Today’s posting is the second in a summary and reflection on a 2008 Routledge book entitled
Foucault and Lifelong Learning:
Governing the Subject
and edited by Andreas Fejes and Katherine Nicoll. I am posting daily and each post will summarize one of the chapters in the book.
The second chapter is written by Richard Edwards and is entitled
Actively Seeking Subjects?
States, governments and discourses can mark practices with meaning and ascribe roles and dispositions to actors. Some discourses are more “legitimized” than others and thus, are more influential in these inscriptions than are others. There are multiple discourses on lifelong learning. Edwards notes that it is a significant policy discourse in many countries and that it coincides with rapid socio-economic changes and instability of the globalizing world. So, he asks:
What do lifelong learning discourses mean in this context, where lifelong learning and globalization co-emerge? (p. 21).
In the post-modern discourse, LLL is linked to human capital. But the social order is complex and LLL should not be viewed only in such terms. They can be viewed in terms of the discursive struggle to inscribe certain meanings over others. Foucault’s accounts of power and historical context offer possibilities for exploring this area.
Discourse and the Disciplining of Individuals
Edwards summarizes the concept of power-knowledge.
§ Power and knowledge are entwined
§ They are developed in and through discourse related to “regimes of truth”
§ Foucault’s “discourse” is a structure of meaning-making which controls through discipline
§ The control, selection and distribution of discourse is determined by the social order
o It limits what can be said, thought, done
§ It constructs subjectivities
§ It defines the boundaries of a concept and the items in that domain
§ It is both representative and constructive
§ The discourses exist in a dynamic web
Foucault showed us how discourse constructed and represented madness and sexuality in certain historical periods. In the early 21st century, discourse is constructing and representing lifelong learning. He also showed us how discourses reshaped institutions and regulated subjects, and how technologies such as documentation and evaluation certain conditions become meaningful and are positioned for intervention. Edwards explains that we now need to address where LLL intersects with disciplinary power and institutionalization.
LLL discourses become meaningful when they encourage disciplinary practices embedded in discourses that define truth. The dualisms of educated/uneducated, competent/incompetent etc. (and the characteristics and assumptions about the subjects within these groups) are created in and validated in discourse. Standards are created and judgements are formulated. The subject him- and her-self are empowered to discipline and subjugate themselves. Discourse creates the categories, normalities and technologies of observation and evaluation through which the individual self-identifies as a subject and monitors his- or her-own behaviour as self-discipline.
Education can be considered a discursive regime of truth that defines roles and identities and norms within its domain. It has its own disciplinary practices which lead to individuals in the domain governing their own actions so that external overt control isn’t necessary. But if we consider that the entire social order has such disciplinary practices, we can take a wider view of pedagogy and consider all such disciplinary practices within any regime of truth in any institution to be pedagogical practice. Subjects learn their subjugation. LLL discourse happens at the intersection between educational discourse and all other regimes of truth, and we see that it mobilizes a variety of subjectivities and activates discipline across the entire social fabric. The LLL regime of truth is not just in the educational discourse.
Governmentality and populations
The previous section talked about disciplinary control of individuals, and the main primary source for that is Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Later, and particularly in The History of Sexuality he further developed governmentality as a theory of control of populations. Governmentality has been used to frame the analysis of practices of governing. Bio-power is exercised by the state to optimize its populations. It involves a governmentality that is spread throughout the social order, not confined to governments, to “integrat[e] bodies, capacities and pleasure into a productive force.” (p. 25).
Whereas discipline creates docile bodies, bio-power creates productive ones. As in disciplinary power, the subjects need to be known and it is this knowledge that allows for the efficient construction and management of a productive population. With governmentality, the subject is fashioned through his or her own expression of their desire (in this case, the desire to learn). This is the desire that will allow the population to be managed as resources to be optimized. Dean (1999, p. 12) says:
To analyze government is to analyze those practices that try and shape, sculpt, mobilize and work through the choices, desires, aspirations, needs, wants and lifestyle of individuals and groups. (p. 26).
Where coercion, force or regulation won’t work to manage a population into becoming more productive, this sort of pastoral power may work. Subjects actively learn their subjectivities and their desires, and in that they choose freely to manage themselves as is desired by the pastoral powers.
Thus, in the discourse of LLL we can see more emphasis in the development of active subjectivities combined with the creation of docile bodies through discipline.
Actively Seeking Subjects
According to Rose (1998) the subject being formulated (aligned with the norms and values of enterprise and consumerism) in contemporary society has these characteristics:
o Seeks autonomy
o Wants earthly fulfillment
o Takes individual responsibility for their destiny
o Finds life-meaning through personal choices
An ethos of ‘enterprise’ is promoted so that subjects will fashion themselves according to it. This includes:
o Flexibility
o Adaptability
o Innovation
Foucault describes “technologies of the self.” These are the means a subject uses to fashion oneself (one’s identity) and evaluates oneself. Through these technologies, the subject comes to reflect the objectives of that which is external to him or her (but are now being internalized).
