Neoliberal Contestations & the Shadow Academy

Following Alain Badiou – writing in the ‘New Left Review’ [Jan/Feb 08, 49] about the ages of socialism in Sarkozy’s France and about the precarity of the communist hypothesis – it would appear that similar forces of ‘capitulation and servility’ [ii] explain the inertia regarding the cultivation and uptake of hypotheses of contestation to the hegemony of neoliberalism within business schools: key sites in the maintenance of the neoliberal orthodoxy within executive and leadership education. Says Badiou,

“A wide variety of 19th century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ’service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis… Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence” [iii] [emphasis added].

What counts as ‘progressive’ in the education of the executants [iv] of the neoliberal order? It is, as Badiou states, the creation of the conditions for the existence of countervailing hypotheses, this time on our sedate business-school campuses. As an inhabitant of the university, it is not difficult to see how higher education business schools are contributing to the process of neoliberalization of the economy [v] through the servility of much of its intelligentsia and the apolitical character of its educative practices. This servility and capitulation towards the dominant regime explains not only the besieged communist hypothesis but any contestation to neoliberal globalization within the b-school’s ambit of narrative authority. Progressivism in the education of executants, then, is the consideration of a range of alternative realms of practice, such as those identified by Leitner, Sheppard, Sziarto and Maringanti [vi]. Arising from within the discourse of urban geography, their four realms of practice for progressive contestations of neoliberalism are:

1. direct action
2. lobbying and legislative action
3. alternative knowledge production
4. alternative economic and social practices.

As a radicalising framework for a shadow academy tasked with educating neoliberal executants, Leitner et al’s alternatives praxes appear realistic, balanced and capable of affecting a reformation of the capitulative pedagogic stasis within the existing structures of executive education. Such structures are legitimate sites of struggle, given the hopelessly utopian and largely rhetorical claims of the anti-capitalists, anti-corporatists and anti-globalists: and as the basis of reformatory praxis these sites represent hope for the ‘conditions of existence’ of contestatory efforts.

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[i] New Left Review, No.49, Jan/Feb 2008, pp.29-42: [ii] ibid, p.33: [iii] ibid, p.42: [iv] after the distinction Castoriadis makes between directors and executants and how the elimination of this crucial distinction is the means of eliminating capitalism – see T. May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, pp. 42-43: [v] M. Casa-Cortes, S. Cobarrubias, “Drifting Through the Knowledge Machine”, p.121, in Shukitis, Graeber, Biddle Constituent Imagination, AK Press, Oakland: [vi] H. Leitner, E. Sheppard, K. Sziarto, A. Maringanti, “Contesting Urban Futures: Decentering Neoliberalism”, p.15, in H. Leitner, J. Peck, E. Sheppard, Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, The Guilford Press, New York