Foucault, Education, the Self and Modernity

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 30, No. 3, 1996

Foucault, Education, the Self and Modernity KENNETH WAIN Michel Foucault is often criticised in English-speaking circles for being interested only in power as domination, and of being uninterested in freedom and social reform. This paper shows, however, that Foucault’s overarching concern was with the constitution of the self under conditions of modernity. It emphasises the significance of his interest in the Classical project of Self-care’, and of his countermodernist educational programme in which the skills of self-governance and the ethical (non-dominating) governance of others, as well as the practice of freedom through sercreation, are the key ingredients.

THE MASKED PHILOSOPHER Commentaries about Michel Foucault are apt to begin with the ambiguity of his thought and personality, an ambiguity that he actively, and indeed playfully, encouraged and delighted in during his lifetime. As one commentator has put it, ‘as he moves from one topic to another.. , his purposes and methods seem to change. So there may not be a single “Foucault”’ to cope with (Hoy, 1986, p. 2). Much, in particular, is made of and deduced from his frequent refusal to be pinned down to specific political or intellectual positions or creeds; one particular passage, from his last interview with Rabinow (1984, pp. 383-384), is a favourite quotation in this respect: I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political chessboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously:an anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal etc. An American professor complained that a cryptomarxist like me was invited to the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern Europe for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

Foucault is the writer who sought his own personal anonymity, ‘who writes in order to have no face’ (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1991, p. 17), the ‘masked philosopher’.

Not surprisingly, then, he has been assessed and positioned by his commentators and critics in very different and contrasting ways. In an obituary column in Le Monde just after he died in June 1984 Paul Veyne declared his work ‘the most important intellectual event of our century’ (quoted in Merquior, 1985, p. 1l), while J. G. Merquior assessed him as Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

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‘unfortunately. . . a central figure in a disgraceful metamorphosis of continental philosophy’ (ibid., p. 159), and ultimately as no more than a ‘hidden neo-anarchist’. These assessments show how contrasting reactions to Foucault can be. There seems hardly an aspect of his work or his personality that is not controversial in some way, from his political stance to his manner of writing, and this despite the fact that he often discussed both explicitly. In particular, he insisted on the fundamental unity of his intellectual project, although over time he described it in different ways. Yet even though its framework and general objectives now seem clear enough, nearly 11 years after his death, its constituents-his genealogical methodology, his account of power/knowledge, his final turn towards ‘ethics’-remain the material for controversy.

What kind of interest, if any, could this man hold for philosophers of education? This is the question I want to take up in this paper. Certainly, nothing seems further from the staid practices of Anglo-Saxon philosophy of education than Foucault with his playful elusiveness and his genealogical writings. Yet I shall want to show that there are good reasons for regarding Foucault as one of the major protagonists in what should be today’s key philosophical debates on education.

A DESCRIPTION OF FOUCAULT’S PROJECT

Foucault is popularly characterised as a genealogist interested in ‘power’. But this is a crude simplification that fails to acknowledge his extraordinary complexity as a writer and thinker whose range of interests cannot be appreciated without considering also his innumerable personal interviews.’ This is how he described his life project in his important ‘Afterword’ to Dreyfus and Rabinow’s popular book about him: ‘I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyse the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in culture, human beings are made subjects’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983, p.208). There he identified three of these modes of ‘objectification which transform human beings into subjects’: (a) scientific modes of inquiry that make human beings subjects of knowledge, (b) categorising, or ‘dividing’, practices of ‘normalization’ which either divide the subject ‘inside himself or from others (distinguishing the mad from the sane, the sick from the healthy, etc., for instance) and finally (c) ethical practices through which the individual turns himself or herself into a subject. Each of these kinds of practice, according to Foucault, features its own relationships of power and has its own disciplinary technology.

In one of his very last interviews, only five months before he died, he stated that his problem had always been ‘to discover how the human subject entered into games of truth, whether they be games of truth which take the form of science or which refer to a scientific model, or games of truth like those that can be found in institutions of practices of control’ (interview reported in Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988, p. 1). This general restatement of his intellectual enterprise was obviously intended to reach back nearly to its beginnings, to 0 The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 1996.

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The Order of Things, ‘where I’ve tried to see how, in scientific creation, the human subject will be defined as an individual who talks, who works, who lives’ (ibid.).

This constitution of the modern self, then, through games of truth (‘game’= ‘an ensemble of rules for the production of the truth’, ibid., p. 16) is how Foucault viewed his intellectual project. ‘The problem knowledge/power’, he continues later on in the same interview, ‘is not for me the fundamental problem but an instrument allowing the analysis -in a way that seems to me to be the most exact-of the problem of relationships between the subject and games of truth’ (ibid., p. 12). Meanwhile, the method of historical writing through which he engaged with this ‘problem’ passed from the earliest quasistructuralist ‘archaeological’ stage where the object was ‘the systematic description of a discourse-object’ (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1991, p. 140), to his later critical ‘genealogical’ stage (his final ‘ethical’ stage is distinct not in terms of its methodology but of its subject-matter and historical period). Yet even with regard to these methods of writing history Foucault insisted that they are not different but complementary.

