Transdiscipline, decoloniality and education from a genealogical perspective

The primary purpose of this paper is to understand, from a genealogical perspective, the relationship between the so-called transdisciplines and decolonial studies with the educational field and why they have not achieved their main objective, which, from the perspective of philosopher Maldonado-Torres (2007, 2012), was posed by Frantz Fanon in the mid-20th century: to identify, analyze, and help dismantle colonial and racist “anti-Black” attitudes in the formation of modern subjectivity.

To achieve this purpose, that is, to show why transdisciplinary and decolonial studies have failed to destroy these racist and colonial attitudes, this analysis begins with the emergence of disciplines as well as the rise of what Foucault called the disciplinary society. Moreover, it analyzes how the study of class struggle hid and masked the race struggle within the disciplinary or modern society and how this influenced the emergence of ethnic studies and the onset of the control society.

Finally, the power effects of disciplinary scientific discourse where this masking of racist and colonial attitudes is rooted will be analyzed; these attitudes are uncovered by decolonial studies but remain undestroyed due to their own assimilation into the control society. Thus, a genealogical study is proposed to counteract “the centralizing power effects linked to the institution and functioning of a scientific discourse” (Foucault, 2006, p. 22).

For this purpose, reflection begin with Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s article “Transdisciplinarity and Decoloniality” (2012) and approached from a genealogical perspective; that is, through an analysis of the notion of subjectivity that modern society proposes during its disciplinary phase based on its veridiction and forms of governmentality.

The aim is to study knowledge formation, for which it is necessary to investigate discursive practices and subsequently to examine within those practices the forms of veridiction, that is, the general rules regarding what is considered true or false. Additionally, it involves studying the techniques and procedures through which others’ behavior is intended to be guided; in other words, behavioral norms in terms of power exercise and, therefore, to analyze that power exercised in terms of government procedures. Thus, the goal is not to analyze norms but rather to examine power as exercised in terms of governmentality procedures (Foucault, 2011, p. 20–21). Consequently, what is intended is to analyze the various ways by which individuals are constituted as subjects, that is, what is analyzed is how individuals are concretely compelled to constitute themselves as subjects when relating to themselves. In other words, the objective is the analysis of forms of subjectivation. Under this approach, we begin by discerning the genealogy of the concept “discipline”, to understand the emergence of transdisciplinary and decolonial studies.

We begin from Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s premise that transdisciplines arise as an open opposition to the modern notion of social study emanating from the Enlightenment which emerges not only as a rational and liberating discourse but also with a sub-discourse or hidden discourse that fosters racism and exclusion for the vast majority of non-white communities. In other words, Western modernity’s social studies arise with a kind of “color line” that condemns most communities worldwide to a zone of “non-being”, thus making necessary “the overcoming of disciplinary boundaries” (Maldonado-Torres, 2012, p. 3).

It is clear that transdisciplines and ethnic studies generated a crisis in social studies in the mid-20th century that forced a reconsideration of their approaches and assumptions. Nevertheless, in retrospect, it is also evident that while both researchers and institutions diversified, this did not result in either the destruction or emancipation of disciplines or their accompanying subtext. In other words, neither did they manage to dismantle the so-called “color line” nor its consequent racist, classist and exclusionary discourse since it was disguised as inclusion:

This indicates that decolonial transdisciplinary studies attempted emancipation starting from the same roots and bases as disciplinary discourse; that is, they start from the knowledge-truth axis emanating from Enlightenment thought where progress is conceived as a struggle of knowledge against ignorance, a dichotomy between erroneous prejudices and enlightening reasoning. Hence, precisely, the battle between transdisciplines and “academic disciplines” regarding methodology arises, since it has been considered as a sign of defining rationality in sciences. Another example that shows that transdisciplines emerge from the same axis as academic disciplines is what Maldonado-Torres himself points out: “I also propose that the concept of epistemic decolonization, and more broadly those, concerning decoloniality of being, power, and knowledge, add important clarifications to understand forms of knowledge with a decolonizing character” (Maldonado-Torres, 2012, p. 2).

However, achieving emancipation and liberation requires first dismantling what was conceived as progress during Enlightenment thought; therefore, it is necessary to first free oneself from the conception that the battle must be established between knowledge versus ignorance and now recognize that the battle exists between some forms of knowledges against others: “between knowledges opposing each other due to their distinctive morphology; due to their possessors being mutually antagonistic; and due to their intrinsic power effects” (Foucault, 2006, p. 167).

