An ethico-aesthetic paradigm as an alternative discourse to the quality assurance discourse

Abstract

This article analyses the discourse and practices of quality assurance and quality control through the lens of neo-liberal governing as expressed in economic rationalities such as new public management, total quality management, public choice and human capital. As an alternative to this form of governing, an ethico-aesthetic paradigm is enacted, inspired by Spinoza’s concept of ‘affect’ and Félix Guattari’s and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘ontology of immanence’. This opens up to a reconstruction of the pragmatic scene of didactics as it border-crosses the discourse and practices of ‘action at a distance’, manipulating the classroom space from outside of the situation by measurements and procedures constructed by others. Moreover, it opens up to another construction of the human subject – a processual and event-centred construction of human subjectivity – which also opens up to leakages, movement, creativity and hope in the present.

During recent decades, the discourse and practices of systematic quality assurance and quality control have travelled around the world and resulted to a great extent in market-based models connected to the ideology and policy of neo-liberalism, and expressed in economic rationalities such as new public management, total quality management, public choice and human capital. This has strengthened the expansion of the field of economics within early childhood education, as well as resulting in new ethical and political ways of governing the human subject. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to analyse the terrain on which neo-liberal governing operates as a way to imagine and enact alternative ways of governing the human subject in the present. I will do this by exploring an ethico-aesthetic paradigm inspired by Spinoza’s idea of ‘what a body can do’ and Félix Guattari’s and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘ontology of immanence’.

Consequences of the quality assurance movement

For the past two decades, many studies have given vivid accounts of how the idea of quality assurance and quality control has influenced professional work in early childhood institutions and schools, resulting in an increased stress on assessing and measuring young children’s individual learning towards a predefined and transmittable body of knowledge and predetermined outcomes (Åsén, 2015; Cannella et al., 2016; Dahlberg et al., 1999, 2013). More and more professionals within early childhood education are now expressing resentment at this situation, as an increasing proportion of human and economic resources is used for assessment and control. As a result of this, teachers and other professionals are increasingly occupied with filling in forms, report-writing, documentation, constructing tests, and preparing for inspection and auditing. Combined with this, a large consultancy system, resulting in new occupations and ‘a new bureaucracy’, has been built up during the past decades.

In line with this, David Graeber (2015) argues in his book The Utopia of Rules that the modern market society is the most bureaucratic society that has ever existed, but we do not notice this, as it has become an integral part of our lives. Graeber comments that, formerly, we used to view the bureaucrat as a grey public servant, whereas today’s bureaucrat mostly works in the private sector, with titles such as strategist, manager, business developer or consultant. So, the ‘black hole of administration’ (Forssell and Ivarsson Westerberg, 2014) that we are increasingly inscribed in and take as a given seems to come directly from ‘the administration’s filing box’ (Rajchman, 2001: 7).

This development has prompted many professionals and researchers to ask if the quality assurance movement, in the form it has taken, is effective. It may well be counterproductive in relation to social and educational goals (Forsberg and Wallin, 2006), such as diversity, participation, inclusion and innovation. Instead of responding to such goals, the instruments of testing and standardising quality may function as powerful tools for normalising and taming children’s desires and creativity, with the consequence of a ‘narrowed’ curriculum (Åsén, 2015).

Action at a distance

Analysing the above changes, then, it becomes obvious that an economic logic, with numbers and quantitative measures, has begun to play a considerable role in legitimising decisions for developing preschools and schools. The trust in numbers and the findings they potentiate may relate to the fact that numbers construct a form of visibility in between the so-called facts of the methods and the technical expertise that collects and interprets these facts (Rose, 1999). Hence, numbers acquire significant power in the public space. Moreover, this visibility, where numerical values appear as neutral and objective, makes it possible to establish connections and networks through what Bruno Latour (1987: 219–232) has called ‘action at a distance’. In consonance with this, most quality assurance instruments are constructed and handled by staff who are far removed from the core activities, which implies that preschool teachers and day-care workers have not been engaged and involved in the construction of these systems, which, in turn, makes it difficult for them to relate to and resist them. Instead of trust, this may well create mistrust between different levels in the early childhood education system.

A new form of governmentality?

