Higher Education and the Government of Things

• In Event: Foucault and Education SIG Business Meeting

Abstract

In this presentation I utilize Foucault’s lectures on biopower and Deleuzian notions of the schizoid society to consider higher education as ensconced in what Foucault (2007) termed a “government of things.” In this instance “governing” turns humans, relations, and matter into calculations—a quantification of things that include affective states. This context encourages an anti-materialist ethical positioning, severing
activities from bodies and asserting logics of preemption as necessary and normal. Pivotal to my analysis is the ease with which contemporary notions of governing pull from extractive circumstances, absenting bodies and places in the rush to produce abstracted things that are governable. I end with considerations for materialist methodologies and an emergent stance of academic activism as interventions in such circumstances.

Author

• Aaron M. Kuntz, The University of Alabama