Educational Leadership and Michel Foucault

Donald Gillies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415633123
• eBook ISBN: 9781135052133
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Drawing from the ideas of Michel Foucault, this book offers a critical examination of today's dominant discourse of educational leadership. Foucault's understanding of critique is as apermanent ethos in which humans explore the nature of their existence but at the same time query the limits imposed upon them, and probe opportunities for increasi

1 Introducing Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was one of the towering public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Even in his native France, which could be said to have pioneered the phenomenon of public intellectuals, he remains one of the most significant figures of his age and one who, internationally, still casts a very long shadow more than a generation after his death.

Biographical sketch

Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers, western France. Poitiers, the capital of the Poitou-Charentes region, is an old French city of some historical importance, dating from pre-Roman times and being the site of a famous battle between the French and English forces during the Hundred Years War. It is renowned, as might be expected, for an abundance of churches and public buildings of architectural interest, its centre elevated picturesquely on a promontory high above the Clain River. It is an important academic centre, with an ancient university, whose former students include Francois Rabelais, René Descartes, and Francis Bacon.

The Foucaults were a prominent local family, the father being a distinguished surgeon, and they enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, to the extent that they employed household servants. Paul-Michel, as he was then known, was one of three children, with an older sister and, some years after, a younger brother. The Foucault family were from a traditional Catholic lineage but they seem not to have been especially devout. Nevertheless, Paul-Michel was educated in the faith, if somewhat informally, at the local school, and even had a spell as a choirboy. In 1940, after a disappointing year at the school, his family enrolled him in a local religious school, where he remained until completing the baccalauréat in 1943. It was a traditional curriculum and Foucault excelled almost across the board, in French, Latin, Greek, philosophy, history, geography, foreign languages, and natural science. His family had hopes of him following in his father’s footsteps with a medical career but the teenage Foucault rejected this, much to his father’s disappointment, preferring to follow his academic interests in history and literature.

These final school years of Foucault traversed an extremely difficult time in French history. Since 1940, the country had been under Nazi occupation, as had Poitiers itself, society riven by those who supported vichy France and those who resisted. The city population, then just over 40,000, increased significantly with the arrival of refugees from elsewhere and Foucault himself noted how war shaped every aspect of his life, and that of his fellow pupils, infusing it with threat, fear, and menace (Foucault 2000c: 124). The city and its railway became a target for Allied bombers and some areas were evacuated as a result, the Foucaults themselves moving away for the summer of 1944.

Foucault left home in 1945 for Paris where he enrolled at the prestigious Lycée Henry-IV as preparation for entry to the École Normale Supérieure, one of the most fêted of France’s higher education establishments. He was an extremely hard-working, able student and at the end of the year he was successful in gaining entry to the university for a four-year philosophy course. This had not been his original intention but during his time at the Lycée he developed an interest in philosophy which eventually captivated him. This had been triggered by one particular teacher Jean Hyppolite, whose lectures on Hegel especially appealed to the young Foucault, and who later became a distinguished academic himself.

Although a promising student, Foucault seems to have been a troubled one: he is reported as having been a loner and having struggled to socialize with his peers, tending to be argumentative and waspish. The problems Foucault experienced are worth exploring at this point as they do have a bearing, it could be argued, on the future direction of his work and the growth of his intellectual and public concerns.

Foucault’s father was named Paul, as was his grandfather, and it is significant that Foucault dropped this part of his own name in his late teenage years, so that he no longer appears as Paul-Michel, but simply Michel. This is clearly connected to the difficulties he experienced in his relationship with his father, who seems to have been very controlling and formidable (Miller 2000: 39). On the other hand, Foucault did not break with his family in any final way, and certainly remained close to his mother, whom he visited every summer vacation throughout his life, his father having died in 1959.

One issue which has never been fully explored is Michel Foucault’s psychological problems as a young student, which culminated, apparently, in a suicide attempt in 1948 (Eribon 1993: 26). The reasons for this are not clear, although some have speculated that stress relating to his emerging sexuality may have had a role in it. It is certainly the case that his father took, or sent, him for psychiatric assessment and, perhaps, treatment.

While there is a risk of reading too much into biographical events, this experience may well have influenced some of the later concerns in his work. The notion of abnormality — whether in relation to sexuality or psychiatry — is one that Foucault challenged throughout his career. Foucault rejects the simple binaries that operate throughout the social world — good/bad; right/ wrong; acceptable/unacceptable; normal/abnormal. Despite being homosexual, and being openly so in the public sphere, Foucault was uncomfortable with the simplistic binary division of gay/straight and its stark codification of sexuality. Similarly, Foucault had a long-standing interest in psychiatry and madness, it being the focus of one of his most important works. Although fascinated and intrigued by its concerns, Foucault felt that psychiatry was somewhat arbitrary in the way in which it categorized individuals and in the way in which it classified abnormality. It is not clear if his father’s referral of him to psychiatry was related to Foucault’s homosexuality or mental health, or both, but it is certain that that discipline became a key target of Michel Foucault’s work.

