Foucault and Butler: Power and Agency in Education

In this second paper, I return to Ms. Gage and her classroom, but here, I apply the theories of Foucault and Butler as I grapple with understanding (in a rather discursive and ongoing way) how regulatory practices of schooling serve to produce certain ways of knowing which are in tension with the critical approaches to teaching that Ms. Gage, and other teachers like her, attempt to bring to their students. Although I had initially intended to use Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977) alone in working through my questions, I find myself returning to Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990/1999/2006) again and again as a way to bring agency into the workings, or technologies, of power, something which I find particularly difficult to pin down in Foucault’s work. At the same time, I move forward with some caution here because I always want to challenge myself as a researcher, writer, and thinker to remain both critical and optimistic when it comes to individual and collective agency. Foucault writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), “I have not denied—far from it—the possibility of changing discourse: I have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it” (p. 209). I am reminded by these words that agency is slippery and easily misidentified in fields of power. Yet, Butler does attempt to locate agency in her text, although she too, troubles the location of it all the while. And so in writing about Foucault and Butler together, I am better able to locate my own notions of agency and subversion in the field of literacy and identity – although those locations are likely to shift as I write even this.

As I was preparing for writing this paper, I did some searching through files from another class where I read Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge as part of a small group project. In doing so, I came across an email to one of my group members questioning how Foucault’s regulatory rules of formation, something he writes about in Discipline and Punish as well, fit with Freire’s notion of consciousness (conscienization) and naming the world in order to change it? In other words, if, as Foucault writes, we can never be outside the discourses of power, can we ever truly practice liberatory education in the way Freire and critical scholars who follow his work suggest? How are we to create new practices and transform our realities? Are Foucault and Freire incompatible?

These questions, then, brought me to the example of Ms. Gage and her classroom as well. Ms. Gage, as I’ve written about in my first paper, lives and breathes a critical approach to teaching, even though she may never name it as such. Her entire curriculum and way of being in her classroom challenge her students to critique and question both word and world through analysis of media representations. More importantly, she then moves her students to the production of their own critical representations in film and image. Instead of being passive consumers of their worlds, they become creators of meaning within them. This is not, however, without its difficulties for reasons onto which Foucault sheds some light.

Power

Foucault traces the history of punishment and discipline as it shifts from a focus on prisoners’ bodies to their souls. Alarming as it may be, the transfer of Foucault’s argument about prisons to schools is not a difficult one to make. We readily observe the disciplining of bodies into regulated times and spaces within schools, and more importantly, we witness the instantiation of that discipline on the very souls of our students as we label them, in often subtle ways, as either good or bad, normal or abnormal within the available discourses of schooling and education. When students fail to fit a particular model of the good or bad student, power, in its ever economic fashion, merely shifts the definition of the “crime” of nonconformity to fit the behaviors and dispositions of individuals and continue to mark the gaps between them. Even more, students place the regulations and rules of identity onto themselves and each other in such a way that the classification of our students happens quite readily and efficiently among and within them. Such is the capillary function of relational power; it moves everywhere, subtly and economically.

Within the capillary functions of power, what effect, in the sense of production, do such techniques have on the role of the teacher as well? From my own experience in the classroom and through my observations of Ms. Gage, it is clear to me that teaching critically and innovatively is not without its consequences. The mark of a successful school, according to Foucault, is one that functions efficiently. The mark of a successful teacher, then, is one who does not disrupt the efficient movement of bodies in space. Does not the teacher who asks her students to critically examine the world commit crimes of that very disruption? And by asking her students to become critical and questioning consumers of their world and to participate in the disruption of discourses, does a teacher like Ms. Gage place her students at the peril of being gathered up by the mechanisms of power. In other words, does such disruption become defined as a crime, merely serving the very economy of power against which it pushes? Not only does Ms. Gage then become the “Other” of teachers who better fit the normative model of teaching, but her students become the “Other” of a normative model of learning.

