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Modulating power and ‘new weapons’: Taking aim at the ‘Education Revolution’
Conference paper   Open access

Modulating power and ‘new weapons’: Taking aim at the ‘Education Revolution’

G. Thompson
Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
40th Conference of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Inc. (PESA) (Perth, Western Australia; Margaret River, Western Australia, 02/12/2010–05/12/2010)
2010
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Abstract

This paper looks at the emergent performative culture seducing education in the Australian context. It links this corporate discourse to Deleuzean theorising of control societies to postulate that what we are experiencing is a new form of power relations – that of the modulating mechanisms of power. These modulating mechanisms overlay disciplinary power such that the self is modulated through the amplification and frequencies of the instruments of modulation: the simulation, the categorical sorting and the sample. These instruments are increasingly utilised within the performative culture of the Australian Federal Government’s Education Revolution as examples of the performative ‘terror’ or the abstraction of the self from the terrain in which they move. Finally, some new weapons are suggested that may offer preliminary and tentative ‘movement’ in deterritorialising ways through the enclosed spaces of mass, compulsory school and the policy that shapes it.

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