Foucault and Governmentality in Lifelong Learning

Today’s posting is the first in a summary and reflection on a 2008 Routledge book entitled

Foucault and Lifelong Learning:

Governing the Subject.

The book is edited by Andreas Fejes and Katherine Nicoll.  Foucault has been engaged by academics in education for quite some time now, but not necessarily by those interested in LLL. In this way, this book offers alternative narrations on LLL from those often provided by policy makers and other scholars. 

The first chapter is written by the editors and is entitled

Mobilizing Foucault in Studies of Lifelong Learning.

The authors start by explain that LLL deserves some scrutiny since

·         It is promoted by such supra-national organizations such as the OECD and EU as the solution for our age, and

·         It implies massive changes in

o   Our institutions

o   Governance

o   And “our very understanding as citizens” of our position in society and that of LLL.  (p. 1).

The work of Foucault will be engaged by the authors of the book to explore how governance is brought about through LLL and the subjectivities it supports.  The first chapter, which I summarize and ruminate on here, the authors outline how Foucault’s work will be useful in analyzing LLL. 

Lifelong Learning

This is how LLL is being positioned:

 

Globalization is seen to have caused social and economic pressures and these are related to increasing rates of change in social and economic contexts and to increasing uncertainty.  The solution that will provide social cohesion and the competitiveness that will lead to prosperity is proposed to be the establishment of a Learning Society.  In order to achieve a Learning Society, individuals, institutions and educational systems have to become Lifelong learners.

The rationality of capitalism is that those who do not conform (and in this discussion, that means participation in LLL) will be left out.  This strikes me as rather Darwinian really:  those who are fittest to engage in this competitive struggle will survive…the others will not.  And there is an implication that this is alright; that somehow the remaining ‘species’ will be stronger for the dying out of the weak.   The authors suggest at least that it is important, therefore, to examine who will be included and excluded from participation. 

In previous blogs I summarized Peter Jarvis’ (2008) book entitled:

Democracy, lifelong learning and the learning society

in which he discusses how the state can provide a cushion to mitigate the unwanted effects of unregulated capitalism. (see Dec. 30 posting) It strikes me that identifying and assisting those who are being left out is precisely where the political can cushion the social and economic effects we are suggesting.  One issue that remains, however, is this:  Who can cushion states that are left out?  When states themselves are the competing units in the first order, how can developing countries, indebted to the IMF and WB, compete fairly?  If justice is seen as fairness (Rawls) in what manner can we support justice for the developing world?  Do developed regions continue to provide aid in forms that continue to siphon profits out of developing countries?  Do we turn our heads, concentrate on our own competitive development, and allow the survival of the fittest and the demise of the unfit?    I do agree with the authors that it is important to examine who is being included and excluded, and I am hoping that authors within the book will take up inter- and intra-national exclusion. 

Lifelong learning is conceptualized in different ways. The authors begin then to give a brief history of the development of conceptualizations of lifelong learning and call upon Kjell Rubenson’s (2004) three orientations:

• ·         Humanist
• ·         Strong economistic
• ·         Soft economistic

The first of these was prevalent in the 1970s and is captured in UNESCO’s 1972 Faure Report. This was a vision that positioned the aim of LLL as “the complete fulfillment of man.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Rubenson explains that the humanistic orientation was being replaced with a strong economic focus.  Productivity was important, not fulfillment.  And productivity was gained through science, technology, and human capital.. Lifelong Learning was the way to achieve these tools, and words such as ‘evaluation’ and ‘efficiency’ became important in discussions of learning.

A softer version of the economistic orientation is emerging in the years after 2000, according to Rubenson. The market still plays a central role, but the state and civil society are entering the arena. 

Biesta (2006) posits a ‘triadic’ nature of Lifelong Learning involving 3 dimensions:

• ·         Economic
• ·         Personal
• ·         Democratic

He suggests that the Faure Report subordinated economic functions of LLL to personal and democratic functions.  The 1997 OECD Lifelong Learning for All fore-fronted the economic, ascribing to it intrinsic value. 

…in the current scheme economic growth has become an intrinsic value: it is desired for its own sake, not in order to achieve something else. (Biesta, 2006, p. 175, emphasis in the original.  Quoted in Nicoll and Fejes, 2008, p. 4)

Although personal and democratic orientations may still be there they have currently taken a subordinate role to the economic.  The authors propose that the economic focus in contemporary discourse needs analysis in relation to its historical contexts.  These contexts may first need to be made visible as they may be currently taken-for-granted.  Such analysis will involve examining how power shapes subjectivities……..and that is where Foucault comes in. 

