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Abstract
This article evaluates the continuing contemporary relevance of Foucauldian analyses for critical educational and social research practice. Framed around examples drawn from everyday cultural and educational practices, I argue that current intensifications of psychologisation under neoliberal capitalism not only produce and constrain increasingly activated and responsibilised educational subjects but do so via engaging particular versions of feminisation and racialisation. Like Hacking’s ‘looping effect’, Foucauldian ideas may themselves now figure within prevailing technologies of subjectivity but this means we need more, as well as more than, Foucault.
Notes
1. The transmuting of Ideology & Consciousness to I&C marked a shift away from Marxism, notwithstanding Foucault’s own commitments: ‘I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of recognising Marx’s texts I am thought to be someone who doesn’t quote Marx. When a physicist writes a work of physics, does he feel it necessary to quote Newton and Einstein? He uses them, but he doesn’t need the quotation marks, the footnote and the eulogistic comment to prove how completely he is being faithful to the master’s thought.’ (Citation1980a p. 52).
2. The original settler policy officially promoted concubinage, which was seen as preferable to exposing Dutch women to the dangers and corrupting influences of the colony, as well as promoting greater domestication and assimilation of the colonised (Stoler Citation2010). This policy was changed in the late nineteenth century under the rationale of the socialising influence of the Dutch woman as homemaker who thereby not only maintained the semiotic connection between colonial outpost and its centre but, as a result of this, Dutch wives were even more subject to moral surveillance.
3. Gerald Cradock was kind enough to send me an earlier version of this paper which included a greater focus on this question than did in fact appear in the final published version.
4. The relevance and prescience of this analysis, albeit not shared by the reporters, was indicated in the headlines reporting of Office of National Statistics findings of early January 2014: ‘Stuck in the nest: 3.3 m adults still living with parents as financial woes hit home’, (H. Osborne, The Guardian, 22 January 2014, p. 3).
5. This was published in Autumn 2013 in the British liberal left newspaper The Guardian, in a section which regularly advertises, and alongside, health and social care positions. As one commentator at the Foucault and Education conference pointed out, these ‘qualities’ are very similar to those used to interpellate trainee teachers. The juxtaposition therefore with the social work (and by implication also teaching) jobs therefore merits reflection in various directions.
6. The text reads: ‘My perception spots situations. My focus makes connections. My patience waits for answers. My creativity breeds solutions. My discretion keeps this a secret. My qualities are not out of the ordinary. My work is. Think you know what it takes to safeguard the nation? You may want to think again. www.mi5.gov.uk/careers. To apply you must be over 18 and a British citizen. Discretion is vital. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member’.
7. While Pykett (Citation2012a) discusses the pedagogical state; this has some differences from a co-authored volume published the following year on the psychological state (Jones, Pykett, and Whitehead Citation2013). Rather than presuming a rather undertheorised pedagogical subjectivity, in this volume the resources informing the elaboration of policies of psychologisation are mapped and evaluated, from the ‘Nudge politics’ of New Labour’s Behavioural Insights Team, to the ‘Think’ policies of deliberative democratic models, and then the mindfulness-influenced ‘Steer’ approaches (which suppress the Buddhist origins in favour of upping the ‘positive psychology'). While ‘Nudge’ figures a frail, flawed, vulnerable and irrational subject, ‘Think’ addresses a participatory, active and reasonable subject; and ‘Steer' narrates a neurologically reflexive, empowered and transformed subject.