Alt – Only through educational practices are we able to avoid the mutations of contemporary capitalism, preventing (impact).

In light of this, this text is an invitation to analyze some of the mutations of contemporary capitalism, its current forms of control and the processes of subjectivation derived from it, as well as the strategies that can be invested against them. A double movement, therefore. However, it is not intended here to exhaust the theme, or to approach it in a totalizing or definitive way. Neither was it sought to make a repertory of resistance practices in order to facilitate their control or to shut down their potential in manuals and other forms of reproduction. The purpose of this text is to try to interrogate the present time, seeking to achieve this through analysis instruments that allow stressing the practices instituted in the field of education, as well as putting in motion the subjectivation processes created and experienced there. In this sense, it is important not only to diagnose a certain condition (of the school, of education, of the contemporary world), but above all to cross it with problematizations that may open new possibilities for the construction

Finally, it is a matter of finding – and even inventing – in the interstices of contemporary forms of biopower, their carelessness, small interruptions, gaps, in short, their fleeting openings, where the capitalist machine decides to doze, ways of believing again in the world, breaths, blows that allow us to increase our power to act and affirm life – even in procedural forms. Because, as Pelbart said (2013, p. 13), “[…] there is a biopolitical strangulation that calls for gaps, however small they may be, to reactivate our political, theoretical, affective, bodily, territorial, existential imagination”. Biopolitics and Education

What mutations of capitalism and subjectivation processes are we talking about? What risks, possibilities and threats do they present to us? Nowadays, the terminologies are multiplying: post-Fordist society/ capitalism, information and knowledge society, advanced capitalism, cultural capitalism, cognitive capitalism, post-modern capitalism... It is not the case to define and distinguish each one here: it matters to us to investigate how some specific ways of thinking and living nowadays are becoming massified, crystallized, and at the same time are preventing other life forms from happening. In other words, it is a question of analyzing how worlds that are ready to be inhabited in certain forms, or forms ready to inhabit certain worlds, are being fabricated, at the expense of others.

Foucault used the term biopolitics to designate the set of practices of life control and management. This set is developed by the articulation of two distinct forms of power-knowledge: on the one hand, the disciplines, born in the 17th century, dedicated to the training of the body, to the organization and extraction of its forces and utilities; on the other hand, the control and regulation of populations, which began to emerge in the second half of the 18th century and which focus on attention to births and mortality, health length and longevity. Thus, a new form of power is being born, based on an anatomy-politics of the body: it is the biopower, mark and greater expression of biopolitics:

[…] one would have to speak of bio-power to designate

what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life. […] There is no need either to lay further stress on the proliferation of political technologies that ensued, investing the body, health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence (Foucault, 1978, p. 143-144).