What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? : The need to go above and beyond neoliberal rage without avoiding it

Tero Autio, Liisa Hakala & Tiina Kujala (toim.) Siirtymiä ja ajan merkkejä koulutuksessa. Opetussuunnitelmatutkimuksen näkökulmia Tampere: Tampere University Press 2019, 145–186. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-359-008-3 What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? The need to go above and beyond neoliberal rage without avoiding it1 João M. Paraskeva The great regression 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, 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 cooker was all of democracy, so it 1 In gratitude to the doctoral students of the Education Leadership and Policy Studies program at UMass Dartmouth. Also, a word of thanks to Liz Janson. They all alone know why. João M. Paraskeva 146 was claimed. One of the chickens replied that “we the birds don’t want to be eaten whatsoever period.” 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 all of us as a democratic world, that paradoxically the sovereignty of each nation is an object of museum. This little story, shared by Eduardo Galeano (2010), is a vivid example of the sadism and brutality of late global capitalism, which makes capitalism, democracy, equality, freedom, and justice mutually exclusive realities and thus a divisive social issue. Let’s take a look to some features of our current momentum. Between 1900 and 1999, the US used 4,500 million tons of cement. Between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 6,500 million tons of cement. That is, in just 3 years China consumed 50% more cement than US consumed in the preceding century (Harvey 2016). In the US, the top 0.1% has accumulated more wealth than the entire bottom 90%. With the advent of globalization, inequality becomes a global nightmare. Globalization globalized the few and localized the rest (Bauman 1998). Global inequality is much greater than inequality within any individual country. In the U.S., in the summer 2017, in different states, for the first time in the history, a significant number of commercial places 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 Paris agreement. In the U.S., a kid drops out of school every 41 seconds, and the ‘school to prison pipeline’ became domesticated. In the U.S., in June 2014, student loan debt was approximately $1.3 trillion that affected 44 million borrowers who had an average outstanding loan balance of $37,172). 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, 65). In Texas, one school district reinstates corporal punishment. Now students who misbehave in class will be paddled until they get better grades. What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 147 They are now shipping paddles to their teachers to be used as corporal punishment when students misbehave (Smith 2017). Also, in the U.S., the shocking numbers of African Americans and minorities murdered by the police and incarcerated has become the ‘norm.’ In Brazil, the legacy of the Workers Party government for more than a decade, despite all the controversies, corruptions, accusations, and achievements, was not able to ‘avoid’ the political carnage. Two decades later, the same nation that elected Lula da Silva and Dilma Roussef, made a u-turn and elected a far-right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro. Venezuela. Hugo Chavez mythical leadership and conquests are on collapsing with Nicolas Maduro under constant attack both internally and externally. Aleppo, Bagdad, Benghazi, Srebrenica, Ruanda, Matabeleland, Crimea, the so-called war on drugs ‘in Mexico’, just to mention a few examples, reinforce a ‘subjectivity’ that should never have been constructed: immigrant, refugees. Massive waves of human beings, like never before, have the right to freedom and to escape war and hunger crumble the ‘welfare’ of the West. New York, Washington, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Cairo, bit by bit, the spectrum of ‘abnormality’ becomes domesticated. Today, a terrorist attack may still make the headlines of major newspapers but sadly barely constitutes a surprise. 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. To throw more ashes into the fire, just recently the US President Trump cavalierly recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The UK ‘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. Two years later, Brexit looks much more like ‘Nexit’ as it was not approved by British parliament yet. China decided to move towards the ‘Beijing consensus’, a new politcal management of the economy, a João M. Paraskeva 148 ‘noveaux’ socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics (Enfu and Xiaoqin 2017); in India, Modi’s elected government represents “a far right force with undeniable neo-fascist characteristics” (Vanaik 2018, 40). Despite such apocalyptic events in the West and beyond, the second decade of the 21st century is creating the path for a far-right agenda to succeed as we can see in France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Finland. The ‘masses’ are placing their vote on candidates who insult people with disabilities, women, and people of color as well as unleashed an overt attack against immigrants. The error of casting the vote ‘just’ based on class, race, or gender dynamics persists. Welcome to the reign of low