Neoliberal biopolitics now uses identification of biological threats to maintain its power. Biological insecurity will structurally stop any chance of revolution. Only collective praxis that identifies collections of power will be successful in creating resistance to biocapitalism--our project of resistance is key to reconfiguring discourse away from neoliberal biopolitics.

On this account, another relevant text is Cooper’s Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008). Cooper expands on Foucault’s line of argumentation in The Order of Things (1994), where he suggests that the develop- ment of modern life sciences and political economy are mutually constitutive. Thus Cooper’s project involves an exploration of how neoliberalism is invested in the promissory logics and possibilities of the life sciences, and how these developments should be understood as parallel. In this way, the life sciences are being employed for the creation of capital accumulation and imperial projects, and, in the process, the life sciences are fundamentally being shaped by militarization and the promis- sory logics of biocapitalism. As demonstrated in the case of Project BioShield, the boundaries between biomedicine and war are blurred in official government formu- lations that treat infectious disease and bioterrorism as identical (see Project BioShield Act of 2004 2004).

This consolidation of infectious disease and bioterrorism establishes a new secu- rity discourse and fuses biomedicine, imperialism, and capital. As Foucault (1990: 137) claims, wars are increasingly being ‘waged on behalf of the existence of every- one ... in the name of life’. Thus it seems that with the legitimacy of the imperialist state waning in some respects, and with neoliberalism running out of ways to extract from the public, both can maintain their standing through the identification of a biological threat. This poses a problem for politics, and particularly for anti- imperialist politics. As U.S. liberals have uncritically exalted the national security apparatus and war machine by obsessing over Russiagate, they may now be doing the same in the name of promoting ‘science’ and calling for its depoliticization in the cultural sphere. Should we be surprised that at the precise moment of formation of a new alliance of bioscience, biomedicine, health, defense, and national security institutions that liberals are calling to depoliticize science in such a way as to obscure these relations?

The alliance of bioscience, biotechnology, biomedicine, defense, and national security institutions—a new matrix of power—requires rethinking anti-imperialism. It also requires praxis that reveals the historical and ongoing colonial, economic, political, and imperialist attributes of biomedicine, biotechnology, and bioscience. This is imperative because, as mentioned earlier, complete biological security can never be obtained, and it is this seemingly vulnerable condition that will always be available to pronounce a state of emergency.

U.S. national security discourses have long relied on affective tonality in order to justify operations of domination. The security state must either create or embellish threats in order to mobilize fear and extend the meantime. For example, it is impor- tant to understand how a context of affective tonality enabled the passing of Project BioShield (see Project BioShield Act of 2004 2004). In 2004 the American people were still gripped with derivative fear, stoked by a media that used technologies such as the color-coded terrorism threat advisory scale. The color-coded scale instilled a perpetual sense of insecurity, and it is worth noting that it was operational until 2011. Derivative fear is a concept that Zygmunt Bauman (2006: 3) has bor- rowed from the sociologist Hugues Lagrange to describe a type of secondary fear that forms and lingers in situations ‘whether or not a menace is immediately pres- ent ... even if there is no longer a direct threat to life’. It is a fear that outlives any actual threat, and because it resembles a sentiment of being susceptible, insecure, and vulnerable, it shapes our perceptual frames and behaviors.

It is crucial to note that the state of exception both relies on and manufactures derivative fear (more so than say, manufacturing consent) in order to legitimize operations of suspension. Suggesting that ‘the terrororist threat continues’, President of the United States, Joseph Biden (2021), for example, just reissued the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d). This reauthorization continues ‘for 1 year the national emergency previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States’ (Biden 2021). Ensuring the constant circulation of derivative fear in the infosphere is a key technique to not only justify exceptional measures but keep them in place. Thus we could say that the production of derivative fear is also a technology, and it is one that fastens us to the temporal logic of the meantime.

The Subjective Figures of the New Chronic Mode

and the Temporal Formation of the Meantime

The new chronic mode is an ideological formation that is unique to our present moment of contemporary capitalism, and it operates by extending the present into the future and denying any consideration of the terminal. It is ideological to the extent that it structures a particular reality, and we could say that it is postdigital insofar as it is uniquely a product of late capitalism’s continuous folding of life, sci- ence, and technology. For Cazdyn (2012), the new chronic mode is evident in the ways that reconfigurations of global capitalism have propelled new biomedical technologies and practices that privilege management and displace cure. This focus on health management can be traced to a ‘prescriptive moment’ emerging in the 1980s. What is unique about this prescriptive moment is how new technologies are able to act at the molecular level to manipulate cell growth and interaction.

