Somatic multiplicities: The microbiome-gut-brain axis and the neurobiologized educational subject

Abstract

Therapeutic translations of the microbiome-gut-brain (MGB) axis are reconstructing the educational subject in a manner amenable to Foucauldian analysis. Yet, at the same time, under the sway of MGB research social scientists are taking a biosocial turn that threatens the integrity of Foucault’s historicizing philosophical project. Meeting that challenge head-on, this article argues that the MGB axis augments the neurobiological constitution of the educational subject by means of a dietetic mode of subjectivation. Absent a pedagogical element, there is a hollowness to critical academics’ claims that holobiontic self-conceptions springing from the axis can elicit a resistant subjectivity. Though wild pedagogies might inform a resistant tactics of the self, contemporary self-technologies are – as Foucault has taught us – a pale shadow of the ancient Greek conception of dietetics as an holistic, embodied and ensouled practice. At the intersection between the disciplinary apparatuses of criminology and education, therefore, the MGB-driven biosocial turn unambiguously reinforces the social control function of schooling.

Keywords:

• Biosocial
• gut-brain axis
• dietetic subjectivation
• Foucault
• microbiome
• neurobiologization

Introduction

The tendency towards neurocentrism within the social imaginary has been well-documented (Sampson, 2017; Vidal & Ortega, 2017). In the neurocentric view, to have a mind is simply to have a brain. As one critic, the philosopher Markus Gabriel puts it, the proposition is that ‘the mind is identical to the brain’ (Gabriel, 2019, p. 7). Within education, the turn to cognitive neuroscience has arguably reinforced the assertion, whether explicit or implicit, of this identity relation (Cuthbert, 2015). Yet the assumption that each human person has just one brain, with which the mind is supposedly identical, is being challenged by the neurobiology-driven second brain hypothesis. Popularized in the late 1990s by the American neurogastroenterologist Michael D. Gershon’s bestselling book The Second Brain, the central idea is ‘that the language spoken by the cells of the enteric nervous system is rich and brainlike in its complexity’ (Gershon, 1999, p. 9).

The enteric nervous system is the neuronal circuitry that regulates the intestinal tract. Through the activity of microorganisms that comprise the gut microbiome, communication between that system and the brain is ‘bidirectional’ (Fasano & Flaherty, 2021, p. 383). Inferences drawn from murine (mouse) research done around ten years ago—epitomized by an article evocatively titled ‘mind-altering microorganisms’ (Cryan & Dinan, 2012)—are suggestive of biochemically rich gut-brain connections. In the ensuing decade, there has been an explosion of work on gut microbes that make up the human microbiome and the microbiome-gut-brain (MGB) axis (Basso et al., 2022).

The philosophical implications of the MGB axis are significant. As Penelope Ironstone points out, the notion that our inner-situated microbes—of which we are not consciously aware—might be surreptitiously pulling our cognitive and emotional strings challenges the ‘autonomy and sovereignty of the self’ (Ironstone, 2019, p. 334). Given that human gut microbiota are elementary forms of life, arguably the MGB axis is more of a threat to humanistic conceptions of singular selfhood than the naturalistic ‘self is a brain’ notion that Gabriel (2019) roundly contradicts. Indeed, the MGB axis has breathed new life into the longstanding claim that, as hosts to an array of microorganisms, we are ‘holobionts’ (Simon et al., 2019). That is to say, we symbiotically depend on other forms of life.

Taking a broadly Foucauldian perspective, this article turns the philosophical dial towards education. It examines the potential MGB-derived, emotion targeting therapeutic applications have to create school-level dietetic forms of self-scrutiny and, more broadly, to usher in a nutritional regime of biopolitical control that zeroes in on young people’s emotions. The first section responds to the challenge, driven by MGB axis research, which the breakdown of disciplinary boundaries between the life sciences and the social sciences presents—directly or indirectly—to Foucault’s historicizing mode of philosophical analysis. In the second section, I show how recent scientific findings on the mechanisms of gut-brain communication and their impact on the emotions are being therapeutically cashed out through psychobiotics. Looking at education, the neurobiologizing effects of this therapeutic modality are examined in the third section. The fourth section considers whether the dietetically reconstituted educational subject is necessarily quiescent. In the final section I conclude that, far from being an historical curiosity, Foucault’s perceptive writings on ancient Greek dietetics are more relevant than ever.