What is proposed here, starting from an anti-disciplinary genealogical procedure, is to eliminate the knowledge-truth dichotomy stemming from Enlightenment thought and situate ourselves within the discourse-power axis or discursive practice-power confrontation framework. Thus, what decolonial transdisciplines should focus on is indicating and substantiating that confrontation with academic disciplines does not involve understanding how to improve or transcend them or how to “help” decolonize those disciplines as conceived by Enlightenment thought but rather on developing decolonial studies as anti-disciplines, namely: “an immense political struggle around knowledges about them, their dispersion and heterogeneity […] in this form of multiplicity rather than progress from day over night; from knowledge over ignorance” (Foucault, 2006, p. 168).

Everything suggests that, as Maldonado-Torres points out, the initial intention behind the so-called “decolonial studies” was precisely to address “hierarchical inequalities within modern nation-states based on racial hierarchies” (Maldonado-Torres, 2012, p. 2). Nonetheless, they ended up being assimilated and subsequently normalized under the mantle of discourse on ethnicity where these hierarchical inequalities are masked by neutral descriptive expressions–in other words: where inclusion (or, better yet) the spaces gained within academia always occur under European and modern parameters.

Consequently, any decolonial study loses its liberating force. It becomes normalized within hierarchical, racist and classist discourse disguised as “inclusive”, thanks to the fact that it gives small spaces to its critics to whom it, nonetheless constantly seeks to disqualify for their lack of methodological rigor. Since this disqualification precisely enables its subsequent normalization, allowing them to be adjusted into dominant discourse while making them interchangeable, but always from a hierarchical perspective. Thus, they are kept subordinated to ultimately maintain centralized control, ensuring the selection and transmission of content intended by hegemonic classes: “selection, normalization, hierarchization and centralization. These are four operations we can observe in action through a somewhat detailed study of what we call disciplinary power” (Foucault, 2006, p. 169).

As we can see, transdisciplines emerge aiming to dismantle centralized power held by modern disciplines; however, this was attempted through gaining spaces within academia, and for this, they had to adapt to the imposed hierarchization while attempting to subvert racially charged disciplinary power discourse; yet, ultimately, this adaptation resulted in transdisciplines ended up becoming normalized, now partaking in centralized academic power, which constantly disqualifies them for failing to adhere to established parameters and methodological rigor set by those same powers.

Nevertheless, even though transdisciplines became normalized, they initially played a transformative role, prompting a shift in focus regarding disciplinary power, which transitioned from normalization towards regularization. In other words, it shifted focus from individual bodies to species bodies or social bodies. This change was not voluntary but rather forced by challenges against modern society, driven by various actors, including transdisciplinary studies. This is why the following section will analyze this change of focus in the way of controlling individuals as well as the change in the technology of truth-telling based on discipline.

Following post-World War II, social pressure in Western countries revealed the exhaustion of disciplinary states emanated from capitalism’s first phase, specifically the political violence previously concealed through institutions masquerading as neutral or independent such as universities or clinics.

Thus, both universities and educational systems, whose primary function involves distributing knowledge, also serve political purposes, maintaining certain social class power while excluding all other classes from the instruments that wield such power.

That is why transdisciplinary studies have faced marginalization while being undervalued by academia. Yet, once transitioning into a controlled society, they become assimilated, losing their critical force for change. Understanding this normalization process regarding transdisciplinary studies requires elucidating the operational frameworks within industrial-era disciplinary societies as well as the characteristics that define control societies emerging during the information age.

The disciplinary power technique, as explained by Foucault (2006, p. 220–233), targets man/body aiming at governing multiplicities concerning subjects relative to individual bodies requiring monitoring, training sometimes punishment. Consequently, practical relationships among disciplines relate directly to individuals/bodies producing individualizing effects aimed at generating docile, useful bodies suited for production systems through implementing confinement institutions such as schools, hospitals, barracks, factories and prisons:

Similarly, while Foucault situates disciplinary societies, authors like Castells (2002), Reigeluth (2016) and Zangaro (2013) explain that capitalism has gone through two major phases concerning capital-labor relations: one clearly established, that spanning from the origins and consolidation of industrialization until approximately the late 1970s; and another still in formation and of a non-generalized nature, which has developed since then to the present (Zangaro, 2013, p. 56).