However, Cazdyn (2012: 22) cautions that ‘the prescriptive meantime becomes the permanent destination rather than a temporary moment of development’. As a result, not only does this alter our relation with traditional medicine practices focused on ‘causes instead of effects’, and ‘wholes instead of parts’, it alters our relation to life and death. It is worth reiterating here, however, that the new chronic mode is not simply a medical category. Rather Cazdyn is interested in the shared formal logics that manifest across cultural and political terrains. Thus it is important to consider the political implications of Cazdyn’s discussion of the terminal and the permanent deferral of death—and, in particular, the death of capitalism:

If the possibility of death is removed, if the terminal cannot be even considered or risked, we effectively rule out certain courses of action in the present whose ends cannot be known in advance (precisely because we cannot know if they will end in death or the death of the present system). To remove the possibility of death and settle for the new chronic is to choose the known limits of the present over the unknown freedom of the future. (Cazdyn 2012: 6)

Thus the new chronic mode and its temporal formation of the meantime crush our ability to imagine a future without capitalism and, according to Cazdyn, the technologies of the meantime also radically separate death from everyday life.8 When death is taken away from us and substituted for the new chronic, our ability to imagine radical and revolutionary alternatives is diminished, and we completely retreat from the project of organizing for revolution. Instead, we are vulnerable to a postrevolutionary politics that settles for targeting single issues to manage, and invariably extends the indefinite life of capital. Of course, this is not to say that all projects of political reform are dispensable. Rather, it is to say that we should not jettison revolution as possibility.

What is crucial to emphasize here, and to add to Cazdyn’s reading, is that the temporal arrangement of the meantime is also a malicious and intentional construct of capitalism. These supplementary notions of the meantime—the suggestion that it is emotionally mean and intentionally mean (it means to oppress)—can help us bet- ter grasp the relation between the meantime and forms of subjection.9 It can also help us understand how these forms of subjection are related to the ongoing recon- figurations of capital that keep us both tethered to and severed from the meantime. In this way, the meantime is a cruel and intentional arrangement, meant to engender particular (self-exploiting and adaptionist) forms of subjectivity, particular (fleet- ing) experiences of the world, and particular (isolated) ways of navigating those experiences. As an intentionally malicious and emotionally cruel formation, the meantime produces conditions of economic misery and despair, only to then mobi- lize emotion to produce more needs, estranging our relation to alternative futures (see Han 2021a). While it is urgent to theorize these various modalities of the mean- time and the subjective figures that it aims to engender, the task that I will turn to now relates to the cultivation of forms of pedagogical praxis within, against, and beyond the meantime.

Pedagogical Praxis Within, Against, and Beyond the Meantime

In relation to Cazdyn’s discussion of the terminal, and the permanent deferral of death, Foucault’s (2003) distinction between biopower and sovereign power is worth considering once again. Whereas sovereign power is the right to take life and let live, biopower involves making live and letting die. Foucault (2003: 247) states that, with the ascendency of biopower, death becomes ‘something to be hidden away. It has become the most private and shameful thing of all.’ As biopower invests in life, death is divested of its spectacular capacity for transformation. The signature moment of power today is making life, and it is increasingly exercised through a series of injunctions: optimize, fulfill, be productive, improve oneself, live better, live longer. This inflection on making life is certainly evident in educational institu- tions and broader educational logics of learning (Bourassa 2017; Ford 2016; Lewis 2013; Simons 2006).

It is also evident that the demands to be a performance subject, or achievement subject, give rise to insecurity and anxiety as increasingly common and shared con- ditions (see De Lissovoy 2018; Han 2015). In this way, the meantime is also arith- metically mean in the sense that it has a tendency to even out, or disperse, the logics that inform the crises and permutations of capital.10 Despite this aggregating pro- cess, the meantime isolates, preventing our shared condition from being a catalyst for revolution. For example, we all feel tired but nonetheless tend to depoliticize tiredness in the form of a ‘tiredness-of-the-I’ rather than speaking of a collective tiredness (Han 2021b: 12). In fact, in perverse fashion, we might even say that the achievement subject is supposed to take delight in being more tired than others—a badge of their entrepreneurial ethos.

Biopower functions in education through this combination of injunctions and promissory logics: If one is productive, improves oneself, cultivates their human capital, and realizes their potential, then life will be enhanced. If one refuses the demands to be a productive lifelong learner, resists the optimization of their poten- tial, and fails to be responsible for their own learning, then one is left to die. They are not killed by a sovereign but rather exposed and vulnerable to a death from malnourishment, disinvestment, neglect or abandonment (Bourassa 2017). Such death is typically out of view; power no longer requires death as a pedagogical spec- tacle. Nor does the sovereign figure preside over us with the sword as a mechanism of coercion. Rather, to evade death from malnourishment, we are to become self- investing entrepreneurial beings who govern ourselves and each other.