Foucault, microbiota and the biosocial challenge

The increasing salience of the somatic in Foucauldian thought both anticipates MGB research on the biological substrate of emotional and mental life, and is susceptible to being intellectually captivated by it. Though there are many points of contact between Foucault and the topic at hand, the somatic theme merits close attention since studies of the gut-brain axis have the potential not just to threaten philosophically dominant conceptions of embodiment but to shunt Foucault aside.

In lectures given at the College Dè France in the early 1970s, and subsequently published as Psychiatric Power, Foucault uses the concept of ‘somatic singularities’—the biological bedrock of individuated bodies—as the lynchpin between the historically contingent ‘subject-function’ (Foucault, 2006, p. 44), on one side, and the apparatus of schooling that institutionally serves to discipline and to ‘fix individuals’ (Foucault, 2006, p. 81), on the other side. Discipline-based knowledge then ‘fastens the subject-function to the somatic singularity’ (Foucault, 2006, p. 55). Though much insight into subjecthood flowed from this perspective, two comparatively recent developments question Foucault’s bracketing of the terms ‘somatic’ and ‘singularity’.

First, as Hook (2007, p. 55) points out, Foucault seems to assume or require for explanatory purposes the body as a ‘singular physicality in space and time’—an ontologically prior stable body, that is—to serve ‘as an irreducible anchoring point of political effects’. For example, Discipline and Punish shows how ‘the body is inserted into a set of practices’ (May, 2005, p. 524). The same can be said of the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1990, 1986). Yet, in line with processual themes within the philosophy of biology (Dupré, 2012), some philosophers argue that our dependence upon gut microbes mean the body is not singular or discrete, and that the boundaries between it and other entities are vague (Sylvia, 2022). As a result, the body supposedly is ‘unstable’ (Palsson, 2016). All such arguments are philosophically and scientifically contentious. As David Oderberg, the philosopher, insightfully observes:

My gut bacteria and I live in a symbiotic relationship, but it would be plain bad science to say that the bacteria were literally part of me – organs like my kidney or liver, or parts like my skin or blood cells. (Oderberg, 2021, p. 23).

It is hard to argue coherently that gut microbes are any kind of element of the body, such that it becomes ‘less of a unitary whole’ (Bull, 2017, p. 218). Due to this whole issue suffering from philosophical ‘unclarity’ (Steward, 2020, p. 55), terminological precision is important. When I use the term ‘somatic multiplicity’ I do not mean that the human body itself is literally pluralistic but rather that it hosts multiple other forms of life, some of which are on our inside surfaces (e.g. the gut lining), but none of which are actual components of our bodies. Even if microbes were to be regarded as body parts, it is obviously fallacious to assert that, because the body’s parts comprise a whole, the parts themselves are bodies. For these reasons, by my lights, Foucault has not lost the bedrock of the discrete and individuated physical body.

Second, as Nikolas Rose has demonstrated, the last few decades have witnessed the unfolding of a ‘somaticization’ process whereby ‘desires, moods, and discontents’ that ‘previously have been mapped onto a psychological space’ are increasingly pinned to ‘one particular organ of the body—the brain’ (Rose, 2007, p. 188). These mental states are now being mapped onto the wider body, through the gut microbiome. Neither this mapping nor the body’s symbiotic dependence on microbiota provide reasons to throw the Foucauldian baby out with the bathwater, but this is precisely what social scientists entranced by the MCB axis are doing. Without a backward glance to Foucault, even as astute a critic as Rose now sides with sociologists who have a biologizing agenda. Displaying a newfound interest in the microbiome—a topic largely absent from his earlier writings—Rose recently co-authored a monograph that advocates for a neurobiology-informed ‘vital sociology’ (Rose & Fitzgerald, 2022, p. 16). Vital or not, mainstream sociology is a prime vector through which MGB research is driving the biologization of social science. Termed the biosocial turn by its sociological advocates, chief amongst whom is Maurizio Meloni, this redirection is easily summarized: as epigenetics erodes the boundary between biological and social processes (Meloni, 2016), the primary task of social science is tracing biochemical pathways and gene expression in the interaction between the human organism and the environment (Chung et al., 2016). Amply demonstrated by a recent publication (Ignatow, 2022), within sociology the MGB axis is at the forefront of the biosocial endeavour. Through the collaborative efforts of Deborah Youdell and Martin Lindley, an educational sociologist and a biologist respectively, education itself is poised to take a biosocial turn (Youdell & Lindley, 2019).