The general ingredients of his narrative are well known today. Briefly, right up to his ‘ethical stage’ Foucault was interested mainly in describing the way the modern European state began to form in the eighteenth century and, more particularly, in its new institutional machinery as it abandoned its classical culture and ways of life and became a nation-state. Madness and Civilization, his first book, speaks about the phenomenon of ‘the great confinement’ of deviants of all kinds in the seventeenth century, indiscriminately at first, then gradually, within the separate specialised institutions of asylum, prison, hospital, etc. according to the nature of their deviance. The process involved the invention of ‘normality’ as complementary with deviance. Then came the further subcategorisation of ‘deviance’ itself into different kinds. Foucault narrates how the study of the insane, of ‘the mad subject’, which is the more specific focus of his book, concurrently gave birth to a new kind of medical discourse that brought psychiatry, as a new kind of scientific knowledge and arbiter of normality, into being. Then his study of medical practice in The Birth of the Clinic featured his famous account of the ‘medical gaze’ which gave rise to the distinctive disciplinary technology of modernity, the ‘examination’. The examination, together with the modern appropriation of ‘pastoral power’, constituted a transference to the body of the tool of confession developed within the ambience of the Christian salvation of souls, and thus led to a new kind of subjectification and subjection of the individual.

What is probably his most famous work in the English-speaking world, Discipline and Punish, though more specifically focused on ‘the rise of the prison’, involves a general account of how the combination of a series of new strategies and sites of disciplinary power and systems of knowledge or games of truth created in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and subsequently, and patterned and modelled on the modern prison, developed also in its other institutions of confinement (the barracks, the hospital and the school), and eventually infiltrated into the whole social fabric. The modern ideal of a carceral technology, captured in Bentham’s panopticon, spread to form a grid over the whole of society, which thus became a ‘carceral’ or ‘disciplined’ society as a 0 The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 1996.

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whole, setting ‘normalization’ and efficiency as its primary concerns. This very detailed account of the emergence and operation of power/knowledge in modern societies is taken up further and illustrated in the first volume of History of Sexuality in the Western World where Foucault comes up with the startling hypothesis that the truly modern mechanism of disciplined control of the subject is not the repressive censorship of discourse but the contrary, its proliferation.

Finally, Foucault’s interests took a last, and somewhat startling, turn with the other two volumes he managed to complete of his projected History. For one thing, in these volumes, ‘the historian of the present’, as he was prone to describe himself, went back far beyond the beginnings of modernity to the ancient world of Greece, Rome and of early Christianity. For another, the subject of his work now was no longer, as it had been since the beginning of his Nietzschean genealogical stage, power/knowledge, but ‘care for self. Foucault became interested in ‘ethics’, as the mode of constitution of the self by the self, rather than in the power technology of institutions.

This brief account leaves out, of course, his other early ‘archaeological’ and ‘structuralist’ books, The Order of Things, and The Archeology of Knowledge, where his concerns were mainly epistemological, though Foucault himself, as we have seen, does not regard them as separate from his general project.2 His Nietzschean hypothesis, however, throughout his genealogicalwritings, including his ethical stage, is that power is a pervasive factor of human social life under any condition; also, that power and knowledge are inseparable elements of the games of truth and that the three elements, power, knowledge and truth, come together inevitably and are mutually supporting, and that together they form a pervasive grid that infiltrates and conditions all human relationships althoughit is taken to a particular degree of effectiveness and sophistication in the way it is manipulated through different strategies by modern institutions and the modern state; that together they actually form the individual.

Foucault has been criticised for his way of writing history, for not really being a historian, and many Anglo-Saxon philosophers will undoubtedly add that he is not a philosopher either. These criticisms largely misconstrue what Foucault was about: he was, in fact, as uninterested in being located within any ‘discipline’ as he was uninterested in being located politically, although he did comment extensively about ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’.3 The same response could be made to critics who have also pointed to more general imprecisions and uncertainties with regard to his way of doing both archaeology and genealogy (except where it is argued that it is his genealogical method that makes his politics ‘negative’ or incoherent’). These ‘imprecisions’ were part of the deliberate strategy against ‘method’ that Foucault regarded as a tool for domination, although there was a price he had to pay for them as his critics have been quick to point out (see Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Rabinow, 1984). Thus genealogy is definable mainly in terms of what it was against, namely metaphysics and ontology. Finally, a rather different point was made against Foucault by Baudrillard (19804)who, misconceiving his project in important ways, accused him of having become infatuated with the imaginary force of his own narratives and of having installed power in the same hegemonic relationship to discourse as those he tried to demolish, particularly truth.

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POLITICS, POWER AND EDUCATION

However, it is his treatment of power that has evoked most of the negative reaction to Foucault’s politics among Anglo-Saxon political philosophers.

