Foucault, Power, and Education

Stephen J. Ball

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136156120
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Éducation
• Thema: Éducation générale

Foucault, Power, and Education invites internationally renowned scholar Stephen J. Ball to reflect on the importance and influence of Foucault on his work in educational policy. By focusing on some of the ways Foucault has been placed in relation to educational questions or questions about education, Ball highlights the relationships between Foucault's concepts and methods, and educational research and analysis. An introductory chapter offers a brief explanation of some of Foucault's key concerns, while additional chapters explore ways in which Ball himself has sought to apply Foucault's ideas in addressing contemporary educational issues.

In this intensely personal and reflective text, Ball offers an interpretation of his Foucault—That is, his own particular reading of the Foucauldian toolbox. Ideal for courses in education policy and education studies, this valuable teaching resource is essential reading for any education scholar looking for a starting point into the literature and ideas of Foucault.

1 Do We Really Need Another Book about Foucault?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203078662-1

Jana Sawicki describes speaking with Foucault at a seminar in Vermont in 1983:

I told him that I had just finished writing a dissertation on his critique of humanism. Not surprisingly, he responded with some embarrassment and much seriousness. He suggested that I not spend energy talking about him and, instead, do what he was doing, namely, write genealogies.

(Sawicki, 1991, p. 15)

I do not “do Foucault”, and I am not a Foucauldian. Not that such a thing makes sense, as I shall try to explain and demonstrate. Indeed I no longer have much interest in being a something—that is in claiming allegiance to some orthodoxy or community of like-minded scholars committed to a single theoretical position. Rather, I am more interested in the crafting of an academic subject yet to come. For a significant period of my academic career I was searching for a sense of identity and security. I wanted to work nicely and productively within a set of historical conditions of thought that I would never need to consider very seriously or challenge. I wanted to find some body of thought or some key thinker or ideas within which I could feel comfortable and to which or to whom I could turn for the solution to my analytic difficulties and struggles for sense and meaning. Being a something, being a “wise fool”, seemed to have many attractions and advantages. I might have been, at various times, a Weberian, or symbolic interactionist, or critical ethnographer, enfolded gently in their affirmations and “transcendental teleologies” (Foucault, 1972), but only might. I was never quite certain enough, so the fact of my identity was never quite established. Reading Foucault put a stop to all of that. Reading Foucault was a struggle and a shock but also a revelation, indeed Charles Taylor begins an essay on Foucault with the words “Foucault disconcerts” (1986, p. 69). Many of his substantive ideas have become of great importance to me in the empirical work I have done on educational processes, institutions and policies, as I will describe and explore later. However, equally important to me is Foucault’s stance and style of work, the kind of scholar and intellectual he was, and his own struggles not to be “a something”. That is, the particular ethics of intellectual work as a practice of self that he undertook. Indeed his work is defined by his attempts to find a position outside of the human sciences from which to see the social world, and to see the human sciences as a part of that social world—a space that is both liberating and impossible (see Chapter 4). Veyne (2010) had intended to call his book about Foucault “the goldfish bowl and the samurai”. Foucault’s intellectual project rested on seeking to find a space beyond traditional disciplinary or theoretical positions, from which he could subject those positions to analysis and critique, and trouble the “inscription of progress” in modern politics and scholarship. He set himself staunchly against the notion of a universal or self-evident humanity. As Popkewitz and Brennan (1998) put it “For our purposes, Foucault offers the possibility of a different kind of theoretical and political project, which does not automatically privilege its own position.” This is definitely not comfortable and affirming, it involves, as Burchell explains “the experience of not being a citizen of the community or republic of thought and action in which one nevertheless is unavoidably implicated or involved” (1996, p. 30). There is a dual ambivalence here, one aspect in relation to scholarship and one in relation to the practices of government and the constant challenge of “not knowing what and how to think” (Burchell, 1996, p. 30). It involves finding ways to work in the tensions between technologies of competence and technologies of the self. Reading Foucault has made me question what I do as a scholar and social critic, and ethically who I am and what I might become. I have had to confront not the ways in which I am determined but rather the ways in which I might be revocable. He makes me uneasy, in a productive and generative way. He has unsettled my sense of the claims I might make about my work, its purposes, and its role in the enterprise of modernist human science, although I revert to that enterprise regularly and with ease, often with a sigh of relief. In many respects Foucault only really makes sense when his substantive works are viewed, read, understood in relation to his refusal to accept the inscriptions and limits and structures of “normal” social science. As Oksala suggests: “To get closer to Foucault’s intent, it helps if one is willing to question the ingrained social order, give up all truths firmly fixed in stone, whilst holding on to a fragile commitment to freedom” (2007, p. 1). Foucault, although he is often read in a rather different way, is all about being free but also about the dangers of freedom. “My role” he said “is to show people that they are much freer than they feel ...” (Martin et al., 1988, p. 10). His work questions the meaning of freedom, and he sets himself against the idea of freedom as a state of being. Foucault tends to be read by many as an historian of power, discipline, subjectification and normalization, whose work produces a sense of the impossibility of freedom, but that is dangerously misleading and one-sided. He was as much concerned with the modalities of freedom as he was with the production of docility. Perhaps with some exaggeration, Mendieta argues that “Genealogy it could be said, is a science of freedom ...” (2011, p. 113). This raises issues about both subjectivity and scholarship to which I will return briefly at the end of the book. Most of all, for me, Foucault’s work continues to provide a set of effective tools for intervening within contemporary discourses of power. As he explained: “Everything I do, I do in order that it may be of use” (Defert & Ewald, 2001, pp. 911–912). His histories in particular are intended “to show that things weren’t as necessary as all that” (Foucault, 1991a, p. 76) and thus why “they are not as necessary as all that”, now. All of this can be confusing and difficult if we attempt to read Foucault as just another enlightenment scholar or just another post-structuralist. To do so is impoverishing of him and of the reader. The challenge is not to agree with Foucault but to be disconcerted by him, to be made to think in new spaces and to consider new possibilities for thought. However, as I said, I am not a Foucauldian; indeed, much of my research and writing remains focused on the “problem of meaning” and draws upon actors’ accounts of the social world as the basis for interpreting and explaining the social—I dabble in the mysterious and modernist arts of ethnography. Foucault’s work, in stark contrast, begins with “the unconscious structures of thought” and the organizing discourses which operate at an archaeological (rules and regularities) rather than an epistemological (claims to truth) level of knowledge. While the latter seeks to separate the objects and subjects of knowledge and establish a relation to “truth”, the former addresses how a particular discourse acquires the status of scientificity, how it creates in itself, so to speak, the conditions of what counts as truth.

