beyond philosophy of the subject

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Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject:Liberalism, Education and the Critique ofIndividualismMichael Peters a & James Marshall ba University of Canterburyb University of AucklandPublished online: 09 Jan 2013.

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Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject: Liberalism, Education and the Critique

of Individualism Michael Peters

University of Canterbury and

James Marshall University of Auckland

If there is one thing that Jiirgen Habermas and his arch-rival poststructuralist critics can agree on it is the idea that the tradition of the philosophy of consciousness -of subject-centred reason-is now exhausted. Habermas (1987), in seeking to resurrect the philosophical discourse of modernity, suggests that the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject be replaced by the paradigm of mutual understanding between subjects capable of speech and action. His claim is that Hegel and Marx did not achieve this change, neither did Heidegger, nor Derrida and Foucault. They all remain, apart from Foucault, caught up in "the intention of Ursprungiphilosophie". Foucault, in attempting to escape the metaphysics of the self-referential subject, "veered off into a theory of power that has shown itself to be a dead e n d (Habermas, 1987296). Only by replacing the paradigm of the subject-"of the relation-to-self of a subject knowing and acting in isolation"-with that of mutual understanding is it possible once again to take up the counter-discourse inherent in modernity and to lead it away from both the Hegelian and Nietzschean paths which have been proven to lead us nowhere. Such a paradigm, Habermas argues, still allows a critique of Western "logocentrism" but it is one which emerges in a determinate form to recognise that the predecessor paradigm suffered from a deficit rather than an excess of rationality. The paradigm of mutual understanding which emphasises an intersubjectivity inscribed in ordinary communication is, of course, most fully developed and worked through in Habermas' theory of communicative action. Here validity claims immanent in ordinary talk are said to be discursively redeemable at the level of discourse.

Whether Habermas (1987) is correct in claiming that Derrida and Foucault are philosophically astray in their respective attempts to overcome the metaphysics of self-presence or to unravel the modem construction of the subject, is not the primary purpose of this paper. Whether Habermas' own project of defending the impulse of the Enlightenment and modernity through a rational reconstruction of the universal pragmatic conditions or presupposi- tions inherent in the notion of a transparent speech community is a successful or viable enterprise is, likewise, not an overriding concern here. Our starting point is the exhaustion of the philosophy of the subject and the bankruptcy

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20 M . Peters b 1. D. Marshall

of one particular set of liberal practices and institutions based on this paradigm. More cryptically, to the so-called “death of the subject” corresponds the intellectual demise of the project of liberal schooling and education. Historically, liberal institutions (prisons, courts, psychiatric institutions etc), including that of the school and the modem university, have legitimated themselves and their practices by reference to the discourse of the philosophy of subject-centred reason. The Cartesian-Kantian tradition conceived of the epistemological subject as the fount of all knowledge, signihcation and moral action. In transhistorical terms liberal philosophers pictured the subject within a set of highly individualistic assumptions as standing separate from, and logically prior to, society and culture. These same assumptions vitiate the planning and policy documents of liberal capitalist and democratic societies. The individual is conceptualised in theory, and seen in practice, as the primitive unit of economic and political analysis, the ultimate beyond which one cannot go. These same assumptions, but in a revitalised form, now surface in the neo-liberal (and neo-conservative) critique and reform of the welfare state and of education. Underlying these reforms of education in countries like the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are a set of assumptions which reify a form of individualism. Sometimes this form of individualism is referred to as abstract individualism; more commonly it has been christened possessive individualism. The notion, irrespective of nomenclature, has surfaced most obviously in the behavioural postulate of a renewed classical liberal economics which has guided neo-conservatives in policy arrangements to redraw the boundaries between the public and the private, in setting the parameters for easing the transition toward the so-called ”post-industrial” society. The postulate of homo economicus, one of the main tenets of new right economic thinking, holds that people should be treated as “rational utility-maximisers” in all of their behaviour. In other words, individuals seek to further their own interests, defined in terms of measured net wealth positions in politics as in other aspects of their behaviour.

The project of liberal mass schooling and higher education in the late twentieth-century is built on the liberal intellectual authority inherited from the Enlightenment. It is grounded in a European universalism and rationalism heavily buttressed by highly individualist assumptions. It is these assumptions and the authority which rests upon them that is now being called into question and with it both neo-conservative and left radical attempts to reform education. ’Tostmodernism” is the broad cultural phenomenon of Westem societies which best typihes this questioning and the attempt to find new cultural and political orientations.