My point is this: at exactly the same time as MGB disciplinary knowledge is reconstructing the educational subject in a way that is amenable to Foucauldian analysis, the sociological aping of biological science is calling into question the tenability of a Foucault-style analysis of the self and subjectivation. What one encounters in the biosocial literature is a conceptual framing of ‘self’ through the neuroscientistic terminology of brain regions, neuroanatomy and neuropsychological concerns with ‘emotional arousal’ and ‘cognitive overload’ (Bone, 2016, p. 251). As a recent Janus-faced monograph by Meloni illustrates, the biosocial challenge to Foucault operates mostly by stealth. On the one hand, Meloni (2019) presses Foucault into service to provide an intellectually respectable genealogy of biological plasticity. On the other hand, Meloni’s analysis has all the hallmarks of unbridled biologization—which Foucault both warns against and provides the analytic tools to repel (Revel, 2014). According to Meloni (2019, p. 160), what ‘ceaselessly sculpts’ self-identity—in the first and the final instances—are neither the social affordances of culture and language nor the discursive practices and institutional apparatuses Foucault is concerned with, but rather heritable biological baggage. Prime amongst this is ‘paternal sperm physiology’ and ‘the maternal microbiome via the placenta or breastmilk’ (Meloni, 2019, p. 160). Echoing Meloni’s attempts to mitigate the reductive biologism of such statements, Rose and Fitzgerald (2022) suggest that identifying ‘the precise biosocial mechanisms’ of human development ‘from conception’ will somehow reduce ‘sociopolitical inequality, disadvantage, and injustice’ (p. 32). This is nothing more than a promissory note written to render biosocial claims forever immune to critique, whether Foucauldian or otherwise.

Turning the Foucauldian spotlight back on the biosocial scholars, in their hands the human microbiome is a bio-scientific truthmaker. As a truth-producing mechanism, its effects include sheeting moral responsibility back to biological mothers for the dietary intake needed to ensure sufficient microbial colonization of children. Furthermore, the biosocial search for ‘somatic markers of truth’—for example, microbiomic signatures—is wedded, through policy and pharmacological interventions, to an ‘anaemic and politically contained version of the social’ (Gillies et al., 2016, p. 219). Combating microbiomic biocentrism, gendered responsibilization, and the regressive style of politics that results is precisely the point of this present article. Foucault supplies the genealogical resources for this task.

There is a stark contrast between contemporary individualized dietetic self-monitoring and the picture Foucault (1990) paints of dietetics in ancient Greece as ‘the practice of regimen as an art of living’ (p. 108). This socioculturally embedded set of practices integrated sex, exercise and eating. Since dietetics as ‘regimen addressed itself to the soul’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 107), for the Greeks subject-constitution was not reducible to one’s relation to the body. The current juncture could not be more different. The physicalism and biologism of our intellectual culture run counter to classical hylomorphism (that is, the body-soul composite), so anything resembling the social practices of regimen have no philosophical-anthropological foundation. Indeed, as I will argue, under neoliberalism there are few safeguards against a reductionistic, privatized and self-responsibilizing cashing out of the MGB axis’s educational implications. I turn now to identify the psychobiotic content that the MGB axis imparts to the biosocial container, before questioning whether the resulting dietetically reconstituted educational subject can escape it.

