Disruptive Subjects. The Use of Diagnosis as an Effect of the Lack of Pedagogical Analysis on the School Dispositif

Paraphrasing Franco Prina (2011, p. 63), visibility is the first criterion that guides the selection of problematic situations and behaviors in school. Within the school context, behaviors that are divergent or do not conform to the regular functioning of the school organization are immediately visible: they interfere with and stand out from a material background and its usual way of functioning (Tolomelli, 2022). In order to continue in the smooth running of school activities, it becomes necessary for the organization and its representatives to deal with that behavior. If the behavior recurs and treatment through practices and tools wholly internal to the school proves ineffective in preventing its recurrence, the institutional procedure convenes and entrusts external and specialized knowledge with the mandate to investigate the deeper reasons for that behavior. The material background acts as a selector: it indicates an anomaly and an irregularity of behavior and delegates its "treatment" to the knowledge of professionals who seek its cause in the internal functioning of the subject (Foucault, 2000, Barone 2001). This delegation procedure doubles the irregularity, which moves from act to conduct, from behavior to mode of being (Foucault, 2000, pp. 24-25): the shift from the infraction of the norm as a regularity of conduct to the individual personality trait is made possible by recourse to psychological, neuropsychiatric and social knowledge that describes the subject and constitutes it as irregular with respect to physiological, psychological or moral dimensions all welded into a single point: the diagnosis, which creates the individual and transforms him or her into a "case" (Barone 2019). By showing the similarity between the individual (his functional irregularity, his emotional fragility, his social problematicity) and his "irregular act" (Foucault, 2000, pp. 27-28), the character of the irregular takes shape as a truth: a truth about the subject that identifies him as sick and noncompliant. Such a truth fits perfectly into the school organization since, by identifying an unambiguous element on which to intervene with external knowledge and professionalism (educators, school psychologists, mediators..), it allows the school not to question its own structure and functioning. This confirms and guarantees the correctness and regularity of school activities, turning the educational context into "naked empiricity" (Massa in Rezzara, 2004, p. 153): inert and invisible matter and background (Landri, Viteritti, 2016). Such invisibility of context makes the social visibility of divergent behavior a sign of deviant pathological individuality. On the contrary, it is necessary to take a pedagogical perspective that looks at and acts on the dispositif that shapes the educational contexts experienced by subjects. This would make it possible to put the role of school form and functioning in creating deviance back at the center of analysis. Indeed, representations and treatment of deviant behavior are profoundly influenced by the school understood as a material, organizational, symbolic and affective structure: it is this that must be looked at and changed (Massa, 1997, Barone 2013).