Patton (1989, p.260) has summarised it in this way: ‘His apparently neutral accounts of techniques of power lead to complaints that he is normatively confused or that he deprives himself of any basis for criticism of the social phenomena he describes’.

At the same time, it is precisely his treatment of power, with his corollary reflections on discipline and punishment, that has caught the imagination of the limited number of educationalists to have shown an interest in his work. Thus, for instance, J. D. Marshall, one of the even fewer philosophers of education to take an interest in Foucault, goes straight to his treatment of punishment in Discipline and Punish where he believes that ‘Foucault brings to us as philosophers of education important philosophical insights’ (Marshall, 1990, p.82, his italics) and shows how what Foucault says about punishment challenges the conventional ‘legal’ view of punishment developed by Flew, Benn and Hart and introduced into philosophy of education by such as R. S. Peters.

This is because, he says, Foucault replaces their ‘standard, philosophical questions “what does punishment mean?’ or ‘‘how is punishment justified?” with the genealogical questions “how are people punished?” and “what are the forms and techniques of punishment?”’ (ibid., p. 88).

Foucault also shows, Marshall says, that the question of disciplinary punishment needs to be incorporated within a more general account of power, or, better still, of power/knowledge. However, though the issues of discipline and punishment have long been on their menu philosophers of education have shown scant interest in power. ‘In brief‘, Marshall says (ibid., p. 90), ‘much philosophy of education is written as if power does not exist’. And this fact, he continues, has sustained liberal philosophers of education in their ‘comfortable assumption’, which ‘is almost a given’, that education is about the development of the rationally autonomous person. This is an assumption which Foucault’s account of power/knowledge challenges most radically (&id.).

Marshall concludes that ‘Foucault not only directs our attention as philosophers of education to a different way of doing philosophy but also to a set of vitally important questions embedded in the power/knowledge nexus’ (ibid.).And these are, indeed, particularly powerful reasons why philosophers of education should be interested in Foucault though, as I shall demonstrate later, they are far from exhaustive.

In another paper, entitled ‘Foucault and educational research’ in Stephen Ball’s book Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge (Ball, 1990; the first at the time and the only one so far to my knowledge to be dedicated to Foucault and education), Marshall again complains that few educationalists, mainly those interested in social control and in the exercise of power, have shown any interest in Foucault’s work, notwithstanding its ‘disturbing implications for us as educationalists and educational researchers’ (ibid., p. 25). And even these, with ‘some major exceptions. . . are generally passing references to his analysis of power’ (ibid., p. 12). Ball himself, in ‘Introducing Monsieur Foucault’ to the readers of his volume, remarks that ‘One text of CD The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 1996.

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Foucault’s, Discipline and Punish, is key reading for much of the analysis and argument contained in this volume’ (ibid., p. 5). And Marshall again concludes in his paper that ‘the methodological imperative.. .’ that emerges from Foucault’s work is ‘to examine processes of modern power in modern schools’ (ibid., p.7). This is, in fact, the ‘imperative’ that the other contributors to Ball’s volume actually respond to.

Ball himself specifies the intention of his book as follows: ‘that the application of Foucauldian analysis to education will unmask the politics that underlie some of the apparent neutrality of educational reform’ (ibid.,p. 7).

This is most certainly worthwhile work and needs to be done. But Foucault’s narrative about the evolution of the human and social sciences as technologies of power/knowledge raises very crucial questions about the history and purposes of educational research itself that Ball also highlights. Foucault not only, Ball points out, draws our attention to ‘educational sites as generators of an historically specific (modern) discourse’ (ibid., p. 3); his notion of the disciplines as ‘dividing practices’ is ‘critically interconnected with the formation and increasingly sophisticated elaboration of the educational sciences: educational psychology, pedagogics, the sociology of education, cognitive and development psychology’, which are ‘the arenas in which “truth games” about education are played out’ (ibid., p. 4).

This, necessity, then, of doing a genealogical analysis of educational discourse, of the research disciplines that have arisen and grown out of it and with it, including philosophy, of the ‘knowledge’ they have produced and its relationship with the power exercised in educational institutions, and, ultimately, their contribution to the constitution of the self that they have made their ‘subject’ in the different senses Foucault assigns to that term (in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983, p. 212), is another fundamental task, beside investigating the relevance of his account of power for contemporary education institutions and practices and applying it to actual educational sites, which Foucault suggests for educationalists and philosophers of education.

The almost exclusive concern of the contributors to Ball’s book with replicating ‘Foucault’s concern with the technologies of power and domination and the arbitrariness of modern institutions’ (Ball, op. cit., p. 1) explains why, as Ball points out, their point of reference is nearly exclusively Discipline and Punish. Yet it is also itself symptomatic of the limitations that educationalists, Marshall included, have shown in their perception of Foucault’s educational relevance. Examining the processes of power in modern schools is surely important but, it will be remembered, Foucault himself identified not power/ knowledge but a more general concern with ‘the constitution of the self under the conditions of modernity as the overarching concern of his work.

