Foucault and a Politics of Confession in Education

Andreas Fejes, Katherine Nicoll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317650126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

In liberal, democratic and capitalist societies today, we are increasingly invited to disclose our innermost thoughts to others. We are asked to turn our gaze inwards, scrutinizing ourselves, our behaviours and beliefs, while talking and writing about ourselves in these terms. This form of disclosure of the self resonates with older forms of church confession, and is now widely seen in practices of education in new ways in nurseries, schools, colleges, universities, workplaces and the wider policy arena.

This book brings together international scholars and researchers inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, to explore in detail what happens when these practices of confession become part of our lives and ways of being in education. The authors argue that they are not neutral, but political and powerful in their effects in shaping and governing people; they examine confession as discursive and contemporary practice so as to provoke critical thought.

International in scope and pioneering in the detail of its scrutiny of such practices, this book extends contemporary understanding of the exercise of power and politics of confessional practices in education and learning, and offers an alternative way of thinking of them. The book will be of value to educational practitioners, scholars, researchers and students, interested in the politics of their own practices.

I Introduction

1 An emergence of confession in education

Andreas Fejes and Katherine Nicoll

DOI: 10.4324/9781315763057-1

We are encouraged today in contemporary liberal, democratic, capitalist societies to turn our gaze towards our inner self, scrutinizing who we are and disclosing this to teachers, counsellors, parents, friends and strangers. This disclosure of the self as a ‘confession’ has become quite familiar in educational settings. Pupils are asked to scrutinize themselves as learners, to evaluate their behaviour and disclose this so that they can be corrected and correct themselves. Confession is a technique embedded in the use of, for example, individual study plans, learning portfolios and learning guidance and counselling (cf. Besley and Peters 2007; Usher and Edwards 2007; Fejes and Dahlstedt 2013). Through confession in education and other walks of life we increasingly come to know, judge and shape ourselves and others. These practices operate as a technology for the exercise of power and government.

This technology of confession today is not solely relegated to the classroom. It has a long history in Western societies: burgeoning in the practices of hospitals and asylums for the criminal and insane (Foucault 1991) and in law and order (Rose 1999) it proliferated as a particular form for the government of people and was supported through emerging scientific knowledge of the inner workings of the mind from the eighteenth century. It is now familiar across a huge range of practices where experts have become available to guide us in our conduct (Rose 1998); of, for example, counselling, performance evaluations in the workplace, marketing, social work, parenting and personal relationships. Confession has been widely taken up and mobilized across societies with intensified effect over the last years, supported in the emergence of media forms and technologies for communication.

We have only to consider the online communities of Facebook and Twitter to recognize this proliferation. These communities mobilize and disseminate the possibilities for us to reveal ourselves, talk about ourselves, work on our self-presentation and learn to judge who we are. In the mushrooming of the ‘reality’ TV shows Super Nanny, Master Chef and Big Brother too, we find a technology of confession for learning replicated in different guises; parents confessing loss of control, chefs their less than perfect dishes, and in the Big Brother house quite ordinary people confessing ‘selves’. It is through confession that people increasingly reveal their souls to the masses, coming to be known and learning to know themselves anew as they are judged. It is through this technology that we shape ourselves today in virtual sites, in media programmes and more widely, whereby people variously seek to ‘perfect’ themselves (in self-understanding, at work or in parenting, in their health and social behaviour) and achieve perfection, success or fame.

The proliferation of such practices indicates a shift or ‘turn’ towards a governing or stewardship of the conduct of people through a confessional infused with ‘psychology’ (Rose 1992, 1998). Here the ‘self’ becomes the subject of its own narrative, available both to psychological expertise and the ‘self’ for self-shaping. Key now in educational settings, as argued in this book, is a verbalization in speech and writing for self-learning. This does not mean that teachers in education and learning settings have set aside activities with students in the acquisition of knowledge and the development of skills as learning. But they have included a new emphasis on the student learning to know, judge, shape and speak or write about the self as learner. This is supported through pedagogy as ‘learning to learn’, in the emergence of student support in developing ‘learning careers’, and in myriad tools for the self to learn about its learning and progress as learner. The generation and multiplication of learning conversations, logbooks, portfolios for reflection (cf. Fejes and Dahlstedt 2013) and performance appraisals in classrooms bears testament to this.

Alongside and in resonance with this emphasis, national and European education policy through the 1990s promoted flexibility and lifelong learning. Policies suggested that as we cannot know what knowledge and skills we will need for the future we must reshape ourselves flexibly and as lifelong learners. A shift in the focus of pedagogical research from education to learning accompanied this narration. With discourses of flexibility and lifelong learning through the 1990s, ‘learning’ proliferated and became indispensable to thinking about ourselves, others and societies (Simons and Masschelein 2008b). Learning moved beyond the educational space, into workplaces, everyday life and the home, shaping the ‘learner’ as element in a ‘portfolio’ of self-capital (Simons and Masschelein 2008a, b). Learning has become a new feature of life. Research and scholarship on learning-to-learn has become widespread in the field of education, ‘building’ knowledge of how different learning styles and strategies will provide students with necessary skills to handle an uncertain and changing future (cf. Abrandt Dahlgren and Dahlgren 2002). Education practices, policy and research have coalesced powerfully.

It is in these and wider changing contours of the present that this research collection situates itself. Technologies and techniques for shaping the learner as self may be productive but we argue also potentially ‘dangerous’ (Foucault 1983: 231) – for they refashion our relations and extend a domain of government into everyday life in the shaping of selves (governed and governing) as learners. Techniques of verbalization invite and encourage us to turn our gaze inwards, scrutinizing who we really are and who we really wish to become. They demand this truth of ourselves. Whether or not this is disclosed, allowed is a comparison of ourselves to ideals and norms of the present; as ‘good behaviour’ and ‘good subjectivity’. The aim is to become a new and improved ‘self’ in some way, even though who this is is already in part formulated. It is through scrutiny of details in this verbalization that we may come to understand how power operates through them; with what potentials, limits and dangers.

Confession has emerged as a central technology of the self through which we come to know who we are. It operates through disparate techniques that encourage us to disclose ourselves. Confession as technology then does not take one form. Historically there are forms of confession positioning the person as sinner or in a continuing search for self-knowledge (cf. Foucault 1998; Fejes and Dahlstedt 2013). Regularities in their function appeared at different times. Technologies of the self emerged in Ancient Greece as a practice aiming at self-mastery and care of the self, then reshaped with Christianity as confession and continued until the seventeenth century with an emphasis on the relationship between the disclosure of the self and the drama of the verbalized renunciation of the self (Foucault 2003a). Later, with the emergence of practices of the human sciences and psychological knowledge, confession was scientized (Rose 1989; Fejes and Dahlstedt 2013), remobilized as intrinsic to practices of asylums and hospitals, and as a technology and techniques to ‘cleanse’ the sick and insane and make them well: ‘verbalization has been reinserted in a different context by the so-called human sciences’ (Foucault 2003a: 167). Confession seems now intrinsic to our everyday lives and understandings of ourselves in the constitution of ourselves as new.

This collection of chapters takes on the task of illustrating and exploring in detail how the self is shaped and fostered through confession across many differing regimes of discourses in practices of education and learning. In this chapter we introduce the historical emergence of confession as a specific technology of the self. We then orient our readers to some of the concepts as research resources taken up and mobilized in the various chapters. These draw resources from the work of Michel Foucault and as these ideas have been explored in the wider social sciences by people such as Mitchell Dean (1994) and Nikolas Rose (1989, 1999).

