Popkewitz, T.S., & Brennan, M. (Eds.) (1998) Foucault's Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education. Reviewed by Aimee Howley

Popkewitz, T.S., & Brennan, M. (Eds.) (1998) Foucault's Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education. New York: Teachers College Press 388 pp. + xvi ISBN 0-8077-3677-5 (cloth) $58.00     0-8077-3676-7 (paperback) $27.95 Reviewed by Aimee Howley Ohio University * May 10, 1998 "Foucault has become the sort of intellectual figure with whom it is no longer possible to have a rational or nonpathological relationship."—Halperin (1995, p. 5) Certain works of art and theory bring closure to particular moments. They may be fine, even quintessential, statements of the chimera, but they signal its demise. Such are the summative invocations of Foucault found in Popkewitz and Brennan's scholarly collection. Those of us who love the sharp inconclusiveness of the man will find it painful to confront the palor of the codified theory. By the illicitness of his ideas, we caught a glimpse of something beyond self-limiting theory (see Barris, in press). Attempting to unify the theory, Popkewitz and colleagues shut the door on these possibilities. Now situated, Foucault becomes a comfortable thing of the past. As intellectual tool, part of a tradition, important progenitor of social epistemology, Foucault's inspiration is contained. My preference, though, with Halperin (1995), is to sanctify the mystery. Short of that, I am looking for precise attentiveness, and some of the essays in the collection offer such care. Approaching such precision is Jennifer Gore's "Disciplining Bodies: On the Continuity of Power Relations in Pedagogy." In a rather straightforward rendering of theory, the essay applies a Foucaultian analysis of disciplinary power to qualitative data obtained in four quite distinct pedagogical settings. The conclusion--that techniques of power appear in sites as varied as a PE classroom and a feminist reading group-- illuminates three of Foucault's major points: that power is a generative mechanism, that no particular manifestation of power is inevitable, and that freedom concerns the will to exercise power differently. With careful elegance, David Schaafsma elaborates similar points about the constitutive, assimilative, and liberatory possibilities of writing. Indeed, "Performing the Self: Constructing Written and Curricular Fictions" is the only essay in the collection that treats Foucaultian theory as both rich and generative. Incomplete as a theoretical presentation in its own right, the essay nevertheless offers glimpses of the poignantly circular possibilities inherent in Foucaultian thought. Unlike many of the contributors to the collection, Schaafsma activates Foucaultian premises rather than simply and mechanically applying them to conditions apprehended otherwise. Furthermore, like Foucault himself, Schaafsma uses disqualified texts in strategic ways when he positions the poems of an African-American school girl at the intersection between discourses of politics and literary criticism. In contrast to Foucault, however, Schaafsma fails to offer adequate self-abnegation as justification for coopting the self-disclosures of subjugated persons. This breech reflects Schaafsma's propensity to treat critical pedagogy with greater generosity than--from a Foucaultian vantage--it deserves. Whereas each of the essays discussed above makes a direct and coherent statement, other essays in the collection tend to approach coherence obliquely and to intermingle luminous and prosaic moments. "A Catalog of Possibilities" (Simola, Heikkinen, and Silvonen, pp. 64-90), for example, deftly recapitulates and recombines pieces of Foucault's self-repudiated opus to establish the linkage among the techniques of discourse, self, and power that together constitute technologies of truth. Except for a rather unfortunate diagram of the technologies of truth, the attempt to unify the Foucaultian field seems, in my view, to do justice both to the genealogical forays and the transcendent frustration that undergird it. But when this "meta-methodology" (p. 71) is applied--even rigorously--to the constitutive discourse of the "modern Finnish teacher," it fails to encapsulate a practice. Worse still, it belittles the Foucaultian arsenal by unleashing it against an already lifeless quarry. The error, I think, is to start with discourse. With few exceptions, Foucault starts with the body and moves from the interrogation and discipline of the body toward the discourse it produces. Several essays in the collection make this same mistake. Wagener's review of public discourse about sex and sex education in Milwaukee and Bill Green's examination of the discourse of English teaching undertake rhetorical analyses that are not altogether Foucaultian. In fact, these essays strive principally to disclose the ideological character of official discourse rather than the constitutive character of discursive practices. Thus they engage the sort of unmasking that critical theory and critical pedagogy made popular: they evaluate the normative character of discourse rather than revealing the imprimatur of dispersed (what Foucault called "capillary") practice on the rules of formation of particular (ideological and historically situated) discourses. Similarly, in its analysis of the ways that power relations function to constitute the child, Shutkin's essay, "The Deployment of Information Technology in the Field of Education and the Augmentation of the Child," reverses Foucault's causal ordering of localized practice and centralized control and discourse. Citing Foucault and Bernauer, Shutkin does, at first, localize "deployment" (i.e., "dispositif"), when he defines it as a dispersed, tactical, and constitutive practice applied to the individual. Then, seemingly indifferent to this careful definitional grounding, Shutkin proceeds to use "deployment" much more conventionally in his analysis of the ways that a certain practical journal for teachers framed a discussion of the San Francisco School's "deployment" of a particular laser disc within the social studies curriculum of its miple schools. In this discussion, deployment spans two generations--a