Foucault and Power Relations

Last night, we attempted to examine one overall aspect of Foucault’s work--the notion of power. In particular, I tried to stress to you the way in which the opening of Discipline and Punish can be read as a critique of linear versions of progress. In that section, we can see Foucault contrasting two different regimes of power, regimes that create differing power relations, and invest subjects to distinctly different (identity) effects.

As I speculated in class, we probably have all been influenced by classical Marxism (and other Enlightenment discourses) to see power as something negative--as a decree of prohibition, or a form of oppression, emanating from those who “have” power onto those who are “powerless.”

Foucault, on the other hand, I think would have us view power as both creative and destructive, productive as well as reproductive. Most accurately, power simply is for Foucault, I think. There is no “me” outside of power relations--power calls me into being. It invests me and shapes me. And since I am enmeshed in multiple, overlapping networks of power, I am a divided subject. I am called into being, through and within different discourses and institutions, to differing effects. The identity I perform at any particular moment is correlated to the context in which I find myself.

So we must be suspicious of power, critique its effects, yet never imagine that we could ever suspend or abolish power relations. Yet this does not condemn us to a world of only violence and struggle. The ways in which we discipline ourselves, and are disciplined by others, can be informed by playfulness as well as struggle, humor as well as manifestos.

We raised some interesting questions about agency last night, ones that Erich nicely extended in the preceding post. I encourage you all to keep examining this issue as we read for the following weeks.

Another thing I would like you to consider is the notion of a “Foucauldian pedagogy.” Is the term oxymoronic? Are we ever justified in our attempts to discipline others? Can we create the conditions of another’s freedom?

While our initial answers might be “no,” we need to recall the permanence of power relations. Teachers are unable to suspend power relations in their classroom. Indeed, when they sometimes do try--as happens in certain misguided versions of progressivism--we can readily see the effects: students exercising, in ever more hurtful ways, power over students who are already positioned within relatively more marginalized subject positions--the immigrant kid, the disabled kid, the gender non-conforming kid, and so on. The early work of my adviser, Tim Lensmire, and of former MSU professor, Anne Haas Dyson, are good examples of ethnographic research into this particular classroom dynamic.

Another classic study in education from a Foucauldian perspective, one I mentioned in class night, comes from Valerie Walkerdine, in her book, Schoolgirl Fiction. In particular, I recommend this chapter on gender relations in a pre-school classroom.

Foucault, in my opinion, alerts us to the dangers of unifying projects, of attempts to normalize and homogenize. In this sense, he is an ally to all educators who wish to bring to their classrooms respect for individual students, their disparate and on-going identity projects, and their attempts to imagine new ways of inverting power relationships to their own ends.

What are such ends? Ultimately, for Foucault, the answer lies in an aesthetics of the self, the desire for the stimulation and performance of new forms of desire. Paraphrasing into my own language, new ways to play, new ways to love, new ways to welcome the unknown into our lives . . . It is by engaging in such projects ourselves, and supporting those of others, that social change can perhaps be brought about.