A Strange Craving to be Motivated: Schizoanalysis, Human Capital and Education

Abstract

This paper takes Deleuze’s remarks on education in control societies as a starting point to survey recent developments in human capital theories, large-scale educational assessments and education policies that target motivation as a site for measurement and intervention. Motivation is just one of a constellation of related subjective dispositions (e.g. aspiration, engagement and persistence) that are now monitored and modulated through large-scale educational assessments in an effort to improve investments in human capital. The paper provides a brief mapping of the territorialities of human capital through analysis of developments in education policy since the 1960s, focusing on market decodings of desire, the axiomatisation of desire through the quantification of productive capacities, and State interventions to reterritorialise desire for the self-appreciation of one’s economic value. Through this discussion, the paper aims to show how schizoanalysis, understood as metamodelling (Guattari 2013), might be taken up as a methodological strategy in education policy studies to enable a reading of how economic and psychological models contribute to the production of human capital as a subjective form (Feher 2009).1 In the final sentences of Postscript on Control Societies, Deleuze (1995: 182) observes that ‘Many young people have a strange craving to be “motivated,” they’re always asking for special courses and continuing education’. Deleuze was writing about control societies at the beginning of a new post-Cold War era for education policy, during which the rise