generation of practice (i.e., in the San Francisco schools) and a generation of discourse (i.e., in the journal)--but in both generations "deployment" emanates from the center outward. Official practice displaces local practice as the important point of contact between the individual and the state apparatus. A more rigorously Foucaultian analysis focuses on the bio-political construction of the preschool child. In his essay, "A History of the Present on Children's Welfare in Sweden," Kenneth Hultqvist (pp. 91-116) demonstrates appreciation of the sense in which the socially constructed child is both a body and a discourse: The preschool child does not denote anything real, but is a drafted plan for a new age, for a reality in the making, for when a more divine condition than that of the present has arrived.... The preschool child-- the renewer of the race--is something of an historical zero, a dividing line in the so-called human development, when all the old trash is to be thrown overboard and replaced by something new and lasting. (p. 102) Hultqvist uses the essay as a series of occasions for instantiating the Foucaultian insight that discourse and practice are coextensive and mutually constitutive. Indeed, from this insight emerges the most darkly startling point of the essay--a point that aims at the two chambers of the postmodern heart. In considering the social construction of the decentered individual, Hultqvist targets reflection and recuperation, fingering them as rationalities for mass-producing the modernist prototype of a society governed from within the self. "The decentered person of today is confronted by the endless task of chasing his or her own shadow (which is always elusive). This may be a (very) successful 'method' to deal with scarce resources" (p. 109). The point has such possibilities that, by the end of the essay, I found myself regretting that Hultqvist had spent so much time charting the constitutive implications of the Montessori--in contrast to the Frobel--preschooler. In the same vein, but with less vigor, Bernadette Baker roots contemporary childhood in an ideology of rescue. Failing to situate her own retelling within the larger project of critical psychology (see e.g., Bradley, 1989; Burman, 1994; Kessen, 1979; Morss, 1990, 1996; Sigel & Kim, 1996; Walkerdine, 1988), Baker's analysis aps but incrementally to Katz's (1968) rather thin and somewhat strident revisionism. Like Katz, Baker retells a familar story from a committed and oppositional vantage. She demonstrates, for example, how child-study contributed to an ideology of rescue that resonated in common schools already primed for the moral improvement of immigrants. Whereas contrarian history has a place, it is neither as productively circular nor as elegantly disarming as Foucaultian genealogy. It purports to tell how things really were, rather than illuminating the relations of power and knowledge that enabled (and constrained) them to be in certain ways. For some of the essays, Foucault serves principally as the bearer of a benediction. Granted permission to write, Lynn Fendler, for example, provides a detailed chronology of the "educated person." Her efforts are not improved by the claim that the history is, rather, a genealogy. In fact, despite the narrowing of attention to the cultural or discursive artifact, "educated person," her chronology of the Western rational tradition is much like any other conventional progression from Plato through Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. Fendler does not quite end up casting Foucault as the final frontier, but her analysis tends in that direction. Conflating theoretical explanations with what they explain, she succumbs to the determinism that Foucault just barely missed in The Order of Things (but atoned for with The Archeology of Knowledge). Unlike Foucault, Fendler seeks relief from a totalizing episteme in the construction of a new, albeit more self-critical, one: Political projects that seek to be critical of the power relations being constituted in current social configurations require analytic tools and concepts that take into account innovations, changes, shifts, and adaptations of those (re)configurations ... Certain discourses of postcoloniality, postmodernity, and feminism have begin to develop tools of analysis more adequate to the task at hand. (p. 61) Absent from this formula for resistance are Foucault's two principal correctives: outrage and limit-testing. Ignoring these, Fendler quiets what is most disquieting in Foucault. Doing so, she educates us less than she might. In "School Marks: Education, Domination, and Female Subjectivity," Mimi Orner overtly acknowledges the plan to "bend" Foucault to her purposes: "I do not remain 'loyal' to Foucault's project here ... Instead, I use Foucaultian concepts and insights as I 'poach' ... other feminist and poststructuralist work that offers more direct insight ... " (p. 281). Whatever the method--and indeed it is a method contrived from defensive argument, feminist exposé, and intellectual posturing--the result simply registers, rather than positioning, outrage. To her credit, Orner expresses outrage toward practices that implicate direct rather than derivative practices: in her story gendering does take place in conversations about bodies, not in determinations of tenure or promotion. But like many self-styled feminists of the academy, Orner decouples outrage from theory. Whatever its possible merits, this strategy contravenes the Foucaultian practice of embeping theory in outrage. By including this essay in the collection, the editors do a disservice to the--albeit questionable-- aim of the work, to codify (or at least situate) Foucaultian theory. The remaining essays in the volume attend most particularly to this aim, that is, they are about Foucaultian thought rather than instantiating, exemplifying, or, as with Orner's essay, defying it. Although to me they are the most heartless, these also seem to be the most scholarly essays in the collection. In "Genealogy and Progressive Politics: Reflections on the Notion of Usefulness," Ingólful Jóhannesson examines the value of Foucaultian theory for both constituting and critiquing emancipatory