Governmentality and Educational Territories: Toward a Critical Affectivity in Pedagogical Relationships

Abstract

Governmentality is a fertile concept for thinking about the operation of power, neoliberalism and subjectivations, both in the field of social sciences and educational philosophy. However, government dispositive do not operate as monolithic processes that flow directly from neoliberal policies to the population. From a critical and situated philosophical perspective, the article proposes opening a theoretical-practical discussion to rearticulate and think of the educational territory as a space of affective variability. It is shown through concrete pedagogical practices that these dispositives are complex assemblages in everyday practice that are subtly and capillary modulated through an affective governmentality deployed by educational authority. In this tension of governmentality, the findings question classical perspectives of power in the pedagogical relations of the socio-educational sphere, indicating that there is a way of escape and flight from the subtle governmental affective modulations. By reconfiguring the territory and the school, a discussion opens on socio-educational interventions whose experimental materiality gives rise to new forms of pedagogical relationship in educational territories that are not imposed, but rather emerge from the interaction and rhythms of the affective and inventive practices of those who inhabit them.