Confession as technology of the self

Confession is a technology of the self and a particular form of the exercise or conduit of power that acts in governing today. At the same time it is a distinctive theorization emerging in various books and papers of Foucault (cf. Foucault 1998) and through a seminar on the topic at the University of Vermont in 1982 (Martin et al. 1988).

For Foucault a power relationship is a ‘structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions’ (Foucault, in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 220). The question of power relationships is one of government; both of people and of the self: ‘For to “conduct” is at the same time to “lead” others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities’ (Foucault, in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 220–1). Today, through education and more widely it is the ‘autonomous’ learner desired through practices of government as both its prerequisite and effect. For societies seek autonomy as a form of prescribed freedom for their people and in this practices of government become acceptable and can be productively engaged. It is through the conduct of conduct that people come to govern themselves as well as others.¹ ‘Government’ is therefore much wider than the government of the state. It is the government of the self, the state and others.²

A focus in this collection is on a ‘how’ question of this governing. This is a dual question of politics and power. A how question of governing through education and learning becomes one both of technologies of power (of a domination that is both productive and limiting) and those of the ‘self’. The first concerns the practices through which a self is ‘objectified’ – made an object for examination and regulation and construed as normal or abnormal in order that it can be corrected (Foucault 2003a). The second concerns the way the self shapes itself into a new and improved self. As Foucault argues, technologies of the self permit self-shaping towards particular ends. They allow:

individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.

(Foucault 2003a: 146)

Technologies of power and of the self do not function separately. Rather, the encounter between the two is what Foucault called government. Technologies of power and domination thus ‘have recourse to processes by which the individual [learner] acts upon himself’ (Foucault 2003c: 203–4), and technologies of the self ‘are integrated into structures of coercion or domination’ (Foucault 2003c: 203–4). Thus, an analysis of government in education or learning considers such regulatory practices at their points of intersection, whereby those leading conduct and technologies of the self become aligned and integrated within regimes of power. The question of how is thus a question of the specific exercises of power; its regularities, chance occurrences, dispersals and serendipities. This is then also a political question – what happens through them?

This is not a question of cause and effect, for this would be to suggest that power is a ‘thing’ and this is not what is implied here. Rather, power is exercised through events of specific relations through which, by their repetition, we come to form understandings of ourselves as ‘selves’.³ Thus, selves are only ‘selves’ in that they come to know of themselves as such. They are not constituted in any stable way or made for all time through power relations. Indeed selves are forms rather than substance, constituted and constituting themselves in and through practices, where forms of self may emerge not even identical to within selves (Kelly 2013). In differing situations subjects may constitute themselves in different and even conflicting ways. Selves are then forms of practice. However historical conditions may lead us to understand and practice ourselves in relatively stable ways.

McWhorter puts it this way: ‘[s]elves are events of power and remain always dependent upon repetitions of the power-events that maintain them. Consciences, self-understandings, capacities for judgement and creative practice come to be within these networks of repeating events’ (McWhorter 2003: 114). Thus, although we are made subject to others through technologies of power and to ourselves through the technologies of the self, we are not determined through this. Rather, agency is ‘made’ through choice, identity and conscience. It is through exercises of power of the self on the self, and those of others on the self, through their repetitions and regularities that relatively stable self understandings, capacities and consciences, and so forth, may emerge. Although as McWhorter discusses, Foucault may sound at times as if he considers power as fully subjugating and not leaving room for the self to act with agency, he did not hold this view:

It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to [one's] own identity by conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.

(Foucault, in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 212)

Power is not being theorized by Foucault as a ‘thing’, but as an exercise. It is through its exercise, whereby ‘power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free’ (Foucault, in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 221), that subjugation is attempted as the shaping of a field of possible actions. There is always choice in this field of possibilities, including multiple forms of refusal. In talking about the power relationships Foucault contrasts this notion with violence as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part II A politics of confession in assessment
• Part III A politics of confession in dialogue
• Part IV A politics of confession in State programmes
• Part V A politics of confession as care of the self
• Index