Governing the potentials of life itself? Interrogating the promises in affective educational leadership

This article critically explores how educational leadership is becoming increasingly affective in order to cultivate pupil potential and thereby meet the challenge of creating the best schools in the world. It critically analyses policy and handbook approaches to affective educational leadership technologies by showing the difficulty in keeping promises and by introducing the Massumian distinction between possibilities and potentiality. The analysis draws upon the notion of governmentality and the 'affective turn', and highlights affective, educational, leadership technologies as they appear in contemporary leadership handbooks in Denmark using four examples: (1) How school becomes the managed core of society. This reshapes educational leadership as onto-power, which means governing through ideas and materialities of perception and neurons. (2) How affectivity becomes synonymous with positive feelings, while more indeterminate parts of affectivity are neglected. (3) How educational leadership becomes a matter of governing the future through simulation and imagination. (4) How affective leadership is energised by a temporally and spatially structured bio-morality. I argue that such discourses tend to maintain the status quo rather than challenge basic premises and thereby, the edifying nature of the technologies paradoxically overshadows the possibilities promised by the technologies.