Edwards presents the relationships between the various acting pedagogies this way:
o Organizational technologies involve the exercise of power
o Technologies of the self involve self-fashioning of subjectivity
o Technologies of the self are orchestrated so that what is organizationally desirable (productivity, flexibility etc.) is felt as personally desirable.
By acting on oneself, one achieves the characteristics meaningful to the organization.
Du Gay (1996) focuses in on the relationship between the ethos of enterprise and flexibility at 3 levels:
o The individual
o The organization
o The nation
Each learn the ethos of flexibility through discourse and ascribe value to particular practices and characteristics such as flexibility. The character of the entrepreneur is seen as “…an ontological priority.” (Du Gay, 1996, p. 181 in Edwards, 2007, p. 29). These characteristics are not limited to value in the workplace, but in all of one’s life. Some of these valued characteristics are
o Self-reliance
o Personal responsibility
o Boldness
o Willingness to take risks
Fashioning values, norms, dispositions and desires IN and OUTSIDE of work becomes an important component of organizational (and I would argue, national) change. The meaning and significance of work, (and values important for work) pervade all of life. Edwards refers to discourse technologists as the agents who re-code meaning through discourse.
Individuals, as entrepreneurs, are accepting risk. They are also acquiescing to the need for continual self-improvement in terms of their productive capacity. Rose (1999, p. 161) puts it this way:
The new citizen is required to engage in a ceaseless work of training and retraining, skilling and reskilling, enhancement of credentials and preparation for a life of ceaseless job seeking: life is to become a continuous economic capitalization of the self. (p. 29)
How is this a sustainable and acceptable condition? By taking responsibility for their own success, subjects experience a sense of empowerment. Thus, such fashioning isn’t experienced as oppression.
It occurs to me that much of what I have read on LLL presents this demand on the individual worker to continually reinvent and remarket oneself. What seems less pervasive in these discussions, but what I believe is also relevant, is that it isn’t only individuals who are experiencing that demand. All economic units, (particularly those involved in international competition, but not limited to them) are faced with the need to adapt and improve or die. Retail businesses, manufacturing and extracting organizations, service industries, public and private, professional associations, governments, nations and international regions such at the EU, all face similar pressures. There is a pervasive ‘mentality’ that isn’t necessarily centred in governing by states or by organizations. It is a product of and runs through the sub-structure core that Jarvis (2008) spoke of (see previous posts). But I will not explore this further here.
Confessional Practices and Lifelong Learning
Foucault spoke of confession (not in religious terms) as a practice whereby the individual marks oneself as an subject to be known, exposing one’s disposition for evaluation and categorization. Truth is created in confession, as the discourse creates truth. Edwards points at the availability of self-help books and courses as evidence of a culture of confession. I would add that it also illustrates the mentality that the individual is perpetually flawed and responsible for their own salvation. In contemporary society, some areas in which the individual is now living a confessional lifestyle in which they are self- and other-identified and judged as insufficient include
o Sexuality
o Health and Fitness
o Lifestyle
o Career development.
Foucault (1981, p. 59) identified that the confessional plays a role in
“…justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life…” (p. 30).
The all-pervasiveness of the confessional mentality means that it is not perceived of as oppressive. Rather, it leads us to believe that our truth, indeed our very happiness and salvation, can only be found if we dig deep into our dispositions, and expose our inadequacies so that they might be known and acted upon. Although we identify weaknesses and solutions based on the learned values in the discourse, and although we expose ourselves openly to judgement, we also accept that we are solely responsible for our own salvation. In regards to LLL, it is in the confession that individuals identify and accept their deficits as commodities and their moral obligation to increase their economic worth.
Fashioning Lifelong Learning
Changes in Lifelong learning are concomitant with changes in ways of governing. Certain pedagogies (broadly defined) in the discourse are significant in re-structuring the social order. Edwards reminds us that the networks of power relations and discourses and agents involved in this mobilization of LLL for changes in the social order are exceptionally complex, and importantly, dynamic. Where there is power, there is room for resistance. Furthermore, the complex nature of the network, and the autonomy and reflection encouraged within it provide opportunities for critique and resistance. But the complexity and dynamism also means that LLL needs to be decentred as a single regime of truth so that we can look more directly at the various meanings it has and the various work that it does.
I will be posting every other day now, so the next posting will be on Jan. 9, 2011. In that post, I will continue by summarizing the next chapter in Foucault and Lifelong Learning: Governing the Subject. Chapter 3 is entitled
Understanding the Mechanisms of Neoliberal Control:
Lifelong learning, flexibility and knowledge capitalism
and is written by Mark Olssen who will use Foucault's concept of governmentality to understand the link between LLL and its institutions to Western politics and economics. He posits that Foucault was more radical than most realize and that the ability of LLL to serve economic development depend on whether or not LLL can be linked more broadly to social justice.
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