Education as Dispositif, Subjectivation and the Late Foucault

Foucault can be an educator if we accept that the truth is always in the making, and that we are always co-responsible for the truth that emerges in the course of our learning biographies. Foucault may be viewed as a key twentieth century author en pedagogie, insofar as he spearheaded reflection on the profound implications of “procedurality” for the formation of subjects, in both the places of conformation and those of resistance to any given educational or formative project. We cannot anywhere nearly grasp the potential value of Late Foucault’s work for educators or for those wishing to contribute to the pedagogical debate if we do not seriously take on board the outcomes of his enquiry: up to the very end of his life, Foucault continued to insist that we should not be concerned with analysing the subject but rather the genealogy of subjectivation and desubjectivation. This paper propose that we should not only use Foucault to guide educational action but above all to newly problematize the entire field of education, as Riccardo Massa said twenty years ago, and to view contemporary educational practices as the effects of a dispositive that is increasingly difficult to pin down. In essence, we need to analyse more closely the reciprocal relations between practices and theories of education.