I tried to explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the individuals who are speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such discourse: what conditions did Linnaeus (or Petty, or Arnauld) have to fulfill, not to make his discourse coherent and true in general, but to give it, at the time when it was written and accepted, value and practical application as scientific discourse.

(Foucault, 1970b, p. xiv)

He was profoundly and consistently interested in how “human beings are made subjects” (Foucault, 1982, p. 208) but not interested in “speaking subjects” per se. Indeed he saw the modern preoccupation with self, what he called “anthropological prejudice”, as an inhibition to the possibilities of thought: “It is no longer possible to think in our days other than in the void left by man’s disappearance” (Foucault, 1970b, p. 34). This void is, he goes on to say, “nothing more, nothing less, than the unfolding space in which it is once more possible to think”. I explored with Maria Tamboukou, some of the continuities, affinities and contradictions embedded in the tensions between discourse and hermeneutics in a book we edited, Dangerous Encounters: Genealogy and Ethnography(Tamboukou & Ball, 2004 ). Among many other things both genealogists and ethnographers are fascinated by the minutiae of everyday life and the ways in which the sinews of power are embedded in mundane practices and in social relationships and the haphazard and contingent nature of practices. This was never more clear to me than in the work I have done on “performativity”, in looking at the ways in which lists, forms, grids and rankings work to change the meaning of educational practice—what it means to teach and learn—and our sense of who we are in terms of these practices—what it means to be an educator, and to be educated, I return to these concerns in Chapter 4. The focus of much of Foucault’s work is on such practices and on power relations ¹ and on the problem of government. In his “middle period” in particular his attention was focused on the “management of populations” and on what he called “bio-power”—of which education is a significant component—and this is addressed in Chapter 2. He was interested in the ways in which power flows through architecture, organizational arrangements, professional expertise and knowledge, systems of classification and “dividing practices”, therapeutic procedures and how it comes to be written onto bodies and into our conduct—that is, power as totalizing and individualizing and as productive. As he wrote “Power produces, it produces reality” (Foucault, 1979, p. 194).

