‘Emergency!’ Or How to Learn to Live with Neoliberal Globalization

Abstract

The author explores the cultural politics of neoliberal globalization, its deformations of critical facets of public culture as it has returned home, and he explores the politics of emergency. Rather than seeing the politics of emergency as something indicative of an emerging ‘emergency regime’ attendant to the terror war, he argues that the current politics of emergency is rooted in neoliberal globalization more generally, especially in terms of the need for powerbrokers to institutionalize insecurity and anxiety as central facets of a ‘new normal.’ He then turns to the criminalization and militarization of schools as examples of how the process of institutionalizing insecurity has unfolded in the last decade, suggesting that public schools are an ostensible and crucial site (being the one of the last sites to be precaritized) because the types of subjects and agents required for neoliberal globalization must learn how to live (in fear) with neoliberal globalization. Without an understanding of how schools are being leveraged to produce a ‘new normal,’ strategies for engaging schools as democratic public spheres will be potentially under-developed or mis-directed.