Conference Agenda

The notion of prefiguration—the practice of organizing and acting in ways that embody the future society one strives to create—has become increasingly dominant in the field of political philosophy in recent years (Cooper, 2017; Raekstad, 2020; Swain, 2019). Though it has originated in anarchist thought and initially was mainly associated with utopian perspectives (Franks 2018; Cooper 2014), it has gradually developed into a much more comprehensive framework for both the depiction of specific political struggles, and a broader understanding of political action in general (Monticelli, 2022). This transformation occurred to a large extent due to the recognition that prefiguration is a far more everyday practice than is commonly assumed. Many actors within the political field frequently behave as though they possess authorities and powers that, in practice, they do not yet hold, in order to render those authorities and powers effective in practice and socially recognized. An analysis of this prevalent phenomenon of prefiguration is therefore essential to political thought, as it enables a comprehensive account of our political reality, and a deeper understanding of many processes that, in practice, shape our life-in-common.

In light of this understanding, reflection on prefiguration appears no less important to the field of education. A substantial portion of educational practice operates precisely through prefigurative means, seeking to shape future reality by acting as if the world we aspire to see around us were already the world in which we in fact live. Education for democracy, education for the values of justice and equality, and education for responsible leadership are all frequently carried out by encouraging younger generations to behave as though social reality already corresponds to what we wish it to be, on the assumption that such action may ultimately bring that reality into being. For this reason, the relative scarcity of engagement with the phenomenon of prefiguration in educational thought is surprising. Aside from a small number of studies that analyze concrete phenomena through the use of this conceptual framework (e.g., McCowan, 2010; Fink, 2024; Ashar, 2022), there is little systematic research that addresses the deep relationship between prefiguration and education.

This paper seeks to address precisely this gap by offering a systematic reflection on the significance and potential contribution of examining education through a prefigurative perspective. It explores the new insights that a prefigurative standpoint may bring to an understanding of education itself as a field of knowledge and practice, and, equally importantly, how engagement with prefiguration enables a rethinking and reformulation of education’s relationship to various domains, including performativity, play, aesthetics, and political action. In order to illustrate the possibilities inherent in this renewed perspective, the study focuses on two examples of educational thought drawn from different intellectual traditions, demonstrating how the proposed perspective contributes to the discussion in each case. The first example is John Dewey’s educational thought, particularly as articulated in his seminal work Democracy and Education (Dewey, 1916). The second is the thought of Jacques Rancière, especially in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière, 1991), which offers an original and compelling account of education and its entanglement with the political space of our shared life.

To learn is to change what it means to know. Learning is not the acquisition of content but an individuation process in which the learner emerges with and within an environment (Sauvagnargues, 2012). Deleuze (2007) reminds us that individuation is not reducible to a subject or a form; it can be a landscape, an hour of the day, a fragment of life. Learning is therefore a rhythmic, vibrant multiplicity in which bodies, materials, affects and temporalities co‑compose. To learn with rather than from shifts pedagogy away from performance and mastery toward events of becoming.

Consider the room in which learning unfolds. Its walls, air ducts, chairs, acoustics and temperatures do not merely surround us; they participate in our becoming. They create openings and closures, proximities and distances, possibilities for belonging or withdrawal. When I meet your eyes, when a smile is exchanged, when a hand reaches out in greeting, these micro‑events are not social niceties but processes of learning to know, cracks through which imagination enters.

Guattari (2006) argues that desire is not the property of a subject but a production of signs within machinic assemblages. Entering a room is therefore an encounter with a field of signs: trust, risk, escape routes, invitations, tensions, potentials for collaboration. A classroom is not a neutral container but a relationscape in which bodies and materials co‑produce conditions for learning.

Rather than tracing evidence or seeking stable outcomes, pedagogy can be understood as the mapping of rhizomatic multiplicities, relational events that form machinic assemblages (Manning, 2009). A moving body enables thought in act; what moves as a body returns as the movement of thought. A smile, a voice, a gesture are not expressions of an inner state but forces that matter in the individuation of listeners, speakers and critical subjects. How a body perceives a room becomes part of what it is able to think.

Becoming emerges through intra‑actions when biogrammatic forces meet. Manning (2009) writes that we move not to occupy space but to create it; each step gathers force for becoming. Desire for individuation becomes desire to learn, not productivity but production, not representation but creation. To learn is to act as if nothing were self‑evident, to wonder that there is being (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994).

