Educated Hope in an Age of Privatized Visions

Abstract

Questions of agency and hope are inseparable from questions of politics and social struggle. As the vast majority of citizens become detached from public forums that nourish social critique, agency not only becomes a mockery of itself, it is replaced by market-based choices in which private satisfactions replace social responsibilities and biographic solutions become a substitute for systemic change. As the worldly space of criticism is undercut by the absence of public spheres that encourage the exchange of information, opinion, and criticism, the horizons of a substantive democracy disappear against the growing isolation and depoliticization that marks the loss of a politically guaranteed public realm in which autonomy, political participation, and engaged citizenship make their appearance. Drawing on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, the author attempts to address the current crisis of meaning, political agency, and pedagogy and develop a cultural politics that links the notion of educated hope to the promise of a radical democracy.