This criticism of the importance of numbers for governing is not a rejection of numbers. It is quite clear that quantitative measurements have been an important cornerstone for democratic development over the last century. The criticism is more concerned with when, and in what context, numbers are used. We have to be aware that numbers – like any categories and classifications through which we measure and construct children – inform and constitute what is seen to be important to achieve and do in everyday practices with children. Tom Popkewitz (2011) argues that numbers function as cultural practices, which construct cultural theories concerning who we are, can be and should be. Hence, they govern us and we govern ourselves through them. Consequently, theories that are underpinned by numerical data become materialised in our practices with children and inform not only how we think and act, but also what we hope for. If numbers become productive and are materialised as actions and subjectivities, it is not enough to analyse if the policy and the administration connected to the quality assurance movement are effective or ineffective. Jason Read (2009) comments – with inspiration from Michel Foucault – that simply to oppose neo-liberalism as an ideology or to enumerate the numerous failings of its policy will not help us.

Foucault (1982: 208) described his own project as the study of ‘the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’, which is a complex process that intersects with regimes of power/knowledge by making use of the human and social sciences and their related disciplines. From this perspective, Read (2009) argues that we cannot view neo-liberalism just as a manner of governing states or economies, as its technologies are also active in constituting us as human beings, and, consequently, function as a new form in an ethical-political strategy of governing.

Towards the end of his life, Foucault (2008: 226) also began to study the manner in which people are governed and govern themselves, and claimed that neo-liberalism had started to constitute a new mode of governmentality (conduct of conduct), resulting in a new mentality where the individual was constituted as a subject of ‘human capital’ or homo economicus – that is, ‘an entrepreneur of himself’.

From the norm of solidarity to the norm of autonomy

In line with Foucault’s thoughts on neo-liberal governing, many social scientists have argued that, in advanced liberal societies, there has been a shift in how the human subject is made and constructs her/himself (e.g., see Bloch et al., 2006; Dahlberg, 2003; Fendler, 2001; Hultqvist and Dahlberg, 2001; Miller and Rose, 2008; Read, 2009). This shift in the conduct of conduct is related to the critique of the social subject of the welfare state that occurred at the end of the millennium, based on the argument that the social subject of the welfare state was a passive and dependent citizen rather than an active, independent and responsible citizen. In response to this critique, an ethical-political reconstitution of the ‘universal citizen’ of the welfare state, whose individuality is supposed to embody the nation and the social, has taken place, resulting in a call for a more autonomous and flexible subject who is individually responsible for her or his own self-actualisation through an active life. Combined with this, a process of privatisation of institutions has taken place, which, according to Read (2009), is in line with neo-liberalism’s strategy and ethos for dealing with the public sector – an ethos that has made its way into different disciplines, such as microeconomics, sociology, political science, psychology, pedagogy and philosophy.

The autonomous and competent child as a new strategy of governing

Foucault’s (2008: 226) notion of the ‘homo economicus as an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of her/himself’ is also materialised in the education system. As a mode of governmentality, children are increasingly encouraged to understand their life – actually and potentially – not in terms of fate, social status, rights and obligations, but through their interests, aspirations, competence, passions and desires. They are, as a consequence, supposed to govern themselves through the norm of autonomy as free individuals, almost in the form of a ‘duty to be free’ (Popkewitz and Bloch, 2001; Rose, 1999).

This ‘duty to be free’ requires new capacities, skills and strategies to enable the child to interpret her/his past and dreams about the future as a result of choices made and choices still to be made. The active child also presupposes active parents who are able to form good judgments and well-calculated actions and strategies by dealing with the opportunities offered when it comes to, for example, day care and schools. Hence, the result may be that the ‘norm of autonomy’, at the same time, qualifies and disqualifies for action, as some children and parents will be brought into active citizenship, while others will not.