The room itself participates in this process. Heat, cold, echoes, muffled sounds, these tactile‑optical forces shape the event of learning. They are not background conditions but affective intensities that open or close possibilities for thought.

Deleuze (2003) distinguishes between probability, the calculable, and chance, which is a non‑scientific, non‑aesthetic choice. Concepts belong to this latter domain. They are not given but created; they posit themselves (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Conceptualisation is therefore inseparable from sensation. Sensations activate memories, embodied, implicit, unconscious, that become recollection‑images (Deleuze, 1997/1989). These images are virtual until actualised by perception; they do not deliver the past but recompose it in the present event.

Bodily memories emerge autobiographically and become implicit memories (Damis, 2022). They appear as sensations that actualise emotions, like fear, joy or sorrow, which in turn shape perception. Sensation affects thought diagrammatically (Williams, 2008). In this interplay of differentiation and connectivity, rhizomes of perception‑images resist, shift and emerge. Rhythm becomes differentiation; new thought‑images become possible.

Learning, then, is the creation of concepts and emotions as forces of recollection: a co‑composition of bodies, environments and events. To learn is to become with the world, to allow the environment to actualise new possibilities for thought.

In his criticism of the limitations of evidence-based education, Gert Biesta (2010) insisted on the need for a different view of educational professionalism; this view should not be based on an idolatry of the vocabulary of “efficacy” and “causal connections” but rather on the recognition of the “noncausal nature of educational interaction” (p. 36). While in later publications his stance increasingly moved towards an existential understanding (see the notion of “professional subjectification” [Biesta, 2014]), in Good Education in an Age of Measurement his position was still imbued with Deweyan motifs.

In this paper, I will resume this Deweyan thread and inflect it in the vindication of a non-reductionist mindset by focusing on a specific domain, that of inclusive education. While developing a theoretical argument, this paper also draws on my experience as a practitioner in a University Centre for the Inclusion of Students with Disabilities, where I worked in an interdisciplinary team together with psychologists, bioengineers, and assistive technology specialists. In this sense, this contribution also offers an argument in favour of what I call the inclusion–interdisciplinarity chiasma.

My argument develops in two steps. First, I elicit a specific Deweyan understanding of inclusion, also with reference to its operational meaning. Although Dewey’s theorization of democracy still constitutes a fundamental horizon of meaning for reflection on inclusion, my inquiry does not take its point of departure from his canonical texts, such as Democracy and Education. Rather, it turns to an essay from his later work in which he investigates the notion of “the social” as “the inclusive philosophic idea,” as the title itself indicates. Notably, this is the only text in Dewey’s entire oeuvre whose title contains a term referring to inclusion, even when the titles of sections and chapters are taken into account.

The Deweyan paper engages with questions of “metaphysics” and philosophical method but this should not sound odd in the context of my contribution. Indeed, as Dewey repeatedly emphasized, even the most abstract and seemingly convoluted metaphysical speculations take their impetus from the context of experience and—if appropriately reinterpreted—can provide guidance for orientation at the level of lived practice.

By drawing upon his attack on empiricist and reductionist conceptions, there will emerge the idea of what I will call the logic of inclusive transaction, viz. the idea that reductionism is per se a factor of exclusion, even where it presents itself with the neutral gait of scientific démarche. If it is not a stage within a broader process of inquiry, it tends to sanction ontological rifts and chasms, to carve out a “reality” from the nexus of its relations and consign it to a substantively empty isolation.

As noted above, while starting at a purely theoretical level, my analysis refers to the activity of practitioners in the field of inclusive education, helping to define the role of expert knowledge and professional competences in interventions with people with disabilities, as well as to clarify both the limitations and the potential of the personalization of intervention.

Moreover, Dewey’s specific view of “the social”—which is, in some respects, Latourian avant la lettre—is mobilized to undergird the case for a transition from the classic social model of disability to the bio-psycho-social model. In addition, a Deweyan understanding of the latter (and of the related logic of the International Classification of Functioning [WHO, 2000]) is proposed. The Deweyan transactional–inclusive logic thus functions, it will be argued, as a device capable of strengthening certain achievements of the social model while avoiding some of its simplifying drifts.