Put differently, power is interiorized, and we find ourselves folded into a ‘neolib- eral regime of auto-exploitation’ (Han 2017: 6). In terms of political organization, this has drastic consequences. As Byung-Chul Han (2017) asserts, people are increasingly ‘turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression.’ (Han 2017: 6–7) While trapped in the meantime, the new chronic mode prevails and, never to waste an opportunity in the meantime, it cruelly cashes in on our depression and anxiety. In this process, resilience becomes a broader cultural logic—a way to cope in the meantime—and grit is touted to us as a device to help us navigate through seemingly immutable social conditions (Slater 2022). We could say, fol- lowing Graham B. Slater (2022), that the meantime not only produces subjective figures but an ‘adaptationist imaginary’ that stabilizes capitalist realism and fore- closes radical and collective politics.

The educational meantime—the interminable time of education in the learning society—forfeits the present as a time for revolution and concedes the future to a series of subsequent nows that are structurally indifferent from the now of the pres- ent. As Jason Wozniak (2017) makes clear, debt is one of the more insidious tech- nologies that capital employs to extend this control to the future and short-circuit the present. In this process, debt shapes, constrains, and individualizes subjectivity. We could also say that the logic of learning, more generally, is tethered to a ‘peda- gogy of time’ that transforms us into economic subjects compelled to manage and curate ourselves in the meantime (Ford 2019). The logic of learning retreats from relational conceptions of pedagogy and posits the student as a ‘learner’ who is responsible for their ‘learning’ (Biesta 2006).

Pedagogical praxis within, against, and beyond the meantime requires collective forms of relating, sensing, feeling, thinking, knowing, doing, and living that refuse full inscription into the new chronic mode and logics of the meantime. Here, collec- tive action and a reappropriation of time are key components for forms of life that inhabit both the present-as-different and, at the same time, a future that is unknown and as of yet unwritten. A pedagogical praxis within, against, and beyond the mean- time must also necessarily engage with various forms of life and death, experiment- ing with the ways that these terms and conditions both limit and enable relations to the terminal, and thus foreclose or permit practices of exit, affirmation, or negation. For example, we can discern from Foucault’s writing on the operations of biopower that the production of various forms of death—including exposure to death, betrayal, and expulsion—can both precede and yield relational conditions for the production of life (Bourassa 2018). Could we not also say that our ability to think and relate to various terminals—the terminal points of capital, the learning apparatus, the achievement subject, or the adaptionist imaginary—enables conditions for new forms of life and new ways of being otherwise?

The concept of exit—and the pedagogical praxis of exopedagogy—is instructive here. In one variant, exopedagogy ‘emphasizes pedagogy as an action of exodus that organizes study for the extension and intensification of the common’ (Lewis 2012: 859). Here, Tyson Lewis stresses exopedagogy as a praxis that breaks with the dialectic of the public versus the private and posits a location out of bounds. In another closely related variant, Lewis and Richard Kahn (2010: 12) offer the follow- ing distinction: while pedagogy is the ‘re-presentation of the example’, exopeda- gogy is the ‘re-presentation of the exceptional’. The affirmation of genealogies as antisciences that make possible the insurrection of subjugated knowledges embod- ies just one form of study with the exceptional that potentially alters the meantime by revealing its historical contingency.

Extending the concept of exopedagogy, Derek Ford offers the praxis of exo- exopedagogy. In this reading, Ford posits negation (or suspension) as the temporal axis of exo-exopedagogy. Exo-exopedagogy as a praxis of negation and suspension enables an exit from the present that allows us to relate differently to the present. Practices of negation, as Ford (2019) points out, are not merely premised on an assertion of opposition. Negation also involves forms of preservation, suspension, and innovation. To submit capitalist biomedicine, capitalist biotechnology, and cap- italist bioscience to the praxis of negation involves a complex operation. ‘Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated.’ (Ford 2019)

Such a process permits us to pinpoint an opposition to capitalist biomedicine, capitalist biotechnology, and capitalist bioscience, without jettisoning completely biomedicine, biotechnology, and bioscience. Negation disentangles biomedicine, biotechnology, and bioscience from capitalism, and thus opens these practices to new possibilities—a form of profanation that makes them available for a new use (Agamben 2007). Negation, as such, acknowledges the terminal—the terminal of capitalism itself and the promissory forms of life that it has on offer. It rejects and refuses capitalism’s power over life. More than this, negation ‘sustains all other potentialities’ (Ford 2019). We could say, then, that if pedagogy is the re-presentation of the example, and exopedagogy is the re-presentation of the exceptional, then exo- exopedagogy could be conceived as the re-presentation, or better yet the praxis, of the suspension of both the example and the exceptional.

