The Chilean Student Movement and the Bio-Politics of Existence: New Patterns of (re)Politicisation in a Post-Authoritarian Society

Abstract

This article analyses the specific forms of doing and building politics in the Chilean student movement, and through which, it becomes a key actor for mobilising (re)politicisation within a post-authoritarian democratic society. The bio-politics of existence – transforming life into political action – is central to understanding this role. The bio-politics of existence refers to the emergence of a new political subjectivity in the Chilean student movement engaging with new forms of (re)politicisation of everyday life and forms of egalitarian political relationships. The bio-politics of existence interweaves with self-transformation to constitute subjectivities that subvert neoliberal governmentalities. Learning through making mistakes is central for student activists in 2006 to (re)vision their political agency and animate, in 2011, a radical political imaginary of politics as being-in-common. The manifold forms of the bio-politics of existence in the Chilean student movement, from everyday activism to grassroots building network alliances – presupposing temporal contingencies to identity politics as marginal sites and spaces of resistance – unveil a rhizomatic growth of egalitarian, participatory politics through which the Chilean student movement transformed, from below, the character of politics and democracy in a society regarded as the first laboratory of neoliberalism.

1. Introduction

The depoliticisation of politics by the civic-military dictatorship was not only a symbolic discourse but also a practical one. Depoliticisation happened through the transformation of the city, the radical transformation of education and the depoliticisation of every sphere of our everyday lives. In a nutshell, it was a design oriented to depoliticise people.

(Bea, former constitutional delegate, Santiago de Chile, July 2022).

In the wake of a constitutional process set up in Chile in July 2021, which followed Chile’s nationwide uprising to fight against injustice and inequalities – in one of the very well-known institutional stable democracies in the region – Bea’s comment raises interesting questions in order to understand how (re)politicisation happens, and what features such a process within a neoliberal post-authoritarian society.

These questions are analysed through the case of the Chilean student movement, a collective actor that has become key for the transformation, from below, of the character of politics and democracy in a society regarded as ‘the first laboratory of neoliberalism’ [1]. The Chilean student movement must be seen in tandem with Latin American social movements mobilising – particularly since the decades of the 1990s onwards – against ‘dispossession, poverty and inequality that have flowed up in the region since the early 1980s’ [2]. As discussed in this article, the process of (re)politicisation in the Chilean student movement echoes ‘new forms of popular politics [that] politicise places, subjectivities, and social relations’ [3] and through which Latin American social movements seek to articulate their struggles for free education, housing, land, water and health.

It is argued that the Chilean student movement constitutes a remarkable example of the formation of a post-hegemonic ‘cultural politics’ [4] that sheds light on understanding what features the process of (re)politicisation in one of the most extreme forms of neoliberal state formation in the region. This article unfolds post-hegemonic cultural politics in the Chilean student movement by looking at the bio-politics of existence, that is, as transforming life itself into political action. The bio-politics of existence becomes central to the politicisation process within the Chilean student movement. It is featured as a rhizomatic growth of prefigurative egalitarian politics, which took place in all directions and ‘across different spaces and places where politics have not traditionally been produced’ ([5] p. 482).

Analysis on the impact the bio-politics of existence and diverse forms of (re)policitisation has had on ‘reinvention of politics’ [6, 7] does not, however, extend to the context of the recent waves of political mobilisations in Chile. Yet processes of (re)politicisation in the Chilean student have contributed a significant step towards understanding how social mobilisation ‘against a depoliticised social order’ ([8], p. 271) happened within a post-authoritarian neoliberal society. Such a process does not only encompass the development of a ‘radical democratic culture’ [9]; (re)politicisation continues to mean ‘a question of resonance’ [10] to contest the hegemony of neoliberalism.

The bio-politics of existence refers to an experiential process of doing politics differently. Bio-politics presupposes understanding the interrelationship between power, governmentality and resistance. Governmentality [11, 12] encompasses forms of self-regulation or technologies of the self [13] to produce a governable subject. In the case of the Chilean student movement, ‘the neoliberal free-market ideology that has dominated the most radical transformation the Chilean education system has undergone in the last 40 years’ ([5], p. 476) becomes the unique economic rationality that delineates the relation between subject and power, as well as the reciprocal constitution of power techniques and forms of knowledge. This article identifies neoliberal free-market ideology as the hegemony subverted by students’ activists and the milieu for new forms of political activism and (re)politicisation. Thus, attention draws to heterotopia [13], understood as ‘counter-sites’ in which the order of things is challenged ([14], p. 169). Throughout this article, heterotopias, in particular rhizomatic heterotopias – as ‘non-hierarchical, centreless, submerged forms of resistance’ ([14] p. 170) – are analysed through the lens of specific forms of doing and building politics within the Chilean student movement, entangled with temporal contingent forms of oscillating individual activism and collective mobilisation.

This article draws on my research on the geographies of the political construction of the Chilean student movement (See [15]). It builds upon 28 in-depth interviews with student activists collected in Santiago de Chile between June and November 2011. Informed constructivist theory, geographical information systems and Gephi were employed to build different levels of abstraction and produce an emergent inductive comparative analysis of the socio-spatial constitution of the Chilean student movement.