Why Foucault and Lifelong Learning?

The authors argue that Foucault offers a new way to formulate questions about LLL.  Foucault theorized about power. One can look at how power is enacted, coordinated and modified in LLL through a Foucaultian lens. The authors welcome the idea that such explorations may disturb notions of what people do (as learners, educators etc.) in LLL and how it involves the wider world. Foucault (in Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p. 187) said that

…what they don’t know is what what they do does. 

The authors propose to explore these wider effects of power relations. They will look at LLL as a political technology and strategy of power. One reason they give for such exploration is that LLL policy may have (does have) unintended consequences, sometimes opposing the original aim of the policy. They want to look for the possibility of a “grid of intelligibility” (Foucault, 1982, p. 187) within. They want to expose taken-for-granted assumptions and values and “destabilize” our vision of LLL. Where LLL is commonly envisioned as having emancipatory potential, Foucault gives us a way of looking at it differently and acknowledging that in some ways it is a governing technology controlling populations.

Foucault’s notion of governmentality is of interest to the authors.  Governmentality explores the every-day power relations that affect our perceptions and actions. They wish to use Foucault to diagnose

“…the fragmented and serendipitous, complex and contradictory lines of action and thought, and agents that seek to govern conduct, so as to better understand how we come to act and think as we do…” (p 6).

Government and Governmentality

Power and the Conduct of Conduct

To understand Foucault’s concept of governmentality, we have to first look at how he reconceptualises the notion of power.  The authors summarize what Foucault saw as inadequacies of previous visions of power.  I’ll not repeat here.

Similarly, the authors summarize Foucault’s notion of power in more detail than I will. There are many primary and secondary sources that will give further explanation.  I won’t walk through the authors’ summary very faithfully. Suffice it to say that Foucault’s notion of power is of something that is not held, but exercised in and though complex relations between ‘free’ (for some definition of freedom) agents.  He is interested in how power works (what technologies and strategies are involved) and what happens when it does.  He is interested in how it conducts (verb) conduct (noun), or governs actions. 

Note the apparent paradox of freedom and power. Power requires the freedom of the subject and implies the possibility of resistance. Power can only be said to be in exercise if it is affecting the freely determined actions of the subject on which it is acting, even if that freedom is subsequently (even unacknowledgingly) delimiting the complete freedom of the subject.

When discussing LLL and policy, we will certainly be discussing the state.  We have tended to think of power as something resting with the state in such regards.  The authors point out that with a Foucaultian notion of power, there are other forms of power operating from other sources that need to be examined.   As Jessop (2007, p. 35) puts it, power is not exerted in the form of

…social norms and institutions and distinctive forms of knowledge rather than sovereign authority. (p. 10).

The state is more a product of the ways in which we perceive the world.  Although they can be a site at which power acts, I see the state somewhat as a conduit or medium through which the norms and understandings of the world are enacted.  Foucault puts it this way (in Jessop, 2007, p. 36):

…the state is nothing more than the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities.

The authors include 3 ways in which Foucault (in Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p. 224-225) says that strategies can be used in a power relation: 

• ·         Through a rationality that is aimed to achieve specific ends as the outcome of action;
• ·         Through the way in which a subject acts in terms of what he or she considers the action of another is likely to be and what the other thinks the subject will do, in order to gain advantage; and
• ·         In the procedures used to reduce the possibility of the struggle and confrontation of the other.  

I have inserted the emphases to illustrate that these represent strategic rationalization, action, and procedures, each aimed at orchestrating the development of an outcome. I think these distinctions are important if one is going to consider, and perhaps contrast, strategies of power as they can be exercised through the state as opposed to the more diffuse network of power relations that Foucault engages. Although at this point in ruminations, I don’t know if this distinction will become useful in exploring the writings to come in this book.  But the book does promise to examine strategies which lead to changes in power relations.

What the authors are interested in then is this:

• 1.      How is LLL exercised as power?
• 2.      What happens when LLL is involved in reconfiguring educational relationships?

Governmentality

How has governmentality been taken up?

1.      A frame for analyzing governing practice.

• ·         Focuses on sovereign power, disciplinary power (see Foucault’s Discipline and Punish) and governmentality (also see bio-power) which seeks to optimize populations.
• ·         Bio-power is a political and disciplinary technology (where the subject governs themselves) that governs the population exercising power at the level of the body.
• ·         The authors explain that bio-power works in education by governing individual action in accordance to the need of society.