A new ethical and political form of governing

We have to be aware that this conceptualisation of autonomy and responsibility is creating a new kind of freedom, where governance is increasingly linked to the individual’s management of risk in a so-called ‘risk society’ (Dean, 1999). This ethical-political rationale assumes that children and parents can identify, take responsibility for and begin to manage risks. Hence, the ‘duty to be free’, as a specific idea of freedom with its new regime of governing, needs to be problematised, as it can both qualify and disqualify for action and participation – for example, for inclusion and exclusion. A crucial question is: What will happen to those children and parents who do not have the conditions to be able to embody the norm of the entrepreneurial self, and who are not capable of taking responsibility for their own self-actualisation through an active life? Those, for example, who do not have either the economic capacity or capabilities required for participating in and accessing the benefits of ‘freedom’, and using their own existence as a ‘rational choice’ and ‘human capital’. Arguably, even those who possess these possibilities of being able to strategise for themselves among available options, as subjects of freedom, do not really play a role in determining those options. It is a freedom that is shaped, conditioned and constrained within a form of subjectification characterised by increasing self-interest, competition and social insecurity – a subjectification that may function in a more intrusive way in children’s, parents’ and teachers’ lives, as the individual’s capacities and potentials are subject to constant intervention.

In addition to constituting the human subject in a different way, the constitution of the community of the welfare state, where the community was maintained by the state for the common good and responsibility was based on solidarity, has to a great extent been exchanged for a responsibility based on an individualised and neo-liberal ethos, with its stress on individual choice and competition. As such, we are encouraged to understand our life not in terms of destiny or social class, but in terms of our own success or failure in acquiring the skills and making the choices needed for realising our own life.

Social exclusion as a technology of governing

With quite a strong claim, Rose (1999) argues that social exclusion has become a concept that circulates as a form of technology for the administration of the marginalised, and now serves as the organising principle of welfare reforms. Without denying that inclusive education is of the utmost importance, Rose relates this claim to the changes in the governing of the human subject described above – from a so-called ‘dependent citizen’ of the social state to a citizen who is supposed to govern her/himself as an ethical subject of freedom. So, instead of the social state with its ‘universal citizen’ constructed through discourses of social justice and solidarity, social exclusion has entered as a strategy to deal with diversity and equity. This points towards the hidden contradictions embedded in conceptualisations of inclusion and exclusion. Popkewitz (1998) has proposed that current educational reforms are practices that produce boundaries in terms of what is inside and outside the norms of competence and achievement – that is, what is seen to be included or excluded. As the variety of tools for administering the ‘excluded’ and ‘marginalised’ involves procedures of differentiation, these tools will, if not implemented with care, render many children ‘incompetent learners’, as well as isolating them in terms of ‘belonging’. Instead of opening up to children’s interests, desires and learning, such tools may instead be taming their desires and learning. Thus, implementing standardised tools, which culminate in classifying children as ‘at risk’ and/or ‘in need’, may, if not scrutinised and contested, be counterproductive in relation to the calls for diversity, inclusion and participation that are circulating in today’s educational reforms.

The double movement of social control and intensification

Do we see in the above change the beginning of what Deleuze (1992) calls ‘societies of control’? When Deleuze wrote about societies of control, he did not mean a refined form of Bentham’s panopticon, as Foucault (1977) characterised the disciplinary society. In societies of control, Deleuze argues that normalisation takes place not only through disciplinary procedures rooted in specific institutions like schools, hospitals and jails. These societies, rather, demand constant change and assume that the child is continually being subjected to training and judgment, and is supposed to repeatedly create her/himself anew by an immanent logic. This means that the child will exercise permanent control over her/himself in the form of lifelong learning and through continual evaluations, in order to be able to improve her/himself in the form of an independent life project. It is a form of governmentality that seems to be a governing without governing, as, in order to function, children must have a great deal of freedom to act and choose between competing strategies. Like Foucault (2008), Deleuze argues that this form of governing operates on the conditions and effects of actions, which means that everyone has to try to discover the conditions out of which they are able to freely conduct themselves. This enabling of experience might be more open and tolerant of difference, and create new opportunities, at the same time as it creates a new complexity. Nonetheless, the newer notions of autonomy, flexibility and freedom, while present in discussions about quality programmes over a long period, are enmeshed in a complex assemblage of ‘the machine’ as a capitalist, social and diversified set of happenings surrounding the child (and parent, family, community), while also leaving room for escape and new lines of flight (Dahlberg and Bloch, 2006). In many ways, Deleuze’s societies of control make the play of discourses and their constraints more open, with leakages, so that the notion of ‘autonomy’ or ‘freedom’ must be seen as being not only within constraints, but also within places for imagination. New concepts may emerge – new understandings, coming from children or from ‘others’, which we, as adults, may not yet see or realise.