Thus despite the validity of Marshall’s observation that understanding Foucault’s representation of the practices of discipline and punishment requires the explanatory context of his broader understanding of power, does not Foucault’s account of power itself, in turn, need to be understood within the context of this more general concern with the self? Not if his interest in the constitution of the self is effectively reducible to an interest in how that self is formed by disciplinary technologies only, or if, as his critics maintain, Foucault effectively excludes and shows no interest in the practice of freedom. However, 0 The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 1996

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as I shall argue in the last section of this paper, this is not how the ‘final Foucault’ we have available to us in his last courses and interviews represents himself to us.

The points I shall be making there are: (a) that more accuracy and completeness than is often exercised by many of his critics is required in representing and evaluating Foucault’s account of power itself; in this respect his other writings, and, even more so, his later interviews are critically important, and (b) that an account of Foucault and education that does not take on the complete Foucault, the Foucault who begins with a critique of modernity and finishes with an account of how ‘care of self was exercised in antiquity, misses out on his wider significance for education and philosophy of education.

Marshall’s remark that Foucault’s account of power/knowledge undermines the tacit assumption among many philosophers of education, particularly but not exclusively those of a liberal persuasion, that education is about producing rationally autonomous individuals, also needs to be taken up further because it goes to the very heart of the questions that have preoccupied Anglo-Saxon philosophy of education over the last decades, namely, what is education about?

What should the aims of educators (not to say of education) be? Foucault’s critics, as Patton (op. cit.) remarks, represent him as having no alternative to offer to the aim of rational autonomy, no answers to these questions; as being merely a nihilist or neo-anarchist. But this characterisation depends largely on what has become a pretty standard view about Foucault’s account of power, i.e. that it is exclusively a matter of ‘power over’ or domination.

This is in effect the way, as we have seen, the writers in Ball’s book, including Marshall, interpret it. Apart from the fact that, as Jeffrey Roth (1992) remarks in his review of Ball’s book, ‘All essayists implicitly accept Foucault’s treatment of power relations as an apt and generative framework for describing the intertwining of domination and subordination in educational institutions’, i.e. they accept it uncritically, ‘Foucault’s ideas about the constitution of human subjects have been transferred almost exclusively as negative critique, emphasizing domination, silencing and categorization’ (ibid.). The approach reflects the view of Foucault’s critics and, perhaps, of the writers themselves, that ‘Foucault’s ideas’ could not, in effect, be used otherwise except as negative critique. But what is the value of engaging in negative critique if the possibility of following it up with positive change is ruled out a priorz?

This is, as we have seen the crucial question critics address towards the whole of Foucault’s enterprise: the question of what is the point of referring to him as a nihilist. It is a question that can be calculated to discourage educationalists from interesting themselves in his work or doing more than Marshall does, drawing selectively from his negative critique for their own very limited research purposes or for occasional quotation, or, perhaps, to make political points against current practices. In the last section of this paper I shall argue that Foucault was not, in fact, a nihilist and that the general criticism brought against him and against his account of power in this respect is fundamentally unjust. I shall also argue, as I said earlier, that there does exist a ‘positive’ Foucault, a Foucault who went beyond negative critique even if, consistently with his general outlook, he stopped short of actually having a theory. This was 8 The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 1996.

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‘the final Foucault’ of the ‘ethical’ phase, referred to earlier, where he did actually have a positive account of education to offer: an account that will be missed by those who limit their interest in his work to his dystopian narrative of power/knowledge in Discipline and Punish, a narrative that does not even constitute his conclusive pronouncement on the subject of power/knowledge itself.5 MODERNITY AND EDUCATION

There is no doubting Foucault’s own direct interest in education, even apart from his very frequent direct reference to educational institutions and pedagogical processes and practices. Keith Hoskin perceives in him a ‘cryptoeducationalist’. Foucault, he shrewdly observes, ‘really discovered something very simple (but highly unfamiliar nevertheless) -the centrality of education in the construction of modernity’ (Hoskin, 1990, p. 29). What Foucault was actually doing all the time, Hoskin insists, ‘whether he thought he was talking about power or knowledge, was an educational analysis’ (ibid.).Hoskin believes that the ‘clue’ to Foucault the crypto-educationalist lies in the centrality of the notion of ‘the examination’ to his narrative of power/knowledge in Discipline and Punish, the examination being ‘of all technologies, the most obviously educational’ (ibid., p. 31).

Foucault’s interest in ‘education’, however, is much more fundamental and direct than that. Indeed it lies, as we have seen, at the very heart of his whole intellectual project, in his interest in the constitution of the self. For what is education about if not the way the self is constituted through learning processes? Foucault’s way of problematizing the modern subject, on the other hand, as Maxine Greene says, suggests that a critical, maybe even very radical, reassessment of this phenomenon we call education itself, as a modern phenomenon, is urgently required. ‘If we examine his work from the vantage points of institutionalized education or educational research’, Greene says, ‘he will appear to be a Great Destroyer-or, in the most literal sense, a “deconstructionist” ’ (Greene, 1983, p. 105). Writers like Foucault are necessary every now and then, she says, to shake us out of our complacency, to jolt researchers who otherwise, ‘like other truth-seekers,’ tend to ‘live on the surfaces of settled discourses’. We occasionally need someone prepared ‘to move outside the ordered tables of resemblance and comparison, to disrupt and reformulate’ (ibid., p. 106).