This article addresses the radical transformation of the Chilean education system in the last four decades. It revisits the roll-out of a neoliberal economic policy agenda in education as ‘the consensual governance’ [8], which fundamentally pursued a consistent expansion of neoliberal economic rationality in and through education. Then, it reflects on how the Chilean student movement sought to delineate contestation to the dominant discourse on education as an economic domain and towards rupturing this neoliberal order ‘by reclaiming education in its political dimension’ ([5], p. 476). This contestation denotes a process of emergence of forms of rhizomatic heterotopias – in particular during the 2006 school occupations – as politics grounded on daily life and located in the social sphere. Politics of everyday life not only becomes counter-hegemonic to ‘the post-democratic transition consensus around a reformed neoliberal market-driven education agenda’ ([5], p. 476) but also subverts the meaning and influence of politics tied to ‘the knowledge and practice of the old left’ ([16], p. 15). The latter encompasses forms of autonomous egalitarian political relationships as a process of (re)politicisation produced as forms of egalitarian politics that are ‘continually adapting to change contexts and conditions’ ([17], p. 76). What features this process unveils the capacity of the Chilean student movement to articulate the grievance for free public quality education for all as a cross-cutting social and consolidate prefigurative egalitarian politics as what features new forms of (re)politicisation in the Chilean student movement.

Then, the bio-politics of existence in the Chilean student is unfolded. It refers to a process of re(vision) through which former student activists locate their political activism on the margins. The margins become ‘a politics of location’ where student activists began their revision process as ‘radical creative space which affirms and sustains [their] subjectivity …and articulate their sense of world’ ([18], p. 153). Recognition of ‘learning through making mistakes’ (See [15]) is vital to the bio-politics of existence. It relates to both individual and collective identity processes by which student activists reframed their demand in spatial terms, that is, as a struggle to be resolved by the whole of society. Not only does the bio-politics of existence delineate new geographies of political activism, but also it directs at the movement efficacy by developing a rhizomatic resonance of free education as a cross-cutting demand. As such, the Chilean student movement sought to connect its demand for free public quality education for all to struggles led by social movements and civil society actors fighting against dispossession, poverty and inequalities entrenched in neoliberal agendas. This rhizomatic resonance constitutes a learning process within the Chilean student movement, and it connects with the possibility of articulating ‘convergence spaces’ [19], activating a ‘politics of mutual solidarity’ [17] and extending processes of (re)politicisation.

The article’s final section discusses the bio-politics of existence in a continuum for ‘radical political changes’ [20] in a post-2011 Chilean student movement scenario. It reflects on what features such a process and what mediates the potentiality of rhizomatic egalitarian politics to reinvent politics and push agendas for transforming democracy. The bio-politics of existence cannot be detached from the emergence of a neoliberal democratic political subjectivity produced through technologies of the self and governed by the principles of autonomy, individuality and choice [21]. This neoliberal democratic subjectivity encompasses a collective reflexive actor that recognises ‘the inescapable presence of difference … and pursuing ways of achieving unity in diversity’ ([22], p. 18). Thus, rhizomatic egalitarian politics marks out the possibility of the emergence of a popular civil society governed by certain neoliberal techniques of the self, associated with unfulfilled neoliberal promises, which simultaneously become the drivers for (re)politicisation characterised by temporal contingent forms of oscillating individual activism and collective mobilisation.

2. Bio-politics, governmentality and heterotopias

In Foucault’s work, the debate on the bio-politics is derived from the notion of biopower, understood as the practice and form of regulation of modern nation-states on subjects and their bodies [23]. Thus, Foucault’s notion of bio-politics refers to ‘a new technology of power … [that] exists at a different level, on a different scale, and [that] has a different bearing area, and makes uses of different instruments’ [24]. New technologies of power are inextricable linked to the concept of governmentality that ‘includes a wide range of control techniques that make subjects governable’ ([25], p. 814). Thus, bio-politics mediates a process of subjectification through power techniques and forms of knowledge production, operating directly as a form of ‘representation’ upon which ‘governments define a discursive field in which power is rationalised’ and through specific forms of ‘intervention … as political technologies’ ([26], p. 191).

In his 1979 Lectures, The Birth of the Biopolitics, governmentality assumes a central role in the analysis of neoliberalism, in particular German post-war liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School, acknowledged as its most radical form. In Foucault’s analysis, the distinction between government and governance draws attention to individual choice and government as ‘market governance’ [27]. Thus, bio-politics aims to regulate ‘forms of governance that encourage both institutions and individuals to conform to the norms of the market’ ([28], p. 12), with the market being an essential cornerstone of neoliberal modern techniques of governmentality.

In Foucault’s work, the actual way that power and neoliberal governmentality are distributed in societies is commonly seen in terms of the state as a ‘distinctive institutional structure’ [29], as a form of discourse, for example, ‘validation of knowledge’ organised around dynamics of ‘marketisation, performativity and enterprising individual’ ([30], p. 409), as self-control and regimes of power for families, children and households, to name a few. In other words, Foucault’s analysis is on government as ‘the conduct of conduct’ and as a term which ranges from ‘governing the self’ to ‘governing others’ [12].

