Knowing Foucault, Knowing You
Knowing Foucault, Knowing You:
'raced'/classed and gendered subjectivities in the pedagogical state
Erica Burman
Manchester Institute of Education
University of Manchester
Ellen Wilkinson Building
Manchester M13 9PL
UK
Abstract: This paper evaluates the continuing contemporary relevance of Foucauldian analyses for critical educational and social research practice. Framed around examples drawn from everyday cultural and educational practices, I argue that current intensifications of psychologisation under neoliberal capitalism not only produce and constrain increasingly activated and responsibilised educational subjects but do so via engaging particular versions of feminisation and racialization. Like Hacking’s ‘looping effect’, Foucauldian ideas may themselves now figure within prevailing technologies of subjectivity but this means we need more, as well as more than, Foucault.
This paper weaves together a number of stories, stories of knowledge of self and others, for which it is suggested that Foucault’s ideas are useful, in particular for indicating their mutual contingencies. These are ‘personal’ stories that are, however, not only ‘mine’ but rather intimations of broader structurations and constraints on configurations of subjectivity for which we need to evaluate rather than merely 'apply' foucauldian perspectives. How these stories are linked, and what they teach us about Foucault’s relevance, in the context of (what has been called) the pedagogical society, becomes a question taken up later.
I. A border crossing
In 2005 I flew into the US to attend a childhood conference, arriving from Mexico. Surrounded by Latinos, I could see families separated and children being interrogated as to who their parents were and where they came from. When it came to my turn at the immigration counter, the young African American man asked me what I did. "Psychology, huh?", he said. Then, "Nietszche?". I nodded, mouth dry as the surreal turn of conversation left me lost for words. My two index fingers pressed ineffectually on the pads, so that I had to repeat the security measure. "Do you know Foucault?", he asked next, as he indicated for me to look into the camera for the iris identification shot. My mind raced wildly (after all, I was jet-lagged), and I tried to figure out what to say. I felt cameras boring into the back of my head as well as mapping my unique eye pattern: what kind of trap was this? He smiled, and said: 'I bet you're wondering what I'm doing working here. Life takes strange turns.'
Was this confession a form of inoculation (in Barthes' 1972 sense), an incitement to an illusory interpersonal encounter that could transcend the institutional apparatus of regulation? Or a knowing 'obscene sneer' (in Žižek's 2000, sense) while doing (and/or undoing) the work of the state? And so I entered into the US, passing the Mexican children still waiting to be reunited with their parents.
Alongside the many ways 'race' and class modulate citizenship and migration, this moment exemplifies how disciplinary power and confession combine. This illuminates some of the connections between juridical and biopolitical forms of power that Foucault identified as follows: ‘…with this new police state government begins to deal with individuals, not only according to their juridical status but as men, as working, trading, living beings.' (Foucault 1988: 156). Beyond this shift to juridical power, this example also how these networks are more porous for some than others.
Such analyses pose particular dilemmas for educational researchers. There is a lot of talk of travelling theory, and how Foucault has travelled (e.g. Baker and Keyning 2004), but what about how we so-called knowledge workers, even as critical intellectuals, are hailed and understand ourselves? Has Foucault now crossed the border to become known and employed by the state? Or does this example show how the state and state actors are not monolithic but rather exercise their power through minor and multivalent strategies. Or, beyond this, has 'the state' now so fragmented that such boundaries between state and non-state, between juridical and civil society, can no longer be maintained? By his account, economic constraint forced this immigration officer to leave university to do this work, but just as private companies now police the state on its behalf, this intensifies even as it distributes (and perhaps also diverts in new ways) practices of power/knowledge, and so generates complexities of individual and collective agencies such that our worst suspicions can sometimes be more than founded or unfounded. (As members of the Paranoia Network, a self-help and activist group of people who identify - or have been identified - with the label of Paranoid Personality Disorder, put it: you can never be paranoid enough.)
We may think we know our Foucault (but of course we could know more), and he helps us know ourselves better, situating what we know of ourselves and how we know this within cultural-historical conditions of possibility. Or perhaps, like good neoliberal entrepreneurial subjects, we know or 'make up' our own individualised, personalised version of his ideas. But there may be another viewer who sees more - and to whom we account for ourselves, in this sense exemplifying Foucault's (1988a: 59) comments about the increasing significance of 'verbalization' that, from the eighteenth century onwards, now constitute, rather than renounce or refuse, notions of selfhood. Such features may, I suggest, have become intensified within recent neoliberal times, including in relation to the wider cultural-political appropriation of pedagogical practices.