discourses. Thoughtfully engaging Foucault's ideas and inserting them into a larger set of emancipatory discourses, this essay works to render harmless the distinctions between theory and practice. "Theory is practice, practice is theory, and these activities can be kept less divided from each other if we rethink their relationships" (p. 299). In apition, and more pointedly, the essay restates and elaborates Foucault's characterization of progressive, in contrast to, other politics. Bringing this analysis to light, the essay serves to defuse a common complaint about Foucault, namely that his theory and his political activity existed in separate and incompatible realms. Whereas Jóhannesson focuses on commonalities among emancipatory discourses, Lew Zipin concentrates on their distinctions. In his careful essay, "Looking for Sentient Life in Discursive Practices: The Question of Human Agency in Critical Theories and School Research," Zipin considers the theoretical consequences of Foucault's and, later, Judith Butler's, Valerie Walkerdine's and Bronwyn Davies' insistence on anti-humanist and anti-foundational modes of thinking. Through intricate argumentation, Zipin identifies in these theories the implicit need for agency--taken within the theories as prediscursive, contingent, or indeterminately opportune-- but recast in his analysis as merely necessary and vaguely Marxist. It is an interesting argument--Marxist species-being versus the discursively constituted self--but I would have preferred to see it played out between the principals. In the hands of the seconds--Fraser and Bourdieu, on the one hand, Butler, Walkerdine and Davies, on the other--the theoretical journey devolves to a series of illuminating but ultimately distracting side trips. In the process, Foucault is left by the wayside. Fortunately, he is picked up again by David Blacker in his essay, "Intellectuals at Work and in Power: Toward a Foucaultian Research Ethic." Blacker picks up Foucault in more ways than the intra-textual: he rescues Foucault from the accusation that he has "nothing positive to say" and is, therefore, anti-progressive and self-undermining, and he restores Foucault's politics to the realm of local--"theoretically modest"-- practice (p. 357). Through this latter rescusitation, Blacker makes room for oppositional intellectuals to participate in a Foucaultian project. Elaboration of this eminently attractive idea, however, leads Blacker to put forward a distinctly anti-Foucaultian version of a purportedly Foucaultian ethic: "One should strive to become master of the consequences of one's actions" (p. 361). Based on the guiding principles of "efficacy" and "honesty," this ethic depends upon self-understanding, harmonization, honesty, and the "controlled and self-regulated dissemination of the subject into the world" (pp. 362-363). Explicitly teleological, this ethic disregards both Foucault's anti-foundationalism and his transgression of limits. Blacker's oppositional intellectual is normalized in accordance with external principles of ascetic practice, which legitimize his or her "will to power." If Foucault might have posited "oppositional intellectuals," he would have envisioned them as unruly, their activity indeterminate, and the sources and consequences of their strategies only partially accessible to them. Blacker's essay ends the volume, and presumably on an up beat. It gives us license to go forth and do what most of us already do: fight ideological battles with our colleagues, avoid speaking for the truly oppressed, and question rather than condemn the unpalatable, even intolerable, practices of others. Blacker's exhortations and, in many ways, the entire collection of essays sadly remind us: "Mr. Foucault, he dead." At the same time and precisely because our relationship to Foucault is not rational, we know for a fact that his ghost walks and, indeed, is hard to pin down. Note *This review was produced under the editorship of Nicholas C. Burbules because of the potential conflict of interest occasioned by the fact that David Blacker, who contributed a chapter to this volume, is the Education Review Area Editor for this topic. References Barris, J. (In press.). That Foucault justifies truth and ideology critique. Quarterly Journal of Ideology. Bradley, B. (1989). Visions of infancy: A critical introduction to child psychology. Oxford, UK: Polity Press. Burman, E. (1994). Deconstructing developmental psychology. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1971). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1976). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Harper & Row. Halperin, D. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press. Katz, M. (1968). The irony of early school reform: Educational innovation in mid-nineteeth century Massachusetts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kessen, W. (1979). The American child and other cultural inventions. American Psychologist, 34(10), 815-820. Morss, J.R. (1990). The biologising of childhood: Developmental psychology and the Darwinian myth. Hove, England: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Morss, J.R. (1996). Growing critical: Alternatives to developmental psychology. New York: Routledge. Sigel, I.E., & Kim, M. (1996). The images of children in developmental psychology. In C.P. Hwang, M.E. Lamb, & I.E. Sigel (Eds.), Images of childhood (pp. 47-62). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive development and the production of rationality. London: Routledge. About the Authors Thomas Popkewitz and Marie Brennan co-edited Foucault's Challenge. In their other work, both of these scholars focus attention on the political and sociological ramifications of educational policy and reform projects. Brennan also considers gender in education and research methods. Popkewitz is Professor of Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Brennan works at Central Queensland University in Australia. About the Reviewer Aimee Howley is Professor of Educational Administration at Ohio University where she currently struggles to make meaningful translations between the theories she cherishes and the lived experiences of the administrators with whom she works.