Foucault’s distancing of himself from his past in terms of family, politics, and religion was important to his development as a person and a thinker. In his later work, he makes much of the business of re-invention, of becoming other than one was, as a central ethical task (Foucault 1992: 10–11; 2000a: 130ff.; 2000b: 261–262), and he also strongly resisted any attempts to be labelled, or be categorized as a particular type of thinker, preferring a series of endless readjustments. This makes it hard for the student of Foucault to keep track of his developing thought but it seems to have been a deliberate and conscious decision, and indeed enterprise, to reposition himself regularly and to resist adopting any fixed outlook. His central commitment to critique is founded on these very principles, as will be explored later.

While it would be wrong to see Foucault’s adult life as shaped or determined by his teenage experiences, it would be equally inadequate not to recognize the apparent links between the two.

Perhaps related to this emotional and psychological turmoil, Foucault initially failed his final examinations, eventually being successful in 1951. From then until his death, Foucault was immersed in the academic world, although he did play an increasingly political role from the late 1960s onwards. Appointments took him to various countries abroad until his return to Paris where he worked for the last 15 years of his life. As his work is the most relevant aspect of his life for this study, the rest of his biography here will only be lightly sketched.

His first appointment after graduation was as a lecturer in psychology at the University of Lille, France. Despite having majored in philosophy, Foucault became increasingly interested in psychology, and completed postgraduate certificates in the discipline, as well as undertaking clinical placements. One of his first pieces of academic writing was a translation of the work of Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist, whose father had treated Nietzsche himself. During this period of the early 1950s, Foucault developed a deep interest in Marxism and joined the Communist party for a time. While never again being part of any political party or formal grouping, Foucault could be said to have remained on the Left throughout his life. That is not to say that he was not often a target for attacks from the Left, especially so from Marxists.

From Lille, Foucault moved to Uppsala in Sweden and, after four years, from there to Warsaw, Poland. Both of these positions were cultural posts and it was not until the early 1960s that he returned to France, to Clermont-Ferrand, to a post in philosophy. These different posts can be seen reflected in Foucault’s work, perhaps, which does not fall into any one discipline but spreads across a range of intellectual fields. Indeed, he spoke himself of the value of being exiled from France for those years as affording him the possibility to come to terms with himself and his roots, to clarify his identity, at a distance from his most immediate influences. In 1966 Foucault relocated to the University of Tunis, partly to accompany his long-term partner Daniel Defert (1937—) who had been posted there as part of his national service. He was thus largely absent from France during the explosive events of 1968 (when the country was rocked by widespread student revolt) but the following year he returned as professor of philosophy at the University of Vincennes. In 1970 he was appointed to the prestigious Collège de France to a post he entitled as ‘Professor of the History of Systems of Thought’, a post he was to hold until his death in June 1984, at the age of 57.

Foucault: the major works

Michel Foucault was a voluminous writer and even today new work is being produced, long after his death, as his lecture series from his Collège de France days are transcribed and published. In the following section, only a sample of his work will be discussed, focusing on his most important publications. Those with particular relevance for the issue of educational leadership are separately highlighted in the Further Resources section at the back of this book.

Madness and Civilization (1961)

Madness and Civilisation was Foucault’s first significant book and was based on his doctoral thesis. In some ways it can be seen as the first manifestation in print of his combined interests in psychology and philosophy. Its complete publication in English was only released recently (Foucault 2006), although an abridged version had long been in print. Foucault’s main argument in the book was that the concept of ‘madness’ as an abnormality or a clinical concern is an Enlightenment development, and that previously the mad were seen as simply possessed of a different perception of the world. The ways in which madness became the focus of scientific, and then medical, examination and treatment are explored, and thus the movement from difference, to illness, and so to treatment. Foucault argues, in some ways prescient of his work on discipline and punishment, that the more humane treatment of the mad was at the price of much more medical and moral control. The target was not merely to understand the mad, nor to alleviate their circumstances, but to ‘cure’, to manipulate them back into the prevailing norms of acceptable behaviour and thinking. While not denying the phenomenon of clinical insanity, Foucault suggests that ascriptions of madness were often entirely socially and culturally rooted and difficult to justify in any scientific sense. The book is hugely controversial and many critics argue that it is historically inaccurate and tendentious (Scull 2007). Nevertheless, it represents what might be termed a typical Foucauldian perspective in that it argues against the simple binary of rational/mad and explores ways in which these distinctions have been socially and politically constructed.

The Birth of the Clinic (1963)

In this book, Foucault traces the origins of clinical medicine in France in the late eighteenth century. Foucault, as became typical in his work, rejects commonly-held views to present an alternative reading of history. Instead of seeing the rise of the clinic as a symptom of the abandonment of superstition and folk medicine in the face of enlightenment science, Foucault concentrates on the changing professional identity of the doctor, and so on the relationship with the patient.

