When Idle Talk Is Idealized: Thinking with Heidegger’s Existential Analytic in a Time of Neo-Liberalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neo-liberalism’s greatest strength as an ideological force has been its ability to traverse boundaries, adapt and adopt customs and cultures, and inflect the central premise of individualism, competition, and capital creation into all manner of non-market spaces. In this article, I argue that Heidegger’s rendering of “idle talk” furnishes a useful prism for understanding the current conditions of neo-liberal influences in education. I offer two analyses of what it means to be in a time and place that is enframed by discourses of neo-liberalism and the material conditions of capitalism. First, I describe how thrown conditions in education reflect a preoccupation with a limited, neo-liberal view of what it means to care or be concerned. Second, I suggest that alternatives to neo-liberalism are less available because of impoverished conceptions of what it means to understand. I conclude with the argument that, despite the dire ontic conditions, there is much opportunity to contemplate what comes next for exploring alternative educational futures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.135 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".