Happiness as dispositive in Chilean education: power, discourses, and lines of flight

This article examines the emergence of what is here termed a felicitary dispositive within the Chilean school context, understood as a heterogeneous assemblage of lines through which happiness and positive emotions are constituted as a strategic field for the circulation of power within schools. Drawing on a Deleuzian cartographic approach, the study develops a critical ethnography of the dispositive based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in three schools in Santiago, Chile. The analysis focuses on two key dimensions of the dispositive: the lines of enunciation and the lines of flight. The findings show how certain discursive mechanisms legitimise and normalise felicitary practices in schools, while affective intensities simultaneously generate movements that overflow regulatory and control logics. The article contributes to educational ethnography by showing how the felicitary dispositive reorganises the socio-educational field through the codification of affects, while remaining irreducibly exposed to the constitutive indeterminacy and variability of affective life.