Mediatizing neoliberalism: The discursive construction of education’s ‘future’

Joseph Sung-Yul Park1

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, The Shaw Foundation Building, Block AS7, Level 5, 5 Arts Link, Singapore 117570

Abstract

Constant construction of what is at stake for education in the changing global economy serves as a powerful way of justifying neoliberal reforms of education systems. In particular, the media often play a crucial role in promoting and rationalizing neoliberalization of education by mediatizing particular ideas of what the future will be like—for instance, by characterizing the future in terms of extreme volatility and unpredictability. Critiquing the discourses that call for neoliberal educational reform, therefore, requires closely attending to the semiotic processes through which such ‘futures’ are constructed. In this paper, I make this point by analyzing how the chronotopic nature of media representations—i.e. how they bring together and juxtapose differently construed time-spaces—serves as an important site for naturalizing a neoliberal vision of the future. Through an analysis of two media texts—first, the Korean television documentary series Myeonggyeon Manli, and second, a promotional video for a student career center at a Singaporean university—I show how they both rely on a representation of the future as a time-space that radically breaks from the present, and how the distinct future chronotope presented in these texts in turn naturalizes specific figures of personhood and interactional regimes that work to rationalize neoliberal transformations of education that are taking place in the here and now.

신자유주의 교육개혁은 급변하는 세계 경제 속에서 교육이 무엇을 목표로 해야하는지를 끊임없이 구성함으로써 스스로를 정당화한다. 특히 미디어는 미래에 대한 특정 비전을 미디어화 함으로써 (예를 들어 미래를 극히 불안정하고 예측불가능한 시공간으로 묘사함으로써) 교육의 신자유주의화를 정당화하는 역할을 하곤한다. 따라서, 신자유주의 교육 개혁을 주장하는 담론의 비평을 위해서는, 그러한 ‘미래’들이 기호를 통해 구성되는 과정을 자세히 분석할 필요가 있다. 이를 위해 이 논문은, 미디어 표상이 갖는 크로노토프적(시공간적) 특성을 살펴보고 (즉 미디어 표상이 어떻게 다른 시공간들을 서로 연결하고 중첩하는지를 살펴보고) 이것이 어떻게 미래에 대한 신자유주의적 비전을 정당화하는데 이용되는지 논의한다. 한국의 다큐멘터리 프로그램 ‘명견만리’와 한 싱가폴 대학의 학생 취업센터가 만든 홍보 비디오를 분석함으로써, 이 논문은 두 텍스트 모두 미래를 현재와 극명히 분리된 시간으로 묘사하고 있음을 보여준다. 이렇게 구성된 미래의 시공간은, 특정한 인간상(figures of personhood)과 상호작용 체제(interactional regime)를 자연시함으로써 지금 이곳에서 벌어지는 교육의 신자유주의화를 정당화한다.

1 CONTACT Joseph Sung-Yul Park ellpjs@nus.edu.sg

Key words: education reform; media representation of the future; neoliberal chronotypes; volatility; unpredictability

Introduction

The dominance of neoliberalism is established through the exercise of political power, but the semiotic process through which the ideology of neoliberalism gets perpetuated and naturalized is also an important aspect of its reproduction. As Voloshinov (1973) reminds us, the reproduction and contestation of ideologies is mediated through signs, and for this reason, the sign is a site of struggle. For instance, ideological contestation of social meaning through neoliberal keywords (Williams 1976) is one mechanism through which the neoliberal social order is rationalized. This is demonstrated through Holborow’s (2015) analysis of how terms such as deregulation, human capital, and entrepreneur obscure the material interests that underlie neoliberalism and propagate neoliberal principles across multiple domains of society. The semiotic mediation of neoliberalism does not take place solely through words in the morphological sense, of course. It is also accomplished by broader discourses that contextualize and temporalize neoliberalism — that is, through talk about neoliberalism that roots it in particular space-times. Such discourses circulate through various domains ranging from public articulation of policies to everyday casual conversation by workers, reinforcing and questioning neoliberalism’s status as the new common sense (Chun 2017). Moreover, such discourses not only occur through overt talk about the political economy, but also through the more general way the world around us is semiotically constituted and represented.

In this paper, I suggest that one important dimension of semiotic mediation of neoliberalism is that of time — in particular, how the ‘future’ is represented. Neoliberalism may be understood as an anticipatory regime (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009); that is, the relentless expansion of the logic of the market, as most saliently embodied by the global flow of speculative capital, valorizes anticipating the future and carefully managing our selves in the present to maximize the profit we can gain in the future. One of the places where this becomes prominent is the field of education. The logic of human capital development that undergirds neoliberal reforms of education that we are witnessing today, including the emphasis placed on competition, austerity, and commodification of skills and knowledge (Flubacher and del Percio 2017), demands investment in the potential of individual students today whose future lives are supposed to bring maximized profit for both themselves and society (Park 2016). The moral expectation that students should develop themselves as a bundle of skills relevant for the workplace (Urciuoli 2008) requires that they constantly consider what kind of conditions will define the future job market and mold themselves accordingly to that prediction. Likewise, such pressure calls for educational institutions to constantly reframe themselves as service providers that dispense commodified knowledge relevant for the future, instead of remaining a bastion of theoretical research that is increasingly seen as bound to an outdated past.