Within capitalist logic, knowing how to perform work entails using knowledge efficiently, that is, in terms that vary based on existing relationships between capital labor competition and technological development. Likewise, control strategies must ensure that work is carried out based on the generation of value under specific conditions, just like formal education, since it is subject to employability criteria.

According to Castells, there were at least two phases during the period known as the Industrial Revolution. The first began during the last third of the 18th century, and it was characterized by:

This industrial phase is accompanied by certain legal, economic and ideological procedures that are directly related to production in which “dead labor predominates over living labor. This means that workers must adapt to the technical requirements of production, and that their task is limited to the execution of an activity guided by the dictates of fixed capital” (Zangaro, 2013, p. 57). This situation determined the management of knowledge during this phase of capitalism, since it imposed the necessity to obtain the know-how from the craft practice, thereby ensuring the organization of work based on valorization.

To achieve this objective, it was necessary to strip artisans of the know-how that allowed them to control execution times, which was accomplished through a double division of labor: “the first, between workers who had the knowledge to conceive how to carry it out and organize it, and those who merely executed the previously defined activities. The second, among those in charge of the execution itself, as each task was further subdivided into as many partial actions as possible” (Zangaro, 2013, p. 57); generating, in this way, the division between intellectual and material labor, which was established based on a logic of positions and qualifications.

Qualification was determined by establishing a model or standard of practices that each individual had to perform after a formative process based on the acquisition of a set of knowledge and skills. The relevance that qualification took on during this stage of capitalism led to the creation of an educational system that produced and disseminated certain basic knowledge under a hierarchical control structure.

In this control structure, discipline was given a privileged place, understood as “a device that, operating on the body and within the framework of institutions of confinement such as factories or schools, allowed the expropriation of the know-how of skilled labor, the conversion of individuals into useful bodies, and the internalization of behavioral norms appropriate to the requirements of industrial society” (Zangaro, 2013, p. 58). As can be observed, the structure of disciplinary dominance is not limited to the factory but extends to both the school and the health system.

In summary, it can be said that formal education was governed by the requirements of the labor market of the industrial era, which was reflected in schools, the control structure that predominated during this period: discipline. This was implemented to expropriate the know-how inherent to guilds and artisans through the division and subdivision of processes. Thus, the emphasis was placed on controlling both labor and educational processes under a logic of positions and qualifications.

On the other hand, Castells considers that “this technological system in which we are fully immersed at the beginning of the 21st century took shape in the 1970s” (Castells, 2002, p. 86). However, this does not mean that the first stage (the industrial) has disappeared today as there are elements of it that remain. Nevertheless, the emphasis is now placed on new elements or mechanisms of control over work and workers, which are based on a new management of knowledge:

This is what Deleuze (1999, p. 279) calls control societies, which are replacing disciplinary societies through ultra-fast forms that adopt control “in the open air” and that replace the old disciplines that operated during the period of closed systems:

In this phase, work acquires a different nuance or focus as it is “informational because the productivity and competitiveness of the units or agents of this economy (whether they are companies, regions, or nations) fundamentally depend on their ability to generate, process, and effectively apply information based on knowledge” (Castells, 2002, p. 121).

As a consequence, this new approach is immaterial in nature and, unlike the industrial phase, living work predominates, where the management of knowledge focuses on its utility understood as the “cognitive capacity to interpret and mobilize information” (Zangaro, 2013, p. 58). This resulted in a change in global competition conditions, which led companies to modify their organizational structures and work processes in order to generate flexibility that corresponds to market demands.

The above resulted in an increase in the level of training and the recovery of expropriated knowledge through mass schooling and the dissemination of information technologies, which is why:

Likewise, this logic leads to the disappearance of the division between material and intellectual labor, so that the evaluation of work will no longer be through formal objective criteria but “based on the current and potential possession of intellectual and affective capacities such as personal initiative, the ability to coordinate knowledge, and efficient communication development” (Zangaro, 2013, p. 59); and this actual or potential possession will be referred to as competencies.

This is because it is no longer about detailing the individual to train them as was done in disciplinary societies, but rather about using global techniques or mechanisms to achieve a global and regulated balance; that is, “taking into account life, the biological processes of man/species and ensuring that there is not a discipline but a regularization” (Foucault, 2006, p. 223). This means that it is no longer a disciplinary technique that focuses on the body and produces individualizing effects, but a technique that focuses on controlling a living mass, the population.