2.      By focusing on the ‘mentality’ aspect of the term, exploring the ‘bodies of knowledge, belief and opinion in which we are immersed” (Dean, 1999, p. 16), that condition the way we ‘think’ about governing.

• ·         Liberal forms of governing involve the freedom of the individual
• ·         The interest is in how mentalities join up and involve power relations in conducting the conduct of the people by governments.
• ·         How does thought influence practice in governments?

The authors provide this quote from Dean (1999, p. 18):

The analysis of government is concerned with thought as it becomes linked to and is embedded in technical means for the shaping and reshaping of conduct and in practices and institutions.  Thus to analyse mentalities of government is to analyse thought made practical and technical.

• ·         Practices include the production of knowledge and truth
•  The production of knowledge and truth constitute the mentalities
• ·         Liberal mentalities lead to practices that affect what is perceived by the individual as the realm of possibility in acting and thinking.

The authors explain that Foucault asked what types of rationalities are constructed in different historical contexts.  People in contemporary society are more ‘governable’ by regulation and standardization of conduct.  The authors say that (and reference Rose, 1999) analysis of governmentality :

• A.    involves micro-analysis of power relations at the point of exercise
•   in practices that shape an individual’s self-organization (discipline)
• B.     involves macro-analysis of political practices to manage populations
• C.     links A and B

For LLL, we can see part “B” in the practices/policies that shape learning actions of “the people” so that they are advantageous to the nation.  We can link these to the practices that act on the individual to promote him or her as a lifelong learner.

Hultqvist and Petersson (1995) explain that neoliberal governmentality leads to “alliances between different authorities that seek to regulate the economy, social life and the life of the individual” (in Nicoll and Fejes, p. 13).  Neo-liberalism is a mentality forming a particular relationship between industry, the state and the worker/learner.  (The authors did not include industry, but I think that is part of the broad mentality and consistent with Jarvis’ notion that there is an international, industrial/resource capital core running through all state activity)  In this relationship, the learner/worker/subject is conceptualized as free and autonomous:  they “practice freedom as a form of self-governance” (p. 13, referencing Burchell, 1996). [I have added the word “conceptualized” in this summary which was missing from the original text.  I think it highlights the ‘mentality’ aspect of governmentality while calling attention to the notion that this is not an absolute freedom, but rather one under influences that are not acknowledged by the worker/learner/subject.] This freedom is critical.  It is both the “instrument and effect” (p. 13) of governance because the expression of individual freedom (I will add: “that the subject has learned”) coincides with the political objectives of the governing. The choices of the individual are the choices that enable the governing powers.  I will add that it also aligns with the objectives of the global capitalist core that is also involved in the network of power.  I used the term ‘governing powers’ expecting this to include the global capitalist sub-structure core that Jarvis refers to, and not just the state.

Governing the Subject

Governing shapes the population and each individual. Governing is directed at subjects. In analysing governmentality, we explore how humans are being made

1. ·         objects to be known
2. ·         subjects

• subjectivities created within the mentality governing them
•  I think of “the under-skilled worker” or the “knowledge worker” or the “under-educated”

As ‘objects to be known’, the individual can be explored with the Foucaultian notion of Power/Knowledge.  One begets the other.  Power legitimates knowledge and knowledge of the subject is the basis of power.  Readers unfamiliar with Power/Knowledge relationship have many sources to draw upon and I won’t summarize it further here. Suffice it to say here that Foucault was interested, as are the authors in this book, in how power and knowledge are involved in the development of different subjectivities and how we learn to govern ourselves.  This will involve analysis of technologies, techniques and tactics operating in discourse.

The authors clarify that technologies are not specific plots laid out by evil masterminds of governing.  Rather they are the consequences that emerge from the existing mentality.  One such technology that Foucault explored at length was the confession.  This does not imply religious confession but rather more of a self-proclamation. For example, in expressing with a counsellor one’s own intended direction of study, one formulates a subjectivity, such as the under-skilled lifelong learner who is responsible for his or her own prosperity. 

The authors pose 4 questions that might be answered by the authors in the book:

• ·         What rationalities of governing are constructed?
• ·         What subjectivities are brought forth?
• ·         How is governing conducted?
• ·         What is the teleos of government?  (here they reference Dean, 1999)

In tomorrow’s post, I will summarize and reflect on the second chapter in this book.  The chapter is written by Richard Edwards and is entitled

Actively Seeking Subjects?

In this chapter, Edwards will consider the multiplicity of conceptualizations of lifelong learning and he will show that it co-emerges with changing forms of governing. He will suggest that as a regime of truth, LLL needs to be decentred.  We need to explore the meanings it has and the work it does.