At one level, ”postmodernism” has come to refer to a form of cultural analysis focusing on changes in forms of production and modes of consump- tion. It is closely related to a break with foundational philosophy and with the rejection of universalist claims of totalising social theory. Specifically, postmodernism as a critique of modernist social theory serves to radically decentre

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Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject 21

the subject, the cornerstone of both liberalism and Marxism (though in different ways).

In this respect the so-called “postmodernist” (poststructural) critique of the subject which is clearly evident in the work of Foucault, Demda, Lacan and others, has found favour with a number of feminist writers who have accepted and applied these insights in novel ways (e.g. see Nicholson, 1990). Flax (1990:43), for instance, acknowledges how postmodern discourses make us sceptical about beliefs derived from the Enlightenment concerning truth, knowledge and the self that are taken for granted and serve as legitimation for contemporary western culture. In her view, feminists, like other post- modernists are beginning to suspect that all such transcendental claims reflect and reify the experience of a few persons-mostly white, Western males?

Frederic Jameson (1985:115) distinguishes two clear positions on the critique of individualism. The first is an historical thesis closely connected to the changing conditions of modern capitalism:

In the classical age of competitive capitalism, in the heyday of the nuclear family and the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic social class, there was such a thing as individualism, as individual subjects. But today, in the age of corporate capitalism, of the so-called organization man, of bureaucracies in business as well as the state, of demographic explosion- today, that older bourgeois individual subject no longer exists.

The second position Jameson identifies- that of the poststructuralist critique-is regarded as more radical (ibid.):

It adds, not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of that type. Rather, this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural. mystification which sought to persuade people that they “ h a d individual subjects and possessed this unique personal identity.

Of the two positions the latter is more philosophically interesting and productive, for it exposes or unmasks the individualism of liberation, and its rejuvenated form in neo-liberal thinking as ideological at the stage of history when this form of ideology has achieved hegemonic proportions.

This paper in the first section provides an introduction to some of the issues surrounding the theme of the exhaustion of the philosophy of the subject. In the second section, it relates these issues to what has become known as the “communitarian critique” of different forms of liberal individualism, Yet in different ways both liberalism and the communitarian critique do not take into account the ”postmodernist” critique of the subject. One seeks to develop the individual as the ultimate unit of analysis; the other substitutes a notion of the ”social self”. Both, in effect, do not take into account the decentring of

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the subject and the consequences of such a view for notions of the individual and the “social self“. To this extent they are tied into a basic opposition (individualism versus community) which has yet to be overcome. The third and final section, carries through the analysis by examining Foucault’s theory of power as it relates to the disciplinary society and the way in which human beings are made individual subjects. It is suggested that Foucault’s notion of the subject significantly bypasses issues between liberals and conununitarians.

I The Exhaustion of the Philosophy of the Subject Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1989), responding to Jean-Franqois Lyotard’s recent attempt to define the postmodern, goes beyond Lyotard to suggest that not only the project of the great discourse of emancipation but also, more fundamentally, the philosophical project itself- as it was inaugurated for the West by the Greeks-is either finished or no longer sustainable. It has been com- pleted in its possibilities. Since Hegel, he maintains, its possibilities have been exhausted. Even in its post-Hegelian forms (that of Marxism and of the form represented by Nietzsche), he claims, the modern surpasses an exhaustion of the discourse of emancipation to show all the signs of the end of the philosophy of the subject and the project of Western philosophy in general. He writes (1989,12) :

The modern is, rather, the unfolding in all its forms of a finishing philosophy of the subject. And this is the case even with techno- science, to use Lyotard’s term, which is autonomous in the sense that it is its own subject. And with the postmodern, which is a retrenchment onto the little subject after the failure of the great subject (subject of history, or subject of Humanity).

Lyotard (1989), replying to Lacoue-Labarthe, disagrees. He considers it a mistake to talk of the philosophy of the subject in terms of classical Greek philosophy. In this he may have had in mind that the philosophy of the subject, echoing Foucault’s assertion of ”man” being a recent invention, begins with the birth of modern philosophy on the ground tilled by Descartes and later by Kant. At any event Lyotard (1989:14) wants to disabuse Lacoue-Labarthe of the notion that the postmodern is just a retreat of the big subject into the small subject. At the same time he points to a movement in the history of philosophy, of what he calls an anti-or a non-subject philosophy, to call into question more general assertions about the end of philosophy. That the philosophy of the subject is at an end, however, is not in dispute. It is a theme which runs through much German and French modern philosophy. Seyla Benhabib (1986:343-4), for instance, writes:

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No idea has been as central to the tradition of critical social theory as the belief that the exercise of human reason is essential to the attainment of moral autonomy and fulfdment, public justice and progress. This idea, which critical theory showed with the great thinkers of the bourgeois Enlightenment from Hobbes to Kant, was never really repudiated.