For this purpose, the competencies, both in the Tuning Europe project and in its Latin American version, were established based on surveys of employers and the results of these coincided with the results of the surveys of graduates from higher or university level, therefore, for both, the most important thing was what was required by the labor market. However, this represents new difficulties for the control structure, since the discipline is overcome in the face of a work that “no longer materializes in a bodily act, directly observable and potentially systematizable, but rather occurs within a cognitive experience, affectively-subjective” (Zangaro, 2013, p. 59).

Therefore, as a mechanism of control, a strategy that directly links work objectives with the objectives of the individual was chosen so that they appropriate them and develop their own self-control strategies. In this way, control shifts from the process that industrial capitalism focused on to the control of results in cognitive capitalism; thus, guaranteeing that the objectives of capital are achieved. In this way, the knowledge incorporated and mobilized by living work is not limited to its exercise within the workday but extends to social times, blurring the boundaries between work time and non-work time.

In this new stage, both the management of knowledge and the forms of control undergo significant modifications since the focus shifts from the discipline applied to the population to the self-regulation that each subject makes of himself. Likewise, there is a shift from education based on qualifications and the hierarchical structure to education based on competencies and holistic self-management.

Consequently, the student must be an active information processor who has cognitive competence to learn and solve problems, therefore, the competence must be considered and developed through strategic learning for a significant appropriation of the curricular contents.

For these reasons, the role of the teacher should not be limited to the mere transmission of content, but the planning and organization of didactic processes are necessary so that they recreate the minimum conditions to generate meaningful learning, that is, their role. It focuses especially on the preparation and organization of didactic experiences to ensure that the student learns to learn and think.

As a result of the above, it follows that, to carry out an evaluation, prior knowledge, the cognitive strategies used, the student’s abilities, the type of goals being pursued and the degree of significant interpretations they have reached must be considered. Students, as well as the declarative, procedural and attitudinal contents, in which self-assessment is very relevant.

Following this logic, strategies can be defined as the self-control mechanisms available to an individual to direct their ways of processing information and that facilitate its acquisition, storage and retrieval.

In summary, during the regulatory stage of capitalism, the management of knowledge is based on utility, specifically, on the real or potential cognitive and affective capacity of the individual, where both work and formal education will focus on projects and competencies since, in both cases, work is produced within a cognitive experience that allows for the recovery of expropriated knowledge. However, since it could not be controlled with discipline, a model was chosen that allowed linking personal objectives with labor objectives and relied on the self-control of individuals; consequently, controlling the result rather than the work process.

Similarly, this technology applied to work and school can also be applied to academia, since in the society of regulation, modulation or self-control, the criticism and control of methods or procedures of transdisciplinarity will no longer be as relevant as this is left to their own regulation. Nonetheless, what will indeed be controlled is the outcome, that is, the product of research or studies through their funding. In other words, “researchers are subject to various situations where a conflict of interest may exist, causing the results of their work to be, or appear to be, subordinated to the interests of third parties. This is especially true for research funded by industry” (Salas, 2010, p. 143).

Although the focus is placed on regulation, this does not imply that normalization has disappeared, but they continue to coexist at two different levels, which allows them not to exclude each other, but rather to articulate one over the other. On the one hand, there is a form of police control that leads to the normalization of individual behaviors; whereas, on the other hand, there is a series of regulatory mechanisms that impact the population: “Thus, there are two series: the series body-organism-discipline-institutions; and the series population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State” (Foucault, 2006, p. 226).

It is at this point, that of population-biology-regulation-State, where Foucault (2006, p. 230) argues that racism is introduced into the society of control or regulation. That is because, to regulate or control biological life at the level of species or population, the distinction, hierarchy and classification of races as good and bad, inferior and superior, is established: “racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the dead of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: ‘the more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in species as a whole and the more I (as species rather than individual) can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate’” (Foucault, 2006, p. 231). As can be seen, racism is not only the dark side or a subtext or an ideology of the Western discourse emanating from the Enlightenment, but an entire technology of power as will be analyzed below.

In consequence, it can be observed that modern racism is not only related to an ideology, but also to a technology of power, which incorporates: “So racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and a purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power” (Foucault, 2006, p. 233). As a result, although transdisciplinary approaches emerged to challenge the centralizing power of modern disciplines, they did not achieve their goal as their strategy was to legitimize themselves in relation to these disciplines. To do so, they had to normalize themselves, which means that they had to assimilate to them and their centralizing and legitimizing power over individual bodies first, and then over the population-species.