identity politics. Welcome to the real colors of the epistemicide. Democracy is being used to kill democracy (Wolf 2007). We are facing the normalization of shock, of chaos, to the cynicism of full blast blatant fascism and authoritarianism, peppered with sublime irony. To add more ashes to the Western fire, in Cataluña, people voted for independence from Spain. As if such pandemonium is not enough, much of the political and educational left persists clinging to an archaic board, embarking on ‘theoretical timesharing,’ which helps the radical right to enjoy a prolonged and fat sabbatical. Shockingly, and as some argue, people speak more about the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Such havoc reveals a sort of “Polanyic mechanic” unleashed by global neoliberal ideological matrix that drove society to what has been defined as the inevitable way forward regardless its lethal consequences (Geiselberger 2017, 12). Oddly, 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, xi). The claim that we live in a non-ideological momentum is indeed an ideological claim (Paraskeva & Torres Santome 2012). 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 What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 149 Berlin Wall – which is the fading of the “iron curtain of ideology and the vigorous emergence of the velvet curtain of culture” (Žižek 2008, 661). The global far-right resurgence is the larva of the capitalist new neoliberal volcano. 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 – as we will see later on, in a refined 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 (Paraskeva 2011a; 2011b; 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 new 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 blunt oxymorons. The history of the capitalist system is one of perpetual crisis. However, what is new in the current crisis is that neoliberalism dried both the central right and central left political options stimulating a major transformation on the right political specter (Porta 2014, 73). That is a specter that feeds and embraces a “dangerous populist wave, whose lethal feature relies not in is nationalistic conservative impulse, but in its eugenic reactionary creed” (Krastev 2014, 130). Neoliberal globalization “is a gigantic repacking enterprise – the pouring of old philosophical wine into new ideological bottles” (Steger 2002, 65). We are facing a collapse, which is not simply related with economic and cultural factors, but also shows “a crisis of social imagination about the future” (Berardi 2012, 8). What we are facing is indeed the reboot of mankind’s ideological revolution, one that frames the current Modern Western Eurocentric time, a paradoxical time. João M. Paraskeva 150 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, vii). We are witnessing an era of “random regression symptoms” (Geiselberger 2017, 10). Such paradox graphically reveals how modernity and the totalitarian cult of Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological framework are maxed out. 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 [US, China, Russia, EU] entered in a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre” (p. x). 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, 44). What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 151 Game over! Let’s go comrades, the European game is definitely finished, it is necessary to find something else (Fanon 1963, 239). Modernity is under the gun due 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, was/is a “misleading dream” (Harding 2008, 23). 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. Peruvian public intellectual Quijano (1991) coined this Modern Western Eurocentric system of dominance, el patron colonial de poder, the ‘coloniality matrix of power’ (Mignolo 2018). 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 face of slavery, genocide, holocaust, poverty, inequality, social and cognitive apartheid, intergenerational injustice, and the temerity to change nature, among other issues. Painfully all of these sagas are at the very root of such modern societal tech advancements. The João M. Paraskeva 152 twentieth century, “was the last Eurocentric century” (Thernborn 2010, 59). As Frantz Fanon (1963) beautifully stated “let’s go comrades, the European game is definitely finished, it is necessary to find something else” (p. 239). The eugenicism of Eurocentrism is undeniable, an eugenicism that “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, 4). Needless to mention is how the educational/bildung system in general, 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 an eugenic Empire (hooks 1994). What we need, is to engage in a battle against the modern Western Eurocentric “monoculture of scientific knowledge [and fight for an] ecology of knowledges” (Santos 2004, xx). This 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”. It is thus crucial to challenge el patron colonial de poder (Quijano 1991) and its yoke of multiculturalism which is profoundly “Eurocentric, [that] create and describe cultural diversity within the framework of the nationstates of the Northern hemisphere” (Santos 2004, xx-xxi). Imperialism and colonialism are the specific formations through which the West came to “see,” to “name,” and to “know” indigenous communities (Smith 1999, 60). 