Governmentality (see Foucault) can be understood as “the conduct of conduct”. It refers to the ways in which strategies and techniques can be employed to direct the behaviour of populations by creating a free citizenry that best suits the interests and policies of those that govern (Edwards, 2006) and where freedom is really “…the art of being free in a specially acceptable way and [to] regulate[d] in ways that make it useful to society” (Jarvis, 2008b, p. 78). Governmentality allows individuals to “practice freedom as a form of self-governance” thus allowing the governance of subjects at a distance, and where those that govern enable individual choice to address the problems of tomorrow. The state is not the intervener and not the problem solver, but the enabler (Fejes, 2008).
Most generally, those that govern would imply the state. However, Jarvis’ (2008) description of the substructure would extend the category to include those that govern (conduct conduct) through access to capital, media, and technology. In that way, LLL is directed at constituting a population which will further the goals of global competition in a knowledge-based economy (Edwards, 2006).
The dominant discourse posits that we are in times of rapid change which produce unknowable but threatening futures. Neoliberal perspectives believe that the best solutions to threatening futures includes minimal state intervention, and a trust in market rationality and individual rational choice. Therefore, there is a need to direct that individual rational choice so that it will be supportive of global substructures and will enhance competitive advantage. There is a need to mobilize the knowledge, skills and competencies resident in humans, so there is a need to ensure that humans mobilize themselves (Simons and Masschelein, 2008). Needs subject to see themselves that wayThat way, the global substructure can direct the future in ways that it favours by controlling the population. The discourse does this by inculcating citizens with an acceptance of change and a fragmented world, and by formulating subjects who feel autonomous and responsible for making the future. (Olssen AND Peterssen, 2008). Olssen (2008) argues that Keynesian economics could not lead to global economies because precisely because it offered no way of controlling individual workers. LLL in a neoliberal economic frame provides a way of constituting workers globally as knowledgeable subjects and governing their active behaviour and choices through strategies and technologies. “…[G]overning therefore, becomes less to do with rational process of social reform and more to do with fashioning conduct based on certain norms and values wherein… populations are signified as certain types of active subjects rather than passive objects” (Usher and Edwards, 2007, p. 105).
Simons and Masschelein (2008) offer a description of governance in three over-lapping and inter-related dimensions:
- · The epistemologic
- · The strategic
- · The ethical
The epistemic dimension involves regimes of truth (Foucault) which support global capital interests and feed the strategic and ethical dimensions of governmentality. The discourse defines what is normal, valuable, and legitimate (Edwards, 2008). Fed by the disciplines of sociology, psychology, education, subjectivities and reality is created. (Fejes, 2008). Truth, in the dominant discourse, is to be based on economic rationality. Even the social is economized.
In the strategic dimension, LLL policy and research are used as intellectual technologies of governance for ordering social, economic and political reality (Edwards, 2006). Simons and Masschelein (2008) speak of the learning apparatus which is an inter-connected complex of dispersed practices and discourse promoting entrepreneurship and capitalization of life through learning. Its goal is the adaptation of capital. Research and policy are both aspects of the learning apparatus (and epistemological governance) as they define, legitimize, and evaluate various ways of being in the world. Tactics that promote consumerism are part of the learning apparatus as they stimulate the desires that are require for individuals to assume the risks of self-entrepreneurial behaviour and beliefs (Simons and Masschelein, 2008). Confessional technologies, such as portfolios, the Europass and personal learning plans, are ways in which individuals can evaluate themselves and proclaim their own deficits (Simons and Masschelein, 2008), thereby exposing oneself to external judgement while accepting sole responsibility for one’s own salvation (Edwards, 2006).
In the ethical dimension, Griffen (2002, p. 268.as cited in Griffen, 2008, p. 127) argues that “at the level of government strategy, people may be variously persuaded, cajoed, bribed, threatened or shamed into becoming active individual learners.” Knowledge is positioned as an ethically necessary mechanism to learn to handle the future (Olssen AND Peterssen, 2008). LLL in the neoliberal global capitalist system relies on self-perceived autonomous individuals who make self-perceived free and rational choices which coincide with the interests of the substructure. The will to learn is constructed as an imperative attitude and personal attribute which is both a product and an instrument of the learning apparatus, fashioning governable individuals (Simons and Masschelein, 2008). Referencing Foucault (2004, p. 53), Simons and Masschelein (2008) refer to the permanent economic tribunal, another product and instrument of the learning apparatus acting through both strategic and ethical dimensions to persuade individuals to engage in continual capitalization of their labour market value.
It is in the ethical dimension that LLL relates the individual to the collective (Olssen, 2008). Popkewitz (2008) discusses this relationship in terms of unfinished cosmopolitanism. The lifelong learner is constructed as someone who reflects the values of the collective and wishes to solve the problems of the collective. But the unity of the collective is no longer the nation state or humanity in general. Each individual holds multiple identities and allegiances, each with varied values. Increasingly, the common ground between these collectives is being defined in the discourse as the culture of neoliberal global corporate capitalism. Therefore, the ethical response is to solve economic problems framed by neoliberal values.
Tomorrow I will discuss how responsibility for LLL is allocated in the dominant discourse.
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