The debate on principles such as autonomy, individuality and choice, ruling both technologies of the self and neoliberal governmentalities, draws attention to power, freedom and resistance and how their mutual interdependence is critical to the debate on governmentality. The production of subjectivities by neoliberal governmentality calls us to think about subjectivity as a site of struggle [31] to contest or escape norms mediated by bio-politics. In Foucault’s work, concepts such as power/knowledge, discourse, disciplinary and bio-power have long been used in ‘the debate about non-state and adversarial forms of politics’ [32, 33, 34, 35]. However, the debate on Foucault’s contribution to the field of power and resistance studies still needs to be expanded as it is argued that Foucault’s work primarily focuses on the regimes of power rather than on forms of resistance and alternative politics [32, 36].

This critique is addressed by exploring Foucault’s concept of heterotopia – understood as ‘counter-sites’ in which the order of things is challenged ([14], p. 169). Heterotopia refers to the concept of ‘counter-conducts’ [37]. It is also understood and framed as an analytical approach to looking at ‘the specific practices and rationalities of protests, which themselves work to constitute particular identities and subjectivities through the performance of dissent’ ([32], p. 236). It is argued that heterotopia constitutes spaces of alternative ordering that offer analytical utility for describing and comparing social movements and protests [14].

Foucault’s concept of heterotopia might encompass ‘juxtaposed several incompatible emplacements in a single real location; entail temporal discontinuity’ and therefore ‘being closed and isolated, yet open and penetrable’ ([14], p. 171). Heterotopias constitute experimental spaces that offer an ‘escape route from power’ and ‘lines of flight’ [29]. For Foucault, resistance is a practice exercised from many points and ‘spread over time and space at varying intensities, at times mobilising groups and individuals in a definite way’ [38].

Such potentiality of resistance, disruption and alternative order of things requires rendering visible ‘the neoliberal modes and technologies of governmentality’ ([31], p. 86). Nevertheless, debate on Foucault’s concept of resistance must consider that bio-politics and neoliberal modes of governmentality have been set down by neoliberal rationality that seems to be more challenging to define as neoliberalism constitutes a “rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested” ([39], p. 182). How does resistance against normalised neoliberal governmentality occur? Central to this question is the acknowledgement that both resistance and contestation are the results of the construction of subjectivities as ‘processes of becoming that focus on what we do rather than on what we are, that is to say, the work of the care of the self’ ([31], p. 87) [40]. Thus, the tight interrelationship between power and resistance encompasses an endless process of construction of our subjectivity (re)configured upon ‘our understanding of ourselves [that] is linked to the ways in which we are governed’ ([41], p. 14).

The process of subverting and reinventing our subjectivities – within a resistance/power paradox – is inextricably tied to the constructive process of collective identity. Melucci’ s work [4, 42] on collective identity – acknowledged as ‘the most systematic, comprehensive and influential theory of collective identity’ ([43], p. 394) – emphasises the conceptualisation of collective identity as a constructive process oriented towards the production of cognitive frameworks. This notion of collective identity offers insightful theoretical contributions to understanding resistance and contestation to ‘the biopower’s normalising strategies in the production and regulation of docile bodies’ ([32], p. 237).

Social movements engage with cognitive frameworks concerning definitions of ends, means and fields of action, which do not necessarily entail unified or coherent meanings [42] but rather ‘different and contradictory definitions’ ([43], p. 395). So, the constructive process of collective identity underpins the formation of resistance practices, such as rhizomatic heterotopias, as transformative spaces characterised ‘by no beginning or end’ [14]. Rhizomatic heterotopias constitute malleable spaces of resistance, spreading in all directions and encompassing ‘a multitude of differentiated meanings, forms of action and modes of organisation’ ([42], p. 13) through which social movements seek to (re)configure specific practices of resistance towards altering the order of forms of neoliberal political-economic governance [29], both constituted ‘within mundane and immediately practices of everyday life’ [44] and located at the interplay of highly differentiated historical, political and economic contexts.

3. The rise of a neoliberal model of education in Chile

The widespread adoption of neoliberalism is partly explained by the critiques of the welfare state, particularly in America and Britain in the 1970s, characterised by ‘prolonged unemployment, rising inflation, a crisis in the supply that Keynesian models were unable ‘to explain or rather correct’ ([45], p. 7). Chile became ‘the epicentre of the Chicago experiment’ ([46], p. 63), although it is often not mentioned. In the 1950s, a US government-sponsored covenant between the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (The Pontifical Catholic University of Chile [PUC]) in Santiago de Chile and the School of Economics at the University of Chicago was to be set up for training one hundred postgraduate students in economics between 1957 and 1970.

Nevertheless, the history of neoliberalism starts ‘with Thatcher and Reagan’ because ‘it is much more flattering in that way’ [47]. Chile became an undebated example amongst neoliberal political economists because of authoritarianism and lack of political freedoms in which the Chicago School’s approach to liberalism, notably Milton Friedman’s theories, was imposed and tested.

A key element in Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal governmentality, particularly on the form of liberalism of the Chicago School’s approach, refers to how the consistent expansion of market relationships seeks to govern all spheres so that any difference between the economic form and the social sphere is elided [26]. The US neoliberals attempt to redefine the social sphere as an economic domain, for instance, social relations and individual behaviour being deciphered in terms of economic categories. Similarly, the market rules the assessment of governmental practices to show ‘whether they are excessive or entail abuse, and to filter them in terms of the interplay of supply and demand’ ([26], p. 198) [48]. The latter does not mean, however, a diminished role of a neoliberal state model. Rather, it is argued that it exists as a continuum between ‘specialised state apparatuses’ and ‘technologies for leading and controlling individuals without at the same time being responsible for them’ ([26], p. 201). So, what features a neoliberal governmentality starts from the intertwinement of a ‘responsible and moral individual and an economic rational actor’ ([26], p. 201). It is actively reinforced by neoliberal economic rationality that accounts for the expression of free will based on a self-determination decision and individual responsibility regarding its consequences. Therefore, a responsible and rational individual whose responsibility in all sorts of areas ‘becomes as a matter of personal provision’ [49, 50].

Chile became the epicentre for the US Chicago School’s neoliberal economic rationality following Pinochet’s military coup on September 11th, 1973. A neoliberal economic free-market reform, ideologically designed by a group of economists known as the Chicago Boys – because they adhered to the orthodox neoliberal theories of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago School of Economics – endeavoured to modernise Chilean society by targeting the transformation of the ‘provision of social security, health and education’ ([51], p. 22).

The roll-out of the Chilean neoliberal experiment in education into a market-oriented educational system ([52], p. 110) represented ‘the most profound transformation ever experienced in Chilean public education’ ([53], p. 4). Not only this neoliberal economic reform in education accorded to the bureaucratic and authoritarian project of modernisation by Pinochet’s dictatorship, but it also derived the roll-out of a ‘Silent Revolution’ [54] focused on ‘promoting individualism and competitive relations between individuals’ and on reshaping the borders of ‘the collective outlook of social organisation in Chile’ ([54], p. 210) as a form of individual responsibility.

Consequently, a neoliberal free-market economic policy is geared towards structuring neoliberal governmentality as education is structured as a ‘specific form of intervention’ ([55], p. 191] to shape a neoliberal democracy defined by Pinochet dictatorship as an ‘authoritarian, protected, integrated, technical and authentic social participation’ ([54], p. 202). Thus, the possibility of rolling out the first laboratory of neoliberal state formation in Chile is flanked by the lack of political freedoms, proscription of political parties and a full scale of political repression that explains why ‘the neoliberal social sector reforms went farther in Chile than in other countries’ ([56], p. 75).

In the advent of a democratic government in Chile, a coalition of centre-left parties, known as the Concertacion, assumed office in March 1990 and led the implementation of a new programme of growth with equity. This developmental strategy stood between social democracy and free-market capitalism to become a ‘potential Third Way option for Latin America’ ([57], p. 5). It is acknowledged as a line of continuity with the reforms initiated by Pinochet’s dictatorship.

‘Clearly, the shift in regime type is dramatic – a bureaucratic authoritarian one replaced by a democratic one. However, this political form does not define the state that it manages. The Chilean state retained and deepened its capitalist features during the 1990s through further liberalisation and privatisation strategies, continuing the capitalist accumulation model imposed by the Chicago Boys economic team from 1975. This can be described as continuity in the form and orientation of the state; thus, continuismo has transcended the transition in the regime type’ ([58], p. 359).

In the field of educational policies, the development strategy of growth with equity was proposed as the optimal route to make quality education available for all. Such an approach reflected a new focus by the governments of the Concertación (1990–2010) on social democracy and economic policies that promoted ‘equality of opportunities rather than of outcome’ ([59], p. 30). Equity aimed at the ‘integration of the population, with access to the basic benefits of the state for all, in order to achieve equality of opportunity and lives with dignity for all’ ([54], p. 250). Equity, in the onset of educational policies from the 1990s, intersected with the implementation of universal and comprehensive programmes to improve quality education for all and the development of targeted compensatory programmes to enhance equal opportunities amongst disadvantaged students at the poorest primary and secondary schools, as a principle of equity [60]. Such targeted compensatory programmes mirrored – as a principle of equity – a ‘safety net’ understood as ‘general security but at the lowest level’ ([61], p. 206).

As decades have passed, neoliberalism is ‘no longer a dream of Chicago economists or a nightmare in the imaginations of leftist conspiracy theorists; it has become a common sense of the times’ ([62], p. 38). In the context of Chile, the democratic legitimisation of the first laboratory of neoliberal state formation – initiated during Pinochet’s dictatorship – on the one hand, encapsulated continuismo or the continuity of neoliberal state formation, as part of a negotiated transition to democracy with the authoritarian regime. Furthermore, continuismo led to consensual neoliberal governance as policing [63] the prevailing order of the post-democratic transition consensus around a reformed neoliberal market-driven education agenda [5]. While the latter seems to place the debate on governmentality in policymaking, the roll-out of the Chilean neoliberal experiment in education cannot simply be read off in terms of policies. Instead, it construes, first and foremost, a political project to radically transform Chilean society. Indeed, a neoliberal free-market-driven education agenda shaped ‘a new topography of social domain’ ([26], p. 203), encompassing forms of governmentality of individualism, meritocracy and marketisation. It is precisely the failure of these policies and their discursive construction of equity and fairness they aimed to bring about that ended up being contested by the Chilean student movement.