As a way of contributing to the theme of this special issue, where the intersection of education and the intercultural politics of neoliberalism is explored, in this paper I employ the perspective of mediatization (Agha 2011, Androutsopoulos 2016) to explore one possible semiotic foundation for that nexus. In particular, I focus on how the chronotopic nature of media representations (i.e. how they bring together and juxtapose differently construed time-spaces; Bakhtin 1981, Park 2010) serves as an important site for naturalizing a neoliberal vision of education, thereby functioning as a crucial venue for the rationalization of neoliberal educational reforms. Through an analysis of two media texts — first, a Korean television documentary series, in which celebrity academics report on future social trends, and second, a promotional video for a student career center at a Singaporean university — I show how they both rely on a representation of the future as a time-space that radically breaks from the present. I then discuss how such construction of the future works to justify the neoliberal imperative these texts promote, providing a particular ground upon which education comes to be reimagined as a neoliberal project of human capital development.

Neoliberal chronotopes

Capitalism as a system is forward-looking, in the sense that it must continuously seek to reproduce conditions for accumulation of capital through new investments, new markets, new technologies, and new structures of management. Particularly in neoliberalism, which emerged as a response to the crisis of capital accumulation brought about by intensifying competition in the globalizing economy, anticipation of future market conditions and prospects for profit becomes a highly crucial element. Various managerial techniques, including just-in-time production, flexible deployment of labor, outsourcing, downsizing, and financialization, all point to a heightened sensitivity to shifting conditions of the market, which enables capital to project and execute strategies that can most efficiently respond to and profit from such conditions. The rise of speculative capital and its predatory expansion that monetizes all aspects of human life is perhaps the starkest illustration of this. Speculation is significant because it not merely represents an extension of rational calculation of profits along temporal lines but constitutes a particular kind of subjective orientation of selves in time. As Adams, Murphy, and Clarke (2009:247) note, ‘speculative forecast … has been loosened from the virtue of certainty and redirected as an injunction to characterize and inhabit degrees and kinds of uncertainty’, which leads to the reframing of ‘anticipation as an affective state, an excited forward looking subjective condition’, through which we are expected to actively orient ourselves towards the future.

This is precisely the logic of human capital development that is valorized in neoliberalism. The notion of human capital extracts the natural and creative capacity of humans from its historical and social embedding, and recasts it in terms of an economic resource, as potential that everyone is endowed with regardless of one’s social provenance, as capital that can be mined, developed, and improved to yield economic and social profit in the future (Park 2016). Thus, endless projects of self-development, in which people are expected to continuously and willingly pick up new skills and competencies as a way of marketing themselves in the world, become the ideal state of being for neoliberal subjects. In the volatile job market and under constantly

changing demands of work, becoming an entrepreneur of the self (Foucault 2008) through flexible and continuous rebranding is presented as a means of survival and success, as well as the most effective way of realizing one’s true sense of self, unencumbered by the social constraints that restrict our potential (Park 2016). Therefore the logic of human capital development inherently presumes a particular orientation towards the future; it implies assessing one’s worth based on what one can make it become in the future, and thus requires careful forecasting of future conditions of the market and strategically positioning oneself in the present based on those predictions. Such temporal orientation also quickly picks up a moral dimension, for not developing one’s human capital today amounts to wasting valuable capital that can bring not only self-realization but also self-sufficiency and great profit for the future society. Needless to say, the discourse of human capital obscures multiple inequalities, such as the fact that valorization of entrepreneurship rationalizes drastic precarization of work and the profit that capital derives from it, or the fact that who can benefit from such projects of self-development is heavily constrained by socioeconomic conditions of the present. Nonetheless, the moral and affective quality attributed to human capital development rationalizes its logic by presenting anticipation of the future as a fundamental responsibility and ethical outlook for neoliberal subjects.

The implications of temporality inherent in the logic of human capital development suggests that it can be helpful to consider the semiotic foundation of neoliberalism through Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. In Bakhtin’s (1981) framework, chronotopes refer to ideologically constituted distinctions in time-space that have implications for our understanding of the nature of the characters, relations, and events that inhabit such time-space. As neoliberalism presents the future not simply as a linear extension of the here-and-now but as a radically distinct time-space which calls for entirely different ways of being, we might argue that neoliberalism sets the future in chronotopic terms. That is, in neoliberalism, the future is not simply a set of projectable trends and forecasts but a distinct chronotope, defined through an ideological articulation of what type of people occupy the market-oriented time-space of the future, how they conduct themselves towards others, and what kind of affective and moral stances do they display. Thus the unpredictable and uncertain future is depicted as a time-space occupied by entrepreneurs of self, who refuse to rely on traditional structures of community and solidarity and instead willingly and responsibly engage in constant work of self-development, and through such work, successfully realize their full potential as creative human beings. This neoliberal chronotope, in turn, leads people to project back such future ways of being onto their present as guidance for their conduct in the here-and-now. Because this chronotope is presented as that of the future, distinct from the present yet inevitably converging with the present through the flow of time, chronotopic presentations of the future become extremely powerful semiotic mechanisms that lead us to internalize the neoliberal regime of anticipation, telling us that we only ignore such visions of the future at our own peril.