Nevertheless, transdisciplinary approaches began to delegitimize the so-called Columbus Day, which was originally intended to glorify the so-called conquest, the encounter of two worlds and to celebrate the entry of what is now called America into Western European culture. After the second half of the twentieth century, this conception began to change and emphasis was placed on another perspective: the European invasion, the massacre of the Indigenous peoples and the subsequent and ongoing destruction and annihilation of their cultures, as well as the consequent resistance of these people. This transformed Columbus Day race day into Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance Day as Maldonado-Torres (2007) states:

However, this failed attempt at cultural annihilation produced, according to Zea (1980), a cultural trauma that originated within the denial of logos and reasoned speech; this was the foundation of European domination and oppression. Native people were considered not to have a language but only dialects; and thus, their rationality (logos) was deemed inferior, requiring them to be guided like infants by European rationality and laws as claimed by the Spanish philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda.

For this reason, from Foucault’s perspective, “The law is not born of nature, and it was not born near the fountains that the first shepherds frequented: the law is born of a real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes; the law was born in burning towns a ravaged field” (Foucault, 2006, p. 55). According to this French thinker, the apparent order and peace of states are underpinned by war, in which there are only two sides. In his own words:

In this regard, Foucault follows Marx when he suggests that “historical articulation leads to a binary conception of society” (Foucault, 2006, p. 56) the oppressors and the oppressed. Nevertheless, the well-known “class struggle” merely subsumed the so-called caste or race wars from the nineteenth century (Foucault, 2006, p. 65). In both cases, a discourse of battle is issued, which ultimately leads to a discourse of law: “It might be the right of his family or race, the right of superiority or seniority, the right of triumphal invasions, or the right of recent or ancient occupations” (Foucault, 2006, p. 57). From then on, “we have, then, a sort of major parting of the ways, which I will try to reconstruct. It corresponds to a recasting of the dialectic, and to a recasting of the theme of racial confrontations in terms of the theory of evolutionism and the struggle for existence” (Foucault, 2006, p. 65). This is biological social racism, whose antecedent lies on the wars of invasion, where two mutually external races faced each other, and which later developed into a one race “In other words, what we see as a polarity, as a binary rift within society, is not a clash between two distinct races. It is the splitting of a single race into a superrace and a subrace” (Foucault, 2006, p. 65).

In other words, the racial war between Europeans and native people, which resulted in their more or less continuous subjugation of the latter for three centuries, will unleash a nation-state after their independence war. This state would continue the war, but now as a class struggle, which is, in fact, the confrontation between those who consider themselves a super-race and those they view as a sub-race. This subrace would become, with the development of the bourgeois system, the virus of the social body, which the super-race must combat to prevent the “disease” of the social body and its eventual death. Consequently, in the present day, “At this point, the racist thematic is no longer a moment in the struggle between one social group and another; it will promote the global strategy of social conservatisms” (Foucault, 2006, p. 66).

In this way, the shift in focus within the process of governmentality can be understood, that is, the manner in which the conduct of individuals is formed and directed. In a disciplinary society, control was aimed at individual bodies (subjectivation), for which disciplines (veridiction) were indispensable. However, this model began to lose its power after the Second World War, and gradually individuals began to rebel against this type of control through student, worker, peasant, feminist and sexual diversity movements; all of these eventually created a crisis in the model of governmentality of Western modernity emanating from the Enlightenment, during the last third of the 20th century.

This crisis in the disciplinary society model alarmed the hegemonic global class, which began to reorganize itself to maintain the control it still had and recover what it had lost. To achieve this, it was necessary to incorporate some of the demands of the rebellious movements, such as less control of the individual through greater social and political participation of traditionally marginalized groups, as well as their legal recognition. This is why, starting in the 1970s, a transition to a new model of governmentality began, one that could generate a new form of subjectivation. This shift led to the move from the control of the body to the control of the species/population, which required not discipline, but regularization, and techniques aimed at controlling a living mass: the population.

As can be seen, the main goal of transdisciplinary approaches was to dismantle the colonialist and racist foundations that underlie the structure of Western modernity, which emerged from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Specifically, the intention was for transdisciplinary analysis to uncover the “dark side” of the Enlightenment and, once revealed, destroy the mechanisms by which individuals are controlled through bourgeois democracy (governmentality). This involves how individuals behave within the control system through normalization (subjectivation), based on what has been established as true discourse via the disciplines (veridiction).

