Triangulating the lifelong learner: neuroliberalism and the OECD’s focus on meta-cognition, affect, and wellbeing

While the value and influence of neoliberalism as a concept continues to interest scholars of lifelong education, recent developments in the field suggest alternative explanations may be appearing. One of these, ‘neuroliberalism’, is emerging as a way of accounting for recent shifts in society, governance and global politics as part of a wider ‘neural turn’. The latter’s relevance to the field of lifelong education has yet to be established, however, and this paper discusses the concept and its value in context by analysing recent claims by the OECD about a ‘Triangle of Lifelong Learning’. The OECD’s neuroliberal focus on irrational (rather than rational) subjectivity is analysed, as are its use of tropes of metacognition, affect and wellbeing. The concept of ‘dividuality’ as an aspect of ‘machinic’ capitalism, drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Maurizio Lazzarato, is used to show how the OECD’s vision of the future of lifelong education contributes to the construction of a neuroliberal agenda for lifelong, lifewide education.