Western man has become a confessing animal

(Foucault, 1998, p. 59)

The Soviet Individual: Genealogy of a dissimulating animal

                                                                                                                 (Kharkhordin, 1995, p. 209)

Foucault’s (1998) and Kharkhordin’s (1995) famous dictums about the Western and Soviet ‘men’ as confessing and dissimulating individuals capture very well the differences arising at the level of actors' subjectivities in neo-liberal and post-communist regimes. Focusing on the field of educational policy-making in post-communist Ukraine, where neo-liberal and post-communist subjects interact most closely and where the differences between the two types of subjectivities are manifested most remarkably, this paper addresses the question of how the subjectivities of post-communist actors change as a result of interaction with the Western (neo-liberal) regimes of truth and global policy discourses.

To rephrase this question in Kharkhordin’s (1995) terms, the article asks how formerly ‘dissimulating’ individuals now relate to new regimes of truth and governance and in doing so co-produce their own subjectivity.The discussion presented in this paper is primarily concerned with the question of a post-communist subject, which as Kharkhordin insightfully puts it: [M]ay happen to be one of the most important questions of the day, as amidst all the flux of post-communist world, amidst structures and institutions being changed every day, there is only one relatively stable element of the Communist legacy left. This is the Soviet Individual. (Kharkhordin, 1995, p. 210)

However, in order to understand the production of subjectivity of post-communist subjects, continuous reference is made to the process of production of the subjectivities of neo-liberal actors. This comparison is important since nowadays post-communist and neo-liberal subjects often find themselves interacting closely with each other in many fields of social practice, of which the field of educational policy-making in post-communist Ukraine is one.

Taking Dreyfus and Rabinow’s (1982) conceptualisation about objectifying and subjectifying discourses as a methodological point of departure and drawing on the findings of discourse analysis of policy documents, online reports and interviews with 18 policy-makers, the analysis traces the different modes of subjectivation at work in neo-liberal and post-communist societies and the effects they have on actor subjectivities. The article demonstrates that the reception of the global regimes of truth in a post-communist policy society has led to the rise of a new form of subjectivity – the subjectivity of Westernised post-communists individuals.

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