Greene is right but, apart from the fact that Foucault is not a ‘deconstructionist’ (or a ‘Great Destroyer’ either), the suggestion that we need to re-evaluate our understanding of education in the light of a critique of modernity is not his uniquely. Other philosophers, notably Lyotard, Rorty, MacIntyre (specifically) and Habermas (more indirectly) have also made it. All could be described, like Foucault, as ‘crypto-educationalists’, as having, like him, discovered ‘the centrality of education in the construction of modernity’.

All are fundamentally interested in the modern construction of the self through the different learning processes to which the modern subject is exposed. All have, also like Foucault, engaged in a critical re-evalution of the political role of the human and social sciences within the discourse of modernity. All derive 0 The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 1996.

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their interest in education from a common insight that the cultural project we call modernity has either failed completely or needs to be radically reassessed. It is this ‘crisis’ of modernity, in their view, that requires us to re-examine our current understanding of education which, as it stands, is an essential part of that project.

Critics of modernity from Weber to Toulmin, to critical theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno, and, more recently, Habermas, to postmodernists like Lyotard, and neo-Aristotelians or neo-Thomists like MacIntyre, share a common apprehension of the effect of modernity’s ethos of rationality in real terms in everyday life, of how far the need to rationalise things has actually been taken, what form it has acquired, and what its underlying socio-political motives are. Foucault’s panopticon society and the note of pessimism critics detect in his writing strongly echoes Weber’s account of the rationisation of modern culture, Horkheimer and Adorno’s haunting narrative of a ‘totally administered society’ domesticated by its ‘culture industry’, and MacIntyre’s account of the manipulative ethos of modernism represented by the bureaucratic and therapeutic practices of its elites and experts.

Perhaps the philosopher who has understood this connection between the ‘crisis of modernity’ and education most clearly is MacIntyre, who argued that the ‘crisis’ is also one for educators who find themselves unable to harmonise the modernist ideal of autonomy with the demand for socialisation (MacIntyre, 1987). Thus, like Habermas, he speculates on the restoration of a ‘public’ (or of different publics) and of education into the realm of the public as the alternative to education for individual rational autonomy. Lyotard, on the other hand, confronts Habermas’s politics of consensus with paralogy and with a ‘schizophrenic ethic’ of continuous displacement and instability (Lyotard, 1984). Meanwhile Richard Rorty, himself a lapsed ‘liberal bourgeois postmodernist’, recoils before postmodernism’s pessimism about the possibility of social reform and proposes a compromise with Dewey’s politics of ‘social hope’ which eventually leads him to re-describe education as a twolevel enterprise involving the straightforward uncritical early socialisation of the young into their contemporary culture followed by their ‘edification’ through strong critical misreadings of that same culture at the university. Against Lyotard and Foucault he declares a strong partisanship for liberal reform within the setting of a ‘liberal utopia’ (see Rorty, 1989).

The first casualty of these critiques, whichever account of the crisis and its solution one opts for, is the notion of the rationally autonomous self which, as was pointed out earlier, has been central, over these years, to the liberal definition of the purposes of education. In short, it is not just Foucault’s account of power that currently challenges the notion of a rationally autonomous self. Foucault’s account makes it particularly problematic because it renders such a self in principle impossible, or at least highly implausible, but the fact is that the cultural project which made the ideal a coherent one seems to have collapsed.

Foucault appears to challenge the very possibility of education itself, at least as it has been understood from Socrates to Freire and beyond, namely as a process of ‘liberation’, to be distinguished, whatever else may be the case, from domination and indoctrination or domestication. Foucault’s genealogies, with 0 The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 19%.

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their account of the contemporary operation of power/knowledge in schools through disciplinary technologies aiming to forge ‘a docile body that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’ in the name of eirciency and normalisation (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1991, p. 1980) seem not only to rule out the notion of a rationally autonomous self, but to render the word ‘education’ itself illusionary if not meaningless. And this is, again, not a challenge educationalists in general, and philosophers more particularly, can ignore.

FOUCAULT, MODERNITY AND EDUCATION

Foucault represented himself generally as an ‘historian of the present’, but a ‘present’ understood as modernity in general. From this point of view he was fascinated in his later years by Kant’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’. There Kant defined the task of philosophy as that of reflecting on its own present.

Foucault, somewhat surprisingly given his earlier attack on Kant in The Order of Things, placed his own work within this project. Kant, Foucault argued in a posthumously published and crucially important essay of his own similarly entitled ‘What is Enlightenment?’, requires us to understand modernity in terms of a difference or point of ‘exit’ from the past, by asking ‘what difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?’ (Foucault, in Rabinow, 1984, p. 34).

