The performative power of (non)human agency assemblages of soft governance

Abstract

This article addresses recent transformations of European education governance, in particular, the ways in which the parliamentary steering chain has been supplemented with an incentive-based mode of soft governance. The article argues that this new soft governance makes use of technologies that are designed to measure performance. In order to capture the impact of these tools, the article suggests that new performativity-based approaches to policy and reform studies have been introduced that take inspiration in the turn to materiality. The article seeks to provide a theoretical overview of these performative approaches and examines the performative effects of data visualizations and the way the governing through (data) visualizations become a governing through affects. The article explores how affects, such as shame, may be seen as an effect of certain modes of soft governance that may operate by concealing their own traces by making people and nations voluntarily co-opt themselves into the governing processes.

Keywords:

• Performativity
• new materialism
• soft governance
• affective economies
• data visualizations
• Karen Barad
• Jacques Derrida