Nevertheless, this objective was not fully realized since transdisciplinarities are defined and determined in relation to the disciplines that dominate academic institutions and research centers. Consequently, in order to gain space within these institutions, transdisciplinary fields had to assimilate or normalize themselves to these disciplines, which gradually diminished their transformative power. Nonetheless, what they did succeed in achieving was the crisis of the disciplinary society model. Yet, this model was not destroyed; rather, it evolved and transitioned into a model of regulation, modulation or self-regulation.

In this new technology of power, diversity and inclusion of traditionally excluded sectors are accepted and promoted as the control is no longer placed on the process or development of analysis or research. This shift allowed the recovery of certain subordinated knowledge, knowledge that had been disqualified and treated as non-conceptual, insufficiently elaborated and hierarchically inferior because it fell below the level of knowledge or scientific rigor demanded by the disciplines. Moreover, this also facilitated the full inclusion of transdisciplinary approaches within academia and research institutions.

Nonetheless, in this new power technology, the emphasis is placed on the control of the results. That is, while studies and research are self-regulated in their development, the result is controlled. This means that research that aligns with the interests and true discourse of the hegemonic class is the research that receives more funding. This dynamic steers researchers and research centers to focus on producing studies that are disseminated by the media and social networks as true discourse, which in turn regulates the behavior of populations.

Just as in the disciplinary society, the struggle of races was subsumed into the struggle of classes, a mere disguise for the battle between a super-race and a sub-race. Today, a similar attempt is made to hide this struggle under the apparent diversity and inclusion, but still from a position of otherness in terms of inferiority. This inclusion remains under the parameters of integration with the European and modern ideals. In other words, it is the search for equity from within inequity. “The poor are poor because they choose to be”, Latin American countries are poor due to their own inability to organize, because they are corrupt or because they are anti-democratic, not because there is a centralized control structure like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund that promotes investment and loans to countries that comply with the results established by these organizations, while simultaneously fostering the freedom to organize as best suits each country, so long as the dollar remains the hegemonic currency.

As a consequence, the current task is to eliminate the tyranny of encompassing knowledge along with its centralization and hierarchical ordering; so that the analyses and studies of the current technology of power are not normalized or regulated by the disciplines; that is why they maintain their emancipatory effects. What is needed are anti-disciplines that recover subordinated knowledge, local memories and erudition through genealogical procedures:

As Foucault indicates, genealogy is not empiricism or inductivism, and it is even in opposition to the power effects proper to scientific discourse. Therefore, the genealogical procedure does not follow a methodology like that of the sciences, but instead operates on a different plane and conception of knowledge. This is why Foucault does not call it a “method,” as this term refers to the knowledge of the disciplines:

Hence, the genealogical procedure involves bringing together subordinated knowledges, such as erudite knowledge and local memories. By subordinated knowledges, two things are understood. First, these are historical contents hidden by the rationality of formal systems: “subjugate knowledges are, then, blocks of historical knowledges that were present in the functional and systematic ensembles, but which were masked, and the critique was able to reveal their existence by using, obviously enough, the tools of scholarship” (Foucault, 2006, p. 21).

Second, subordinated knowledges include a series of knowledge that had been disqualified as non-conceptual because it was considered to have a low scientific value: this knowledge “what I would call, if you like, what people know (and this is by no means the same thing as common knowledge or common sense but, on the contrary, a particular knowledge, a knowledge that is local, regional, or differential, incapable of unanimity and which derives its power solely from the fact that is different from all the knowleges that surround it)” (Foucault, 2006, p. 21).

Contrary to what it seems, scientific knowledge is not being disqualified as something false, irrelevant or dispensable. What is being affirmed is that what needs to be eliminated is its use as a centralizing, hierarchical, normalizing and excluding knowledge: this is the battle against the power effects inherent to discourse considered by the disciplines as scientific. This is the battle against the effects of power inherent in the discourse considered by the disciplines as scientific, and that is why antidisciplinary studies are needed that are organized in an analogical and non-hierarchical way. On the other hand, this battle must also be fought in the area of veridiction, that is, where said discourse is disseminated, through an education that involves questioning the truth and the way in which it is accessed, in the same way that it questions the political structures that shape the individual, that is, an education that leads to the recovery of expropriated and subjugated knowledge.