So in this paper I juxtapose various accounts of the uses of Foucauldian ideas - both historicizing and (in)disciplining them. The diversity, complexity and sheer volume of his work, let alone its particular libertarian features, lend it to so many interpretations. My aim is to show how, far from being depleted or even co-opted, Foucault's ideas are still a vital resource for understanding current sociopolitical conditions; in particular, how the expanding role accorded education under neoliberal capital is illuminated by Foucauldian analyses. I will suggest that, in order to make the most of these, we can and should also draw on other analyses too. Beyond the rather cheap (that is, too easily polarised and dismissive) 'pro' vs. 'anti' Foucault arguments about gender and 'race' that focus on what Foucault did or did not write ('why didn't he talk about women/gender?', 'why didn't he talk about colonialism/racialisation?' - most of which are either incorrect or irrelevant (on gender, see, for example, McNay 1992, Diamond and Quinby 1988, Ramazanoğlu 1993, and Sawicki 1993, and on colonialism, see especially Stoler 2010), I will move across fields of practice to highlight how these have contributed particular emphases to their readings and uses of Foucault's corpus.
By way of - or at least on the way to - warranting these arguments, I will tell some other stories. Some of these border on personal as well as institutional forms of reflexivity, but I propose all the more relevant fodder for foucauldian - and other - analyses thereby. Such accounts and - within neoliberal discourse - the capabilities so incited, developed and maximised - can generatively inform other interpretive-political analyses, that help us better evaluate his educational contributions.
II. Disciplining Foucault: a short genealogy
My story of encountering Foucault comes from psychology, and the search to find critical tools to explicate the oppressions and exclusions meted out by that discipline. The 1984 book Changing the Subject: psychology, social regulation and subjectivity (Henriques et al. 1984/1998) became a landmark text for a generation of critical psychologists and more. In this (and the journal Ideology & Consciousness, which first published some early English translations[1]), Foucault appeared as a key critical resource, alongside a (Lacanian version of) psychoanalysis and a seasoning of Derrida, to destabilise the rational, unitary subject from its triumphal place in psychological theory and practices. From 1985 onwards the term 'the psy complex' (coined more or less simultaneously by Nikolas Rose and David Ingleby, see Rose 1985, Ingleby 1985), was applied to describe the forms of knowledge and practice that exemplified the double sided facets of subjectivity discussed by Foucault - constituted as both subject to, and subject of; thus topicalising and bringing in a particular anti-humanist twist to questions of freedom vs. determination, and a different way of dealing with the structure-agency binary. Psychology was (and still is) the modern discipline par excellence of surveillance, calibration and control, oriented around a technology of administration (testing), that not only classifies and segregates individuals and populations but also produces forms of being, subjects, in its image: a perfect nexus of regulation and confession.
Foucault formed a key node in the repertoire of critical theorists brought together for critical and feminist psychologists instituting a radical swerve or twist on the discursive turn in psychology (a form of 'critical psychology' that came to be associated specifically with British social psychology, see e.g. Bozatsis and Dragona, 2013; Parker 2003). His analyses of the emergence and functioning of institutions of normalization and their role in producing the positions and practices of pathologization (whether in the prison, the school, the mental hospital, the child guidance or the gender identity clinic, see Burman et al. 1996) were, and continue to be, vital. And far from Foucault's ideas being complex, 'difficult', inaccessible and addressed only to an intellectual elite, they remain a key inspirational resource for mental health system survivors in making sense of their experiences of psychiatric 'treatments' (Parker et al. 1995). Significantly, feminists were among the earliest to engage with foucauldian accounts of the productive or incited forms of power - in, for example, analysing feminised modes of subjectivity produced by the popular cultural confessional genres of agony aunt columns as much as by psychotherapy (Wilbraham 1997).
For psychologists at that time, the primary object of critique was the rational unitary subject, and while psychoanalysis was drawn upon to show the partial, unstable, defensive - and gendered - character of its rationality, including its scientist versions (Hollway 1989), Foucault offered a historical account of its emergence. Along with the doom and gloom regulatory version of Nikolas' Rose's earlier (1985) account of Foucault, of the panopticon and the normalized, self-regulating subject of the 'psy complex', it is Foucault's analysis of the productive character of power that provided the key segue into performativity theory (c.f. Butler 1997). We could pause here to comment on the mistaken debate on discourse determinism that occupied some critics (including critical psychologists) who set up a false opposition between oppression and incitement. As Foucault's pupil and successor, Michel Pêcheux put it in a key, recently re-translated, paper:
a discourse, by its very existence, marks the possibility of a de-structuring-re-structuring of these networks and trajectories. Any discourse is the potential index of a movement within the sociohistorical filiations of identification inasmuch as it constitutes, at the same time, an effect of those filiations and the work (more or less conscious, deliberate, and constructed or not, but all the same traversed by unconscious determinations) of displacement within their space. (Pêcheux 2014, 94)
More recently, critical theorists in and of psychology have shifted from discussion of the 'psy complex' to discuss psychologization as a specific and depoliticising mode of cultural practice (De Vos et al. 2010, De Vos 2012, 2014). I will return to this shortly. But now for a short educational interlude.