Trajectories of intensification through affect

Recently, researchers (Massumi, 2002a; Read, 2009) inspired by Foucault’s and/or Deleuze’s thinking have proposed that this complexity, with its dynamic entanglements of relationships, connections and transformations, follows a general trajectory of intensification through affect. Brian Massumi (2002a), for example, argues that as power is no longer fundamentally normative – like it was in its disciplinary forms – it is also affective, as it governs directly over the movements and the momentum of bodies. Governing, then, becomes a sort of double movement in between control and intensification. Massumi relates the concept of affect to Spinoza’s ‘affectus’, which is an ability to affect and be affected, and proposes that the dynamic of current capitalism hijacks affect. As markets become saturated, there is a need for variety and ‘niche marketing’. Thus, in order to intensify the potential for profit, the market hijacks affect, with the consequence that the market logic of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field, and a form of immanent control through affect permeates all types of practices and spaces. This situation has obliged Massumi to ask whether the market is now taking over the aesthetic and ethical field – a field where possibilities of alternative practices and resistance against the above-mentioned individualistic and competitive subjectivities and predetermined outcomes may be possible.

Meeting affective modulation with affective modulation

Massumi (2002a) answers this question by stating that alternative actions do not have to fight against the idea that power has become affective. Rather, they have to function on the same level, which means that we should, according to him, meet affective modulation with affective modulation. He therefore proposes that this will require a performative and aesthetic approach, as there is still the potential, and openings, for affective contagion and the possibilities to spread that affective dimension in relation to our own purposes.

An ethico-aesthetic paradigm

Following Massumi’s thoughts on a performative and aesthetic approach, we can now turn to Guattari. In the final chapter of his book Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995) provocatively suggests that, given the desperate times in which we are living, there is a great need for an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. For Guattari, this paradigm is connected to inventiveness and creativity of thought. Specifically, in relation to education, he asks: ‘How do you make a class operate like a work of art?’ (Guattari, 1995: 133). How do we create a school in which the teacher operates as an artist – as an artist who experiments and where materials are used in unpredictable ways so as to produce unpredictable art? The teacher’s actions are, therefore, more of ‘an experimental tweaking of an autonomous process than a molding of dumb matter’ (Massumi, 2002b: 173) – all of which presupposes both a teacher who has transgressed the idea of being a transmitter of knowledge and a child who is not seen as raw material that is simply waiting to be moulded. It is a reconstruction of the pragmatic scene of didactics that has border-crossed the idea of ‘action at a distance’, which means manipulating the classroom space from outside of the situation by measurements and procedures constructed by others, as if we were ‘disembodied subjects handling an object’ (Massumi, 2002b: 11).

Eventalising existence

Manipulating the classroom space from the outside, as a form of ‘action at a distance’, cannot address the world ‘as it happens’, which implies that we are missing the fundamental and practical details that really matter to children and teachers in actual social settings, such as day-care centres and preschools.

When Massumi proposes that we meet modulation of affect with modulation of affect, he raises the necessity to be open to what is happening in the immediacy, in the event. The idea of ‘the event’ has preoccupied many thinkers for centuries. Recently, the idea of the event has been revitalised by a number of thinkers. Foucault (1991), for example, argued that our traditional ways of acquiring knowledge have been preoccupied with the general, abstract and hidden, to the extent that our existence has become de-eventalised. He suggested that, in order to ‘eventalise existence’, we need to rediscover and draw attention to the indecisive processes and life-giving encounters that, at any given moment, are in becoming, which means that we must dare to open ourselves up to change and to the unexpected – to non-knowledge and to that which puts difference in motion.

Similarly, Guattari (1995: 18), in proposing an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, also stresses the importance of responding to the event, as it holds the possibility for creativity of thought, without which, he argues, we will not be able to solve any of the great environmental, social and mental problems that we are facing in the 21st century. In this respect, the event, for Guattari, is the potential bearer of new ‘constellations of universes of existence’ (1995: 18).

