Dividual Subjects

Contradictions in the Administration of Student Trajectories in Vocational Education

Abstract

This article examines the contradictions shaping the administration of student trajectories in vocational education in the context of massification and increasing heterogeneity. Drawing on a critical review of the literature and a combined reading of Foucault's concept of discipline and Deleuze's idea of control, we examine the expansion of support systems and interventions aimed at identifying risks and promoting student progression. We argue that these devices operate through a double logic: they decompose students into indicators, risks, and capacities amenable to targeted intervention while simultaneously recomposing them as autonomous individuals responsible for managing their own trajectories. We propose the term dividual subject to describe the outcome of this contradictory overlap between dividuation and individualization. We argue that contemporary dispositifs of control, rather than replacing disciplinary ones, overlap with and redirect them. This contradiction makes it possible to problematize the ways in which students in vocational education are named and governed, treating the literature as an archive of the transformations that have unfolded within this field.