For those who have had any experience working in academia, especially philosophy and the humanities, the name of Michel Foucault has acquired a resonance that needs no further introduction. Famous for bringing new methods and theoretical frameworks into social analysis, historiography and political theory, Foucault is also one of the most controversial and radical thinkers of the 20th century alongside figures such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. Foucaultian scholarship has made breakthroughs and brought numerous contributions to fields as diverse as economics, biology, linguistics and even sports science.
Educational policy is another major discipline that has been influenced by Foucault’s theories of knowledge, power and subjectivity. How does power function inside the educational system in a covert manner? How are we trained to be trainable? But most of all, how are various disciplines or systems of knowledge used to justify existing relations of power? Educational institutions play a significant role in producing certain subjects, i.e., the docile student, the employable trainee, the competent teacher etc. Subjects that produce and reproduce their own docility, often unbeknownst.
Foucault is, without a doubt, the philosopher of multiplicities. Therefore, it is impossible to discuss his work under a single heading or even a handful of “key concepts”. Every reading of Foucault reveals something new, often radically new, whilst every act of writing about Foucault could yield completely different ways of extrapolating his work. In this case, let us focus on the terms Genealogy and Archaeology. Genealogies and archaeologies refer to a unified yet multi-faceted method of writing history. The method is often referred to as counter-history or the history of the present.
One of Foucault’s most profound theoretical insights is how power, far from being exclusively repressive, tends to have positive effects and is often used as a productive instrument. It is not always the case that we are denied recognition based on who we are or who we aren’t; it is not always the case that we fall victims to police brutality or have our civil rights infringed upon one way or another. These are fairly familiar and relevant issues that need to be addressed, but the idea that we are constituted as subjects is something altogether new. The fact that who we are “essentially” is already an effect of specific institutional constellations and power structures offers one of the most original criticisms, not only of educational systems but also legal jurisdictions, prisons, asylums and even modern medicine.
“The pragmatism of Foucault’s scholarship raises important questions about the relation of intellectual production to social practices”, wrote Popkewitz and Brennan in their introduction to Foucault’s Challenge (Popkewitz & Brennan, 1997). We might add that the relation is made up of a constant feedback loop, where institutions produce certain types of individuals, which reproduce those institutions in virtue of being trained by them and training others according to similar rules.
Foucault employs epistemological questions in a manner that has real and material consequences. More accurately: Foucault has shown that “social epistemologies”[i] themselves, i.e., the tacit assumptions of groups, have a real and material impact of their own. For instance: “A social epistemology studies speech as effects of power” (Popkewitz & Brennan, 1997). But to see and expose a practice, an institution or a custom as an effect of power, the Foucaultian scholar must first write a proper history of the present. Histories of the present form a significant part of the Foucaultian armament. Their function is to present a critical history by problematizing a particular on-going relation of power or even an entire assemblage of power structures. The clearest example for the moment would be the relationship between the teacher and the student. The teacher holds power to shape and discipline the students’ bodies and minds, and the student attempts to resist the effects of normalization through various acts of transgression. But on a deeper level, one could try to interrogate how each, in turn, is shaped as a teacher or student. Where a “typical” question of educational policy would try to understand whether or how a student or a teacher is being oppressed, excluded, denied their basic liberties, and so on, a Foucaultian analysis would try to understand how subjects are made into students or teachers in the first place, i.e. how a student, her identity, is already an “effect of power”.
The notion of discipline is very important. Consider the double meaning of the term: Discipline as a process, that is, a process of disciplining or training, and the noun ‘discipline’, which refers to a body of knowledge. Both play an equally fundamental role in Foucaultian theory. Especially within the educational context. A school is, in this sense, very similar to a clinic. It is a space where knowledge is simultaneously gathered and applied. The student is, in this case, both the object of knowledge and a subject of discipline. She is both studied and trained at the same time. Therefore, a school or a university is located at the triple junction of power/knowledge: A space of training, understanding, and the space of formation of social epistemology.