This, in effect, seems a sensible question to ask in times of ‘crisis’ or of rapid change. It is arguably the question demanded of educationalists and educators today who should be asking it with regard to our current educational practices.

Kant’s answer was that ‘Enlightenment is the process that releases us from the status of ‘immaturity”’, i.e. from ‘a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for’ (ibid.). The recognition of one’s own maturity was the difference modernity made with respect to premodernity. And the striving after rational autonomy, as the process of achieving maturity, is the educational aim that corresponds, as Kant also understood very well, with this aspiration. However, if the aspirations of modernity have ceased to be our aspirations then the educational aims of modernity cannot be our educational aims either; surely this is, again, a possibility that educationalists, perhaps philosophers in particular, need to address.

‘Solidarity’ and the search for a public, rather than free-floating rational autonomy, may well be the new point of exit for late modernity as several political philosophers have suggested. The ‘postmodernist’ challenge in this respect is that it views the notion of a public, offered as a focus for solidarity and as an alternative site of rationality to the ‘autonomous self by Dewey, Habermas and MacIntyre, as an eminently modernist one also, and therefore one to be treated with immense suspicion, to say the least. And nobody seems to justify that suspicion more than Foucault, particularly in Discipline and Punish where he also poses a very different problem from those raised by other critics of modernity who have worried about the totalizing rationalisation of contemporary society. Such critics became pessimistic about our times because of the historical failure or hopelessness of their different Q The Journal

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emancipatory projects; in short, their pessimism was a historical one. Foucault, on the other hand, seems to make emancipation hopeless in principle.

So what is our ‘exit’ from modernity, according to Foucault? Or is there no exit? To return to our earlier question, is Foucault indeed a nihilist, as his critics assert? In order to answer these questions we need first to continue to look closely at his essay on Kant and the Enlightenment (Foucault, 1984). There Foucault understood modernity not as an epoch or set of features characteristic of an epoch ‘preceded by a more or less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling “postmodernity” ’, (ibid., p. 39) but as an ‘attitude’ or ‘a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way too of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task’-modernity is a kind of ‘ethos’ to be distinguished and contrasted not with ‘postmodernity’ but with ‘countermodernity ’ (ibid.)6.

But the issue, Foucault insisted, is not one of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ modernity. Nor should our inquiry be into its good or bad elements. What is needed is an analysis of ourselves as beings ‘who are historically determined to a certain extent’ by it through a series of precise inquiries directed not towards something called the Enlightenment’s ‘essentialkernel of rationality’ but toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary’, i.e. ‘toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects’ (ibid., p. 43)-in other words, towards modernity’s point of exit. Foucault wanted to retain the modernist inclination towards ‘a permanent critique of ourselves’, which is indispensable to the recognition of automonous maturity that needs to be maintained and permanently reactivated at the same time as we throw over its ‘doctrinal elements’ (ibid., p. 42).

The kind of analysis he evidently had in mind was genealogical. Genealogy, Foucault says, must turn the negative Kantian critique of the necessary limits of knowledge round ‘into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression’. Genealogical analysis enables us to discern ‘in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary restraints’ (ibid., p. 45). It requires ‘treat(ing) the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events’ rather than as features of a transcendental rationality. By sensitising us to ‘the contingency that has made us what we are, it presents us with the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’. In short, it ‘seek(s) to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom’, to be achieved by working ‘at the limits of ourselves’. It enables us ‘both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take’ (ibid., p. 46). It constitutes itself as ‘a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves on ourselves as free beings’ (ibid., p. 47).

In other words genealogy provides us with the tools for a project of freedom, of going beyond our ‘limits’, which individuals must each work out for themselves on themselves according to their own particular historical situation and circumstances. This is the positive Foucauldian account of a 0 The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 19%.

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countermodern view of the self and of autonomy. Meanwhile he is clear about what he rejects, namely ‘all projects that claim to be global or radical’, utopian projects that have invariably spelled disaster in the past: ‘we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programmes of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions’, he says. On the other hand, he actually pronounces himself as favouring gradual piecemeal reform, ‘specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years’ (ibid., p. 46).

EDUCATION, POLITICS AND POWER

We have intimated what the objections against Foucault’s account of power are. In the main it appears to his critics to be altogether stifling and nihilistic.

Charles Taylor (1985) has criticised it as incoherent because, he says, Foucault does not oppose it with some notion of freedom. The fault lies in Foucault’s narrowly exclusive identification of power with ‘power over’, with power as domination. Foucault, Taylor argues, does not consider the other dimension of power, ‘power to’, or power as freedom. This being the case he leaves no space at all for any possibility either of liberty or of social progress. As Taylor puts it, in Foucault’s narrative ‘there is no escape from power into freedom, for such systems of power are coextensive with human society’; we can only step from one domination into another (ibid., p. 153).

