Abstract
My a priori characterisation of a contest over principal subjectivity is as a political struggle for the soul of the principal – a struggle with and against the technologies of neoliberal government that confer a particular permutation of power, truth and ethics on principals. This is a struggle directed to gaining some freedom from the impositions and enclosures of neoliberal governmentality in order to remain ‘open to alternative and foreclosed ways of being and knowing’ (De Lissovoy, 2016, p. 167).
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Notes
- 1.
This connection is supported by Butler’s (1995) theoretical interpretation of Foucault’s ‘productive’ power and subjectivity . Butler says ‘that the subject is that which must be constituted again and again implies that it is open to formations that are not fully constrained in advance … If the subject is a reworking of the very discursive processes by which it is worked, then agency is to be found in the possibilities of resignification opened up by discourse’ (p. 135).
- 2.
Phillips’ (2006) reference to ‘palette’ is derived from Felix Guattari’s metaphor for thinking about the possibilities for new subjectivities within existing discursive boundaries. Guattari says, ‘One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette’ (1995, p. 7). Phillips (2006) elaborates on the metaphor in saying that ‘the subject-as-artist is afforded a level of creativity but only in so far as new forms can be derived from the “palette,” which is presumably made up of previously encountered forms’ (p. 314).
- 3.
The term ‘stocks of knowledge’ comes from the pioneering work of Berger and Luckmann (1966) in their book The Social Construction of Reality. It refers to an accumulated body of social understandings, distilled from ‘biographical and historical experience’ that comes to represent and delimit an objective reality and ‘which is available to the individual in everyday life’ (p. 41).
- 4.
Even though often cited as such, the phrase ‘conduct of conduct’ does not appear in the original English translation of Foucault’s (1982) The Subject and Power – where it is translated as ‘guiding the possibilities of conduct’ (p. 789). The phrase can, however, be found in the new translation of The Subject and Power (Foucault, 2002) where it appears as a ‘conduct of conducts’ (p. 341).
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Dolan, C. (2020). The Lines of Struggle. In: Paradox and the School Leader. Educational Leadership Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3086-9_5
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