The MGB axis and psychobiotics

Scientists who trace the intricate efferent (brain to gut) and afferent (gut to brain) pathways within the MGB axis have shown how the brain influences the gut, and the gut—in turn—can potentially act upon the brain to influence both cognition and mood (Appleton, 2018). The gut’s endocrine system is one of the afferent pathways, operating through the medium of the vagus (tenth cranial) nerve, by which the microbiota communicate with the brain (Martin et al., 2018). For example, microbiota metabolites—including short chain fatty acids, secondary bile acids and tryptophan metabolites—diffuse through gut-endocrine cells to activate the vagus nerve’s abundant afferent fibres by means of ‘cell-mediated sensing’ (Bonaz et al., 2018, p. 2).

Significantly, gut bacteria can also act upon the body’s neurotransmitters—its so-called chemical messengers—which travel across synaptic connections between neurons. Among these are serotonin and dopamine, two of the brain’s ‘feel-good’ chemicals that affect mood. Notably, microbiota directly influence the production of dopamine, as well as gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and norepinephrine (Fukushima, 2022); they also have the capacity to alter serotonin levels (Strandwitz, 2018). Since serotonin and dopamine cannot cross the blood-brain barrier, the brain synthesizes these from diet-derived neurotransmitter precursors—tryptophan and tyrosine respectively—that can cross it, the metabolization of which is directly influenced by the gut microbiome (Chen et al., 2021).

The lion’s share of serotonin lies in the gastrointestinal tract. Tryptophan is synthesized in enterochromaffin cells in the gut lining, but merely increasing the gut-based production of serotonin does not automatically increase levels of serotonin in the brain (Caspani & Swann, 2019). It is unclear as to whether two other key mood-affecting neurotransmitters, glutamate and GABA, get transported from the gut to the brain at all. As the brain’s main excitatory neurotransmitter (Zhou & Danbolt, 2014), the free amino acid glutamate is widely available in the gut both from food and the bacterial microbiota that produce it (Baj et al., 2019). Though, at neurotoxic levels, excess glutamate is exited from the brain through the endothelial cells of the blood-brain barrier, it cannot routinely cross the barrier in the opposite direction (Zaragozá, 2020). Like glutamate, the main inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA is also produced by gut bacteria (Chen et al., 2021). While there is no definitive evidence that GABA can cross the non-disrupted blood-brain barrier in humans (Hepsomali et al., 2020), the role of the vagus nerve as a pathway for mood-affecting gut metabolites associated with GABA to be transported to the brain has been noted (Fukushima, 2022).

From the preceding review it is clear that the science of the MBG axis’s neurochemical pathways is by no means settled. Nevertheless, psychological and social scientists are pressing into service the supposed mood-enhancing, neuroactive properties of psychobiotics as a way of harnessing the MGB axis for therapeutic purposes (Allen et al., 2017). Initially defined as a specific type of live organism probiotic that alters gut bacteria, psychobiotics now encompass prebiotics, postbiotics and symbiotics (Long-Smith et al., 2020). Postbiotics are short-chain fatty acids (e.g. butyric acid, propionic acid and acetic acid), which are generated from fermentation of prebiotic dietary fibre; synbiotics combine prebiotics and postbiotics (Long-Smith et al., 2020).

In the case of children and young people, psychobiotic therapy takes it cue from the role afforded to the microbiome in the field of preventive health. A recent text calls for ‘harnessing emerging data’ on the topic of ‘the microbiome to maximize children’s wellbeing’ (McClafferty, 2017, p. 217). Note here that the emphasis is not just on the treatment of illness and mood disorders, but rather on fostering good health. One study of young children describes ‘supplementation with psychobiotics’ as ‘a promising emerging approach to promote cognitive, emotional, and neural development’ (Cohen Kadosh et al., 2021, p. 17). Yet, there is a caveat. As one systematic review puts it, ‘the current causal picture…of microbiota and mental health’ is ‘sketchy’ (Hooks et al., 2019, p. 11). A recent meta-analysis that focuses both on physical and mental health concludes that ‘there is still a lack of direct evidence linking specific changes in gut flora to health outcomes’ (Chang et al., 2022, p. 12). It is one thing to say that a hefty mental health price has been paid due to the Cartesian legacy of separating mind and body (Maté, 2022). It is quite another to proceed from denying dualism to promoting psychobiotic therapy for members of the younger generation.

Neurobiologization and school-level dietetic subjectivation

My primary concern in this section is to disclose how MGB-derived disciplinary knowledge is responsibilizing the educational subject, in both familiar and unfamiliar ways, while simultaneously establishing new technologies of power that target young people. Despite the MGB axis receiving no attention in Jan De Vos’s landmark critique of educational neuroscience, The Metamorphoses of the Brain, it supplies a helpful starting point. De Vos (2016) argues that the dominance of the discipline of psychology within education is being challenged, though not yet displaced, by neurology. Increasingly the educational subject is exhorted to understand to improve themselves—or their brain—through neurological science; the genealogical outcome is the ‘neurologised subject’ (De Vos, 2016, p. 40). The psychology of educating the emotions is giving way a situation in which ‘the brain itself has become the very target of educational transformation’ (De Vos, 2016, p. 18). Even though psychobiotics target complex bodily systems and thus are not brain-bound, they still might be regarded as extending the neurologization process—namely, by inverting the extended mind thesis and extending cognition back inwards and downwards from the brain to the gut (Boem et al., 2021). On balance, however, as therapeutic attention shifts away from the cerebral cortex to the gut-brain interplay as the primary somatic target of emotion management, the concept of the neurologized subject is becoming less adequate. Given the deep somatic roots of the MGB axis afferent pathways, in my view, psychobiotic therapy is turning the neurologized educational subject into a neuro­biologized subject.

MGB-derived therapeutics still have one thing in common with the emotionally enhancing positive ‘psy’ techniques such as school-based mindfulness training. To recapitulate: psychobiotic therapy does not stop at the treatment of existing psycho-emotional problems (e.g. anxiety and depression) in children and young people. Focusing specifically on this group, a recent nutritional bio-psy study advocates for more research to support ‘psychobiotic interventions’, the purpose of which is ‘to enhance cognitive functioning and emotional behavior’ (Basso et al., 2022). Like the self-therapeutic techniques associated with positive psychology, these interventions seek to augment emotional stability and well-being by alleviating emotional stress and reducing the risk of depression (Simkin, 2019). Unlike positive psychology, however, the proposed interventions are microbiome-targeting and, therefore, firmly somatic in nature—psychobiotics, their precursors, and food supplements. Since the microbiome’s composition is nutritionally alterable, the net result is not ‘a neurologised subject in charge of managing its brain’ (De Vos, 2016, p. 40). Rather, it is a fully neurobiologized educational subject who is responsible for managing their microbiota. As Grace Lucas insightfully observes:

if it is under the individual’s control to manage their microbiome, and this is what affects mood and mental health, then the implication is that it is the job of the individual to fix it when that mood is low (Lucas, 2018, p. 3).

Under the logic of enhancement, as distinct from treatment, the individual has the responsibility to learn how to manage their microbiota and thus to stop themselves from experiencing emotional disquiet in the first place. For children and young people, shouldering this responsibility does not require ingesting dietary supplements. Similar to adults, an alternative is dietary change accomplished by eating so-called ‘functional foods’, replete with psychobiotics, such as yoghurt, soybean products and other fermented foods (Oroojzadeh et al., 2022).

