In the seminal book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) French philosopher Michel Foucault described how the psy-disciplinesâhis collective term for psychiatry, psychology, psycho-analysis and other psycho-therapiesâbecame entangled in new forms of government. 18th and 19th century liberal Europe was faced with the challenge to govern the population to ensure morality and order, but in ways that also guaranteed the freedom of individuals and a free economy. Expertise, including the social sciences, psy-disciplines, economics, statistics etc., came to provide solutions for this challenge by producing scientific knowledges about persons, society and the economy (Foucault 1988). The emerging psy-disciplines helped to make sense of individuals âas speaking, living, working individualsâ and also provided avenues for these individuals to understand, form and regulate themselves according to these scientific discourses (Foucault 1994: 281). In this way, expertise enabled a shift from coercive control into âthe conduct of conductâ and practices of self-formation. Psy-disciplines in this way are âtechnologies of the socialâ (Fendler 2001), rather than simply scientific areas amassed following simple rules and propositions internal to scientific discovery. As Michel Foucault indicated, and, as has since been elaborated by Nikolas Rose (1998, 1999), among others, educational institutions and actors have been, and continue to be, central to the continuation of the psy-disciplines, their knowledges and practice, which often emerge and operate as natural, inevitable, ethical and liberating.
This book critically explores how the psy-disciplines manifest and operate in contemporary spaces and institutions of education. We trace and document the ways in which psy-disciplinary regimes of truth and technologies work in the government of teachers, students, parents, educational leaders, and others. What does it mean to know oneself and others as a subject of education vis-Ă -vis psy-disciplinary vocabularies, categories, boundaries, and affective registers? What does it mean to relate, to teach, to learn, to lead, or to research on psy-disciplinary terms? What is it possible to be and become, and what forms of beings and becomings pose more difficulty, within and under, what has come to be known as, âthe psy-gazeâ?
As the title indicates, the intention of the book is to âinterruptâ psy-disciplinary knowledges and practices in education. We are not so much âantiâ psy- as we are invested in exploring it as central to contemporary modes of truth-telling, meaning-making, organisation, practice, and subject formation. To interrupt is to bring to a momentary halt; it is to interject into a flow of sorts, to disturb the current, or even interfere with it. To interrupt can be to problematise and destabilise taken-for-granted-as-good knowledges and practices, and to destabilise is to enable a practice of freedom (Foucault 1994) by which it becomes possible to think, to imagine, to feel, to become, otherwise.
Foucaultâs Analysis
For readers new to Foucaultâs analysis of the work of the psy-disciplines, it may be useful to briefly recap some of the major points. He argues (1977: 191) that for a long time ordinary people were not subject to much interest and scrutinyâonly the powerful were. The king, the war hero, particular members of the clergy, and so on, were looked at, observed, and described in detail. It was a privilege for the privileged. However, as new forms of governance were introduced during the 18th and 19th centuriesâforms that Rose (1998, 1996) argues are intrinsically linked with the exercise of political power in liberal democraciesânew techniques of knowing, shaping, and controlling populations became both available and further developed. These disciplinary methods, as Foucault calls them, reversed the relation and âlowered the threshold of describable individuality and made this description a means of control and method of domination. It is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible useâ (1977: 191). âThis turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjectionâ (p. 192). The objects of the gaze began to include the child, the patient, the madman, and the prisoner. Foucault writes:
The examination as the fixing at once ritual and âscientificâ, of individual differences, as the pinning down of each individual in his own particularity [âŠ] clearly indicates the appearance of a new modality of power.
All the sciences and forms of analysis and therapy employing the root âpsychoâ, according to Foucault, have their starting point in this âhistorical reversal of the procedures of individualizationâ (p. 193). The individual emerges out of the grey masses of ordinary people and delinquents and becomes an object of study and a potential for change. The individual, as a historical construct, became a reality fabricated and upheld in multiple ways, including by the ways the new sciences took an interest in its functioning. We began to measure and make comparisons, to make graphs and metrics for normal development, so that pathological development could be traced, and so on. The assumption was that by knowing human behaviour and its psyche, in general, and assessing the individual in relation to this, one could develop practices and therapies for transformation, improvement, or correction.