Another crucial concept is that of surveillance. In Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education, Olssen discusses the possibility of “…utilizing Foucault and other post-structuralist thinkers, [to show] the way educational psychologies such as those of Piaget contribute to the normalization and surveillance of children” (Ollsen, 2016). Surveillance bears a strong conceptual resemblance to discipline; both operate as constitutive parts of those social practices inherent to the norms associated with the production of knowledge and the deployment of various strategies of government. Surveillance and discipline – the literal translation of Discipline and Punish[ii] – are technologies of government, but most importantly, they are encountered within the domain of both (illegitimate) governance and education. To summarize: “Sciences like mental testing and educational psychology defined new ways of relating to the world, new means of administrative control, new ways of defining and talking about people-in short, new means of normalization and surveillance by which order and discipline in modern Western nations is made effective” (Ollsen, 2016).
One of the reasons Foucault is considered a notoriously radical, the subversive intellectual is his ingenious ability to question and render “intolerable” those practices which often tend to be the most common-place and taken for granted. His writings on the prison system, as well as his direct engagement as an activist with the Prison Information Group (GIP)[iii] between the years 1970-1973, testify to this. The clearest example of how such analyses could help us pose radical questions for educational reform would be Foucault’s life-long project of cross-examining the most basic liberal (or more specifically: Neo-liberal)assumption that forms an integral part of the social epistemology of educational institutions: That of the “free” or “autonomous” individual.
According to Olssen, Foucault offers us a materialist (and I would add somewhat determinist) account of the self. The self is not discovered or uncovered through a hermeneutic of self-knowledge, as has been the case from Socrates to Freud; there is no essential truth about the self that the subject needs to recover. We are instead constantly shaped and reshaped through various techniques of the self or technologies of control. But the two do not have to coincide. In fact, the task of uncovering those techniques of the self that help deactivate the technologies of control, i.e. governmentalities, is the key to resisting illegitimate claims to power. With this in mind, Foucault offers us a radical Genealogy of the Subject in a series of lectures given at the College de France titled The Hermeneutics of the Subject, where the Socratic or the Delphic precept “Know Thyself” is replaced with the practice of the “Care of the Self” marking the beginning of the ultimate history of the present: The deconstruction of the liberal subject.
In this sense, a genealogy of the liberal subject could be the beginning of a genealogy of liberal education, the goal of which would be to demonstrate how classical Western thought has dazzled the mind of the average man rendering him incapable of questioning the contemporary relations of power, states of exception and institutional asymmetries inherent to educational establishments and the “sciences of man”. Further, what kinds of alternative lifestyles or techniques of self-transformation would be needed to counter their effects and resist their influence? The final chapter of Stephen Ball’s Foucault, Power, and Education offers an excellent schematic of how genealogies are used to transform oneself: “Foucault is indicating how genealogy can be put to use as a political tool and as a means of self-formation. That is, as a way of making it more difficult to act and think “as usual” and of rethinking our relationship to ourselves and others, and our possibilities of existence” (Ball, 2012).
References:
- Ball, S. J. (2012). Foucault, power, and education. Routledge.
- Gros, F., Foucault, M., Burchell, G., Ewald, F., Fontana, A., & Davidson, A. I. (2005). The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. Trans. Burchell, G. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Olssen, M. (2016). Michel Foucault: materialism and education. Routledge.
- Popkewitz, T. S., & Brennan, M. T. (1997). Foucault’s challenge: Discourse, knowledge, and power in education. Teachers College Press.
[i] Borrowing the term from Popkewitz & Brennan.
[ii] Surveiller Et Punir – One of the most prominent works by Foucault.
[iii] For more information on the GIP: “Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition” by Zurn, P., & Dilts, A.
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Giorgi Vachnadze has done a masters from the University of Louvain, Belgium. He is planning to write a genealogical study on Virology, Epidemiology and Public Health in order to address the current COVID-19 situation for his doctoral dissertation.