From the development of a ‘massive and well-articulated critique of schooling in Chile’ ([64], p. 32) in 2006 to the 2011 massive student mobilisations – which ruptured the post-democratic consensus around the neoliberal free-market ideology that has dominated the most radical transformation of the Chilean education system ([5], p. 476) – the Chilean student movement’s contestation to the neoliberal common sense in education entwined with the emergence of a new political subjectivity. This subjectivity, produced by neoliberalism, ended up challenging the very terms of a post-authoritarian neoliberal democratic transition through engaging with sites of struggles and resistance to forms of technologies of governmentality produced in and through a reformed neoliberal market-driven education agenda. This new political subjectivity subverted this agenda, and it became the milieu for new forms of political activism and (re)politicisation to prefigure the contestation of neoliberalism as a policy, governmentality and ideology.

4. Prefiguration of an egalitarian, autonomous secondary student movement

Prefiguration of non-hierarchical egalitarian autonomous democratic politics is at the centre of the strategy by which the Chilean student movement did seek to subvert ‘the post-democratic transition consensus’ ([5], p. 476) on a reformed neoliberal education agenda and transform the character of politics in a society regarded as the first laboratory of neoliberalism. Prefiguration speaks directly to the process of political reconstruction led by high-school student activists in the early 2000s – at the group of oldest public schools, known as the emblematic schools – and the reinvention of youth politics by pushing the transformation of old-fashioned forms of student organisation to transform ‘the patterns of grassroots student participation’ ([15], p. 199). Colectivos (collective), defined as ‘smaller groups of students that represented the inorganic left’ ([65], p. 6), which, too, encompassed a multiplicity of political identities and subcultures that characterised the left (See [15]), played an essential role in successfully pursuing the transformation of secondary student movement in the early 2000s. They created the Asamblea Coordinadora de Estudiantes Secundarios (The Coordinating Assembly of Secondary Students) as a form of student organisation, focused on the development of egalitarian and non-hierarchical relationships through experimentation with direct democracy and autonomous forms of participatory decision-making.

The Assembly ‘marked an important generational hallmark’ ([15], p. 203) within the secondary student movement as it did come as part of a political strategy that aimed to break up a closed system of politics derived from ‘the knowledge and practices of the old left’ ([16], p. 15). It represented an attempt to strike a balance between traditional militancy, such as the Communist Youth, and colectivos to transform the ‘power geometry’ [66] of politics within the secondary student movement. Such a process engages with the production of politics that weaved ‘a libertarian and egalitarian ethos in the movement’s own structures, social dynamics and lifestyle’ [67].

Everyday schooling was strategic for student mobilisations led by the Assembly. Education became a common space for mobilising students and the transformative character of grassroots activism. Thus, demands on what constrained everyday schooling experience challenged the traditional places and spaces where politics was commonly produced and found (See 15). As a student notes:

We discovered that students we thought should be organised were neither in the political youth headquarters nor in institutional spaces. Rather they lived a daily life, and when we found each other, we realised it was a much more normal dynamic than we would expect to find (Interview with Cesar).

Transformation of the power geometry of politics within the secondary student involved politicising everyday schooling experience at the grassroots level, around very concrete demands, which, too, were detached from grand narratives. As a former student activist notes:

People are interested in other things. I mean, the Communists came with a hyper-structured discourse on public education. However, my classmates were worried about other things. The problems of my classmates were that they had bad teachers; they did not have good quality education. However, colectivos started to introduce those demands I mentioned, like quality education, wearing long hair and the like. They were very concrete things, which were quite far away from what the Communist Party's discourse was (Interview with Sebastian).

For grassroots students, what constrained their daily schooling experience became an essential component of a politics of commonalities, that is, the ‘cultivation of new forms of commonalities’ [68] or what they have in common with others. A politics of commonalities not only was mediated by interrelatedness but also encompassed individual commitment that is no longer opposed to the sphere of collective action (See 15). Thus, prefiguration of everyday schooling experience as an ‘actual mobilisation or strategy’ [69] engages with a politics of commonalities, lived in the present and characterised by the acknowledgement that ‘everyone is similar to oneself’ ([70], p. 465). As such, self-representation becomes central to both the instrumental function of the Assembly and the political strategy of politicising the social sphere that colectivos and the most politicised students placed at the centre of the process of political reconstruction of the secondary student movement (See [15]).

Prefiguration of egalitarian political relationships and the creation of the Assembly, based upon the principles of horizontalidad (horizontality), direct democracy and autonomy, did not emerge to articulate ‘what has been disarticulated politically and socially’ ([15], p. 207). Instead, they arose as a mode of collective political organisation in which self-representation became a form of political action of new emerging political subjectivities. Thus, prefiguration of egalitarian political relationships concerned with politics that is ‘subjective and collective’ [71], prefigured as ‘present-tense politics’ [67], which, too, became the space for a generation who looked for its political self-affirmation rooted in the present and detached from the political narrative of the earlier secondary student movement.

