Subjectivity as a site of struggle: refusing neoliberalism?

This paper extends the author’s previous enquiries and discussions of governmentality and neoliberal policy technologies in a number of ways. The paper explores the specificity and generality of performativity as a particular contemporary mode of power relations. It addresses our own imbrication in the politics of performative truths, through our ordinary everyday life and work. The paper is about the here and now, us, you and me, and who we are in neoliberal education. It draws upon and considers a set of ongoing email exchanges with a small group of teachers who are struggling with performativity. It enters the ‘theoretical silence’ of governmentality studies around the issues of resistance and contestation. Above all, the paper attempts to articulate the risks of refusal through Foucault’s notion of fearless speech or truth-telling (parrhesia).