123

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUCATION

KEY THINKERS IN EDUCATION

StephenJ. Ball

Foucault as

Educator

SpringerBriefs in Education

Key Thinkers in Education

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Stephen J. Ball

Foucault as Educator

123

Stephen J. Ball

Department of Humanities and Social

Sciences

Institute of Education University of London

London

ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Education

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Acknowledgements

There are a lot of people who have directly or indirectly made it possible for me to

write this book. Foremost among them is Trinidad, without whom it would never

have been ﬁnished.

I am also grateful for comments and support from Ansgar Allan, Patrick Bailey,

Paul Gibbs, Alex Moore, Antonio Olmedo, Roger Slee, Terry Wrigley, my research

student seminar and participants at Foucault @ 90, UWS and very especially I am

indebted to Carolina Junemann.

Contents

1 The Impossibility of Education............................... 1

Foucault and Education

...................................... 2

Pedagogy, Truth and Expertise

................................ 8

Late Modern Pedagogy—Is no Pedagogy at All

................... 15

Progressive Pedagogy (Bernstein 1990, p. 72)

.................... 17

Neoliberal Pedagogy

........................................ 23

Foucault as Anti-educator: Humani sm and Education:

Is Education Possible in Foucault?

............................. 29

References................................................ 31

2 Education as Critique—‘Un-thinking’ Education

................ 35

Critique

.................................................. 37

Cracking the Grid

.......................................... 44

Genealogy

................................................ 46

Transgression

............................................. 49

References

................................................ 57

3 Education as the Pedagogy of the Self

......................... 61

Speaking Truly: Pedagogy, Psychagogy and Parrhesia

.............. 63

The ‘Education of the Soul’ (Foucault 1983a)—Education

as Self-formation

........................................... 75

References

................................................ 85

vii

Abstract

Michel Foucault is a starting point or a set of starting points for this book, not its

subject. It consists of a set of improvisations, drawing on Foucault’s ideas, that

address what the idea of Foucault as Educator might mean in practice, or in relation

to practices. It presages speciﬁcally the outline of an aesthetics of the self, which

Foucault began to address in his later works, as a form of self-education or

self-formation. That is, the possibility o f ‘becoming some one else that you were

not’. It is an attempt to begin to envision education as an ethos of transgression and

aesthetic self-fashioning. The point then of the book is not to rehearse Foucault

but to consider some ways in which Foucault can be useful; what can we do

with Foucault in our educational present that will enable us to think about

education differently?

Keywords Foucault



Education



Critique



Self-formation



Transgression



Refusal

Introduction

Each of my works is a part of my own biography. For one or other reason I had occasion to

feel and live those things (Foucault 1988, p. 11)

A couple of years ago I wrote a book exploring how Foucaul t’s tool box of

concepts, methods and perspectives might be used in the sociology of education to

think differently about how we problematise, research and make sense of education.

I began that book by asking whether we needed another Foucault book. There were

many such books then, there are even more now. As I begin to write another

Foucault book that question is even more pressing. Has not enough been said? Of

course, given you are reading this, I have an answer, although I am not sure how

convincing an answer it is. I described the previous book as a ‘Foucault book’,it

was not a book about Foucault, it was a book about what we might do with

Foucault—the ways in which, as he said himself, he might be useful. I am not sure

the same can be said about this book. Given the title it is obviously in part about

Foucault but I am going to deploy the title in a number of ways to think about what

Foucault can tell us about education, about the process of education and about what

it means to be educated. At times, particularly in the third section of the book, I may

be putting words in his mout h. As Allen (2014) puts it, whilst there must be

sustained sensitivity to his work and ethos, ‘all usages of Foucault must remain

partial: those who adopt Foucault can only deform him. This should be done

without regret, for, as Nietzsc he would say, “one repays a teacher badly if one

remains only a pupil”’. So in Chap. 3 I am going to see what might be meant, for

the possibilities of education, by what Foucault says about subjectivity and

self-formation. In an often quoted exchange, Jana Sawicki describes her encounter

with Foucault at a seminar in Vermont in 1983. She explained that she had just

ﬁnished writing a dissertation based on his critique of humanism. ‘Not surprisingly,

he responded with some embarrassment and much seriousness. He suggested that I

not spend energy talking about him and, instead, do what he was doing, namely,

write genealogies’ (Sawicki 1991, p. 15). In another sense this book is an exercise

in what Foucault called self writing, as he says, describing the hupomnemata , books

used ‘as guides for conduct’ in ancient Greece: ‘Through the interplay of selected

readings and assimilative writing, one should be able to form an identity through

which a whole spiritual

genealogy can be read’ (Foucault, nd.). When I speak

about Foucault to audiences interested in education, using Foucault’s tools of cri-

tique, I am always asked—‘so what should we do?’. I often reply in Foucault’s

words that ‘it is not for me to tell you what you should do’. Well, while that remains

true I feel the ethical weight of the need for a different kind of reply, even if just for

my own beneﬁt. So this book is about what we might do about education if we

follow the lines of ﬂight indicated by Foucault, and concomitantly it is also about

‘the arts of myself’ and the aesthetics of my own existence.

To some extent I am going to fashion the book around the tensions, shifts,

ruptures, call them what you will, in Foucault’s work, that involve his transition

from a theorist of oppressions to a theorist of freedoms. However, as he and many

others have said, if we read carefully there may be no such transition, rather just

different ways of addressing the problem of the history of the ways in which we

have been made subjects. And as he also asserted, more or less throughout his

work, we are always freer than we think. Both the limitations of a transitions

perspective on Foucault’s work, and something of the dialectic I am trying to

invoke, making limits visible and intolerable and thus opening up the possibility of

thinking, and thinking ourselves, differently, are nicely pointed up in this quotation.

He argues that the enlightenment should:

be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the 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 (Foucault 1997,

p. 132).

This book is an exercise in ﬁnding my own limits and limitations and going

beyond them. That is, as an educator, of sorts, I must confront the impossibility of

my role and at the same time the possibility of being something else. As a writer I

must confront my failings—the failure to grasp and convey what Foucault may

have had to say about education, the failure to rid myself of modernist conceits. The

more Foucault I read, and the more I read about Foucault, the less I think I

understand him, but the more I understand myself and what I am. The book then

puts myself under revision—as an impossible subject, a Foucauldian educator in a

neoliberal university, a human scientist and modernist.

Having said all that, let me make one thing very clear. This book does not

attempt any kind of textual interrogation of Foucault or seek to make claims about

what Foucault ‘actually’ was or meant. There is now plenty of work of that kind. In

particular at the moment a body of writing that combs Foucault’s lectures for traces

of neoliberal afﬁnity. The intellectualist tradition of Foucault studies, or at least

Foucault wrote about what he called political spirituality, This occurs he says, when people

willfully—meaning ‘with alertness to the creative dimensions of their project’—seek a new way to

establish a regime of truth and a regime of self-governance, each by and through the other. It is

putting into question one’s style of existence and a process of founding, un-founding, re-founding,

creating—of beginnings (see Chap. 3).

xii Introduction