When I am stuck with a problem of analysis, I will often turn to Foucault, and read something, anything, relevant or not. He unclutters my mind, enables me to think differently, in new spaces and to escape from the analytic clichés, which are so prevalent in contemporary sociological work. I also often find his writing elegant and engaging, and although I have never sought to write like him, he has again changed the way I write and the way I think about writing, about “the author function” and the process of the production of texts. Indeed, Foucault was preoccupied with writing, and described it as “like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses it limits” (Foucault, 1998, p. 206). He attributed great importance to the act of writing as a practice of freedom and in a very late paper explored the possibilities of what he called “self writing” (Foucault, n.d.), that is a process of self-shaping through the production of texts. “When I write I do it above all to change myself and not to think the same thing as before” (Foucault, 1991b, p. 27). In this way he was clear about how he approached intellectual problems and approached writing. He regarded his intellectual endeavours as a way of working on himself; he was always a work in progress, always unfinished, restless and angry. Our task each day, he suggested, is to decide that which is of the greatest danger, and explained:

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.

(Foucault, 1983c, pp. 231–232, see Chapter 4)

While we read Foucault as a writer, it is important to recognize that Foucault was a speaking scholar as much as a writing scholar, indeed there were long gaps between his books (for example, from the publication in France of The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969 to Discipline and Punish in 1975, from the History of Sexuality Volume 1 in 1976 to Volumes 2 and 31984) and he announced many plans for books which were never realized. He was a writer, researcher, journalist, political activist and serial interviewee. However, for 12 of the 13 years he was a professor at the College de France he gave an annual series of 12 lectures on Wednesdays, from January to March, which are now translated into English and published. These lectures involved the presentation of new work and work in progress, they attracted large audiences, typically around 500 people, and he spoke from behind a forest of cassette recorders —a setting that he did not enjoy. In 1976 he changed the time of the lectures to try to reduce the attendance—to no avail:

Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematisation were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the College de France do not duplicate the published books. ... They have their own status.

(Ewald and Fontona, Introduction to Foucault, 2010a, p. xiv)

In these lectures he “anticipates, intersects with, and develops themes and analyses found in his published books” (Davidson, 2003, p. xvii). The lectures used history and philosophy from a phenomenal range of sources to provide perspective on contemporary events. They also represent a set of explorations in the genealogy of power/knowledge relations, which was his main philosophical and analytic preoccupation from 1970 on, as distinct from, to some extent, his previous work on the archeology of discursive formations. Apart from the lectures, Foucault also gave many interviews both to journalists and to academics and held Q&A sessions with students, which he seemed to enjoy, and towards the end of his life he gave a series of lectures at Berkeley and Vermont on “truth telling” and “the care of the self”. In the lectures, especially those at the College de France, Foucault makes some of his reasoning and his “methods” clearer than in the written texts. He used the lectures to build and try out arguments and lines of inquiry. For example, referring back to his studies of the genealogy of madness he explains:

My question was not: Does madness exist? My reasoning, my method, was not to examine whether history gives me or refers me to something like madness, and then to conclude, no, it does not, therefore madness does not exist. This was not the argument, the method in fact. The method consisted in saying: Let’s suppose that madness does not exist. If we suppose that it does not exist, then what can history make of these different events and practices which are apparently organised around something that is supposed to be madness? So what I would like to deploy here is exactly the opposite of historicism_ not, then, questioning universals by using history as a critical method, but starting from the decision that universals do not exist, asking what kind of history we can do.

(Foucault, 2010a, p. 3, lecture, 10 January 1979)

As indicated already, Foucault spent a great deal of time and energy avoiding being or being seen or positioned as a structuralist, post-structuralist (he claimed not to know what that meant), historian, philosopher, or postmodernist, or even bizarrely a Marxist, or anti-Marxist. In many interviews he was asked “what he was” and thus “who ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• SERIES EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
• PREFACE
• LIST OF FIGURES AND BOX
• 1 Do We Really Need Another Book About Foucault?
• 2 Let’s Rewrite the History of Education Policy
• 3 A Thoroughly Modern Education - Blood Flows Through it!
• 4 How Not to be Governed in That Way?
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX