"There is no alternative?” Uno sguardo genealogico al futuro della valutazione

Since the 80s the neoliberal governmentality focused on freedom impressed imposing transformations in the field of public policies. This required and still requires not an overcoming of the theory of the disciplinary power - as some time it has also been suggested, too hasty and against the very Foucault’s indications - but rather a reconsideration of this power and its apparatus in a more encompassing governmentality perspective. In my view, the analysis of the evaluation dispositif is the way for such a reconsideration. Especially – but not only – in the field of education, evaluation is one of the most striking innovation in exercise and legitimacy of power of the last thirty years. The characteristic trait of the new neoliberal power is the definition of a numericized environment, in which free actors, forced to choose, can govern themselves through numbers. Calculation does not merely inform, but reorganizes reality, reformats it. In this "digital government", it is no longer a question of the classical activity of statistical quantification as a support for the exercise of power, but rather of quantification becoming the very source of political decisions and personal choices. The new control procedures thus go far beyond the traditional review of legality. Their point is not to verify and monitor individuals and organizations, but more radically to build them through verification and control. In particular, the evaluation practices in the field of education and research provide a privileged point of view on this new form of social engineering. As a total control technology, where everything is “data” to be accounted for in an objective way, it corresponds to a systematic destruction of the judgment as a critical capacity to discern, totally conforming to the new model of “algorithmic governmentality” (Rouvroy - Berns).