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This review has been accessed  times since may 10, 1998
Popkewitz, T.S., & Brennan, M. (Eds.) (1998) Foucault's Challenge:
Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education. New York: Teachers College
Press
388 pp. + xvi
ISBN 0-8077-3677-5 (cloth) $58.00
0-8077-3676-7 (paperback) $27.95
Reviewed by Aimee Howley
Ohio University *
May 10, 1998
"Foucault has become the sort of intellectual figure with whom it is no
longer possible to have a rational or nonpathological
relationship."—Halperin (1995, p. 5)
Certain works of art and theory bring closure to particular moments. They
may be fine, even quintessential, statements of the chimera, but they
signal its demise. Such are the summative invocations of Foucault found in
Popkewitz and Brennan's scholarly collection. Those of us who love the
sharp inconclusiveness of the man will find it painful to confront the
palor of the codified theory. By the illicitness of his ideas, we caught a
glimpse of something beyond self-limiting theory (see Barris, in press).
Attempting to unify the theory, Popkewitz and colleagues shut the door on
these possibilities. Now situated, Foucault becomes a comfortable thing of
the past. As intellectual tool, part of a tradition, important progenitor
of social epistemology, Foucault's inspiration is contained. My preference,
though, with Halperin (1995), is to sanctify the mystery. Short of that, I
am looking for precise attentiveness, and some of the essays in the
collection offer such care.
Approaching such precision is Jennifer Gore's "Disciplining Bodies: On the
Continuity of Power Relations in Pedagogy." In a rather straightforward
rendering of theory, the essay applies a Foucaultian analysis of
disciplinary power to qualitative data obtained in four quite distinct
pedagogical settings. The conclusion--that techniques of power appear in
sites as varied as a PE classroom and a feminist reading group--
illuminates three of Foucault's major points: that power is a generative
mechanism, that no particular manifestation of power is inevitable, and
that freedom concerns the will to exercise power differently.
With careful elegance, David Schaafsma elaborates similar points about the
constitutive, assimilative, and liberatory possibilities of writing.
Indeed, "Performing the Self: Constructing Written and Curricular Fictions"
is the only essay in the collection that treats Foucaultian theory as both
rich and generative. Incomplete as a theoretical presentation in its own
right, the essay nevertheless offers glimpses of the poignantly circular
possibilities inherent in Foucaultian thought. Unlike many of the
contributors to the collection, Schaafsma activates Foucaultian premises
rather than simply and mechanically applying them to conditions apprehended
otherwise. Furthermore, like Foucault himself, Schaafsma uses disqualified
texts in strategic ways when he positions the poems of an African-American
school girl at the intersection between discourses of politics and literary
criticism. In contrast to Foucault, however, Schaafsma fails to offer
adequate self-abnegation as justification for coopting the self-disclosures
of subjugated persons. This breech reflects Schaafsma's propensity to treat
critical pedagogy with greater generosity than--from a Foucaultian
vantage--it deserves.
Whereas each of the essays discussed above makes a direct and coherent
statement, other essays in the collection tend to approach coherence
obliquely and to intermingle luminous and prosaic moments. "A Catalog of
Possibilities" (Simola, Heikkinen, and Silvonen, pp. 64-90), for example,
deftly recapitulates and recombines pieces of Foucault's self-repudiated
opus to establish the linkage among the techniques of discourse, self, and
power that together constitute technologies of truth. Except for a rather
unfortunate diagram of the technologies of truth, the attempt to unify the
Foucaultian field seems, in my view, to do justice both to the genealogical
forays and the transcendent frustration that undergird it. But when this
"meta-methodology" (p. 71) is applied--even rigorously--to the
constitutive discourse of the "modern Finnish teacher," it fails to
encapsulate a practice. Worse still, it belittles the Foucaultian arsenal
by unleashing it against an already lifeless quarry. The error, I think, is
to start with discourse. With few exceptions, Foucault starts with the body
and moves from the interrogation and discipline of the body toward the
discourse it produces.
Several essays in the collection make this same mistake. Wagener's review
of public discourse about sex and sex education in Milwaukee and Bill
Green's examination of the discourse of English teaching undertake
rhetorical analyses that are not altogether Foucaultian. In fact, these
essays strive principally to disclose the ideological character of official
discourse rather than the constitutive character of discursive practices.
Thus they engage the sort of unmasking that critical theory and critical
pedagogy made popular: they evaluate the normative character of discourse
rather than revealing the imprimatur of dispersed (what Foucault called
"capillary") practice on the rules of formation of particular (ideological
and historically situated) discourses.
Similarly, in its analysis of the ways that power relations function to
constitute the child, Shutkin's essay, "The Deployment of Information
Technology in the Field of Education and the Augmentation of the Child,"
reverses Foucault's causal ordering of localized practice and centralized
control and discourse. Citing Foucault and Bernauer, Shutkin does, at
first, localize "deployment" (i.e., "dispositif"), when he defines it as a
dispersed, tactical, and constitutive practice applied to the individual.
Then, seemingly indifferent to this careful definitional grounding, Shutkin
proceeds to use "deployment" much more conventionally in his analysis of
the ways that a certain practical journal for teachers framed a discussion
of the San Francisco School's "deployment" of a particular laser disc
within the social studies curriculum of its middle schools. In this
discussion, deployment spans two generations--a generation of practice
(i.e., in the San Francisco schools) and a generation of discourse (i.e.,
in the journal)--but in both generations "deployment" emanates from the
center outward. Official practice displaces local practice as the important
point of contact between the individual and the state apparatus.
A more rigorously Foucaultian analysis focuses on the bio-political
construction of the preschool child. In his essay, "A History of the
Present on Children's Welfare in Sweden," Kenneth Hultqvist (pp. 91-116)
demonstrates appreciation of the sense in which the socially constructed
child is both a body and a discourse:
The preschool child does not denote anything real, but is a drafted plan
for a new age, for a reality in the making, for when a more divine
condition than that of the present has arrived.... The preschool child--
the renewer of the race--is something of an historical zero, a dividing
line in the so-called human development, when all the old trash is to be
thrown overboard and replaced by something new and lasting. (p. 102)
Hultqvist uses the essay as a series of occasions for instantiating the
Foucaultian insight that discourse and practice are coextensive and
mutually constitutive. Indeed, from this insight emerges the most darkly
startling point of the essay--a point that aims at the two chambers of
the postmodern heart. In considering the social construction of the
decentered individual, Hultqvist targets reflection and recuperation,
fingering them as rationalities for mass-producing the modernist prototype
of a society governed from within the self. "The decentered person of today
is confronted by the endless task of chasing his or her own shadow (which
is always elusive). This may be a (very) successful 'method' to deal with
scarce resources" (p. 109). The point has such possibilities that, by the
end of the essay, I found myself regretting that Hultqvist had spent so
much time charting the constitutive implications of the Montessori--in
contrast to the Frobel--preschooler.
In the same vein, but with less vigor, Bernadette Baker roots contemporary
childhood in an ideology of rescue. Failing to situate her own retelling
within the larger project of critical psychology (see e.g., Bradley, 1989;
Burman, 1994; Kessen, 1979; Morss, 1990, 1996; Sigel & Kim, 1996;
Walkerdine, 1988), Baker's analysis adds but incrementally to Katz's (1968)
rather thin and somewhat strident revisionism. Like Katz, Baker retells a
familar story from a committed and oppositional vantage. She demonstrates,
for example, how child-study contributed to an ideology of rescue that
resonated in common schools already primed for the moral improvement of
immigrants. Whereas contrarian history has a place, it is neither as
productively circular nor as elegantly disarming as Foucaultian genealogy.
It purports to tell how things really were, rather than illuminating the
relations of power and knowledge that enabled (and constrained) them to be
in certain ways.
For some of the essays, Foucault serves principally as the bearer of a
benediction. Granted permission to write, Lynn Fendler, for example,
provides a detailed chronology of the "educated person." Her efforts are
not improved by the claim that the history is, rather, a genealogy. In
fact, despite the narrowing of attention to the cultural or discursive
artifact, "educated person," her chronology of the Western rational
tradition is much like any other conventional progression from Plato
through Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. Fendler does not quite end up casting
Foucault as the final frontier, but her analysis tends in that direction.
Conflating theoretical explanations with what they explain, she succumbs to
the determinism that Foucault just barely missed in The Order of Things
(but atoned for with The Archeology of Knowledge). Unlike Foucault, Fendler
seeks relief from a totalizing episteme in the construction of a new,
albeit more self-critical, one:
Political projects that seek to be critical of the power relations being
constituted in current social configurations require analytic tools and
concepts that take into account innovations, changes, shifts, and
adaptations of those (re)configurations ... Certain discourses of
postcoloniality, postmodernity, and feminism have begin to develop tools of
analysis more adequate to the task at hand. (p. 61)
Absent from this formula for resistance are Foucault's two principal
correctives: outrage and limit-testing. Ignoring these, Fendler quiets what
is most disquieting in Foucault. Doing so, she educates us less than she
might.
In "School Marks: Education, Domination, and Female Subjectivity," Mimi
Orner overtly acknowledges the plan to "bend" Foucault to her purposes: "I
do not remain 'loyal' to Foucault's project here ... Instead, I use
Foucaultian concepts and insights as I 'poach' ... other feminist and
poststructuralist work that offers more direct insight ... " (p. 281).
Whatever the method--and indeed it is a method contrived from defensive
argument, feminist exposé, and intellectual posturing--the result simply
registers, rather than positioning, outrage. To her credit, Orner expresses
outrage toward practices that implicate direct rather than derivative
practices: in her story gendering does take place in conversations about
bodies, not in determinations of tenure or promotion. But like many
self-styled feminists of the academy, Orner decouples outrage from theory.
Whatever its possible merits, this strategy contravenes the Foucaultian
practice of embedding theory in outrage. By including this essay in the
collection, the editors do a disservice to the--albeit questionable--
aim of the work, to codify (or at least situate) Foucaultian theory.
The remaining essays in the volume attend most particularly to this aim,
that is, they are about Foucaultian thought rather than instantiating,
exemplifying, or, as with Orner's essay, defying it. Although to me they
are the most heartless, these also seem to be the most scholarly essays in
the collection.
In "Genealogy and Progressive Politics: Reflections on the Notion of
Usefulness," Ingólful Jóhannesson examines the value of Foucaultian theory
for both constituting and critiquing emancipatory discourses. Thoughtfully
engaging Foucault's ideas and inserting them into a larger set of
emancipatory discourses, this essay works to render harmless the
distinctions between theory and practice. "Theory is practice, practice is
theory, and these activities can be kept less divided from each other if we
rethink their relationships" (p. 299). In addition, and more pointedly, the
essay restates and elaborates Foucault's characterization of progressive,
in contrast to, other politics. Bringing this analysis to light, the essay
serves to defuse a common complaint about Foucault, namely that his theory
and his political activity existed in separate and incompatible realms.
Whereas Jóhannesson focuses on commonalities among emancipatory discourses,
Lew Zipin concentrates on their distinctions. In his careful essay,
"Looking for Sentient Life in Discursive Practices: The Question of Human
Agency in Critical Theories and School Research," Zipin considers the
theoretical consequences of Foucault's and, later, Judith Butler's, Valerie
Walkerdine's and Bronwyn Davies' insistence on anti-humanist and
anti-foundational modes of thinking. Through intricate argumentation, Zipin
identifies in these theories the implicit need for agency--taken within
the theories as prediscursive, contingent, or indeterminately opportune--
but recast in his analysis as merely necessary and vaguely Marxist. It is
an interesting argument--Marxist species-being versus the discursively
constituted self--but I would have preferred to see it played out between
the principals. In the hands of the seconds--Fraser and Bourdieu, on the
one hand, Butler, Walkerdine and Davies, on the other--the theoretical
journey devolves to a series of illuminating but ultimately distracting
side trips. In the process, Foucault is left by the wayside.
Fortunately, he is picked up again by David Blacker in his essay,
"Intellectuals at Work and in Power: Toward a Foucaultian Research Ethic."
Blacker picks up Foucault in more ways than the intra-textual: he rescues
Foucault from the accusation that he has "nothing positive to say" and is,
therefore, anti-progressive and self-undermining, and he restores
Foucault's politics to the realm of local--"theoretically modest"--
practice (p. 357). Through this latter rescusitation, Blacker makes room
for oppositional intellectuals to participate in a Foucaultian project.
Elaboration of this eminently attractive idea, however, leads Blacker to
put forward a distinctly anti-Foucaultian version of a purportedly
Foucaultian ethic: "One should strive to become master of the consequences
of one's actions" (p. 361). Based on the guiding principles of "efficacy"
and "honesty," this ethic depends upon self-understanding, harmonization,
honesty, and the "controlled and self-regulated dissemination of the
subject into the world" (pp. 362-363). Explicitly teleological, this ethic
disregards both Foucault's anti-foundationalism and his transgression of
limits. Blacker's oppositional intellectual is normalized in accordance
with external principles of ascetic practice, which legitimize his or her
"will to power." If Foucault might have posited "oppositional
intellectuals," he would have envisioned them as unruly, their activity
indeterminate, and the sources and consequences of their strategies only
partially accessible to them.
Blacker's essay ends the volume, and presumably on an up beat. It gives us
license to go forth and do what most of us already do: fight ideological
battles with our colleagues, avoid speaking for the truly oppressed, and
question rather than condemn the unpalatable, even intolerable, practices
of others. Blacker's exhortations and, in many ways, the entire collection
of essays sadly remind us: "Mr. Foucault, he dead." At the same time and
precisely because our relationship to Foucault is not rational, we know for
a fact that his ghost walks and, indeed, is hard to pin down.
Note
*This review was produced under the editorship of
Nicholas C. Burbules because of the potential conflict of interest
occasioned by the fact that David Blacker, who contributed a chapter to
this volume, is the Education Review Area Editor for this topic.
References
Barris, J. (In press.). That Foucault justifies truth and ideology
critique. Quarterly Journal of Ideology.
Bradley, B. (1989). Visions of infancy: A critical introduction to child
psychology. Oxford, UK: Polity Press.
Burman, E. (1994). Deconstructing developmental psychology. New York:
Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1971). The order of things: An archaeology of the human
sciences. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1976). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Harper & Row.
Halperin, D. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Katz, M. (1968). The irony of early school reform: Educational innovation
in mid-nineteeth century Massachusetts. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Kessen, W. (1979). The American child and other cultural inventions.
American Psychologist, 34(10), 815-820.
Morss, J.R. (1990). The biologising of childhood: Developmental psychology
and the Darwinian myth. Hove, England: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Morss, J.R. (1996). Growing critical: Alternatives to developmental
psychology. New York: Routledge.
Sigel, I.E., & Kim, M. (1996). The images of children in developmental
psychology. In C.P. Hwang, M.E. Lamb, & I.E. Sigel (Eds.), Images of
childhood (pp. 47-62). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive development and the
production of rationality. London: Routledge.
About the Authors
Thomas Popkewitz and Marie Brennan co-edited Foucault's
Challenge. In their other work, both of these scholars focus
attention on the political and sociological ramifications of
educational policy and reform projects. Brennan also
considers gender in education and research methods. Popkewitz is
Professor of Education in the Department of Curriculum and
Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Brennan works at
Central Queensland University in Australia.
About the Reviewer
Aimee
Howley is Professor of Educational Administration at Ohio University
where she currently struggles to make meaningful
translations between the theories she cherishes and the lived
experiences of the administrators with whom she works.
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