Current developments in the study of metapragmatics allow us to focus on this function of chronotopes as a way of understanding the semiotic basis for neoliberalism’s temporal rationalization. In particular, recent theories of the process of mediatization (Agha 2011,

Androutsopoulos 2016) can be a useful basis for investigating the interdiscursive chains created between the (imagined) future and the present to induce neoliberal anticipation within subjects of today. Mediatization may be understood as a process by which representational practices of institutions semiotically mediate and thus participate in the circulation of meaningful images and interpretations of the world around us. It is not a process that is strictly determined by and confined within institutions of mass media, for what this concept highlights is how images of people, their practices, and the time-spaces they occupy expand in their meaning and uptake as they circulate throughout a web of interactional links that include institutional representations of those images. Instead, it foregrounds the semiotic effects media representations produce as people engage with them in interactions that go beyond passive reception of media content, adding and modulating meaning for those representations in a way that is grounded in their own here-and-now.

In this sense, mediatization offers a useful perspective for analyzing chronotopic construction of the future under neoliberalism. By tracing the specific ways in which the future chronotope is constructed in media texts, we are able to outline the process by which the imagined future is imbued with affective and moral meanings, forming a condition that subjects in the present must orient to. Through mediatization, the future is transformed from a mere temporal extrapolation of the present, to a distinct time-space that continuously speaks to us and presses us into action in the here-and-now, molding us into subjects that internalize the dictates of neoliberalism. Since media texts, by their very nature, work through spatiotemporal extension — that is, by semiotically juxtaposing multiple chronotopes (e.g. that of the viewer, of the reporter, of the reported event, etc.; Park 2010) onto the viewer’s own time-space — investigating the mediatization of future chronotopes through media texts of neoliberalism allows us to carry out a semiotic critique of the neoliberal logic of anticipation.

For such analysis of chronotopes, figures of personhood and interactional regimes can serve as useful resources. Figures of personhood refer to socially recognizable person types that are linked with particular signs of behavior, demeanor, character, and practice (Agha 2007), while interactional regimes refer to expectations about normative conditions for social interaction, such as typical patterns of language use, structures of interaction, or culturally dominant practices (Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck 2005). Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope was ultimately a way of accounting for the different person types and their socially grounded behavior that characterize distinct genres, rather than a mere depiction of time and space. The hero of Greek romances, for instance, navigates time and space in a different way from the fool in medieval folktales, and it is such typified characters, complete with their moral, behavioral, and affective traits, as well as their patterns of interaction with other characters, that constitute the unique nature of how time-space is organized in the Greek romance as opposed to that of medieval folklore. Our analysis, then, can focus on studying figures of personhood and interactional regimes that a given media text attributes to the time-space of the future, and based on this observation, identify the nature of the contrast the text attempts to generate with the present. For instance, how is the ideal student of the future depicted in a media text? What kind of activities does she engage in, what kind of things does she value, how does she interact

with other people, what are the social structures that she must work against, and what kind of affects fill her mind? Such chronotopic characterizations necessarily have implications for how we understand the student of today, which can in turn serve as a basis for the reimagination of education as a site for human capital development. In the rest of this paper, I demonstrate such an analysis, focusing on two instances of media texts produced in the context of neoliberal transformations of educational institutions.

Myeonggyeon Manli : Insights for the future

The first example that I discuss comes from the Korean television program Myeonggyeon Manli, a show aired by South Korea’s public broadcaster, KBS. While my discussion below focuses on two particular episodes on the topic of education (‘The future of education: Will the university disappear’ and ‘The future of education 2: How to develop the power of thinking’, aired on 26 and 27 November 2015, respectively), the show is a good illustration of how vision of the future serves as an ideological basis for neoliberal reforms. As this title (‘clear vision of 10,000 miles’) implies, the program reports on various future trends that will impact Korean society, and suggests various responses. It adopts a unique format which the show calls a ‘lecturementary’, a hybrid between a ‘lecture’ and a ‘documentary’, both of which are common genres on Korean television. On each episode of the show, a host, who is usually a celebrity academic, but sometimes an author, entrepreneur, or some type of expert, speaks to a live audience about one issue that will have a significant impact on Korea’s future. This ‘lecture’ segment is then interspersed with filmed documentary segments introduced by the host which report on evidence of that impact across various sectors of Korean society as well as abroad. Between these segments, the host also has discussions with audience participants. From March 2015 to late 2017 (the time of writing), over 60 55-minutes episodes have been aired, covering a wide range of areas such as the economy, technology, environment, population, labor, and global relations.