Foucault’s and Guattari’s thinking of the event relates to Deleuze’s ontology of becoming. For Deleuze, life involves events, and, inspired by Deleuze, Massumi (2002b) states that events hold affects, intensities and forces. They are pre-personal singularities, corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another, implying an augmentation or reduction in the body’s capacity to act. These intensities and forces open towards movement and becoming, in relation to that which is immanent in the ‘here and now’ of the experience. It is a becoming that always is emerging before that which has been brought to consciousness and actualised, positioned and placed in representations. In order to highlight the difference between what we have already actualised, the non-conscious and non-intentional immediacy, Deleuze uses the concept of the ‘virtual’. He sees the virtual as something real – as a potential, as a self-generating and self-creative process that is produced only for brief moments, before self-reflection, interpretation and identification. Therefore, to open to the event, to movement and potential, and to the non-verbal dimensions, Deleuze suggests that we must fly representations, even if this is not really possible (Deleuze and Parnet: 1987). Hence, through augmenting our capacity to act, we get a new quality of life, a new potential, which remains in our bodies as habits and desires. This is why Massumi (2011: 1–3) opens up to the event when he argues that we do not need to fight against the idea that governing has become a sort of double movement in between control and intensification through affect.

So, eventalising existence by working with an ethico-aesthetic paradigm may bring intensity and the enjoyment of creativity and life, which are the basis for the desire to explore and learn. Moreover, it may bring sociality open for collective forms of social experience through offering a space for ways of governing the human subject other than the individualised and privatised alternatives offered by the discourse of neo-liberalism.

Immanent didactics

In order to achieve this, we have to understand that the ethico-aesthetic paradigm proposed here is a pragmatic idea of change, which builds on the here and now, and on what is already immanent in educational institutions. It is an immanent didactics which implies that we are in alliance with what is produced and which is always in the making. Conceptualising immanent in this way eschews any essential notion. Rather, it is a dynamic process – a force modulated inside the situation, where, by following the trajectories and the singular events in the environment, the processual ‘event-centered singularities’ and assemblages (Guattari, 1995: 7) may give another margin of manoeuvrability. Then, children and teachers assume the function of connectors, the openers of doors to new actualisations, where they get the chance to live out their productive lives amidst processes of always becoming. Whilst children will not all do the same, they will nevertheless, for a moment, experience something totally new together – the unexpected and the surprising. However, this requires thorough and rigorous preparation, and also patience, as the effect can take a long time before it becomes visible (Olsson, 2009). Additionally, it requires great care and attention. And, above all, it assumes a great trust in children’s potentials and capabilities. It also assumes a form of solidarity, a togetherness and belongingness, where children’s explorations and experimentations can be supported through listening and through dialogue, without predetermined questions and answers. Young children can help us with this, as they are already migrant thinkers in time and space to a much higher degree than adults. This means that they are not as codified as adults. They can be seen as ‘transdisciplinary’ and ‘rhizomatic thinkers’, as they often move ‘in and through’ different disciplines, as well as not being as stuck in thoughts characterised by linearity and progression. So, the challenge is to be aware of all the relations and interdependencies that tie us together, and calls for a willingness to explore creative processes and productions through a collective experimentation with the potentialities already inherent in and immanent to children and schools (Dahlberg and Elfström, 2014; Olsson, 2009).

Immanent assessment

How can the effect of an immanent didactics be assessed? Assessment may, in this case, be seen as a form of clinical practice – a form of diagnostic capability that focuses on processes of becoming. These processes should not primarily be judged as some final result, but rather through following the processes and their capacity to continue. In order to achieve this, teachers need to have the ability to install themselves in the work together with children, and to be able to follow the dynamic signs and traces that unfold (or are blocked) in the event. Here, different questions can be asked, including: What is happening here? What kinds of experiences are produced? What new thoughts and actions are arising between the children, teachers and materials? What new perceptions and sensations are opening in our bodies? What is their power to continue? Or, if we allude to Guattari’s (1995) thinking: What new universes do the children bring forward together with the teachers and the environment?

New openings and new possibilities

The ethico-aesthetical paradigm explored in this article, as an alternative way of governing the human subject, opens up for a trust and a hope in Life here and now. Such a trust, prompted by creative openings, the Deleuzean researcher Liane Mozère so vividly expressed in a conversation we had a couple of years ago: ‘We must take advantage of the extraordinary small, unexpected and lively battles for life that children perform. Otherwise, they, and everyone else involved, are not able to unfold their power to act’.