As discussed, the prefiguration of egalitarian political participation stressed the aim of connecting politics with the social sphere. As an alternative form of politics within the secondary student movement, it progressed from prefiguring political participation within local spaces to becoming the democratic structure for democratic participation. Nevertheless, what did mediate this process? This question draws attention to the Penguins’ movement that emerged in 2006 to call for education to be a right, not a privilege, by demanding equal opportunities for quality education for all.

5. The rise of the penguins’ movement: To occupy education

Between March and June 2006, massive high-school student-led protests, known as the Penguins’ movement – because of their white and black school uniform – spread across the country to demand equal opportunities for quality education for all. This demand surfaced due to a cumulative effect of the preceding student movement struggles that speak directly to the process of political reconstruction led by high-school student activists in the early 2000s. While this grievance resembled the political task of connecting with demands students valued, it also became ‘an important force of momentum’ ([17], p. 51) for the Penguins’ movement. Firstly, the demand for equal opportunities for quality education for all sought to gain the support of a wider public, highlighting how a reformed neoliberal agenda on education – implemented by the governments of the Concertacion – failed to bring about the promise of social mobility and equality of opportunities for the middle class. Therefore, ‘student protests in 2006 interpreted the aspirations of a middle class that had not been delivered’ ([72], p. 62).

Secondly, massive high-school student-led protests, particularly high school occupations, encompassed a spatial fracturing within the secondary student movement. On the one hand, school occupations involved mobilising high schools without a long-standing trajectory of student activism (See [5, 15]). Moreover, this repertoire of collective mobilisation coalesced with the involvement and participation of a new political actor ‘that did not have ties with the recent past, but was engaged with prefiguring occupation as a different space for different forms of political agency and participation’ ([73], p. 368).

While school occupations were acknowledged as part of the classic action repertoire of the secondary student movement, the 2006 school occupations were endowed with different meanings and values. Firstly, they were imbued with a place-specific discourse of safety to question heavy-handed policing over the right to protest. Thus, school occupations were justified as a political strategy to guarantee the safety of the students from riot police tactics (See [15]). Furthermore, school occupations become places and spaces for the practice of care of the self. Such a practice intersects with the self-affirmation of a generation not growing up ‘within the dictatorship/democracy dichotomy’ ([15], p. 221). So, in the context of heavy-handed policing over the 2006 high-school mobilisations, a practice of protecting the self is built upon self-affirmation of what students lived and experienced when they demonstrated and of a generational breakdown that attempted to legitimise social mobilisation within a post-authoritarian democratic society.

As discussed, school occupations weaved a spatial fracturing within the Penguins movement as this repertoire of collective action orientated itself towards ‘counter-conducts’ [37] that challenged the contours of neoliberal governmentality and practices of rationalities of education. Students occupied schools to reclaim them like their houses:

A group of high schools put forward the idea of occupations. However, 50% of students were against this idea as they believed it was a more radical mobilisation, while the other 50% were in favour. They argued that occupations were neither a radical action nor drastic but rather a coherent idea. It is because, for many of us, the school has to be our space where one can think, create and do. It is not about sitting down, listening to a good or bad teacher and receiving information. So, it seemed a very good idea to occupy our house; the school became like yours during the occupation (Interview with Carolina).

Occupations become counter sites to reclaim education and alter the order of things in the schooling experience. In reclaiming schools as their houses, students questioned those governmental forms of power as essential control techniques in and through education. By occupying schools, students create ‘their own space’ [74] where they ‘engaged with practices that are rule-breaking of the domain of control exercised’ ([74], p. 31) in and through education. As a student activist notes:

The funniest thing during the occupation was that we could do whatever we wanted to do at school because the school was ours. Because of the level of repression at the school, we all wanted to do many things; we wanted to be in those places we were not allowed to be for example, at the school offices, everyone wanted to be on the roof, walking on the roof.

Spatiality did embody resistance and contestation to what governs the relationship between a subject and education space by transforming ‘his relationship to his own body’ ([74], p. 40). Thus, ‘occupation is about occupying education by challenging what has been socially imposed as education space’ ([15], p. 245), that is, ‘prohibition … and the dislocation of their most immediate relationship’ ([74], p. 35). Thus, walking on the roof and being in the school offices constituted forms of political action to reclaim education by challenging the power relations through which it is produced ([15], p. 245).

As such, school occupations ‘did come to mean more than massive sit-ins’ ([15], p. 246) as school occupations ended up developing into re-appropriation of schooling experience as a different positionality of those who were involved in the student movement, which, too, involved a different socio-spatial positionality as school occupations entailed consolidating a different sense of community. Therefore, school occupations constitute, first and foremost, heterotopias or counter-sites in which education is contested and re-appropriated by breaking down those constitutive relations governing the spatiality of the schooling experience.