In several ways, the show’s format and content reflects the trends of neoliberalism that have been dominating Korean society since the 1990s. During these past two decades, South Korea underwent significant neoliberalization, as the government pushed for increasingly greater liberalization of market and labor relations, resulting in privatization of state enterprises, financialization of the economy, and heightened competition and precarity in the job market. Another outcome of this transformation was how knowledge came to be commodified. Intensified competition in the labor market led to increased emphasis on transferable soft skills, including that of communication skills and human relation skills, and most relevant to our discussion, critical thinking skills. Along with the boom in the market for self-help literature (Seo 2009, Yi 2013), there was a big surge of interest in popularized forms of knowledge in the humanities, which was considered to be the philosophical and rational foundation for critically addressing real-world problems. Thus, while humanities as a discipline withered under the overwhelming investment in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields, books and lectures on humanities-related subjects targeting the general public met an unprecedented boom (Gang 2013). In particular, the lecture format, aided by the iconic

popularity of Steve Jobs-type presentations and TED talks, became highly popular, with ‘star lecturers’ like Choi Jingi and Gang Sinju emerging as highly-sought celebrities with frequent appearances on television.

Myeonggyeon Manli builds upon this trend, framing the traditional documentary format with the new, popular format of lecture, enhanced with multimedia-based infographics and audience participation. Each episode emphasizes interdisciplinary thinking by melding close observation of social, economic, cultural, and technological trends with a critical social consciousness, ideal qualities that are expected of the liberal-minded citizen. Thus, the show takes a liberal stance, which opposes the conservative establishment of Korean society and its inequalities, yet stops short of advocating more fundamental challenges to the capitalist logic underlying neoliberalism. For instance, aligning with the liberal political agenda of Korean society, the show frequently criticizes the jaebeol, the massive family-owned conglomerates that dominate the Korean economy, blaming their monopolistic business practices for stagnant growth of jobs and economic inequality. Yet the show’s proposed solutions tend to focus on promoting an economic environment where small-and-medium enterprises based on individual creativity can flourish, rather than raising more fundamental issues such as the jaebeol’s oppression of labor movements or its political ties with the state. In this sense, Myeonggyeon Manli illustrates how the liberal democratic forces that characterized Korea’s departure from authoritarianism since the 1990s are also in close alignment with neoliberal ideals (Song 2009).

This liberal stance is also apparent in the show’s coverage of the field of education. Myeonggyeon Manli depicts Korean education as a highly rigid exam-oriented system that places a great burden on students while stifling their creativity and autonomy. However, even though such criticism partly aligns with the progressive critics who call for democratic reforms of the Korean education system (Lim 2012), the program does not go as far to problematize various policies that have defined Korea’s neoliberal educational reforms since the 1990s, such as tracking of students according to academic aptitude (Byean 2015), proliferation of elite specialized schools (Jeon 2012), and ranking of universities that push higher education institutions into brutal competition (Piller and Cho 2013), all of which intensify competition and inequality, but are favored by the wealthy upper middle class and the corporate sector, which view them as fostering ‘academic excellence’. Instead, Myeonggyeon Manli’s critique tends to focus on issues such as the ineffectiveness of the overheated private afterschool education market and the failure of Korean schools to inculcate creativity and critical thinking, thereby envisioning a rational and efficient education system in which individual students can achieve well-rounded academic development. For instance, in the episode ‘The future of education’, education researcher Lee Hye-Jung talks about how students at Seoul National University, the top university in the country, spend most of their time in class busily writing down every word that the professor says so that they can reproduce those words verbatim in exams and get an A+. Such reports, which depict the Korean education system as backward, inefficient, and authoritative, indeed align well with arguments for neoliberal educational reforms that present creativity, flexibility, excellence, and individual choice as ideal principles.

Myeonggyeon Manli highlights neoliberal values not only through its format and political stance, but also through its semiotic choices. In particular, through its construction of the future, the show leads the viewers to adopt an anticipatory stance towards the future in a way that aligns with ideals of neoliberal subjectivity. This future is not presented as a mere extension or extrapolation of the present, but a radically different time-space where our assumptions about the world must be completely rethought and where it becomes necessary to adopt a mode of personhood and interactional behavior that is totally different from what we adhere to in the present. In other words, the future is presented as a distinct chronotope from that of the present, populated by new figures of personhood and characterized by a new kind of interactional regime. The semiotic gap between the future and present chronotopes, in turn, is used by the show to instigate a sense of crisis. Presenting various data and testimonies from experts that highlight the distance between the two chronotopes, the show asks whether Koreans are really prepared to face such a radically different future, instilling in the viewers an anxiety that drives them to be constantly attuned to impending changes in order to best position themselves in the present — in other words, it leads them to adopt anticipation as a mode of being, positioning themselves as neoliberal subjects who embrace the uncertainty of the future through endless modulation of their selves.