Foucault traces the changes to punishment and correction during the early modern period. From the earlier public spectacle of punishment, the tortured body in the town centre, which sought not only to punish the individual wrong-doer, but also serve as a warning to onlookers, governments began to favour other forms of population controls. Other techniques of power came into play, which Foucault calls âdisciplineâ. Discipline, among other things, concerns getting the population to behave in a certain way without the use of direct physical violence and, preferably, on their own accord, because they have to come to believe these behaviours to be right, true and good. Discipline entails rituals and practices and it requires knowledge. Knowledge about which forms of discipline are effective and which are not, which, according to this discourse, entails knowing the human and developing vocabularies for describing and measuring this human. Importantly, Foucault questions whether the new forms of discipline were more âhumaneâ. While the body as the major target of castigation disappeared, the punishment that âonce rained down upon the body [was] replaced by a punishment that acts in the depth of the heart. The thoughts, the will, the inclinationâ (1977: 16). Punishment should strike the soul rather than the body. Under the new regime, we were in the business of âgoverning the soulâ (Rose 1999). This changed the way that physical punishment was regarded. Foucault writes, perhaps mockingly, of the new mindset of judges, âdo not imagine that the sentences that we judges pass are activated by a desire to punish; they are intended to correct, reclaim, âcureââ (p. 10). In other words, âa technique of improvement represses in the penalty, strict expiation of evil-doing, and relieves the magistrates the demeaning task of punishingâ (ibid.).
The success of disciplinary power derives from the use of, what Foucault calls, âsimple instrumentsâ; âhierarchical observation, normalising judgement and their combination that is specific to it, the examinationâ (p. 170). In order to ascertain how discipline works, Foucault suggests to look at the âmicro-physicsâ of power: everyday routines and their material arrangements, such as timetables, seating arrangements, architectural orchestrations, etc., and everyday meaning-making practices that compel subjects to think, feel and behave in certain ways, in order to better themselves, for example. The point of discipline is âsubjectificationâ, the making of a particular kind of subject who acts and desires, on its own accord, in desirable ways. In relation to this, it is important to note that Foucault asserts (1977: 194) that we, when thinking of âsubjectionâ or âsubjectificationâ, need to discontinue earlier traditions of regarding this as ânegativeâ:
We must cease once of for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it âexcludesâ, it ârepressesâ, it âcensorsâ, it âabstractsâ, it âmasksâ, it âconcealsâ. In fact, power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.
In that way, power is always already âproductiveâ, and the task for us is to ask, productive of what? What regimes of truth and what forms of being are enabled here, and which are marginalised or even precarious? In what ways do the psy-disciplines know their subjects and objects, and what are the multifarious implications of this? What kinds of lives, communities, and societies do they help create?
The consolidation of psychology into a discipline, and its âsocial destinyâ, was tied to âits capacity to produce the technical means of individualisation, a new way of construing, observing, and recording human subjectivity and its vicissitudesâ (Rose 1999: 136). Alongside the other psy-disciplines, psychology is a âtechnologyâ, âa way of making visible and intelligible certain features of persons, their conducts, and their relations with one anotherâ (Rose 1999: 11). Since World War II, psychologists have increasingly provided the vocabularies with which the troubles of children have been described; the expertise for diagnosing and categorizing such children; the languages within which the tasks of mothers and fathers have been adumbrated; and the professionals to operate the technology of childhood (Rose 1999: 133). While many âexpertises of human conductâ have proliferated over the past centuries, psy-expertise has been marked by a certain âgenerosityâ. Rose (1998: 33â34) defines this generosity as one in which psy- has been happy, indeed eager, to âgive itself awayâ, meaning that it lent âits vocabularies, explanations, and types of judgement to other professional groups and to implant them within its clientsâ. He suggests that psy- has had a âpeculiar penetrative capacity in relation to practices for the conduct of conductâ (p. 34). We are all âcalled upon to play [our] part in the making up of persons and to inculcate in them a certain relation to themselvesâ (Rose 1998: 35). One reason for this may well be that they have provided âpracticable recipes for actionâ in relation to the government of persons for various professionals in different locales (ibid.). An important point here is, of course, that psy-discourse is not only at play in relation to the subjectification of the governed, but is also operative in the subjectification of expert professionals, such as teachers, as well as others, parents for example. Thus it may be that in this time and place a professional may come to feel not only that it âmakes senseâ to take up psy-discourse, it may also be a route through which she can feel competent and justified in her actions and interactions.
Psychology in particular has been highly influential in educational practice and research (Nisbet 2005), for example, in devising the âeducable subjectâ (Fendler 2001), the âdevelopingâ child (Burman 1994; Walkerdine 1994; Cannella 1997), pedagogies (Henriques et al. 1984; Meredyth and Tyler 1993; Popkewitz 1998; Popkewitz and Brennan 1998; Hultqvist and Dahlberg 2001), behaviour management (Millei et al. 2010) and in identifying different forms of âconduct disordersâ, such as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), autism or learning difficulties (Billington 1996, or in this book Allan & Harwood). Currently, psy-methods (self-observation and self-regulation) appear in new constellations with the administration of psychotropic drugs (such as perception, mood, or consciousness altering chemical substances), or combine them with practices neuroeducation or brain based learning utilize. Psy-disciplines merge with these knowledges to form a part of the biopolitical r...