Foucault has also been accused of leaving out still another dimension of power uncovered by such as Hannah Arendt and Habermas: that power which is achieved positively through joint or collaborative enterprise, through acting in concert and together rather than through domination, an account which seems more compatible with democratic practices. Hard pressed on this point by his interviewers (‘Politics and ethics: an interview’, in Rabinow, 1984), he could not bring himself to ‘opt for consensuality’. The most he allowed for himself, rather obscurely, was to be ‘against nonconsensuality’ (ibid., p. 379).

Foucault has also been criticised for being ‘neutral’ about the power/ knowledge regimes and technologies he decribes. And this neutrality is linked by his critics with his method of genealogy. Walzer (1986), who dismisses Foucault’s politics as ‘infantile leftism’, argues that as a political epistemology it is simply incoherent. Foucault’s refusal to specify either a prescription or a prognosis for the social illnesses he diagnoses, Hoy comments, ‘suggests to some readers that genealogy is as unserious and irresponsible as archaeology’ (Hoy, 1986, p. 7).

It is not clear that Foucault’s archaeology, even given the ‘playfulness’ in his writings, was ever meant to be ‘unserious and irresponsible’. Certainly his ambitions for genealogy, quoted above, imply otherwise. There genealogy is represented as the indispensable instrument of the permanent critique of the self by the self, of that ‘possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’, that constitutes our freedom. According to Foucault’s account in ‘What is Enlightenment? genealogy, rather than support a fatalistic pessimism, provides us with the possibility of finding a new impetus for ‘the 0 The Journal of the Phifosophy of Education Society of Great Britain 1996.

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undefined work of freedom’. Its object, as he commented in his earlier interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow, is to ‘promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries’ (‘The Subject and Power’, in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983, p. 217). In short, not only does Foucault create a space for freedom, he actually tells us how he envisages it: namely ‘as work carried out by ourselves on ourselves as free beings’.

But what about the charges that he is neoconservative or irrationalist, made

by Habermas (1990) for instance? Or Merquior’s charge that he is a neoanarchist because: (a) he was a revolutionary ‘spontaneist’ and anti-utopian, (b) he praised particularist combats, and (c) he distrusted all institutions? And a bad anarchist to boot because he distorts the notion of ‘power’ which is ‘the very kernel of anarchist theory’ (Merquior, 1985, pp. 1 5 5 156)?

Rorty, who regards Foucault’s ‘so-called “anarchism” ’ as ‘self-indulgent radical chic’ (Rorty, 1986), predictably suggests it can be rescued if his search for autonomy is kept private. Foucault’s error, Rorty argues, was to project ‘his own search for autonomy out into public space- that is, when the results are ‘bad’ and he becomes an anarchist (Rorty, 1991, p. 195). There is no doubt that Foucault was, indeed, notwithstanding the urge he felt towards anonymity, a very public person. His lifelong, committed and practical political activism against cruelty, injustice or the oppressive abuse of power is well known.

Merquior captures its essence perfectly: Foucault was, indeed, ‘spontaneist’, anti-utopian, and interested in particular combats. It is also true, as Rorty suggests, that the later ‘ethical’ Foucault also became interested in the notion of autonomy as ‘care for one’s self. But is it true too that it is his confusion of the two projects that leads him into anarchy? Foucault himself regarded ‘anarchist’ as just another tiresome label hung on him by his critics (undoubtedly also symptomatic of modernity’s yen to categorize everything). In any case, the best way to judge whether he was an anarchist or not is by looking at what he actually had to say about power.

An anarchist, in fact, is one who has a particular theory about power: one who wants to see relations of power abolished and replaced by power-free relations. Anarchists of all varieties are fundamentally libertarians impelled by ‘a mystique of individual and popular impulse’ (Woodcock, 1971, p. 15).

Foucault believed that power is an all-pervasive phenomenon, that it cannot be eliminated. Being an anarchist, on the other hand, as Hacking points out, goes contrary to the notion of the all-pervasiveness of power (Hacking, 1986, p. 39).

From the standard point of view, then, Foucault is not an anarchist. Nor is he a nihilist either, as Walzer and others claim. ‘To abolish power systems’, Walzer says, ‘is to abolish both moral and scientific categories: away with them all!’

(Walzer, 1986, p.61). True, but abolishing power systems was never part of Foucault’s programme, quite the contrary.

Nor does Foucault oppose power to freedom or make freedom impossible as Taylor and others of Foucault’s critics argue. Patton (1989, p. 260) rightly says that Foucault’s ‘descriptive analyses are based upon a concept of power which is neither evaluative nor antithetical to freedom’. But on the other hand they are not entirely neutral. It is not true either that Foucault was interested exclusively in power as domination. Though domination was the central concern of 0 The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Sociefy of Greaf Britain 19%.