In Myeonggyeon Manli, such future chronotopes are produced in two different ways. First, the show frequently uses explicit predictions of what the future job market and workforce will be like. In particular, the hosts frequently make statements that define the future in terms of extreme volatility and precarity. For instance, in the episode ‘The future of education’, the host Choe Jae Chun, a biologist and professor at Ewha University, cites management consultant Peter Drucker and futurist Thomas Frey to argue that ‘the university as we know it will disappear in 20 years’ (hence the episode’s subtitle, ‘Will the university disappear?’). He also presents ‘3-5-19’ as ‘numbers that define the future generation’ — i.e., an average future worker will work across 3 different fields, change jobs 5 times, and carry out 19 different functions — and claims that in the future ‘no one will live a whole life with only one job.’ Similarly, the host of the episode ‘The future of education 2’, Park Hyungju, mathematics professor at Ajou University, says that ‘the 21st century will no longer be the age of knowledge. It will be the age of thinking, where the ability to read the signs of the times and to seek out the information one needs becomes more important’. It is clear that these pithy and quotable statements are designed to succinctly and memorably present the future as shockingly different from the present — a time-space where traditional institutions of knowledge and normative expectations of work will completely break down, throwing us into a state of extreme precarity and unpredictability. The show then enhances the impact of these statements by juxtaposing them with infographics visualizing the stated prediction and shots of amazed audience members seemingly stunned to hear how different the future will be.

The second way through which the future chronotope is constructed in Myeonggyeon Manli is through its documentary segments. As mentioned above, the host’s lecture in each show is interspersed with documentary segments in which the host visits various sites in Korea and abroad. While segments covering sites in Korea usually highlight some problem that point to

Korea’s backwardness, segments that cover foreign countries typically show how those countries are better preparing themselves for the future. The people occupying the foreign spaces represented in the show, overwhelmingly from highly developed Western countries, are presented as demonstrating a mindset and disposition that aligns well with the volatile future to come, thereby serving as a foil to Koreans who are claimed to be ill-prepared for the rapidly changing world. Thus, the foreign spaces in the documentary segments function as future chronotopes, in the sense that the people and patterns of interaction that occupy that space represent the kind of personhood, subjectivities, and practices that will be required in the future. In other words, the temporal distinction between present and future is transposed onto a spatial distinction, with the foreign spaces standing in for the future.

In ‘The future of education 2’, for example, the host Park introduces a segment in which the camera follows an ordinary day of two teenagers, one from Korea and one from Finland. The afterschool activities of the two teenagers are compared hour-by-hour, sometimes through a split screen; the Korean student toils away for hours late into the night attending classes at cram schools and studying, while the Finnish student spends just two hours on his homework and relaxes for the rest of the day, walking his dog, cooking, and preparing for his motorcycle license test. The host then informs the viewers that even though Finland and Korea are both top countries in OECD’s PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test for academic achievement, in terms of the ‘learning efficiency index’ that measures students’ gain in test scores in relation to study time, Finland ranks number one while Korea drops to 24th. Another segment later in the same episode shows Park in France, which he introduces as one of the countries with the highest number of recipients for the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics. Park visits a high school and asks the students to solve the mathematics section of an examination that was administered to Korean high school students. The results are not good; the average score for the class is only 15.03 out of 67. However, the segment does not present the French students as distressed about this. Instead, it shows them calmly explaining to the camera the difference between the Korean test and the test that they usually take: one student says, ‘in the French test, even when it is multiple-choice, there is usually a series of questions that focus on one topic, so that it allows you to think deeply on that topic,’ and another student says, ‘in the French test, there are many supplementary questions that follow the main question, so it feels like you are guided towards the answer.’ The voice-over narration then sums up the difference between Korean and French math education: ‘What the French mathematics teacher emphasizes most in class is explaining the basic concepts. In the French mathematics class, skills in solving problems is not as important as understanding the process of finding the solution.’

The effects of these documentary segments is clear; Finland and France are presented as time-spaces that contrast with that of Korea, testifying to the backwardness, inefficiency, and unproductiveness of the Korean education system, as evidenced by the contrasting figures of personhood (the overburdened, overworked, and underlearning Korean student, vs. the relaxed, efficient, and productive Finnish student) and interactional regimes (the rote and inflexible modes of Korean assessment that stifle creativity, vs. the open modes of French assessment

that foster critical and independent thinking). And since those foreign figures of personhood and interactional regimes are presented in the segments as ideally aligned with the volatile and unpredictable future, the foreign spaces semiotically constitute an ‘already existing future’, a future chronotope that represents what kind of personhood, subjectivities, and interactional orientations should the Korean education system promote to properly prepare its next generation for the rapidly changing world. In this way, the expert predictions of future trends presented elsewhere in the show (in a circular fashion) become rationalized as well — i.e. the fact that those Western countries are educating their youth by encouraging flexibility, individuality, and creative imagination must be proof that the experts’ forecast that the future will require such entrepreneurial subjects is indeed correct.

