School Assemblages and Unequal Individuations

Notes Toward a Sociology of the Individual in Schooling

Abstract

This article proposes, as an exercise with methodological projection, conceptualizing schooling as an assemblage and constitutive environment of the individuation process. The argument unfolds in four steps. First, it justifies the choice of the individual as an analytical figure over the notions of person, actor, and subject, and examines the limitations of the individualization and socialization approaches: both locate the explanatory principle of the individual outside the very process of individuation. Then, it draws on Gilbert Simondon's genetic ontology to reformulate individuation as an open, relational, and dynamic process, inseparable from its environments, objects, and collectives. Third, it introduces the concept of assemblage from Actor-Network Theory to conceive the individual as an assemblage traversed by the tensions of stabilization and identification. Finally, this framework is connected to Chilean schooling, presented as a constitutive environment of unequal individuations. School writing practices are developed as an exemplary case. The article concludes that unequal schooling as an environment does not precede individuation, but is constitutive of it. This conceptualization is proposed as a platform for an empirical research agenda, particularly a school ethnography centered on writing practices.