The book is again a forerunner of later themes in Foucault’s writings: firstly, it teases out the social, economic, and political influences on medicine so that it becomes something of interest to the nation state in terms of a healthy and productive population; secondly, this involves a major increase in knowledge production so that statistics and medical knowledge, and the development of an organized and logical discipline, grow significantly during this period, each becoming intertwined with power and status; and, thirdly, Foucault identifies the ‘gaze’ as an important element in the develop — ment of medical science. It is through the examination of the human, both the living and the dead, that medical knowledge is advanced and privileged. It is through this visibility, the ‘gaze’, that the individual and the population as a whole become understood and, eventually, controlled. These themes of the body increasingly coming to be of economic and political interest, of the relationship between knowledge and logical order and power, and of the importance of the ‘gaze’, the visual examination, were to feature in more refined and coherent ways in Foucault’s later works.

The Order of Things (1966)

This is the work which is most often judged to be structuralist in nature, but this is a position which Foucault himself rejected in a later foreword to the book. The book, subtitled ‘an archaeology of the human sciences’, is a very challenging read and deals with the history of the disciplines of linguistics/ philology, biology, and economics. Foucault explores how these discourses were constructed differently in different times, how prevailing assumptions and approaches evolved over time so that these disciplines became shaped in new ways. A difficult and complex book, it nevertheless reveals Foucault’s particular interest in the history of systems of thought and his forthright, and controversial, rejection of the foundations of humanism.

At the centre of the book is the notion of the ‘episteme’, a term Foucault uses to describe the principles underlining systems of knowledge at any given period. Foucault’s argument is that the three disciplines under question shared the same fundamental constitutions at the same historical periods, and were transformed at similar times. In earlier times it was the notion of resemblance that structured knowledge so that, for example, plants which happened to look like a particular human organ would be deemed to be therapeutic for it. Nature was in the form of a book which the discerning could read, in a way similar to the Holy Scriptures. This approach was replaced in the seventeenth century by a much more intensive examination of the nature of things by which difference and identity became the focus, rather than resemblance, so that there was a growth of tabulation as an organizing principle across these disciplines. This approach to knowledge can be seen as the beginning of the concept of ‘discourse’, a way of speaking which logically orders reality. The emergence of ‘science’ after the Enlightenment provides a third stage in the history of thought, promising to lay bare and uncover reality. Yet, Foucault argues, for the human sciences this is deeply problematic. The idea that there is a human ‘nature’ is merely a belief, and so the attempts to explore it and uncover its truths are based on a very flimsy foundation. These human sciences assume the existence of that which they wish to explore. In its dazzling concluding section, rich in passion, imagery, and logical pyrotechnics, Foucault presents ‘man’ as a merely modern preoccupation, indeed an invention, and suggests that this will pass, so that the human as an essence, being, or object of study, will be erased ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault 2002a: 422).

The book established Foucault as a major, radical thinker: his attack on humanism, the suggestion that words speak us rather than humans speak words, and his rejection of modernist optimism, of grand theories such as Marxism, made him a particular focus of both acclaim and opprobrium. Sartre, for example, the foremost French intellectual of the time and a Marxist, fought back instinctively but also incisively, arguing that Foucault’s historical method was not cinematic but had reverted to the ‘magic lantern’, so that what was presented was not historical movement but a series of discrete images, whose interconnections were obscured. It is certainly true that the Marxist position of historical inevitability was under serious attack, but Sartre was correct to highlight what would remain a serious problem for Foucault, even when he developed his ‘genealogical’ method that the reasons for change in human thought, the decisive factors, the proximate causes, continued to remain problematic and frustratingly hazy.

The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

This book, following the explosive publication of the Order of Things, is of a very different type. It deals in a detailed, methodical manner with the way in which discourse is constructed. It is not focused on any one empirical area of interest but is instead a drier, formal text. No aspects of culture, science, or politics are given any close, illuminative attention, and so on its publication it had little appeal beyond the narrowly academic. Indeed, it depends on a considerable knowledge of grammar and linguistics for it to be read in any fruitful way. However, it does introduce formally the term ‘archaeology’ as a key concept for Foucault, it being the process of uncovering and unpicking the rules of a discourse at any one time. The domain of things said is what Foucault terms the ‘archive’, and its analysis is the role of archaeology.

‘The order of discourse’ (1970)

This was Foucault’s inaugural prof...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Critical Studies in Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing Michel Foucault
• 2 Why bring Foucault to the study of educational leadership?
• 3 Educational leadership as discourse
• 4 Power and educational leadership
• 5 Governmentality and educational leadership
• 6 Governmentality in practice: governing the self and others in a marketized education system
• 7 Thinking with and against Foucault
• Further resources
• References
• Index