Foucault

1. Foucault Background ideas needed for an application to early years education Note that specific conclusions and discussion points are given at the end of the web notes.

2. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French intellectual, who studied for his PhD. under Georges Canguilhem - a historian of science - and at least initially, his project could be described as 'historical' - except that traditional historians largely rejected his approach because of its attempt to identify what he called 'épistémès‘. These were broad principles of thought that he believed underpinned the culture of an entire era of Western political, social, artistic, and scientific endeavour. Such an approach was hostile to the conservation of disciplinary boundaries, and he said himself: I don’t feel it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else you were not in the beginning (Foucault cited in Martin et al 1988: p. 9).

3. A common feature of his work is analysis of the 'technologies' of power and domination: the ways that they endorse/perpetuate arbitrary models of humanity through the processes of ‘normalisation’. Here, he has some similarities with Gramsci, who proposes that people contribute to their own oppression by accepting unequal power relationships as natural or inevitable. However, Gramsci states that this situation reflects individuals’ ‘false consciousness’, implying that a ‘true’ model of humanity can be reclaimed if only people can be helped to understand how they have misrecognised and misinterpreted their social situation. In contrast, Foucault does not believe there is an underlying ‘true’ humanity – simply differing modes of humanity. His agreement with Gramsci is that dominance is typically achieved, not through explicit coercion, but through more subtle and intangible cultural processes.

4. Discipline and Punish (1977) • The book thought most relevant to educational contexts is usually identified as Discipline and Punish because of its explicitly 'educational' examples. Here, he analyses four ‘disciplinary sites’: the prison, the school, the barracks, and the workshop to present his thesis that: • Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power, which because of its own excess can pride itself on its own omnipotence; it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy (Foucault, 1991: p. 170).

5. Foucault argues that institutional discourses define and perpetuate ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ behaviours through ‘disciplines’ imposed simultaneously from a variety of sources, including the individual’s own self-discipline. • His interpretation of discourse assumes that, in any social context, what can be said or thought by participants is constrained by the boundaries of the ‘acceptable’ or ‘legitimate’ meanings they share. Participants in educational settings are also subject to such constraints, but in addition they are involved in the propagation and selective dissemination of ‘external’ discourses: • Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or modifying the appropriateness of discourses with the knowledge and power they bring with them (Foucault, 1971: p. 46).

6. Key Concepts Pouvoir-Savoir (power-knowledge) Foucault contested the conventional view that acquisition of knowledge makes us more powerful, and stated that the relationship between power and knowledge is more complex than this. He proposed that a more accurate representation of the relationship was the term pouvoir-savoir, which he believed more appropriately reflected the single, inseparable configuration of ideas and practices that constitute educational discourse.

7. Discipline Foucault reminds us that the Latin root of the word (disciplina) has a dual meaning: it refers both to an area of knowledge and to issues of control or power. As a result it can be used as a verb – to describe the actions one performs on oneself or others to achieve some degree of control, and as a noun – to describe a set of qualities that an individual needs to master in order to be recognised or valued within a particular field.

8. Foucault emphasises the role of ‘economy’ and ‘efficiency’ in disciplines. These features are more important than the symbolism or language we use. An economy of language or movement is all about the control we exercise over that language or movement, and, for Foucault, the way in which that control is part of a constellation or network of societal mechanisms or technologies which work in and through us. For Foucault, the machinery/ mechanics/ technology of discipline work first and foremost at the level of the body.

9. There is a close linkage between the development of disciplinary technologies and the development of new machinery and factories and of the apparatuses of the state and capital during the industrial revolution, the school, the prison and the barracks. • The workings of discipline operate at the micro-level, in the tiniest details of movement, arrangement and injunction. This allows us endless scope to explore the disciplinary technologies at work in school. Important to discipline are the techniques of individualising, ranking, ordering, and tabulating matters spatial, administrative and a multitude of others practice domains: • The organisation of serial space was one of the great technical mutations of elementary education … by assigning individual places it made possible the supervision of each individual and the simultaneous work of all. It organised a new economy of the time of apprenticeship. It made the educational space function like a learning machine, but also as a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding (Foucault, 1991: p.147).

10. The Gaze • Mechanisms of observation, surveillance, visibility are important in Foucault’s accounts. Foucault proposes that educational institutions operate a system of hierarchical observation, or surveillance, that serves to control the participants’ attitudes and behaviours. He says: • A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency (Foucault, 1991: p. 176). • He describes the process of hierarchical observation as: • … a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques make it possible to induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible (Foucault, 1991: p. 170).

11. Foucault argues that the ‘gaze’ of surveillance is not simply directed at us by others, but is also a way of looking at our own behaviours. Consequently we become the objects of our own gaze, constantly monitoring our bodies, actions and feelings. Surveillance is everywhere and at all times, it is both an external and an internal technology of discipline: • Hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical “inventions” of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owe its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it… The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery… This enables the disciplinary power to be both absolutely indiscreet, since it is everywhere and always alert, since by its very principle it leaves no zone of shade and constantly supervises the very individuals who are entrusted with the task of supervising; and absolutely discreet, for it functions permanently and largely in silence (Foucault, 1991: pp. 176-7).

12. Normalization “The Normal is established as a principle of coercion in teaching with the introduction of a standardized education” (Foucault, 1991; p. 184). For Foucault, the potentially liberating characteristics of education are always combined with its ‘normalizing’ potential, to which we all subscribe. The education system monitors our progress, passes judgements on us and moulds our attitudes and behaviours in certain ways to ensure that this exercise of arbitrary power is largely undetectable, yet tacitly accepted. Foucault’s notion of discipline has negative and positive connotations, and the implementation of discipline is a two sided-mechanism: punishment of misdemeanours and transgressions, and gratification of desirable behaviours. As a consequence, the arbitrary definitions of behaviour as ‘good’ or ‘evil’, ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ become, in the first instance, possible, then enforcable, and lastly, presumed to be ‘natural’ and incontestable.

13. … the art of punishing, in the regime of disciplinary power, is aimed neither at expiation, nor even precisely at repression. It brings five quite distinct operations into play: it refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed. It differentiates individuals one from another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected or as an optimum towards which one must move. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchises in terms of value the abilities, the level, the ‘nature’ of individuals. It introduces, through this ‘value-giving’ measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal. The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchises, homogenises, excludes. In short, it normalises (Foucault, 1991: pp. 182-3).

14. The examination • The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalising judgement. It is a normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualised (Foucault, 1991: p. 184).

15. It is through examination that the ‘economy of visibility’ is transformed into the exercise of power and of control. In the educational context, this exercising of power has to do with knowledge, ownership, and transmission: • The examination in the school was a constant exchanger of knowledge; it guaranteed the movement of knowledge from the teacher to the pupil, but it extracted from the pupil a knowledge destined and reserved for the teacher (Foucault, 1991, p.187). • In so ordering the pupil-teacher relationship, the examination holds all the players in ‘a mechanism of objectification’. Examinations lock into place the disciplines on the school, creating of them a ritual, a spectacle, a ceremony. Marks and scores ‘formalize’ or fix the child within power relationships.