A rhizomatic growth of school occupations, in particular mobilisation of high schools in the margins of traditional nodes of student activism (See [5, 15, 75]), became central for legitimising the demand for equal opportunities for quality education for all raised by the Penguins’ movement. Such legitimisation did not only rely on the massive number of school occupations; the mobilisation of schools – in the periphery of central nodes of student activism – legitimised this political demand by ‘reasserting that unequal opportunities for quality education happen in certain places’ ([5], p. 479). Waves of school occupations also became a condition of possibility to further instal the Assembly as the space for developing non-hierarchical egalitarian autonomous democratic politics (See [15]). Prefiguration of direct democracy, egalitarian political participation and non-hierarchical structures became identity politics within the Penguins’ movement. This politics is mutually constitutive of a different political meaning of us. Therefore, school occupations become key places and spaces for the constructive process of a collective identity as a transformative collective political action that meant being united and no longer alone and through which the Penguins become a movement.

6. The bio-politics of existence and the rhizomatic resonance of the 2011 Chilean student movement’s collective action

Notwithstanding the academic and policy debate that the Penguins’ movement opened up about the failures of a market-oriented education system, it was regarded as a movement with a limited ‘political victory’ [75] since the Penguins’ demands were met with only limited technocratic reforms that did not bring structural reforms of a market-driven education system, such as making profit-making in education illegal. Five years later, one of the largest student protests in the post-democratic transition era, mainly led by grown-up disenfranchised Penguins, emerged to call for radical reform of the education system by demanding free, public quality education for all and to end profit-making in education.

How did former secondary student activists navigate a post-2006 Penguins’ movement scenario? While analysis of the possibilities and limitations of political capacity within the Penguins’ movement seems to be confined to a ‘resolutionary approach’ [42], it could be contrasted with listening to what former student activists reflected on this student movement even before its direction and content have become clear:

The Penguins' movement had some conditions, but at the same time, it was not quite aware of this. We tackled these conditions without awareness and without developing an important political reflection as we would have now. It was less reflective and much more intuitive. It was not like the movement we have right now. However, we addressed an important issue about the end of profit-making in education. How many of us were conscious at the end of the day that profit was the backbone of the current neoliberal system? Perhaps, we wanted to tear something down, which was the main axis of the system, without being too conscious about it (Interview with Pat).

As argued elsewhere, ‘intuition, more than a reflective political capacity, underpins the process through which students challenged neoliberal “governmentality” by questioning the promises of quality and equity that the neoliberal agenda on education from the 1990s failed to bring about’ ([15], p. 260) [73]. Understanding how the Penguins’ movement demand for education to be a right, not a privilege, morphed, as Pat’s comment addressed, into a more structural demand entails looking at the constructive process of collective identity. In a post-2006 Penguins’ movement scenario, this process of collective identity is mediated by the acknowledgement that the lack of political experience of the Penguins’ movement to mobilise political alliances that met the demands of this student movement was a mistake. Such recognition is deeply embedded with emotions that remained key to reimagining their political agency and collective action in 2011. Emotions mobilised the possibility of relocating mistakes as a necessary step towards the movement’s continuity and collective action over time. As a student activist highlights:

There were more mistakes than successes, with all the emotional implications of this. However, it was also valuable as our mistakes have helped us today. It was valuable to take the time from 2006 and wait quietly until now. A very quiet process took place. It was about waiting, and it was not bad at all to do it in such a way. It was like waiting for the moment in which this could emerge again. Now we are in the second attempt; of course, we have learnt from our own mistakes (Interview with Nicki).

While learning through making mistakes and through waiting could describe how the Chilean student movement borderlands between defeat and continuity across time, particularly during latency periods (See [5, 15]), this also represents a process embodying a relocation of student activism as being on the margins and as a space of resistance through which student activists fashioned a ‘process of (re)vision’ ([18], p. 145) of their political agency.

Recognition of learning through making mistakes is vital to the bio-politics of existence, as an identity politics through which student activists reimagine politics as transforming life itself into political action. In some way, the bio-politics of existence relocated a meaning of politics as grounded in spaces of daily life and as an experiential process of politics as ‘being-in-common’ [17]. The bio-politics of existence encompassed a process of re (vision) through which former student activists located their political activism on the margins. The margins become ‘a politics of location’ where student activists began their revision process and constituted ‘radical creative space which affirms and sustains [their] subjectivity …and articulate their sense of world’ ([18], p. 153).

Not only does the bio-politics of existence delineate new geographies of political activism; it also directs at the movement efficacy by amplifying free education as a cross-cutting demand. Central to this process is developing a rhizomatic resonance by which the Chilean student movement sought to connect its demand to struggles led by social movements and civil society actors fighting against dispossession, poverty and inequalities entrenched in neoliberal agendas. A rhizomatic resonance involves the production of ‘convergence spaces’ [19] as sites that activate and multiply a politics of mutual solidarity [17]. Thus, the bio-politics of existence is not limited to an individual sphere of political agency. Rather, it pursues a strategy of building grassroots networks and alliances amongst different mobilised social actors.

In 2011, mobilised grassroots student activists aimed to become a ‘coalition network’ [19] through the production of territorial assemblies as convergence spaces that further generated the main legacy of the 2011 Chilean student movement. Territorial assemblies represented bottom-up experiences of radical democratic politics, as a politics that not only needs heterogeneity but also depends on it [76] and through which the Chilean student movement sought to embody and extend the horizons of its political action with others ‘to articulate certain collective visions [and] generate a politics of mutual solidarity’ ([17], p. 97).

