This article arises from the thoughts of Hannah Arendt, and more especially from her idea that the essence of education is the renewal of the world. That idea forms the backdrop to a consideration of the current interest in education as the construction of one's own life. I argue that the will to construct one's own life is not a natural, biological given, but a product of a 'biopolitical machine'. In the first part of the article I challenge the contemporary (...) discourse of self-empowerment and expose the way that the will to construct one's own life, in its current manifestation, is an effect and an instrument of a (strategic) configuration that includes the construction of one's own life as a matter of public concern. Ironically, the foregrounding of 'public concern' in this way undermines a more meaningful realisation of the public realm. I see this, however, not primarily as a problem, but as an invitation to think again. In the second part I argue that what the 'biopolitical machine' has shown is precisely that thinking of childhood in terms of a becoming and a 'not yet' does not capture the essence of human being. Instead it should be conceived as a singular, historical experience emerging within a particular historical context. What this reveals is an opening onto a possibility of acting and thinking differently. I conclude with an alternative idea of education, one that is inspired by Arendt. However, this is not intended as a utopian turn, but rather as a means of exposing a dimension of education that has remained silenced or even largely excluded: a dimension that is an invitation to think and to put our thoughts at stake, which is something altogether different from utopia. (shrink)

The ‘European Space of Higher Education’ could be mapped as an infrastructure for entrepreneurship and a place where the distinction between the social and the economic becomes obsolete. Using Foucault's understanding of biopolitics and discussing the analyses of Agamben and Negri/Hardt it is argued that the actual governmental configuration, i.e. the economisation of the social, also has a biopolitical dimension. Focusing on the intersection between a politicisation and economisation of human life allows us to discuss a kind of ‘bio‐economisation’ , (...) a regime of economic terror and learning as investment. Finally it is argued how fostering learning, i.e. fostering life could turn into ‘let die’ and even into ‘make die’. (shrink)

Critical educational research offers the researcher a position and an ethos of comfort. Even the declared recognition of the relativity of principles, norms or criteria so characteristic of much critical research does not prevent it from looking immediately for a way out of this uncomfortable situation i.e. to keep to the idea that comfort is needed and desirable. However, we suggest that this uncomfortable condition is constitutive for critical educational research and may be even for education as such. Therefore the (...) article can be considered as a genealogical analysis of this comfortable critical research, in which we show how the birth of the milieu of the modern school goes together with the instauration of two forms of a comfortable research ‘ethos’: a research ethos rooted in a pastoral milieu and a research ethos rooted in a bureaucratic milieu. In the last section of the article we indicate that another ‘experimental’ ethos of research is possible, including the acceptance of discomfort. This is the ethos of a critical researcher as an inhabitant of a coming research community and as being exposed to the present. (shrink)

This paper starts from a brief sketch of the ‘classical’ figure of critical educational theory or science (Kritische Erziehungswissenshaft). ‘Critical educational theory’ presents itself as the privileged guardian of the critical principle of education (Bildung) and its emancipatory promise. It involves the possibility of saying ‘I’ in order to speak and think in one's own name, to be critical, self-reflective and independent, to determine dependence from the present power relations and existing social order. Actual social and educational reality and relations (...) are approached as a limitation, threat, alienation, re/oppression or negation of ultimate human principles or potential. The task of critical educational theory becomes one of enabling an autonomous, critical, self-reflective life. While ‘critique’ and ‘autonomy’ have meanwhile become commonplace, and ‘critique’ and ‘autonomy’ are reclaimed and required from everybody, we should also consider the question of the relation between an institutional or ideological framework as that which claims to question this frame and to constitute its opposite. The trivialisation of critique is taken as occasion to recall Michel Foucault's analysis of power relations and especially his thesis according to which the ‘government of individualisation’ is the actual figure of power. Starting from the framework offered by Foucault, it can be made clear that the autonomous, critical, self-reflective life does not represent an ultimate principle but refers to a very specific form of subjectification operating as a transmission belt for power. The autonomous, critical, self-reflective person appears as an historical model of self-conduct whereby power operates precisely through the intensification of reflectiveness and critique rather than through their repression, alienation or negation. This brings us back then to the question of how to conceive of the task of a critical educational theory at a time in which critique, autonomy and self-determination have become an essential modus operandi of the existing order. (shrink)