MGB axis research and its translational corollary, psychobiotic therapy, further reconstruct the educational subject in line with the demands of neoliberal governmentality. Under neoliberalism, as Sam Binkley masterfully demonstrates, subjects are exhorted to become ‘emotional entrepreneurs’ (Binkley, 2014, p. 133). For the educational subject the point is to future proof themselves, as they proceed into the workforce, from the emotional consequences of failure that inevitably results from facing harsh neoliberal market circumstances. Now, the school is an important site for the production of the enterprising and emotionally resilient subjects that neoliberalism prizes (Reveley, 2016). To connect this institutional function to psychobiotics is not to draw a long bow. Research already shows the benefits of giving probiotics to young children in nursery schools as a means of preventing physical illness (Merenstein et al., 2011). Educational initiatives that prize proper nutrition are one thing; inculcating emotion-altering habits is quite another since it crosses into the wider politics of emotions (Jackson, 2020). Yoking diet to a naïve, implicit virtue theory of ‘good habits’, bioscience researchers stress the importance of the MGB axis for academic success by children and adolescents (Ekman et al., 2022). When juxtaposed to behavioural health economists pushing for neoliberal nudging monetary incentives to inculcate healthy eating habits at school (Loewenstein et al., 2016), the implications are clear. Through nutrition classes and school-based healthy eating programs, it is but a short step to psychobiotic-laden functional food-eating becoming curricularized as ‘a kind of personal management of risk’ (Crawford et al., 2010, p. 756).

Self-therapeutic dietetic practices are poised to operate in tandem with biopolitical surveillance and control achieved through dietetic programming in schools and microbiomic profiling. New genomic sequencing techniques enable the characteristic microbiomic signatures not just of individuals but of entire social groups to be rapidly identified (D’Argenio, 2018). The gut microbial attributes of particular population segments are thus made knowable, their risk profiles interperable and administrable. Accordingly, criminologists are using the MGB axis to zero in on the younger generation through reductionistic, biosocial—and therefore socio-politically regressive—explanations for, and solutions to, behaviour deemed to be ‘antisocial’ (Gato et al., 2018). Stemming from the comparatively new field of biosocial criminology (Posick, 2018), the idea of targeted school-level interventions aimed at reducing disadvantaged youth’s purportedly deviant tendencies is gaining currency. This is epitomized by a recent proposal to make ‘small tweaks to preschool or school diets’ and ‘microbiome-friendly nutritional supplementation’ ultimately directed at ‘preventing delinquency later in life’ (Tcherni‐Buzzeo, 2023, p. 23). The upshot is the positioning of the neurobiologized educational subject as an agent of deviance in need of anticipatory dietetic correction.

Holobionts, wild pedagogy, and tactics of the resistant self

Alongside a MGB-based biosocial project with a biopolitical social control agenda are duties for individual dietetic self-improvement that arguably dovetail with neoliberal imperatives and thus run counter to collective, oppositional politics. As a forming ground for socio-politically resistant subjectivities, can education blunt these developments? In a cognate article on the body’s connective tissues, Weig (2020, p. 105) argues—correctly in my view—that therapeutically focusing on embodiment through the practice of yoga and mindfulness lacks the ‘sensible togetherness’ that collective politics requires, but that ‘a different bodily awareness of (internal) alterity’ has the potential to move beyond individual subjectivity to the collective. Conceivably, one might obtain this awareness from learning about the gut microbiome. The MGB axis produces new disciplinary knowledge about the subject, but it can also give rise to self-knowledge about our holobiontic nature. Some argue that reappropriating the biological concept of the holobiont provides the resources needed to reanimate critical analysis and, in turn, to enhance ecological awareness. Here are three examples. First, understanding our microbial co-dependence ‘surely increases the stake we have in our environment’ (Thwaites, 2020, p. 94). Second, if we recognize that bodies and ecosystems have a commonality as interdependent ‘dynamic and unstable ecologies’ (Lorimer, 2017, p. 28), this can benefit nature conservation by increasing hospitality in ‘human and nonhuman relations’ (p. 41). Third, ‘the microbial common or multitude’ has the capacity to generate ‘an affirmative microbiopolitics’ that can ‘open the door to the formation of new global communities’ (Ironstone, 2019, p. 335).

Absent a liberatory pedagogical component, however, the preceding claims are hollow. Having an abstract attitude about the body’s microbial dependence does not automatically lead to being practically politically oriented to engaging in environmental collective action. Somatic multiplicities are not the same thing as multitude-mobilizing subjectivities. The missing link is self-technologies that might enable the constitution of ecologically concerned, resistant subjects in the first place. Here I advert to William F. Connelly’s reading of Foucault on the distinction between subjectivating self-therapy and creative, self-constituting practices (Connolly, 2013). For Connelly, there are broad parallels between creativity in nature and creativity in micropolitics. Mobilizing ‘a complex pluralist assemblage’ of sufficient scale and inclusiveness for meaningful action on environmental challenges such as climate change requires a novel ‘combination of tactics of the self, micropolitics, and militant macropolitics’ (Connolly, 2017, p. 206).