Through territorial assemblies and radical democratic politics, student activists did make room for the political condition for cross-movement mobilisation to articulate the demand for free, public quality education for all as a cross-cutting social demand. As a result, space and politics come together and open up the possibility of re-envisioning the movement’s demand in spatial rather than in temporal terms, that is, as a social struggle that will involve the whole of society. Thus, expanding the horizons of collective action with others represents the main legacy of the 2011 Chilean student movement.

7. Conclusion

The Chilean student movement constitutes a remarkable case to understand how heterotopias, as sites of resistance, happen and what characterises such practices. From the process of political reconstruction of the secondary student movement, which led to the emergence of the Penguins’ movements and its massive and well-articulated critique of schooling in Chile’ ([65], p. 32), to the 2011 massive student demonstrations to call for the radical transformation of the Chilean education system, heterotopias engineered alternative discourse formations to rupture ‘the post-democratic transition consensus around a reformed neoliberal market-driven education agenda’ ([5], p. 476).

Nevertheless, this process was more expansive than just policymaking. Instead, it targeted ‘radical changes in politics’ ([20], p. 262) from within the system. This process is intertwined with a political subjectivity that subverts and reinvents politics to reclaim a new meaning of being political, which, too, is mutually constitutive of the bio-politics of existence. From the election of four former student leaders in 2013, the creation of the Frente Amplio (FA- Popular Front) in 2017, to the election of a former student leader as the new Chilean president in December 2021, the Chilean student movement could be interpreted as the political actor that has ‘pus[hed] the democratisation of institutionalised democracy’ ([8], p. 260). Analysis of how the bio-politics of existence is spread within and across spaces of institutional framework or the constellation of contingent factors that might (or might not) reconfigure it is beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, it is worth highlighting that the bio-politics of existence ended up challenging ‘the classic binaries of political thought’ ([32], p. 235) as it seeks to radically transform the state by ‘captur[ing] ever more space within the state’ ([77], p. 33).

Undoubtedly, the Chilean student movement has profoundly transformed politics within a post-authoritarian neoliberal society as the prefiguration of egalitarian political relationships has been conducive to the rhizomatic growth of (re)politicisation. Prefigurative politics and their experimentation with more participatory and autonomous forms of democracy have become a ‘non-negotiable democratic’ form for the ‘reinvention of politics’ [8] for social movement mobilisations that followed the 2011 Chilean student movement scenario.

In a post-2011 scenario, the bio-politics of existence connects with ‘resistance identities’ ([78], p. 8), understood as identity politics ‘generated by actors who are repressed, stigmatised or devalued by the structure of domination in a given society’ ([22], p. 131). This identity politics became an integral part of the formation of the Chilean student movement and its capacity to articulate, through demanding free, high-quality education for all, a larger political strategy to contest neoliberalism in Chile. What does this identity politics’ potential to continue mobilising groups, civil society and social movements rely on?

Firstly, the process of formation of the Chilean student movement contributed to the understanding that the bio-politics of existence rests upon ‘the self-reflexive capacity of social actors to recognise themselves and the field of opportunities and constraints in which they are located’ ([22], p. 132). As a result, the process of (re)politicisation in the context of a post-authoritarian society started, first and foremost, because of the failure of a neoliberal consensus in and around a reformed free-market-driven education agenda. Upon contesting this ‘politics of truth’ [55] or prevailing order, a post-hegemonic movement to neoliberal consensus emerged.

Moreover, the bio-politics of existence stays in movement across different spaces and places where politics have yet to be produced. It is ‘exercised from many points’ upon which this identity politics ‘swarm’ ([23], pp. 94–96). Such a process delineates ‘the distinctive features of todays’ (re)politicisation ([8], p. 262) and the emergence of a new political subjectivity grounded on daily life, which, too, politicises its own reality. These new actors and their forms of politicisation are mutually constitutive of ‘the multitude’ [79] and as political subjectivities that can collectively mobilise and then return to the form of lifestyle activism.

Such oscillation between collective forms of political mobilisation and the self-reflexive capacity of social actors describes what features the contemporary process of (re)politicisation within post-authoritarian neoliberal democratic societies such as Chile. This (re)politicisation process overlapped with different forms of contestation to the order of things and simultaneously with the unpredictability of what the establishment of a new order would look like. Thus, unpredictability resonates, to some extent, with ambivalence regarding what constitutes the transformative potential for which social movements have been campaigning for so long. Nevertheless, for mobilised social actors, such as the Chilean student movement, unpredictability becomes quintessential for the rhizomatic growth of an egalitarian political movement. Such a rhizomatic process of egalitarian, participatory politics has been unpredictable and ‘discontinuous in their spreading’ [22] as it has happened in all directions. Nevertheless, over the last two decades, this rhizomatic egalitarian politics has shed light on understanding both the transformation of the character of politics in a society regarded as the first laboratory of neoliberalism [1] and the potentiality of the demand for education to be a right, not a privilege, to become a ‘question of resonance’ ([10], p. 169) to mark out the possibility of rupturing the hegemony of neoliberalism in Chile as a policy, governmentality and ideology.

Conflict of interest

“The authors declare no conflict of interest.”