Afterword [part 2]: governing bodies and minds

ABSTRACT

This brief comment is intended to provide some remarks on the possibility of placing the particular entanglements of ‘bodies and minds’ presented in this special issue of History of Education in a broader theoretical and interpretative framework resorting to Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. In my opinion, this analytical tool may be very fruitful for the historiography of education and other ‘government practices’ if we want to overcome the troubling dichotomy of ‘bodies and minds’ and interpret the varieties of pedagogical articulations of the corporeal and the mental in their singularity and in the context of the historical evolution of educational concepts and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Bodies
• minds
• pedagogy
• history of education
• governmentality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See here for instance Roger Cooter, ‘The Turn of the Body. History and the Politics of the Corporeal’, Arbor 186, no. 743 (2010): 393–405.

² Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 33–8.

³ Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104.

⁴ The notion was first developed in two series of lectures at the Collège de France during the late 1970s. See Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France (1977–1978) (Paris: Seuil, 2004); and Michel Foucault, La naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France (1978–1979) (Paris: Seuil, 2004).

⁵ Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–26.

⁶ Ibid., 221.

⁷ Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, 87.

⁸ See for instance the general overviews provided by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, ‘The Learning Society and Governmentality: An Introduction’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 38, no. 4 (2006): 417–30; Olena Fimyar, ‘Using Governmentality as a Conceptual Tool in Education Policy Research’, Educate, Kaleidoscope Special Issue (2008): 3–18; and Michael A Peters et al., eds., Governmentality Studies in Education (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009).

⁹ Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2010), 33.

¹⁰ See here Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past & Present 191 (2006): 77–120.

¹¹ Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, 103.

¹² Marc Depaepe and Paul Smeyers, ‘Educationalization as an Ongoing Modernization Process’, Educational Theory 58, no. 4 (2008): 379–89.

¹³ Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990), 119.

¹⁴ Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitik. Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2014), 25–8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Enric Novella

Enric Novella (MD, MA, PhD) is Associate Professor of History of Science at the University of Valencia (Spain). He is the author of the books Der junge Foucault und die Psychopathologie (Berlin, 2008), La ciencia del alma (Madrid/Frankfurt, 2013) and El discurso psicopatológico de la modernidad (Madrid, 2018), and has also published several articles and essays on the history and philosophy of psychiatry, psychology and medicine in leading international journals such as Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, Health Care Analysis, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, History of Psychiatry, Social History of Medicine and History of the Human Sciences.