“The unbearable lightness of being” a post-industrial learner: contemporary capitalism, education and critique

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Global Governance and the Neoliberal Capitalist Order

Proposal

In his 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera explores existential questions around freedom and identity, meaning and purpose, in a period of upheaval in Soviet dominated Czechoslovakia. In this paper I draw on Kundera’s wonderfully suggestive metaphor of the shadowed dance between life, lives and living, to re-engage with critical theory as a theoretical resource. My purpose is to examine upheavals in the social relations underpinning contemporary societies more generally and the OECD’s current ‘futures’ policy program in particular.

Theoretically I re-engage with critical theory, and specifically the Frankfurt School tradition, to develop a situated critique of the global governance of education in the context of contemporary capitalist societies, and immaterial labour associated with cognitive capitalism. As an education researcher operating in the critical theory tradition, I continue to be concerned with the normative well-being of society. However, this comes with a responsibility, as Allen (2015), Arnason (2023) and others (cf., O’Mahony, 2023; Rosa and Shulz, 2023; Dorahy, 2022) remind us; of being attentive to the fact that societies change, and that as a result, our theories of capitalist societies must be scrutinised, reviewed, and redeveloped if they are to remain in the critical theory tradition.

Substantively, I draw on a reflexive and situated approach to critical theory to examine the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) current education futures policy work (see OECD, 2019; Robertson and Beech, 2023; Robertson and Navia, 2024), and specifically their turn to a set of humanistic concepts more typically seen in critical sociology rather than in a powerful institution of global capitalism. What are we to make of this turn, and how might a re-engaged critical theory help make visible the underpinning dynamics giving rise to new social relations and social formation? Normatively, I offer a critique of the OECD’s futures policies, and propose a set of propositions around critical educational knowledge and pedagogical practices that might be an alternative approach to education for the future, as a matter of social justice.

Stylistically, I draw on Kundera’s (1984) reference to existential questions and concepts, to make sense of the paradox of living and labouring in an era of post-industrial capitalism. The novel meditates on the heavy burdens of ideology, violence, and lost ideals in contrast with the light possibilities of individualism, chance, and personal freedom, whilst its storylines depict the paradoxes and "unbearable lightness" of existence amidst political upheaval. In my view these polarities capture something of the tensions and contradictions of living in modern societies. Drawing the idea of ‘upheaval’ forward, I use Kundera’s work to examine a series of challenges and transformations for education in terms of preparing students for work in post-industrial capitalism. For the more privileged cognitariat labourer, the putative lightness of their immaterial labour dances in the shadow of the weightiness of an all-consuming love of work and its pathological tendencies (Berardi, 2009, p. 109). Occluded from view in this class of labouring is the material, exploited labour of (racialised) gig workers in different parts of the world whose labouring is visibly invisible. We reflect upon how and in what ways a revised critical theory for our times is able to foreground both theory and critique in ways that navigate context-immanence and context-transcendence (O’Mahony, 2023, p. 131).

I develop my argument in four parts. In part one I engage with critical theory in relation to its own internal critique, to develop a more reflexive, situated, and contingent critique. In part two I outline the broad contours of the empirical case, OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030, to crack open its assumptions and make visible the forces at play, or what Rosa and Shulz (2023) call ‘dynamis’. Part three shows that despite the appearance of a humanistic turn by the OECD, with the use of concepts such as agency and well-being, it is rather adapting its long-standing economic agenda to respond to shifts in labour in contemporary capitalism. In part four I return to matter of context-transcendence, and how creative cognitive labour might be turned toward a normative project of social transformation. Taken together, I hope to make a modest theoretical, substantive, and normative contribution to a critical theory reading of the OECD’s Futures of Education and Skills 2030 policy work.

Author

• Susan Lee Robertson, The University of Cambridge