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, 156). Eurocentrism is the epistemicide. It 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, 166). What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 153 Modern Western Eurocentric thinking “is an abyssal thinking, 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, 45). 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, 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”. 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 non-existent? 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. Modernity by itself “is not only a cultural revolution” (Amin 2008, 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. 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, 49–50). Colonialism is “the blind spot upon which modern conceptions of knowledge and law are built” (Santos 2007b, 50). Thus, “modern humanity is not conceivable without modern sub-humanity” (Santos 2007b, 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 anti-imperialist foundation” (Amin 2008, 111) seem to be unreachable? Why the impossibility of having 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 João M. Paraskeva 160 Habermas, and many others through The Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research) critical theory, soon established a solid terrain of contestation and alternatives to traditional theories of society. That imposed itself as “a theory of society against domination in all of its forms” (Held 1999, 35). In the field of education such structure of domination has been unpacked in one of the most influential oeuvres of the second part of last century – The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Critical theory challenges the false notion of detached science, and runs “counter to prevailing habits of thought” (Horkheimer 1989, 218). It came as an important ideological weapon against knowledge-regulation toward knowledge-emancipation (Santos 1999), critical consciousness and self-reflection, profoundly crucial in the struggles to interrupt and smashed the scientific cult of objectivity (Arato & Gebhardt 1985). It is a non-unified theory (Kellner 1989, 7) thus, spreading through a variety of approaches that engages in a multitude of critiques on “the crises of capitalism, authoritarianism, Nazism and fascism, manipulation of areas of culture and social relationships and individual development, Marxism and the state” (Held 1999, 35). It is inherently a ‘supradisciplinary’ and not ‘interdisciplinary’ way of thinking, living and grasping reality. 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, 7). Such multifarious critical approaches had a huge impact within the educational and curriculum fields. During the 1970s and 1980s, the curriculum field was swamped by a plurality of scholars exhibiting a myriad of distinct critical approaches, although fundamentally based on a Western Eurocentric epistemological matrix (some of them severe), with tremendous repercussions within and beyond the ‘global north,’ especially in Europe and Latin America2 (Paraskeva 2014; 2016; 2017). The struggle 2 The examples are countless. While in Spain the critical river flows into the education and curriculum field through the works of José Gimeno Sacristán, Julia Varela, Mariano Enguita, Jurjo Torres Santomé, and many others, and in Brasil 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 What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 161 of this generation follows the historical struggles for a just curriculum, since Parker, Adaams, Dewey, Bode, Rugg, Counts, DuBois, through the Civil Rights Movement, the Students Revolt, the Romantic critics, Black-power movement, Anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear war as well as Anti-colonial wars campaigns, woman rights, among others (Kliebard 1995; Pinar et al 1995; Schubert 1980; Paraskeva 2011a; 2011b). One witnessed a cocktail of national-world events that profoundly influenced new cultural and social perspectives pushing for radical transformations. Universities soon “became the cockpit of culture as a political struggle” (Eagleton 2003), 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 high level, “there was a visionary hope” (Eagleton 2003, 24), one that a group of scholars are so undeniably responsible to champion in our field. Some of the intellectuals of these generation of the utopia were also notoriously influenced by the works of Gramsci, Williams, Freire among others, and making the neo-Marxist approach in education more accurate by paying close attention to issues, such as ideology, power, hegemony, identity, discourse; others were trying to go beyond these perspectives; 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 an eugenic view of the scientificity of science and its questionable objectivity. We were witnessing the heyday of neogramscisnism (Paraskeva 2011a; 2011b). To promote a better understanding of the work of this divergent group of critical scholars, I conceptualized a map for charting their theoretical contributions – what I referred to as the critical curriculum river (Paraskeva 2011a; 2014; 2016). 