, 33, 46–48 subjective economy 46–48 supradisciplinary critical theory 157, 162, 164, 167 supradisciplinary materialism 135, 155, 156, 163 supradiscplinary social theory 135, 145, 155, 156, 160, 161, 163 subversity 256, 257 synopticality 287 theoricide 14, 226 thingfication 1, 6 thin intellectualism 226 transmodernity 69 tribal populism 18, 32, 46, 51 unconsciousness 53, 56 ur-fascism 8, 22, 231 utopia 3, 7, 13–15, 25, 27, 43, 114, 118, 127, 128, 136, 143, 149, 150, 156, 162, 163, 167, 168, 177–181, 211, 215, 241, 242, 246, 248, 257, 260, 270, 283, 285, 287, 295, 300–304 utopians 121, 136, 151, 230, 255, 290, 291, 295, 301–304 utopists 14, 15, 283, 300–304 vanguard intellectuals 244, 254, 266 Western xiv, xv, xviii, 18, 21, 23, 25–27, 71, 73, 77, 80, 86, 87, 89, 90–95, 101, 103, 105, 118, 119, 128, 141, 143, 145, 184, 197, 204, 214, 236, 237–239, 246, 248, 250, 254, 262, 268, 289, 296, 298, 304 Western academy 83, 287 Western canon 91–93 Western Eurocentric 2, 6, 8, 10–14, 59–61, 80, 82, 91, 96, 204, 247, 259, 284, 294, 297 Westus 50 working class 26, 181, 214