III. A Kiss
Back to my doctorate days of the early 1980s, undertaking a Piagetian-style study in early years classrooms (which eventually became Burman 1990). The young students worked intently at their nicely grouped tables, tracing out the shapes of letters. When they had finished the allotted task, they queued up at the teacher's desk to show her their work, for her to mark it. And her mark of approval, accompanying her verbal feedback, was to give each successful child a kiss. (I cannot remember whether she withheld this from any who did not do well enough.)
Irrespective of the complex and selective features of memorial accounts, I suggest this story can tell us quite a bit about our contemporary educational moment. This was of course long before the screening and compulsory registration of all professionals working in the UK with children and ‘vulnerable groups’. This practice is, interestingly, committed to a spatial rather than depth model of identity, requiring new applications for every site, with some obvious income-generating effects, among others (for example, on online search brings to the top a commercial company offering to process such applications, now called 'due diligence service'). The Criminal Records Bureau process tapped into increasingly centralised databases to confirm that a registrant did not have any relevant convictions. The current name which replaced it from 2013, Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), appears to intensify the activity on both sides. It perfectly exemplifies neoliberal discourse: your action is figured in more confessional terms (and failure to disclose will of course have significant implications), while the computer search does not merely pattern match or make connections across records, but performs an act of exclusion, of 'barring'. Finally, the move from being a Bureau (a clearly specified office of government), to a Service completes the slippery extension and distribution of state authority in the name of market relations. (We might note that the UK Border Agency has for some time referred to asylum applicants as 'clients' and even 'customers'.)
Each time I tell this story of this kiss (see Burman 2015), I feel anew the sense of how impossible such actions are now. In these days of educational panic over teachers and touching (c.f. Piper and Stronach 2008) (some of which, we must acknowledge, is clearly warranted), it is hard not to read back onto this scene a sense of impropriety; surely some kind of salacious desires must have been at work in the exchange? Beyond inquiring into (and so - as we know from Foucault's 1980b, critique of the repressive hypothesis - so producing) aberrant personal motivations on the part of the teacher, surely this installs the wrong kind of rationale for educational achievement (do well to please your teacher and get a kiss)?
Beyond de-naturalising our current conditions, as Foucault's work has done so well, this story speaks to a subjugated educational history, of which it is a trace. One forgotten educational discourse is the psychodynamic attention to learning and teaching as emotionally-charged relationships and contexts involving fear, anxiety, and pleasure (Salzberger-Wittenberg et al. 1983). Nowadays to speak of such qualities as circulating in the classroom imports discourses of bullying or sexual abuse (which themselves indicate broader discursive landscapes that miniaturise structural-institutional relationships – of, say, racism or sexism - into individual bad actions). But they also reach further back to an entirely mandated policy formulated at the birth of compulsory education, albeit one which failed. (Here it is relevant to note that the trajectory of Foucauldian-inspired educational scholarship appears to have taken somewhat different forms in the UK and the US - see e.g. Baker and Heyning’s 2004 move into more postmodern readings vs. Olssen's (2006) assertion of a materialist substrate to Foucault's approach.) Jones' (1990) account (in Ball's 1990, collection which - as he put it - introduced 'Monsieur Foucault' to British education) highlights how the first models of teacher training aimed to reform undisciplined urban poor youth through manipulation of the relationship with the teacher:
From the outset, teacher training was primarily concerned with ethical techniques; considerations of curriculum context occupied a secondary role. The new strategy made the teacher into an irresistible ethical image whose magnetic attraction would transform the progeny of the labouring classes into ethical subjects responsible to a bio-power. (Jones 1990, 60)
Love was explicitly figured as the medium for this transformation. But not only love, also the withdrawal of love, and the threat of humiliation and shame.
The child had to be taught to love the teacher and the school and not the mean backstreets... Above all, however, the teacher had to make even 'the children he likes least' love him. Love in fact was the instrument of moral training. It could educate the higher sensibilities. The teacher would achieve this education by dismissing an erring scholar from the gallery. This spectacle of degradation would moreover be amplified by the observation of the onlooking class... The object of the exercise was to create an ethical regime that stimulated morality from the shame of offending rather than the 'fear of the rod. (Jones 1990, 64)
What is interesting here is not only how an educational policy still resonates in more recent times (see Sriprakash 2012, 2013, for an account from the global South), but also how this policy failed in part because of the impossible demands put upon teachers who were almost as regulated as the children, as a key consequence of attempting to generate socio-political reform through personal, individual interventions. Crucially, the teacher's kiss now attracts suspicion beyond her individual action or intention. Encapsulated here are continuing themes around the feminisation of the teaching profession and its relation with familial ideologies; specifically, the insertion of a nineteenth century model of the patriarchal family with its naturalised power inequalities and gendered division of labour. The professionalised (and therefore middle class) female teacher as a model mother, inspiring love and devotion - and of course compliance and conscientiousness - both substituted for and was the corrective agent for working class family habits and functions that were thereby deemed deficient. As Jones put it: