Studies in Philosophy and Education 17: 163176, 1998. 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

163

Review Article
KENNETH WAIN
University of Malta

James D. Marshall, Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996. Foucault the Destroyer In a review she wrote for Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinows book Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Maxine Greene (1983, p. 105) remarked that if we examine Foucaults work from the vantage point of institutionalized education or educational research he will appear to us as the Great Destroyer or, in the most literal of senses, a deconstructionist . By the end of the article she had softened her attitude to the extent that she recommended Dreyfus and Rabinows book for reading but still concluded her review tongue in cheek with the words: Sometimes even educational researchers must allow themselves to play (p. 110). Of course, deconstruction is not destruction, as Jacques Derrida has observed repeatedly to his critics, mainly Anglo-saxon philosophers, over the years. Beside, although, as Greene herself observed in his essay, Foucault has been classied in different ways by different critics over the years, deconstructionist is not usually one of them. Finally, her last remark reects another criticism often made against postmodernists (among whom Foucault is often included, courtesy of Habermas) that they are not serious. But, again, it seems off-mark also. Although, in fact, Foucault did cultivate an image of elusive playfulness in his early work, he seems actually, on this matter at least, to have followed Rortys precept and kept it private, except perhaps for when he was being interviewed when pun, irony and paradox were, for him, the order of the day. There is certainly nothing very playful about his narratives of the modern world nor about the way he engaged personally in politics. I begin this critical essay with Greenes mistatements on Foucault because they are typical of many of his Anglo-saxon critics. In this sense he shares the fate of those who have been variously labelled as poststructuralist, postmodernist, deconstructionist, romantic, post-Nietzechean, and so on. The more usual criticism of these writers is that they are irrationalist because of their attack on traditional Western foundationalist epistemology and its conception of truth and reason (what Derrida calls its logocentrism), and irresponsible because of their disinclination

164

KENNETH WAIN

to align themselves with any of the traditional or standard political metanarratives of hope, liberty, and emancipation that have driven reformist and revolutionary politics in the modern age, or indeed to take up any ethical or political project or position at all. Foucaults politics, in particular, have been described by Walzer as a species of infantile leftism, by Merqiour as neo-anarchist and nihilist, and by Charles Taylor as simply incoherent. Greenes essay is also rather typical of a lot of philosophers of education writing from the vantage point of institutionalized education or educational research when confronted with Foucault. She doesnt know quite what to make of him or his work so her review is mainly conned to a summary of what Dreyfus and Rabinow had to say about him in their excellent book, and she practically left the matter there. The difculty philosophers of education encounter with Foucaults work in two-fold; rst, they nd difculty with identifying his writing and interest as philosophical, second, he wrote very little directly about education. The latter may explain, to some extent at least, why, although a considerable amount has been written about the signicance of Lyotards and Rortys (who are usually positioned more or less in the same postmodern/poststructuralist camp as Foucault) work for education, the same cannot be said for Foucault. What little has been written about Foucault and education, or about education from a Foucauldian perspective, usually corresponds with Greenes concession that, at least, his writings about the internal relation between knowledge and power, particularly in the various social sciences or sciences of man, may be of the greatest potential relevance for the educational researcher (1983, p. 108). This potential relevance was explored in a 1990 article by a decidedly sympathetic James Marshall who, while describing Foucault as one of the more interesting and controversial thinkers to have emerged in the Western world in the twentieth century, observed that it is not easy to say exactly how he impinges upon traditional mainstream philosophy and education (1990, p. 81). At the time, Marshall had already produced one general article on Foucault and Education in 1989. Before that his publications reveal a distinct interest in the subject of punishment in education and one could conjecture that this was how he rst came to take an interest in Foucaults work. Since then he has taken up the challenge of showing, nearly single-handedly one needs to acknowledge, how Foucault impinges upon traditional mainstrean philosophy and education. In the process he has produced a steady stream of further articles and essay contributions to different books on the subject, including another article about Foucault and educational research in Stephen Balls 1990 book, Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge. Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education (FPAE in what follows) may, in more senses than one, be regarded as the culmination of this work.

REVIEW ARTICLE

165

Negative Genealogies Before FPAE, Balls book was the rst and, to my knowledge, the only, book dedicated specically and entirely to Foucault and education, and it was an entirely different book from Marshalls. It consisted in a number of articles written by different authors nearly all engaging in a Foucauldian genealogical analysis of educational institutions and practices. It addressed various aspects of the history of education and of some of the discourses and disciplinary disputes currently being formed, developed, and reformed in the educational eld (Ball 1990, p. 2). But it was not about Foucault himself. In its preface Ball identied the more obvious relation between Foucaults work and education. The books concern, he said, was with the role of education and its interrelation with politics, economics and history in the formation and constitution of human beings as subjects (1990, p. 2). The statement illustrates perfectly the breath of scope and application of Foucaults own writing and provides an excellent reason why educationalists should be interested in it. Returning to Greens comments quoted earlier on, the articles in Balls book are the most limpid proof that her judgement of Foucault as simply the great destroyer of educational research is far off the mark. Or, to be more precise, it is true of the conventional human and social sciences which Foucault did, indeed, consistently critique negatively in his work. But the book does not seem to escape the other criticism of Foucaults genealogical writing, that it is entirely negative. (2) This is a judgement of Foucaults work which, on the evidence, Marshall himself shares in the writing of FPAE, and which, in my view at least, constitutes the books major shortcoming. With regards to the contributors to Balls book the explanation for the criticism is simple; they drew their inspiration nearly exclusively from just one of Foucaults works, Discipline and Punish (1979), which is a thoroughly dystopian narrative of the rise of modernity, an utterly negative analysis of the modern state. I suspect the same is true with Marshall, he continues to be inuenced chiey by the Foucault of Discipline and Punish also, despite the extensive bibliography at the end of his book which includes also Foucaults important later interviews and the second and third volumes of History of Sexuality. Marshalls 1990 contribution to Balls book, entitled Foucault and Educational Research, concludes that more than the mere potential relevance described by Greene, Foucaults genealogical analysis offers educational research a new framework not for studying the past, but for assessing the present . . . constituted by an analytic grid of power-knowledge. In the same article, he also refers to a failure on Foucaults part to articulate his theory of genealogy adequately, a failure which, he continued to say, makes its application problematic so that, rather than theorize about its limits of application, it may be better to see what can be done in practice (1990, p. 23). This last statement is problematic in its suggestion that one can choose between theory and practice, but there is clearly some point to it. Genealogy is not a type of analysis or critique which can be dened in terms of the rules of a method, to the contrary it is personal and idiosyncratic, like a literary

166

KENNETH WAIN

work. No two genealogical analyses of a phenomenon will yield the same result or tell the same story. Marshall does not himself attempt a sample of genealogical writing in his article in Balls book, instead his writing aims to open a way to Foucault for education researchers to follow. In this connection he says that the methodological imperative Foucaults work imposes on us is to examine processes of modern power in modern schools (1990, p. 23). This is conventionally perceived as the work of the social sciences, particularly that of sociology and social psychology. But a part, a disconcerting but important part, of what Foucault was about in his genealogies was the unmasking of the social sciences. Laying bare their pretence towards being objective, reliable modes of analyses, or trustworthy methods of reproducing the truth about individuals and social practices, he shows them up as instruments of the modern states disciplinary power, as technologies of domination, dividing practices, or games of truth, as he called them. They are articulated through a norm-ridden discourse in terms of which individuals are studied, judged and categorised as normal, sane, competent, educated, or not. Foucault describes how, concurrently with the creation of the sciences, institutions and practices were invented for the purpose of discipline and study of the human subject, body and mind; asylums, hospitals, military barracks, prisons and schools. His general point is that the human and social sciences are part and parcel of the disciplinary technologies or instruments of government and policing of the modern state. They are, therefore, to be regarded with suspicion rather than hope. Marshall explains Foucaults alleged failure to articulate his genealogical theory to his general, inbred opposition to all forms of systematization, his concern throughout that genealogy should not be turned into just another game of truth. Thus, though its concern with how questions qualies it as a way of writing about the past, or writing history, it differs from conventional histories in that it is not concerned with the truth about the past through an accurate representation of events. Historians of the present, as Foucault describes himself, do not reach outwards for objective truths that capture reality or mirror facts as they are supposed to have occurred, but inwards so that their writings are narratives, myths, fabrications, about themselves as much as about the world they describe. Genealogists are uninterested particularly in the humanist conception of history as linear development or progress and emphasise discontinuity and rupture instead. This characterization clearly establishes the subjective character of the genealogical mode of writing. Indeed, not only did Foucault not hide under the mantle of truth or objectivity, he always insisted on the biographical nature of his writing; each of my works is a part of my own biography (p. 13), he claimed, and my books have always arisen from personal problems with madness, prison, sexuality . . . (p. 36). Foucault emphasises this subjectivenss by referring to his genealogies as ctions, ctions abut the modern subject and its constitution through different technologies of power. Fictions with a purpose, however, a political purpose: to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people

REVIEW ARTICLE

167

accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed (Martin et al., 1988, p. 10). This unmasking of power is liberating in a negative sense and the obvious response to it is to transgress the limits of what we are, but in the last stage of his life and work, which he termed ethical, Foucault passed on to a more positive account of freedom than mere transgression, this is freedom conceived as care for the self. To be honest, and to return to Marshalls point, I disagree that Foucault failed to articulate the nature of his genealogical writing. Although he was, indeed, against systematization of all kinds there are various places where he spelled out its purposes in the most explicit fashion. Certainly Nietzsche, genealogy, history and What is Enlightenment? are key essays in this respect. They constitute wellarticulated explanations of genealogical writing by any account even if they stop short of describing a method. Indeed, in the rst of these essays, borrowing from Nietzsche, Foucault identies two concepts, two bare concepts, that guide the genealogists work; those of descent (berkunft) and emergence (enstehung). Bare as they may be, these concepts still set up the parameters within which the genealogist writes, and he discusses them in some detail. In the second essay Foucault goes beyond the negative characterization of genealogy as the unmasking of technologies of domination for the purpose of refusal and presents us with a more positive description of genealogy as a critical ontology of ourselves . . . to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, not even a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating, it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them (Foucault 1984, p. 50). That ethos, or attitude, or philosophical life, is the ethos of self care.

Postmodernism and Politics Although Marshalls book covers these developments in Foucaults thought, he fails to take up and follow this revolutionary twist in Foucaults genealogical writing with the claims that he made on its behalf to the end. The book is, therefore, in my view, only half written. I have another problem of a different kind with it; FPAE adds very little if anything to what Marshall has already written about Foucault and education previously, in his earlier articles and essays. It is built around the self-same themes though he does esh them out with three important introductory background chapters two of which are biographical. The book also makes the same arguments as the articles. The rst two chapters discuss the formative intellectual and political inuences on Foucault, while the third is an account of liberalism and liberal education which introduces the reader to what the books title advertises as its central thrust; the issue of personal autonomy in education. The book ends with a short conclusion which summarizes the content of the book

168

KENNETH WAIN

and recalls its purposes. These Marshall describes as twofold: rst to provide an introduction to Foucault for educators and students of education and to draw out the educational implications of some of his writings; and, second, to provide a critique, derived from Foucault, of the notion of personal autonomy in so far as this is conceived in liberal writings as an important aim, if not the aim, of education (1996, p. 213). I have the feeling that it would have been a better book had he published a selection of his articles and essays in their original form instead with an introductory preface to them which could have included in more summary form the rst two of the books chapters. Indeed, the account they contain of the intellectual inuences on Foucault, his cultural background, and the French post-war intellectual scene within which he grew are indispensable material for the reading public Marshall identies, educators or students who are still coming to grips with his writings. The short discussion of the inuence on Foucault of the different thinkers and teachers he encountered in his formative years (Bachelard, Canguilhelm, Blanchot, Bataille, Lefebrve, Descombes etc.) is useful also for those who seek more than a mere acquaintance with his work. In point of fact, they tell us little if anything more than is to be found already in the Foucault biographies that have been written since his death by Eribon (1989). Macey (1993) and Miller (1993), but Marshalls summary is important for those have not read any of these books. His need to include a concluding chapter, on the other hand, appears strange since it more or less reproduces the summary of what the books purposes and argument is about which already appears in the Introduction. There are also two chapters which seem like odd ts within the books general scheme, these are chapters 5 and 7 which are entitled On Education and Doing Philosophy of Education respectively. These chapters are unconnected with the theme of the book and their inclusion raises puzzling questions. Chapter 5, which is a discussion of Foucaults own personal characteristics as an educator and of his connections with the French university reforms in the late 1960s, could easily have been summarised into a section in Chapter 2. Instead, Marshall reproduces his full article on Pedagogy and Apedagogy: Lyotard and Foucault at Vincennes, already printed in Michael Peterss Education and the Postmodern Condition. Marshall closes the chapter with a look at how educationalists have used Foucaults work, which, again, should have come earlier, at the beginning. He distinguishes them into modern (Sarap, 1982; Walkerdine, 1984; Jones and Williamson, 1979; Hoskin, 1990), and postmodern (Kiziltan et al., 1990). Marshall is out of sympathy with the latters attempt at a Foucauldean postmodernist critique of education. He afrms that Foucault cannot be used in general but rather his insights should be used either to problematise certain givens such as the pursuit of personal autonomy or in more particular genealogical studies (1996, p. 164). This statement and these limitations he places on Foucaults work, are part of the evidence I mentioned earlier of his sympathy with the standard complaint against postmodernism which he quotes from Beyer and Liston that it

REVIEW ARTICLE

169

cannot deliver and provide support for the type of political project that educational transformation must be (1996, p. 160). Marshall clearly states that Foucaults genealogical writings cannot inspire a positive educational project. In this case he clearly aligns Foucault with postmodernism. Indeed, Marshall takes up the question whether Foucault is a postmodernist in Chapter 6. Identifying Lyotard as the typical postmodernist, he concludes that, whatever the similarities between them, Foucault both refused to side with Lyotard, because he did not wish to be seen as any enemy of reason and enlightenment, and to accept the label of post-modernist (1996, p. 185), I doubt that Lyotard wishes to be seen as an enemy of reason either (note his famous struggles with the notion of justice). Marshall concludes with Hoy that Foucault is neither modernist nor anti-modernist but leaves the question whether he was a postmodernist open (unless he tacitly takes post-modernist to be anti-modernist which would be a mistake) (1996, p. 187). But is it important whether Foucault could be described as a postmodernist or not? He himself did not think so, being against all forms of labelling. How does the issue contribute to the books purpose to critique the liberal notion of personal autonomy? Chapter 6, entitled Personal Autonomy Revisited, refers to Habermass famous critique of postmodernism as neo-liberal in its political inspiration. Marshall, rightly (and against Habermas), does not include Foucault as postmodern in this sense. He argues, to the contrary, that the promises of choice and freedom made by the new-right left Foucault, who had just begun to address the neo-liberalism that was about to sweep Europe and other areas of the Western world (1996, p. 187) when he died, unimpressed, for they merely signify changes in the form that governmentality takes (Foucault, 1979b) (1996, p. 188). In short, Marshall disassociates Foucault also from the recent trend (a major shift he calls it) in the rising neo-liberal discourse to divert the notion of autonomy away from its traditional liberal sense; to refer to the autonomous chooser as part of the wider discourse of a dominant consumer culture fed by a free-market economic agenda. The main difference he notes between the two conceptions of autonomy is that in traditional liberalism the autonomous selfs power of choice was authentic, while the neo-liberal autonomous chooser is merely a creature of consumerism, whose formative forces effectively constitute the states new technologies of government with education playing its part. This, indeed, is a crucial objection against continuing to make the liberal notion of personal autonomy the aim of education. The situation, Marshall points out, was well-understood by Lyotard, but where does it leave us with Foucault? A proper Foucauldian response to neo-liberalism, in Marshalls view, is an increased vigilance, and an increased imagination and inventiveness, to deal with the complex problem it represents. But what about something more positive? Marshall suggests a neo-social democratic approach to these crises of education (and the welfare state) and the increasing demand for autonomy. This, however, is not, he remarks, explicit in the extant works of Foucault (1996, p. 193). And he is right

170

KENNETH WAIN

in this respect, Foucault, however, described care for self as having both an active erotic and a political dimension with important pedagogical implication. True, he remained unwilling to develop a political theory or position out of the elements of an ethos of self-care, to tell people what to do, but they clearly point to a form of social and political responsibility which renders the characterization of Foucault as a mere prophet of extremity, or of the nihilistic politics of transgression for its own sake, as inaccurate as the judgement that he is a mere destroyer. In any case, Marshalls book cries out for a critical chapter on Foucaults politics. His tacit assumption that Foucault is a straightforward anarchist will not do.

Liberalism, Liberal Education and Autonomy One gets the feeling that Marshall may have felt the need for his concluding chapter because he may have felt that, by the end, the book had lost its sense of direction. The chapter could be read as an effort to recapture the books central thrust, to return it to its advertised focus, the issue of liberal autonomy and education, after the detours of the previous chapters. But it does not solve the books problems in this respect. For some reason or other the author seems to have been determined to include in it the whole array of themes about Foucault explored in his earlier articles. Either that or he did not have enough mileage on his central theme to justify a book about it and had to resort to other themes on Foucault to beef it up. The result is that it struggles for coherence. Somehow I also got the feeling that Marshall had not worked his material enough into a book. It does not help either that the book is littered with gross typographical and other errors of production of different kind, beginning with the contents page itself, errors which certainly should not feature in a publication of this standard. The problem in this case, of course, is with the books production not with its writing, but production errors are off-putting and do detract from a books overall quality. Apart from its biographical purpose, which is aimed at education students for whom, in general, Foucault is a shadowy presence, Marshall uses Chapter 2 of the book to introduce Foucault the genealogist. This he does by illustration, by describing the writing of Discipline and Punish. In Chapter 7 he also illustrates an alternative Foucauldian philosophical approach to education by drawing on the same book, thus conrming my earlier thesis that Discipline and Punish has remained Foucaults central work for him. In describing their impact on his work in Chapter 2, Marshall emphasises that Foucaults readings of the writers who inuenced him, including Heidegger and Nietzsche, were never straightforward but always subversive; all who were adopted were not merely adopted, but adapted and then made to groan (1996, p. 21). Having fullled the rst purpose of his book Marshall passes on to discuss liberalism and liberal education. Ignoring its notorious complexity he divides the liberal political tradition into three strands each corresponding with different understandings of freedom, individualism and state power. Apart from the dubious

REVIEW ARTICLE

171

merit of this kind of typology, one is struck by the absence from his account of the established superstars of liberal political philosophy today like Rawls, Gutmann, Ackerman, Taylor, Habermas, Dworkin, Walzer. Instead of drawing on recent liberal political theory he classies his liberalisms around the theories of the classical pregenitors of liberalism, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Mill, Spencer, Hayek, etc. His only reference to a contemporary is to Robert Nozick who he treats, however, as a straightforward descendant of Locke. The obvious question that occurs to ones mind is, why classify at all? The answer in this case is that Marshall wanted to nd a manageable way of approaching liberal philosophy of education. His preliminary classication of liberalism enables him to classify liberal philosophy of education also into three corresponding strands. Still, I am not sure that he needed to classify liberal philosophy of education into strands either. All that seemed necessary for him at this stage was to establish, as he does, that all these liberalisms and possible variations on them possess a number of common elements which nd their articulation in the notion of rational personal autonomy which they all share. Marshalls three strands of liberal philosophy of education are represented by the work of R.S. Peters, John Dewey and Kenneth Strike. Peters is taken to represent the British liberal philosophical tradition. Strike the neo-liberal in the Hayek mode (though Marshall concedes that this positioning is not unproblematic and would probably be challenged by Strike himself). But where does Dewey t in? Surely he doesnt t within the third strand of libertarian liberalism Marshall identies with Locke and Nozick! At one stage he refers in passing to Rortys fascinating thesis about similarities between Dewey and Foucault but dismisses it on different grounds. One, more credible, option would be to align Dewey with the communitarian liberalism of Arendt and Habermas. Perhaps he could have taken up another suggestion of Rortys that Deweys politics are consonant with Rawlss post-A Theory of Justice brand of liberalism which, in Rortys view, prioritizes democracy over philosophy. At the very least, Rorty attempts to open up a strand of contemporary liberalism other than the three identied by Marshall consonant with Deweyan politics, one Foucault would have been sympathetic with, which does not begin politics with a foundational philosophical statement about truth or justice, or about human nature. One thing is apparant; Dewey does not t Marshalls three-fold typology. In fact, Marshall is sometimes plainly wrong about Dewey. One case in point is when he includes Dewey among those philosophers who focus on the teachers authority in the classroom instead of on the micro-technologies of power at work in it. This characterisation does not square with Deweys view about the regulative role of the social environment, of living together, which led him to discuss power in terms of control, guidance and direction rather than the personal authority of the teacher. What is at issue for Dewey is how power can be exercised non-coercively within democratic environments. His answer is that it must be internal, achieved through that identity of interest and understanding (1916, p. 39) reached by players participating in a game, not as a mere function of the teachers authority,

172

KENNETH WAIN

however this authority may be justied. Indeed, if anything, Dewey has been criticised for neglecting the importance of the teachers authority. This is not, in my view, correct either. But the point I want to make here is that to join Dewey with Peters as one for whom authority is the correct concept for the discussion of social control (Marshall, 1996, p. 78), is off the mark. Moreover, Deweys detailed discussion of control, direction and guidance in Democracy and Education contradicts Marshalls other claim about Dewey that for him power is emphatically off stage. Indeed, this discussion amounts to an in-depth treatment of the different forms of power Dewey deemed relevant to schooling. But these are particular examples of the the more general problem with Marshalls treatment of Dewey which is that Dewey does not really t into his typology of liberalism, and cannot therefore be assigned positions that are typically liberal. Indeed, Dewey does not fall easily within the liberal category at all, not because he did not share the traditional liberal values and the liberal faith in reform as a tool of progress, but because his emphasis on the social has often been criticised by traditional liberals as bordering on the illiberal. This is because it runs counter to the unconditional value liberalism places on individuality. The charge of communitarianism which was frequently levelled against him in the past was a sinister one for old liberals but holds less water in todays intellectual climate. There are well-known sections of Deweys writing (including Democracy and Education) where he defended and celebrated individuality, or at least a certain version of individuality, and his view of community was far from collectivist in form or spirit. But Deweys case illustrates perfectly the perils of employing classications such as Marshalls, and one cannot help suspecting that the reason why he avoids the more contemporary liberal political philosophers is perhaps because, like Dewey, they defy such easy categorisation and would hopelessly complicate matters for him. And, of course, these same remarks hold true also for Marshalls classication of liberal educational philosophies; it may be neat and pat and easy to work with, but it does no justice at all to the complex phenomenon that has come to be recognised as liberal philosophy of education over the past forty or fty years. Curiously again (because he does not explain it) it leaves out all the contemporary protagonists (Strikes book dates back fteen years) within liberal philosophy of education. And this ommission is more serious than the ommission of the political philosophers, because, as he claims himself The concern of this book has been to mount a critique of liberal education, in particular the notion inherent in liberal thought of developing personal autonomy (1996, p. 137), and one queries the extent to which such a critique is adequately served by a discussion of Peters, Dewey and Strike, who cannot collectively be taken as representing the differences within liberal philosophy of education today. Marshall tries to reassure us that this does not really matter because Regardless of these differences . . . within the liberal framework there is a certain view of human beings and society, which permits a general view of education to be articulated, formulated and put into practice, and

REVIEW ARTICLE

173

that within liberalism and liberal education there is a very strongly espoused thesis about the centrality of rational autonomy, which is reected in liberal theories of schooling. But why, in that case, to return to my previous point, complicate matters with dubious typologies?

Autonomy Revisited Marshall follows his chapter on liberalism and liberal education with a more detailed discussion of autonomy in education arguing with Colin Lankshear (1982) that many who wish to advance personal autonomy as an educational aim are also prepared to argue for considerable constraint upon the young (Marshall, 1996, p. 83). The examples of the many he cites are Dearden, Peters, Hirst, and White. He goes on to describe several possible conicting positions on autonomy (1996, p. 89) and asks how Foucault would consider them. Since he considered persons to be socially constructed beings, he would certainly reject, Marshall rightly points out, the idea that being autonomous is part of human nature. Moreover, as social constructs, Foucault showed that modern individuals are not constituted as free individuals but as docile beings, beings who are disciplined to be governable. Their education, of course, contributes signicantly to this outcome. Thus, in reality, Marshall concludes his Foucauldian critique of the liberal ideal of cultivating personal autonomy, what appears as an ethical and educational ideal is a masquerade for the political aim of constituting selves as subjects of a certain kind (1996, p. 111). Which, in reality, is no startling thesis since the Marxists got there before Foucault some time ago. The question which follows is whether Foucault, like Horkheimer and Adorno before him (with whom he shares the joint inuences of Heidegger and Weber), represents the socially constructed individual as a totally administered being also. Whether, in short, his account of power leaves us with any room for notions of freedom and autonomy, and, therefore, education, to be meaningful. Or whether we should merely accept our fate as determined beings. Marshall rightly answers no to these questions. Foucaults account of power, he says, becomes mellowed by notions of resistance, freedom and hope (1996, p. 90). I would say that becomes mellowed, is a mild way of putting it and, again, fails to do justice to Foucaults account of the workings of genealogy in the nal ethical stage of his intellectual development. This phase, represented also in the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, turns on Foucaults perception that the replacement in priority of the Greek maxim, to care for thyself, with the maxim, also Greek, to know thyself, was fundamentally mistaken (p. 103). But it also rested on Foucaults radical reassessment of the function of genealogy which I referred to earlier. Marshall does identify an emerging liberal critique in the work of Stefaan Cuypers which represents care for the self as a fundamental educational aim. Cuypers, however, does not wish to replace personal autonomy with self care, he believes that we need both. Marshall disagrees insisting that there are too many

174

KENNETH WAIN

problems with personal autonomy to justify retaining it as an educational aim, he also nds Cuypers notion of caring for oneself distinctly different from Foucaults and unacceptable on several grounds. Marshall concludes the chapter by noting that none of the accounts of autonomy furnished by the liberal philosophers of education he discusses would be acceptable to Foucault. But, again the question arises by itself, what did Foucault say about freedom and self care himself? It is not taken up in Education and Power either, the next chapter of the book. Instead, Marshall returns to the argument already more than amply explored in his earliest articles on Foucault and education, that power is essentially off-stage in philosophy of education and needs to be brought to centre-stage, and that the discourse on power is really suppressed by a liberal philosophical framework which operates with an inadequate conception of power and shows a marked propensity to talk about authority instead. The chapter contains a detailed account of Foucaults twin notions of biopower and governmentality which are closely tied to his other complementary notion of policing as the central characteristics in the display or power in the modern state. Marshall also challenges Walzers view that Hobbes was Foucaults major intellectual antagonist, arguing instead that his real opponent was Rousseau. Though Foucaults characterisation of juridico-discursive power depends heavily on legal models from Hobbes to Austin, Marshall argues, governance and biopower are Foucaults real targets and Hobbes and juridico-legal theories only a target because they mask bio-power (p. 118). Again Marshall continues to pursue Foucaults account of power as an oppressive instrument in the chapter. He describes Foucaults account of bio-power, of the political technology of the body (p. 127), and observes that its minute techniques are at work also in the school, its practices creating a complex power/knowledge web which disciplines the bodies and minds of children in different ways, whether in their best interests or not. Liberal philosophers of education, he observes, have viewed power as necessarily negative, as always acting contrary to childrens interests. Their tendency to focus on authority, he argues, means that they have ignored the actual mechanisms of power which feature in the classroom, though he admits to recent important correctives to this trend coming mainly from Burbules and White. The overall conclusion of the chapter is again damning for liberal education which in its pursuit of personal autonomy, masks the power relations operating, and hence the thrust for governmentality, by its talk of authority and the development of mind (1996, p. 215). Again, it follows from Foucaults genealogy of power/knowledge. But what are the positive things Foucault had to say about power and freedom, how can they be turned into classroom strategies that operate in the childrens interests? Perhaps they cannot, but surely the question requires serious discussion! In Chapter 7 entitled Doing Philosophy of Education. which is his nal chapter apart from the Conclusion, Marshall refers to a current impasse of philosophy of education. Foucaults genealogical writing, he contends, shows us a way out of it. He illustrates how by returning to the theme of the punishment

REVIEW ARTICLE

175

of children, contrasting Foucaults approach to the subject with the traditional analytic approach. What is particularly interesting in this chapter is the blending of Wittgenstein into the Foucauldean critique, but, again, this is not new either, it reproduces an article which Marshall had already published in 1995. His critique of punishment, and his argument about the deciencies of the liberal approach to power and autonomy, is where Marshalls own critique on modern education is most interesting and persuasive. It is in this chapter that he elaborates briey on Foucaults notion of freedom as transgression, but he fails to pursue it for its potential educational implications, for example in terms of cultivating the strong poet, which Rorty, for instance identies as the function of liberal universities in a postmetaphysical age. The answer to the question why occurs explicitly on page 216 of the book where Marshall summarizes his approach to Foucault in the following way: A general conclusion which might be drawn, he says, is that Foucault has little to offer to practising educators in terms of a way forward or a way out. This conclusion explains Marshalls failure to examine the positive side of Foucaults genealogical writing, his elaboration of freedom or autonomy, the new counter-modern ethos of responsibility, in terms of self-care which could have rendered the book, in my view, complete. Given his dismissal of Cuyperss model Marshall could have turned to Foucault himself for clues about how self-care could be an educational aim teachers could work with against the humanistic denitions of autonomy. Rortys account of how transgression could be a form of education through the cultivation of poetic irony which edies the individual and enables self-overcoming could have provided a starting point. Rorty, of course, limits the cultivation of poetic irony to ones private life, socialisation into the prevalent culture is the form he gives public education, and this solution runs smack into Foucaults critique of power. But what about an account of self-care which restores unity to the educational enterprise? This would, indeed, be a revolutionary possibility and certainly one worth exploring in-depth in a world where education is in crisis and where the individualism of a market mentality is constantly gloried, particularly in the media. Foucault himself sought it in pre-modern times, in antiquity. Like so many other philosophers discontented with modernity he goes back to classical Greek and Roman times when the ethical project, in his view, took the wrong turn. I feel that Marshall has surrendered too readily to the prevalent view among Foucaults Anglo-saxon critics that Foucault has nothing politically interesting or meaningful to say to education. Taking that judgement up critically should be the rst step towards a deeper analysis of Foucault and education which could be exceedingly rewarding.

176 Notes

KENNETH WAIN

The list could have included Cleo H. Cherryholmess (1990) Power and Criticism, Teachers College Record, but Cherryholmess book appeared in the same year as Marshalls article. 2 See, for instance, Jeffrey Roths review article Of What Help is He? A Review of Foucault and Education, American Educational Research Journal, Winter 1992, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 683694: The problem is that Foucaults ideas about the constitution of human subjects have been transferred almost exclusively as negative critique, emphasizing domination, silencing, and categorization (p. 683).

References
Ball, S. (ed.): 1990, Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge, Routledge, London. Foucault, M: 1984, What is Enlightenment?, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Greene, M: 1983, Foucault, Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Education: a Perspective, Comparative Education Review (Fall) 2(2), 105110. Marshall, J.D.: 1989, Foucault and Education, Australian Journal of Education 33(2), 97111. Marshall, J.D.: 1990, Asking philosophical Questions about Education: Foucault on Punishment, Educational Philosophy and Theory 22(2), 8192. Marshall, J.D.: 1995, Wittgenstein and Foucault: Resolving Philosophical Puzzles, Studies in Philosophy and Education 14, 329344. Martin, L.H., Gutman, H. and Hutton, P.H. (eds.): 1988, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Tavistock Publishers.