Time for Caring Democracy: Resisting the Temporal Regimes of Neoliberalism

Abstract

This chapter develops the implications of dyssynchronous temporal regimes for cultivating caring democracy (Tronto, Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice, New York University Press, 2013). Sheldon Wolin (1997, Theory and Event 1(1), Project MUSE) suggested that, the slow deliberation democracy requires, is at odds with the acceleration of neoliberal culture and economy; the chapter suggests that care work is similarly dyssynchronous. Drawing from the case of ‘educational innovation,’ the author outlines the distributive as well as the constitutive consequences of neoliberal time for practices of care and deliberation, for care workers and citizen-subjects. Despite a shared culture of accelerated time, the implications for citizen-subjects are far from uniform. Neoliberal time sustains the privileged irresponsibility of some and becomes a defense for disciplining the timeliness and responsiveness of others. An important part of this work is accomplished through ‘educational innovations’ committed to standardization and assessment that ‘synchronize’ educational time with productive time thus implicitly and sometimes explicitly undermining the value of education as a caring practice.