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 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 Joao Paraskeva (Eds), International Critical Pedagogy Reader. New York: Routledge, 1–14. João M. Paraskeva 162 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 struggle for a more just curriculum. As Mia Couto (2008, 89) argues, “no river separates anyone, quite the opposite it weaves the destinies of the living”. We are facing a generation of scholars who fought vigorously for a just education and curriculum, which never failed to see the conquest of social justice, equality and freedom in the horizon. We are talking about a group of intellectuals who dared to dream, who challenged instituted eugenic powers, that many of them never enjoy areas of academic comfort and in some cases faced fascist dismissals. We are before a generation that in so many was instrumental in belligerent battles for some civil rights that we enjoy today – inclusively within the academia – a fact that so many of us ignore or marginalize. We are talking about a group of thinkers and social activists that dare to open the chest to the bullets for a ‘world we all wish to see’ (Amin 2008), that knew quite well that to do justice of the worlds of the world, curriculum the way it has been produced needed to face a radical overhaul. Such 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 magnetized social justice and equality as the horizon and bestride against all odds towards such horizon. We are talking about a generation of intellectuals that “was born in a time when time does not happen” (Couto 2008, 23), that knew fully well that what “really matter was the journey” (Couto 2008, 32), and that they needed “to believe that there was a noble cause, a reason why it was worth living” (Couto 2008, 95). I call this handful of fighters, following Pepetela’s (1992) 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 intellectuals, groups and the communist party in the struggle against 500 years of bloody Portuguese colonialism towards freedom and justice. It is an exegesis that examines the accomplishments and frustrations of a generation that What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 163 pursuit the utopia of an independent nation fighting tenaciously towards such utopia and got lost almost three decades later in a painful dystopia of a totalitarian regime with all its consequences. This generation, Pepetela (1992, 22) argues, “soon understood, right at the heart of the Empire, that the batuques (drums) that they heard in the childhood pointed to another journey that was not the journey imposed by the Portuguese fado”. A generation that dwelled acutely natural dialectics between nationalism and internationalism, Marxism and Communism, an utopia that forced painful purges within class, race and gender dynamics. There is a slight difference between ‘utopian generation’ and ‘generation of the utopia.’ I consider the generation of educational scholars 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. In our field, however, as I will examine later on, we ended up moving from utopia to what I call involution. Despite that, it is crucial to understand that our debt to this generation will be undeniably forever open. As Mia Couto (2008, 27) would put it, such generation were the Naparamas, “avenger of my people’s sorrows, fighters against those who make war, warriors of justice”. Such generation of utopia reflects an era in which “the conflict broke out on the streets over the uses of knowledge” (Eagleton 2003, 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, 25), but also from other Parthenon’s of the Western modern hegemonic power in a “heady mélange of Fanon, Marcuse, Reich, Beauvoir, Gramsci and Godard” (Eagleton 2003, 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, Middle East, Asia, South and Central America, East and West Europe to the US. Needless to say, that in these battles, “humanities lost their innocence” (Eagleton 2003, 26). It is undeniable that these João M. Paraskeva 164 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 helped galvanizing and materializing social justice and curriculum relevance as the utopia within and beyond a generation of educators. That is, such generation did not just draw a utopian picture in the lost horizon, they actually dared to draw multiple Western epistemological paths that would lead to that horizon. The utopia was wrapped as real. The generation of utopia was responsible for the construction and stimulation of a fantastic and more than just utopia in a given utopian generation. The utopian generation was in a way authored by a complex non-monolithic generation of the utopia. 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 evident successes, it was always a high road for the advocates of a 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. 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. Wexler (1987) mercilessly criticizes the critical theory overemphasis on reproduction and resistance, which made “the new sociology of education historically backward-looking and ideologically reactionary” (p. 127), claiming for the need to incorporate post-structural and postmodern tools to better understand society, schools and curriculum – a juicy epistemological avenue explored by scholars, such as Giroux, McLaren, Pinar, Doll, Grument, Miller and others. However, a major blast was well articulated by Liston (1988). He argued that the works of a particular radical Marxist tradition within this What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 165 river (including the works of Apple and Wexler) exhibit a “functionalist approach and have