Post-Education and Ethical Government

In the 1983 conference La culture de soi Foucault made some reflections on the incorporation and integration of the techniques of the care of self in our societies in institutions and disciplinary knowledges such as education. In this article I set out to explore how these techniques that have been re-incorporated by the neoliberal governmentality of so-called platform capitalism also thanks to the more general hybridization - unstoppable and in process - between the realms of formal education and the informal “outside” of our spheres of sociality, beyond work itself: what I name here as post-education. The main aim of this contribution is to question what ethical government is being proposed by post-education, in order to demonstrate that on the one hand, through remote control, that is, through the codification of behaviours and feelings included in digital educational and social media, we are more and more governed by dispositifs of biopolitical regulation. On the other hand, through the techniques of the self-incorporated by these dispositifs, we increasingly govern ourselves as well as we are governed by others which in turn are governed by ourselves, in a relentless interaction of emergences of control and freedom, where the ethos is the real stake. After a description of the main features of post-education such as privatisation, digitalisation and the hybridisation of formal education and that of social life, the paper investigates the forms of control operating though objectivations/subjectifications and the possibilities of resistance and in-surgent subjectivations through autonomy and critique. Finally, the paper presents fields that can be explored in future research on the role of the other/teacher and the “chances” of another possible (post-)education.