ABSTRACT
I wish to demonstrate in this chapter that Foucault’s conception of governmentality provides a powerful tool for understanding developments in relation to learning and education which links the organization of learning to both politics and economics in developed Western societies. My thesis will be that the radicalness of Foucault’s own is much greater than many writers on Foucault seem to realize. For what is offered by Foucault’s conception I will argue is a new version of ‘superstructural sociology’2 that provides a means of understanding how educational and economic practicesmutually condition and adapt to each other, while avoiding the excesses that plaguedMarxist analyses in the later twentieth century that represented such processes as the outcome of a necessary determination. In this context I will argue that Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and state reason enable a more powerful understanding of relations between discursive patterns of a society and the dominant institutional forms of economic and political power than Marxism did. While I will identify lifelong learning as a specifically neoliberal form of state reason in terms of its conception, emergence and development, which has manifested a uniformly consistent – albeit not exclusive – concern of serving the dominant economic mode, the prospects for moving beyond it depend, I will claim, on whether the structures of learning created can be harnessed for other ends; that is, whether embryonic within the discursive programme of lifelong learning is the possibility of linking the discourse to a progressive emancipatory project based upon egalitarian politics and social justice. Is it indeed possible that we can all be inhabitants of a genuinely learning society? And what would such a society look like?
