Their adherence to this set of “rules” proves their indoctrination, only creates spaces of resistance such as this round can breakthrough biopolitical fascist subjectivities

The first step in pedagogical efforts to unmake microfascist subjectivities is identifying the ways in which desire is mobilized in educational settings to control, repress, order and impose rules as a form of fascism—when control and order have dangerous consequences such as limiting students’ basic political freedoms. If educators are attentive to their own microfascisms and those elicited by their students, then it will become clearer to understand how and why the desire to follow rules and see others conform to them is central to formulating pedagogies that problematize the consequences of this desire. It is crucial, then, for educators to understand how the diverse range of students’ as well as their own affective responses to rules and control constantly run up against social- and politicalwide ways of knowing and feeling about the self and others. Therefore, a point of departure for educators is to examine how affective dynamics work micropolitically to organize students’ affective responses (e.g., towards racism, nationalism, extremism, sexism, and ableism) and under which circumstances there can be an antidote to the microfascist practices in everyday life (M. Zembylas, 2020b). A key pedagogical question then is: How and with which pedagogical resources can educators and students first of all identify forms of fascism and its damage micropolitically?

What is needed are pedagogical strategies that render the burdens of microfascism unbearable, namely, strategies that show to students how they are prevented from reimagining reality and opening new potentials in their lives, if they are trapped into fixed desires and anxieties about themselves and their relations to others. In other words, educators need to cultivate spaces of resistance micropolitically through the ‘diligent unmaking of the various subordinated subjectivities’ (Mohammed, 2020, p. 208) that students develop in schools and classrooms. Students often learn in schools to submit to an order and a set of rules, and they become attached to the idea that if their bodies, health or citizenship were ‘properly ordered’ then everything would be fine; thus they take such ordering as desirable and treat every complexity encountered as distraction (Fitzpatrick & Tinning, 2014). A valuable pedagogical strategy, therefore, would be to create opportunities for students to ‘refuse to allow any fascist formula to slip by, on whatver scale it may manifest itself, including within the scale of the family [and I could add the school as well] or even within the scale of our own personal economy’ (F. Guattari, 2009, p. 166). This implies that students need to be given opportunities to understand that the reduction of the complexity of each subjectivity into a fascist formula forecloses countless other ways to apprehend and negotiate relations with others.