To foster a sense of microbial commonality one must first escape subjectivation through ‘tactical work upon the self by the self’ (Connolly, 2013, p. 128). Conceivably, a critical pedagogy might play a role in transmuting dietetic self-therapy into artfully cultivating a tactics of the self that connects the dependence of our inner bodily functions on microorganisms to the relational dependencies between our bodies and other entities in our environing contexts. One promising lead is the wild pedagogy movement (Jickling, 2018). Singularly focused on heightening awareness of the ecological crisis in the Anthropocene, wild-type educational strategies include ‘listening to our own bodies and those others around us’ in the manner of ‘a meditative practice’ (Blenkinsop et al., 2022, p. 41). There is complementarity between wild pedagogy and a proposal by two rhetoricians who encourage bodily experimentation in ‘skillful living with the microbiota’ (Kalin & Gruber, 2018, p. 272). This accords with the Foucauldian notion of embodied experiments that are simultaneously ‘new folds in the body/world nexus’ and ‘acts of political resistance’ (May, 2005, p. 527). Beyond rhetoric, however, Kalin and Gruber’s skillful experiments amount to little more than taking probiotics—which is educationally unhelpful as it regresses to the neoliberal imperative for dietetic self-improvement and risk management. In consequence, exactly what shape a truly wild pedagogical, microbiomic tactics of the self might take is an open question.

Conclusion

The new frontier of therapeutic emotional self-regulation in education is neither psychological (applying positive psychology principles and mindfulness) nor neurological (administering antidepressants), but rather neurobiological (psychobiotic and dietetic) in nature. As the afferent pathways between the gut and brain become markers of deviant identity and targets for school-based psychobiotic emotional regulation, the neurobiologization of the educational subject is likely to proceed apace. The dietetic corollary of this process is not just neoliberal responsibilized self-care but deviance prevention. At the disciplinary intersection between criminology and education, the biosocial turn reinforces the social control function of schooling. It is, therefore, a decidedly wrong turn.

Within education, the key to critical analysis of dietetic subjectivation is not biosocial but rather philosophical and genealogical. Early in the discussion of dietetics in volume two of the History of Sexuality, Foucault uncouples the ‘dietetic’ from the strictly ‘therapeutic’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 97). At present we are witnessing a recoupling of these approaches within an unreconstituted structural functionalist sociological and criminological view of the school as a site from which to socially control deviance. By contrast, as Foucault has taught us, for the ancient Greeks dietetics was ‘a whole manner of forming oneself as a subject’, spanning body and soul, thereby equipping oneself ‘for a rational mode of behaviour’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 108). Of course, this integral connection with self-formation is long lost. This is precisely why talk of encouraging the young to learn to live skilfully with their microbiome must be viewed with a degree of circumspection—the classical world culture that sustained dietetics as an holistic, embodied and ensouled practice no longer exists. For this reason, it remains to be seen whether artful dietetic self-technologies will arise to combat neoliberalism-reinforcing microbiomic technologies of power. Either way, hopefully this article will put philosophers of education at the forefront of efforts to tease out the educational implications of the MGB axis and thus to meet the biosocial challenge head-on.

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Notes on contributors

James Reveley

James Reveley is an Associate Professor in the School of Business at the University of Wollongong. His research interests include social media and digital labour, disaster capitalism, subjective aspects of neoliberalism, and the educational implications of epistemic presuppositionalism. His work has been published in a range of international journals including Gender, Work & Organization, Thesis 11, Science and Society, Human Relations, Policy Futures in Education, Enterprise and Society, and Philosophy of Management. He is currently engaged in research that seeks to identify new realist insights into the sociohistorical ontology of higher education organizations.