ABSTRACT
We live in dangerous times. Not only are public schools under a massive and coordinated assault, but the very idea of public institutions is increasingly becoming threatened by the New Right’s clarion call for privatization of the public sphere. It is an era of economic terror propped up by “enterprise culture” and the growing number of transnational corporations whose omnipotent sway in foreign policy brought us Grenada, Panama, and Desert Storm. International bankers have become the new “warrior-prophets” of predatory culture; their synthetically manufactured political mythology has ushered in a new global agenda of takeovers and buy-outs. On the one hand, the world has been bequeathed, to borrow a description by Vincent Pecora (1991:130), “one grandly obfuscating vision of global harmony and interdependence policed by Conan the American —the ‘new world order,’ a phrase whose historical resonance alone demands the keenest suspicion of all that it attempts to name.” On the other hand, post-Fordist capitalism has effectively transformed the relationship between subjectivity and the structures through which experiences become constituted such that subjectivity is now experienced as decentered and radically discontinuous. Our identities have been respatia-lized and reinvested in new forms of desire. Our agency has been dispersed on the predatory horizon of micro-politics with no common understanding of oppression or collective strategy to challenge it.