My questions bring me, then, to the relationship between power and knowledge as well. For Foucault, at the heart of all mechanisms of power is the “truth-power relation” (p. 55). He writes that punishment, in any of its many forms, does not make use of the body any longer, but makes use of representation. In other words, regulation of ideas and representations is a more efficient way to control than regulating bodies – one follows the other. For Ms. Gage, her entire critical approach to instruction and analysis is to question representation and to ask her students to determine whose interests are served by various representations of ideas and people. In this way, she asks her students to uncover and critique ideology, but in doing so, she must give them a new language with which to even imagine and speak such things.

Foucault writes, “It is not simply at the level of consciousness, of representation and in what one thinks one knows, but at the level of what makes possible the knowledge that is transformed into political investment" (p. 185). Thus, regulatory and normative practices determine what is even knowable. In order to teach critically, a teacher like Ms. Gage places her students in a crisis of language and truth as they seek the words and ideas that push against the very frame in which they have been realizing their world. “Power produces;” Foucault continues, “it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production" (p. 194). Here, then, is the crux: Ms. Gage and her critical approach to teaching can still never exist outside the power that produces what is knowable. Indeed, by being in opposition to a notion of Truth (with a capital T), Ms. Gage still reinforces and produces that knowledge in opposition to her own way of viewing the world through multiple truths (lowercase t).

No wonder she stays up at night worrying that she may never move her students to change their worlds.

Agency

Foucault is difficult for me because as much as I try to find flaws in his argument, the more I live in this world, the more I think he is right. But like Ms. Gage, I won’t give up searching for a fissure in the workings of power, and here is where Butler helps.

Although she finds a foundation in the philosophy of Foucault, Butler takes up the question of political agency in a way that Foucault does not. In her discussion of the construction of gender, Butler contends that certain performances and rituals of the self become normative, while more incoherent performances, or subversions, merely serve to keep normative practices in tact (the “Other” against which the norm is once again defined). Moreover, she agrees that we can only express an ‘I’ through the language made available to us.

At the same time, however, Butler finds possibility in the “iterability of performativity,” and views this repetition with supplementation as “one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility” (p. xxv). What she seems to be saying here, is that there is possibility in the repetition of performances and in the possible supplement to or subtle shift in that repetition. Because there is movement, there is possibility. She does not dispute Foucault’s argument that power always produces within the same matrix of power, but she does raise the question of disruption within and through that same matrix. Tanetha brought us this example in class when she spoke about “using the master’s tools.” Butler, too, seems to believe, in her examples of gender ambiguity, that in its productive function, power may produce a different version of the repetition. She asks, “What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?” (p. 44). And although she does not necessarily answer such a question, she wonders if parody, hyperbole, dissonance, and confusion might not subvert in powerful ways.

In returning my thoughts to Ms. Gage, then, the production aspect of her class becomes critically important. The possibility for her students to create representations of their world through parody and dissonance, albeit always within the matrix of power and using the master’s tools, creates a small fissure for subversion to arise. Agency, for Butler, becomes a question of signification and resignification at work, and as Ms. Gage’s students resignify, a theory of agency is at work. It is the incompleteness of representation, the blip in the iteration, the et cetera, that opens the possible space for change.

And yet, Butler is not so naïve. She ends her book reminding us that all performances are not without their punitive consequences. She notes that we cannot go through the world feeling that our identities our unsuccessful or in constant subversion without great sacrifice and pain. “For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary” (p. 201). The construction of identities is not opposed to agency, she goes on, but “is a necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible.” Agency, too, must be intelligible within fields of power.

So, I end in a similar place to where I started: still wondering about critical teaching pedagogies and their consequences on students and teachers. Foucault and Butler offer a mollified and optimistic view at the same time. I turn, then, to that copy of the email I found while planning to write this paper for a suitable answer to my question about the compatibility of Foucault and critical pedagogy. To my question, my friend and colleague answered this: “any attempt to make [students’] experiences more equitable and humanizing is far from trivial.” That sounds pretty good to me.


References

Butler, J. (1990/1999/2006). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.