neglected crucial empirical investigations” (p. 15). Liston’s claims that particular radical critical Marxist approaches were criticizing functionalist dominant and counter-dominant traditions relied precisely on a functionalist approach. To add more ashes Ellsworth’s (1989, 299) denounces a reactionary impulse of the political (related with the functionalist approach) and edifies an acerbic critique of the shortcomings of critical pedagogy, arguing, “What diversity do we silence in the name of liberatory pedagogy?” The contradictions within the critical platform were not unnoticed by Giroux (1996, 691–695) as well. He openly challenge the reductionism of correspondence and reproduction exhausted narratives, and the capacity to create 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. Also, Apple and Weis (1983), McCarthy (1988), Apple and Carlson (1998) and others have tried to address some puzzling silences produced by the critical platform, regarding class, race, gender, and sexuality, thus running away from any uni-dimensional theory in which economic form was the determinant category (Freire, 1990). Critical theory could not thus resist to its overt functionalism of challenging a grand narrative with another master narrative, one that obliterates the nexus science, society and the subject (Popkewitz 1978), and needed to recognize another dimension of the political battle, that is linguistic genocide (Darder 2001) Make no mistakes. The ‘generation of the utopia’ achieved many accomplishments. However, they have been incapable of interrupting the epistemicide. This is not a minor issue. It establishes a clear line between critical poststrucutural and post-modern and feminist theories and decolonial and anti-colonial intellectuals that saw critical poststrucutural 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 ‘nonexistent’ (Santos 2014; Paraskeva 2016; Smith 1999). To say that radical and critical theories and pedagogies are ‘part of the João M. Paraskeva 166 epistemicide’ might be read as a loaded statement. However, the fact is that they 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 responsible 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, 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). Within social havoc, that is “in conditions of social hypercomplexity, human beings tend to act as a swarm. Social life becomes a swarm and in swarm it is not impossible to say no. It’s irrelevant” (Berardi 2012, 15). Notwithstanding the violence and cruelty of neo-liberalism 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 ended 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 proved being 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. Paradoxically, the great and unmistakable advances of the generation of the utopia created a What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 167 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 delays our epistemological just walk towards the utopia. Should the field’s utopia be pillared in a utopian theory? What a great avenue to be itinerantly explored in a future. Curriculum involution 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, 28). As I was able to argue elsewhere (Paraskeva 2017), the clashes between dominant and specific counter-dominant traditions and within each of these traditions fueled what I would call, drawing from José Gil (2009), a ‘curriculum involution.’ In such sometimes – ruthless struggles, neither the dominant nor the counter-dominant traditions were able to claim full victory; thus we keep experiencing an increasing void between, on one hand, the absence of the consolidation of the a fully segregated curriculum – we do have countless examples of counter-dominant victories – and, on the other hand, the full absence of the emergence of the new human being. And within such impasse, the epistemicide keeps being perpetuated. There is thus a void defined by a paradox: neither the ‘old human being’ died, nor the ‘creation’ of the new human being was fully materialized. Neither the old social order remained safe, nor the new social order emerged. 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, 28), counter hegemonic movements and groups, while able in many successful ways, to deconstruct how lethal is João M. Paraskeva 168 such capitalist social casserole, they have been also unable to break the modes and conditions of production propelling the capitalist matrix, and in so doing flourishing the emergence of a new autonomous human being free from the social and cognitive chains of oppression, segregation and inequality. The inability to fully establish ‘their human being’ is the malaise affecting dominant and counter-dominant platforms. 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 respect non-Western Eurocentric epistemological frameworks. To rely on José 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) that, in too many ways, points into a ‘regression.’ No transformation occurred. The improvement drove into regression. Such involution reflects a “positive feedback” which define the hypercomplex epistemological environment of our times (Berardi 2012), that is a “modern time without modern solutions a time of strong questions and weal answers” (Santos 2009, 3). Contrary to negative feedback, positive feedback “increases the magnitude of a perturbation in response to the perturbation itself” (Berardi 2012, 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 mope, 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). Such theorycide fueled by curriculum involution (Gil 2009) forces us to examine not just critical theory, but the very future of theory in our field within what José Gil (1998) calls “antinomy of power”; What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 169 in doing so, and being a “theory of society against domination in all of its forms” (Held 1999, 35), as we stated previously, critical theory and pedagogies of society “are a discourse of power and on power” (Gil 1998, 58.9). José Gil (1998) scrutinizes on the limits of power within a thesis and antithesis yarn; that is the limits of power needed to be contemplated between and within a thesis, that 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 that states that “power has neither a beginning nor an ending in time nor does it have spatial limits” (Gil, 1998, 56). 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, 56). 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, 57). 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. 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 completed exhausted? Exploring the (in) finitude of critical theory will allow one to understand what kind of “elements of impotence or weakness” (Gil 1998, 56) it carries, as well as the real colors of space and time “preceding its beginning and its end” João M. Paraskeva 176 and stabilization. The theory(ist) is a volcanic chain, who shows a constant lack of equilibrium, is always a stranger in his/her own language. It is not a sole act, however; it is a populated solitude. ICT challenges the sociology of absences and how certain non-Western epistemologies have been rendered as nonexistent; challenges any form of indeginestoude; that is, it challenges any form of romanticization of indigenous cultures and knowledges, and it is not framed in any dichotic skeleton of West-rest (Paraskeva 2011, 177–178). ICT opens the veins of the oppressive Modern Western Eurocentric epistemological canon. It is against any canon (Paraskeva 2011). It is, as Darder (2016) argues, “an epistemology of liberation that can persistently challenge structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life must be cultivated, nurtured and embodied within the blessed messiness and unwieldy chaos of everyday life within schools and communities” (p. 12). ICT confronts and throws the subject to a permanent unstable question of “what is there to think?” (Paraskeva 2011). ICT pushes one to think in the light of the future as well as to question how “we” can actually claim to really know the things that “we” claim to know, if “we” are not ready specifically to think the unthinkable, to go beyond the unthinkable and master its infinitude (Paraskeva 2016a; 2011). In this sense, ICT is “a theory of change” (Spivak 1988, 3), that goes beyond confrontation as the matrix for change and assumes a commitment to ‘radical co-presence’ (Santos 2014), or, better said, a subaltern radical co-presence towards a non-abyssal path. ICT “travels extensively through the ‘other side of the epistemic abyss” (Moreira 2017, 2). ICT challenges book worship (Tse Tung 2007, 45) and the yoke of writing as prima facere condition to the legitimacy of what is knowledge (Smith 1999). In that sense, ICT is an ethical take; it is the subaltern momentum. ICT is people’s theory. It is a clear call against the precariousness of any fixed theoretical position. ICT is “not merely invocation or evocation; it exemplifies how ideas can be added powerfully to the sources of curriculum studies by substantially including Works” (Schubert 2017, 10). Above and beyond What happen to (curriculum) critical theory? 177 the Modern Westernt Eurocentric epistemological dominant and counterdominant traditions. An itinerant curriculum theory is inherently “an exfoliation” (Gil 1998, 127) metamorphosis, a sill of infinite mourning’s (Couto 2008, 105), an anti and post “mechanotic” (Al-l-Ahmad 1987, 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, 68). ICT is a “new form of political affirmation grounded a global epistemological visions and interests to be favored and courses of action to be followed that are sustained in people’s history” (Popkewitz 1978, 28). In this regard, 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 critical path taking it into a different level, it is also a decolonial attempt to do critical theory (Kellner 1989, 2). In so doing an itinerant curriculum theory re-thinks utopianism. While it is “in the nature of utopia not to be realized” (Santos 1995, 481), such new logic needs to be de-linked from coloniality matrix and decolonize it as well. Utopian’s legitimacy relies on a “new epistemology and psychology, which resides on the virtual archeology of the present” (Santos 1995, 481). This implies moving from traditional hegemonic and counter-hegemonic utopian frameworks 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 heretotopia, 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, 481). João M. Paraskeva 178 Such heterotopia is different. It implies processes of de-linking from coloniality and modernity, decolonize it; it responds to Jürgen Habermas (1981) challenge of modernity as an incomplete project with a commitment to decolonize it. 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