We can see, then, how Myeonggyeon Manli’s construction of the future provides powerful justification for the ongoing neoliberal transformation of the Korean education system. Constructing Korean education as a backward system that contrasts with the liberal ideals of Western education has indeed been a key trope for arguments supporting neoliberal reforms of Korean schools. Myeonggyeon Manli’s chronotopic presentation of the future renews and reinforces that trope by projecting the contrast between Korea and the West along a temporal scale, presenting historically and socially contingent educational conditions of liberal Western societies as unavoidable futures. Here, the Korean education system is presented as backwards not simply because it does not fare well compared to that of Western societies, but because it is not generative of the subjectivities and stances that are demanded by the future world characterized by volatility and unpredictability. The problems of such chronotropic representation of the future should be obvious; it obscures the fact that such precarity is not a natural trend beyond our control but an outcome of capital’s endless pursuit of interest, and it reproduces global-level inequalities through neo-imperialist valorization of the West. The most significant issue here, however, might be the show’s construction of education as a matter of entrepreneurial alignment with the future — that is, it leads the viewer to embrace uncertainty and unpredictability as a way of being, celebrating individual creativity and continuous self-management as the ultimate goal for education. In this sense, Myeonggyeon Manli demonstrates how, in the promotion of neoliberal educational values, the construction of the future becomes a central point of contention.

‘Whatever the future may hold’: Producing future-ready graduates

My second example is a promotional video for a student career center of a Singaporean University. In 2014, the National University of Singapore (NUS) rebranded its Career Center as the Center for Future-Ready Graduates (CFG). As the renaming makes clear, the new CFG was meant to expand the aim and scope of the center, not simply providing assistance to students in finding jobs after their graduation, but also equipping them with general skills that help them be ‘ready’ for the future world. For instance, the Center’s traditional career preparation program was revamped as ‘Roots and Wings’, a training course that ‘aims to equip students with a toolbox of broad-based essential life skills which will serve them well whatever the future may

hold.’2 Through this course, all first-year students at NUS receive training in a range of personal and interpersonal skills, such as focus and attention training, empathic communication, personal branding and storytelling, which they are in turn encouraged to apply to their personal and academic development as well as their career planning. In this way, CFG actively builds upon the notion of ‘future readiness’, reframing career preparation as part of a larger project of being prepared for one’s future life through the acquisition of soft skills that can be applied to any context.

While readiness has long been a key concept in education that indicates a student’s preparedness for progression along stages of academic development (Evans 2013), the idea has taken up new significance in the management literature since the 2010s, which characterized the world as becoming increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA: Mack, Khare, Krämer, and Burgartz 2016) and called for organizations to adopt a mindset that can flexibly respond to the uncertain future. In this sense, future readiness as a concept closely aligns with the image of ideal neoliberal personhood, in which subjects are expected to anticipate the future by constantly upgrading themselves, resiliently adapting to rapidly changing demands of work and insecurity in the job market. In the context of Singapore, where increasing liberalization, deregulation, and privatization of the economy has been emphasized despite the state’s continuous intervention into the market (Liow 2011, Teo 2011), the notion of future-readiness has been a prominent keyword that rationalizes the state’s aversion towards welfare. For instance, multiple policy initiatives promote and privilege skills-upgrading of citizens over provision of welfare, for instance the SkillsFuture initiative that provides Singaporeans aged 25 or older with educational credit that can be used for acquiring new skills relevant for the changing workplace. These initiatives are framed in terms of enhancing the future-readiness of Singapore’s workforce and allowing workers to resiliently redesign and rebrand their careers (Tan and Tan 2016).

The notion of future-readiness thus plays a major role in the ongoing neoliberalization of education, as it translates into the belief that the main goal of educational institutions is to prepare students for the uncertain future. This is particularly the case with institutions of higher education, which, under neoliberalism, are charged with the responsibility to provide their students with skills that can be flexibly applied in the real world, as opposed to theoretical and bookish knowledge that only has currency within academic contexts. Given the current trend of austerity and reduction of state support to higher education institutions, this means that universities often need to actively orient to such discourse of future-readiness as a way of ensuring their survival. Therefore, the extent to which universities are able to generate future-ready graduates becomes an important criterion for the evaluation and assessment in university rankings and league tables, and a central element of the recent trend of branding of higher education (Altbach and Knight 2007).