Though much remains to be explored in regards to exopedagogy and exo- exopedagogy, the turn to questions of organization in these writings is promising. Along these lines, while it is beyond the scope of this chapter, the question of whether exit (or exodus) is a transitory phase (or movement) deserves more atten- tion. Following Virno (2004), I would suggest that it is. This is important for a few reasons. First, it should serve as a caution against romanticized conceptions of exit that easily morph into escapism and passive withdrawal (Fleming 2017). Second, if exit is a transitory phase, that should attune us to the rhythms of exit, as well as the specific localities—locations and dislocations—of exit. Asking about the rhythms of exopedagogy and the rhythms of exo-exopedagogy is another way of asking about their movements and localities, and how these pedagogical forms of praxis can enter into relationality with other forms of praxis and pedagogy. Only in this way can we appreciate the full repertoire of pedagogical praxes that can be organized within, against, and beyond the meantime.

In closing, I want to reiterate the centrality of biopolitical and decolonial per- spectives to the pedagogical praxis within, against, and beyond the meantime. Biopolitical and decolonial perspectives offer unique ground for exit, exopedagogi- cal, and exo-exopedagogical praxis insofar as both confront the terminal, and both are concerned with forging new ways of being otherwise. Biopolitics as an affirma- tive project involves movement and subjective mutation from capitalist subjection to political subjectivation. For Maurizio Lazzarato (2014) this involves collective actions (strikes, struggles, revolts) that suspend the dominant significations and temporal regimes of capital. These actions enable a neutralization of capitalist subjection and initiate a process which is only the beginning of a ‘new relation between “production” and “subjectivation”’ (Lazzarato 2014: 19). This process permits new discourse, knowledge, and politics, but it requires a rupture from the new chronic mode, an acknowledgement of the terminal, and a receptiveness to the possibilities that the meantime forecloses.

Following Noah De Lissovoy (2018), one example of such an affirmative project of political subjectivation could start with a minor gesture: inviting students to betray their anxiety. As discussed above, anxiety is an increasingly generalized con- dition, though it is mostly experienced individually. A life in the meantime is an anxious life, and the collective betrayal of our anxiety is a betrayal of our isolation. As De Lissovoy (2018: 199) points out, such an invitation fosters a ‘collective imag- ination against the given’. While such an imagination is necessary to exit the mean- time, part of our pedagogical praxis must also involve attending to the ways that capitalism reappropriates our forms of struggle and reroutes our movements of exit. This is another reason why we should think of exit and exopedagogy in terms of rhythms and concrete movements. Decoloniality may offer the most promising paths out of the meantime.11 As a way of thinking, knowing, being, and doing that is informed by centuries of struggle against settler colonialism and the coloniality of power, decoloniality starts with a nuanced conception of the terminal. The projects of global capitalism and Western modernity, along with their temporal ordering and episteme, their hierarchical struc- tures of race, gender, and heteropatriarchy, must be undone. Decoloniality acknowl- edges the terminal, and it also acknowledges how colonialism and coloniality reconfigure forms of life and death. Coloniality wounds, injures, and violates, clos- ing off collective forms of life (human and more-than-human), ways of being, knowing, and doing, and it offers in place of these, impoverished forms of living better. As many decolonial theorists point out, living better is not living well (buen vivir) (Escobar 2020). This legacy, formed in struggle and praxis, offers paths for rethinking forms of educational life and death, and it recalibrates the very meanings of these terms and conditions as produced by capitalism and coloniality.

Capitalism and coloniality cannot offer us sustainable forms of life, and there- fore the life that they bequeath should be negated and put in suspension, as should the forms of death that it makes us fear. In this way, decoloniality recognizes that an engagement with the terminal is necessarily a refusal of capitalism and coloniality’s forms of educational life, and this puts us in proximity to certain forms of educa- tional death. Thus decolonial pedagogies might involve a praxis of thinking-doing that delinks the efforts of capital and coloniality to unite educational life and living better. This collective project, which involves epistemic disobedience, and acts of betrayal of the colonial matrix of power, fosters new forms of political subjectivation that are more likely to offer paths out of meantime. Robust formulations of living well (buen vivir) founded in praxis and struggle disrupt the new chronic mode, suspend the meantime, and advance other ways of being, thinking, and doing that, in turn, reconfigure educational life itself. This form of relinking allows for educational life to be put to another use. This praxis both emerges from, and pro- ceeds toward, a decolonial otherwise that is already here in the gaps of the mean- time, and, at the same time, yet to come through the making of decolonial paths.