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.
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).
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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).
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 sidedmechanism: 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.
… 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).
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).
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.