NUS’s launching of CFG can also be understood as a response to such pressure. NUS is a typical case of an Asian university striving to secure and enhance its status as a global, or ‘world

2http://nus.edu.sg/cfg/content/roots-wings ; accessed 11 April, 2018.

class’ university through various strategies such as forging international alliance with other global elite institutions, enhancing and promoting its research output, and fostering international student exchange, all of which are factors that figure prominently in global ranking of universities (Xavier and Alsagoff 2013). Another important factor that is deployed in the branding of the university is the employer perception of graduates, and NUS promotes not only itself but also its graduates as a brand by emphasizing the industry-relevance and entrepreneurship of its graduates. The CFG is part of this branding effort, as it allows the university to demonstrate its investment in producing graduates that can readily meet the expectations of corporate employees. The idea of future-readiness foregrounded in the newly imagined Center, then, is a highly strategic move that responds both to the foundational tenets of neoliberalism and to the pressure of market-based competition with other global universities.

Analyzing how the CFG’s promotional video constructs the future, then, provides us with a useful window for observing exactly how the notion of future-readiness works to rationalize and naturalize the underlying interests that drive the branding of CFG. In fact, the 14-minute video, first published in 2014 on YouTube and also made available on CFG’s website, is titled ‘NUS Centre for Future-ready Graduates: What is Future-ready?’ thereby foregrounding the notion of future-readiness.3 The video begins with the Center’s director, Crystal Lim Leahy, explaining the rationale of CFG from her office on the NUS campus:

Every generation has its own story. In 50 years we’ve come from third world to first. Our parents’ generation struggled and overcame unimaginable challenges through sheer grit and hard work. And today we live in a very different world. If our parents’ challenges were those of doing, perhaps ours are being challenges. Who will we be in this future? Are we agile enough to dance with this rapid change? Can we find our focus in a world full of weapons of mass distraction? Can we communicate and collaborate in this increasingly global world? In five years’ time, 75% of Fortune 500 companies will be names that we never heard of. Thousands of jobs are going to change form. We’re going to go from employee working for a company to our own personal brand, buying and selling our skills and services in the global marketplace. If everything changes, how do we prepare for the future? What are those essential life skills that we need to make sense out of any situation? So these are the questions that we help you to seek at CFG.

As with the case of Myeonggyeon Manli, here we see how the future is constructed as a radically different time-space from that of the past and present. Lim’s opening talk refers to the then-upcoming 50th anniversary of Singapore’s independence (celebrated in 2015) and the dominant national narrative that emphasizes how Singapore rose from a small entrepot with no natural resources to become a first-world country through the structured planning of the state and efforts of its citizens. It then suggests that the viewer (i.e. NUS students) will face a ‘very different world,’ in which such linear and predictable model of progress no longer can be expected and in which ‘everything changes’; and presents CFG as providing the students with ‘essential life skills’ that allow them to ‘make sense out of any situation’ in this brave new world.

3The video is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-4fyhY27AY&t=30s

Here, the challenges presented by this new world are defined as ‘being challenges’, i.e. ones that cannot be addressed by simply working hard or acquiring a particular skill, but by becoming a particular kind of person, a subject who can embrace uncertainty and be content with constant change. In other words, the opening talk presents the future as a chronotope that is defined in terms of a new figure of personhood; if the older figure of the Singaporean is characterized by ‘sheer grit and hard work’, the new figure of personhood called for in the future is agile, focused, collaborative, and always ready to respond to unexpected situations.

As in Myeonggyeon Manli, however, this future chronotope is not simply defined through such pithy predictions, but further reinforced by taking the viewer to another time-space — in this case, the corporate world. Following Lim’s opening talk, the video shows interviews with several high ranking officers at major corporations in Singapore, who respond to the question, ‘What is the future like? What does it mean to be future ready?’ and talk about the kind of things that they look for in a new hire. The future that these corporate officers describe is again a world where uncertainty and ambiguity prevails. For example, Chng Sok Hui, Chief Financial Officer at DBS Bank, Singapore’s largest financial institution, states that future-readiness is a mindset that is open to unpredictability and uncertainty: being ‘comfortable being uncomfortable … prepared to take some risks, to learn new things; and be prepared to experience failure at certain times; and have this inner resilience to bounce back from failure,’ and having a ‘belief in yourself, that you can reinvent yourself, that you can be relevant, you can adapt to changes around you.’ Based on this, she also says that what DBS looks for in a new hire is ‘the extra, special spark, gumption, the confidence that comes from personal conviction’ which represents such resilience and self-trust. Similarly, Mitesh Patel, Managing Director at Black & Veatch, a US-based multinational corporation focusing on infrastructure development, says: ‘The world is becoming hyper competitive … We are looking at a lot of uncertainty around the world … lot of ambiguity, because there’s a lot of disruptive forces, whether in technology, politics, geography, whichever way you look at it.’ For this reason, he explains, for university graduates seeking corporate jobs ‘soft skills are extremely important and I cannot overemphasize it.’