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Discipline and Punish, the later Foucault drew very specific distinctions between ’ domination and power, and assimilated liberty into his account of power. ‘In order to exercise a relation of power,’ he said, ‘there must be on both sides a certain form of liberty.. .in the relations of power, there is necessarily the possibility of resistance, for if there were no possibility of resistance -of violent resistance, of escape, of ruse, of strategies that reverse the situation there would be no relations of power. This being the general form,’ he concluded, ‘I refuse to answer the question that I am often asked: “But if power is everywhere, then there is no liberty”’ (Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988, p. 12). In short, for Foucault, ‘if there are relations of power throughout every social field it is because there is freedom everywhere’ (ibid., p. 12). A state of domination exists only where power is ‘blocked’,where there is no possibility of altering or reversing the relationship of power. In sum, ‘One cannot impute to me,’ he concludes on the point, ‘the idea that power is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom’ (ibid., p. 13).

Foucault’s objection to an ethics of communicative action, like Habermas’s, on the other hand (and this is the point of his unwillingness to go beyond being ‘against nonconsensuality’), is that he thinks it utopian. The way to take on the phenomenon of all-pervasive power relationships, he says, is ‘not to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give oneself the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination’ (ibid., p. 18). The pedagogical implications of this programme are actually spelled out by Foucault himself in the same interview. He did not see, he said, ‘where evil is in the practice of someone who, in a given game of truth, knowing more than another, tells him what he must do, teaches him, transmits knowledge to him, communicates skills to him’. The problem is rather to know the difference between the legitimate use of power and ‘domination which will make a child subject to the arbitrary and useless authority of a teacher, or put a student under the power of an abusively authoritarian professor, and so forth. I think these problems,’ he concludes, ‘should be posed in terms of rules of law, or relational techniques of government and of ethos, of practice of self and of freedom’ (ibid., pp. 18-19).

There are, then, structural alternatives to the carceral school, classroom and society, because there are power relationships and technologies that are not dominating. In this sense, Foucault suggested that actual educational institutions can be analysed and understood in terms of ‘a block of capacitycommunication-power’ (‘The Subject and Power’, in Rabinow and Dreyfus, 1983, p.212). There is a kind of education that corresponds with the achievement of these alternatives: it corresponds, as we saw above, with a pedagogical project that enables subjects to ‘give laws to themselves’ (this is the continuation of the thread with the Enlightenment), which provides them with skills to exercise power, with ‘techniques of management’, and, more fundamentally, with certain ‘practices of the self and of freedom’ (that are discontinuous with the practices of modernity) that form the core of one’s ethos and, by implication, are the basic of the whole educational project.

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These practices, described in his last interviews, involve regarding one’s own life as a work of art and engaging in that care of one’s self that goes with regarding it in this way. The ‘concern with the self, as ‘the deliberate practice of liberty’ in the form of ‘self-mastery’, became the preoccupation of the final, ‘ethical’, phase of Foucault’s life-work. One of his interviewers observed that the subject dealt with in his previous work was ‘shall we say “passive” while the subject of which you have been speaking for the last two years in your course at the College de France is an “active” subject’ (in Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988, p. 11). Foucault’s ‘active’ subject is far removed from the narcissistic marginalisation of the self advocated by Rorty.

The root of the difference is quite clear. Rorty’s view is, as his account in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature indicates, Sartrean. Foucault, on the other hand, distances himself from Sartre’s account of self-creation. ‘We should not have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity’, he says (‘The Subject and Power’, in Rabinow and Dreyfus, 1983, p.237). The difference is fundamental: self-creation is not to be regarded as Cartesian self-absorption but as a kind of activity on and within the world. This is because ‘these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested, and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group’ (In Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988, p. 11). Thus, at a far remove from the self-inflicted marginalisation of the strong poet, Foucault describes ‘care for the other’, particularly as a way of governing or exerting power over the other, as an essential ingredient of care of self. This is what makes selfcreation consistent with the kind of political activism Foucault embraced, even if it is an activism of a ‘pessimistic’ kind.

Correspondence: Kenneth Wain, Faculty of Education, University of Malta, Msida, Malta.

NOTES 1. Deleuze (1992,pp. 165-166) comments about Foucault’s interviews that ‘Right till the end of his life Foucault attached a lot of importance to interviews, in France and even more so abroad, and this not because he had a taste for them but because in them he was able to trace these lines leading to the present which were drawn together in his major books. These interviews are diagnostics. It is rather like the situation with Nietzsche, whose works are hard to read unless one sees them in the context of the Nuchlms contemporary with each of them’.

2. In his interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983, op cit., p.237). Foucault describes his life work as covering three possible domains of genealogy: the truth axis, the power axis, and the ethical axis.

3. Foucault said about his genealogies that ‘I am fully aware that I have never written anything other than fictions. For all that, I would not want to say that they are outside the truth’. Quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow, op cit., p. 204.

4. A good defence of Foucault against Baudrillard is made by Racevskis (1983).

5. Foucault took the subject of power/knowledge up again in several interviews as well as in The History of Sexuality.

6. Certainly this suggestion is worth taking up given the current confusion with the word ‘postmodernity’. In this sense opponents of modernity, like MacIntyre, for example, who is clearly not a postmodernist, and Rorty, could classify as countennodernist, in the sense that they propose a contrary ‘ethos’.

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