These interview segments are significant not simply because they reiterate and reinforce Lim’s predictions of the future, but because they present the corporate workplace as a future chronotope that NUS students should orient to. In the video, the corporate workplace stands for the future in a double sense: on the one hand, it is the future that the students will enter after their graduation as they join Singapore’s white-collar workforce; on the other hand, it is where the supposedly uncertain future becomes relevant for them — for the predictions of uncertainty and ambiguity matter to the students insofar as they impact their future careers in the corporate workplace. The video specifically presents corporate managers as experts on what the future will be like, and through the interviews, the managers’ expectations of the future seamlessly blend into their advice on what the students should expect in the workplace and the job market. The effect of this is that the corporate workplace is presented not simply as a continuation of the students’ university life, but as a distinct time-space that demands a certain character and personhood. And it is precisely this gap between chronotopes that compels the students to anticipate the future and take up a new persona that can be relevant to that future here and

today — because the future is unpredictable, the corporate workplace requires workers with ‘spark’, ‘gumption’ and ‘soft skills’; and because the workplace requires such workers, students should take up such qualities now, leaving behind any comfort they may have enjoyed in the predictable and protected environment of the university. Such distinction of time-space is further reinforced visually, as the video frames the interview segments with external and internal establishing shots. While Lim’s opening talk is prefaced by images of the lush greenery of the NUS campus and comfy office of the CFG, the interviews with corporate managers send a clear message to viewers that they are now transported to a different space with shots that depict the view from the high-rising corporate office, receptionist desks fashioning sleek corporate logos, immaculate minimalist boardrooms, and the well-groomed office of the interviewee. Such visual framing reminds students that the corporate world is a different time-space where a different stance and orientation to life are expected.

Thus, if in Myeonggyeon Manli the time-space of foreign countries served as a future chronotope that functions as a foil to highlight the backwardness of the Korean education system, in the CFG video the corporate workplace serves as a future chronotope that leads NUS students to adopt an anticipatory mindset today to become subjects who embrace uncertainty and flexibility. In this way, the video both highlights and obscures the fact that the imperative to become entrepreneurs of the self is really a demand of capital rather than an inevitable or natural condition of the future. While the video gives voice to corporate officers to spell out what they expect of university graduates as potential employees, it also frames those demands as authoritative predictions of the future by transposing them onto a distinct time-space, thereby concealing material interests that link higher education, capital, and the state in the here-and-now, which drive universities to competitively invest in branding of their graduates. Therefore, as the video works to inculcate in the student viewer a neoliberal subjectivity that takes precarity for granted, it also allows NUS to demonstrate to its stakeholders that it is doing a faithful job of producing entrepreneurial graduates who are well prepared for the future workplace. Again, construction of the future becomes a key semiotic juncture for the neoliberalization of education.

Conclusions

In this paper, I have discussed how the chronotopic nature of media texts can be a powerful means of rationalizing neoliberal transformations of education. While I emphasized how neoliberalism itself constitutes a particular vision of the future, this becomes a particularly salient issue for the field of education, as education is frequently understood as a moral endeavor where a student’s, nation’s, and society’s future welfare is at stake. In neoliberalism, capital violently descends upon education to appropriate it for its own purposes, leading to drastic reforms of educational institutions and reconstitution of our understanding of the role of education in society. The discussion above shows that such process is also a semiotic one, where mediatization of the future serves as a key element. Constructing the future as volatile, complex, and unpredictable is an extremely powerful way of generating anxieties and discontents about the current state of education; at the same time, it ironically makes us strive

to predict and anticipate the future even more and to reconceptualize education so that it is deeply aligned with the goal of preparing students for the future. Through such representations of the future, neoliberal reforms of education that focus on individual entrepreneurship, flexible skills, and branding of selves gain significant traction.

The analysis I presented throughout this paper, which focuses on such mediatization of the future via the notion of chronotopes, can thus serve as a useful basis for our critique of neoliberalism as an anticipatory regime. For instance, I have shown how media texts’ semiotic foundation in spatiotemporal extension, which brings together multiple time-spaces to the here-and-now of the reader/viewer, is exploited in the texts as a site for discursively constructing the future. In particular, the analysis above highlights how chronotopic representations of the future are not necessarily about the future, but other time-spaces — such as the foreign countries in Myeonggyeon Manli or the corporate world in the CFG video — which reflect underlying material interests that drive neoliberal reforms of education. It is precisely the framing of those other time-spaces as the ‘future’ that obscures those material interests and leads people to accept the neoliberal imperative as unavoidable. Contesting neoliberal reforms of education, then, can be aided by a close critical investigation of these images of the future. Tracing the semiotic basis for the neoliberal construction of the future can point to concealed relations of inequality that neoliberalism reproduces and exacerbates, and this in turn will allow us to deconstruct the image of the future that is naturalized through the transposition of chronotopes. This means that the future is indeed at stake with the field of education, for reclaiming education from neoliberalism will also reshape how we envision the future.

Notes on Contributor

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His work focuses on language ideological processes that shape and sustain material and political relations under globalization. Topics of his research include the politics of English as a global language in Asian context, shifting conceptualization of language in neoliberalism, language and affect, transnationalism and the metapragmatics of mobility, and media representations of discourse. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea (Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World (co-authored with Lionel Wee, Routledge, 2012), and English, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity: The Politics of Language in South Korea (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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