Benhabib (1986:344) charts a series of movements leading to an impasse: Hegel's critique of Kant's pure reason which emphasised the unfolding of reason in history; Marx's critique of Hegel initiating the turn from the reflective to the productive subject; the early Frankfurt School's appropriation of insights from both Hegel and Man to emphasise "that the autonomous subject was not an isolated Cartesian ego, but a historically and socially situated, concrete, and embodied self".

Yet, even combining such insights, the reinterpretation of the autonomous subject as the subject of history came to sound increasingly empty after the Holocaust and the horrors of Stalinism. It seemed that the two legacies of the Enlightenment - technical and practical reason- were incompatible and that nothing of value could be redeemed from the Enlightenment outside of the notion of instrumentality. Benhabib (198695) comments:

This impasse indicated that the shift from the repective subject of idealism to the productive subject of Marxism offered no real alternatives.

Habermas' "move" from the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject which incorporates Marx's notion of the productive subject, to the paradigm of mutual understanding is intended to resolve this impasse. Benhabib recognises certain gains in this shift: the replacement of the concept of truth by a communica- tional model of argumentation; the substitution of a model of reflection by one of argumentative interaction; the reinterpretation of the notion of autonomy, no longer considered as self-legislation but, rather, as the capacity to adopt and act on a universalist standpoint, and finally the shift to a form of normative legitimacy where norms are generated under conditions of a rationally moti- vated consensus. Such a project Benhabib (19863%) indicates, carries with it risks and obscurities. Both the return to reconstruction of competencies and the employment of transcendental or quasi-transcendental forms of argumentation obscure some of the essential insights involved in the paradigm shift; such as:

the emphasis on human plurality; the narrative and interpretive structure of action; the utopian hopes of a communicative access to need interpretations, and the vision of a community justice that fosters a community of solidmity.

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Other commentators, poststructuralist critics included, are suspicious of Habermad transcendentalism and universalism, of Habermas' project of saving the emancipatory impulse of the Enlightenment by offering principles to ground and provide foundations for his reconstructive theory of communicative action. Habermad appeal to rational consensus and discursively redeemable validity claims is considered just one more attempt to "eternalize the discourse of the day" (Rorty,1980:10); one more self-deceptive effort to ground the European form of life and its institutions by glorifying contingent social practices.

Benhabib's (1986) reasons for rejecting the discourse of the philosophy of the subject are, first, that it cannot provide workable explanations of the current crises phenomena facing our societies today and, second, that it leads to an unacceptable normative position which privileges the working class as the representative of humanity.

Contemporary French philosophy, especially that which may be described loosely as poststructuralist, shares with critical theory an ultimate rejection of Hegel's subject of reflection. There is similarly a movement toward the speci- fication of the subject in terms of its embodiment (Levinas), its temporality and its embeddedness in socio-historical conditions. Indeed, it is possible to trace the reception of Hegelianism in contemporary French thought from the first moment of popularity among the first generation of interpreters (Hyppo- lite and Kojbve) to one of rebellion of the second generation.'

Derrida (1982)-in an early essay-addressed the question of 'Where is France, as concerns man?" in a way that provides a basis for understanding the genesis of the structure-agency debate. He indicates how after the war the thought that dominated France was essentially humanist, commenting that (Derrida, 1982: 16):

the history of the concept man is never examined. Everything occurs as if the sign man had no origin, no historical, cultural or linguistic limit.

While "current" French thought (in the 1970s) was dominated by the critique of humanism and anthropologism such a critique, Derrida (1982:119) maintains, is more a product of an amalgamation of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger with the old metaphysical humanism, rather than a central re-questioning.

Judith Butler (1987: 175), echoing this interpretation, presents French theory as a series of reflections on Hegel:

The twentieth-century history of Hegelianism in France can be understood in terms of two constitutive moments; (1) the specifica- tion of the subject in terms of finitude, corporeal boundaries, and temporality, and (2) the "splitting" (Lacan), "displacement" (Derrida), and eventual death (Foucault, Deleuze) of the Hegelian subject.

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Without embarking on an exegesis of the writings of those “poststructuralist” thinkers, which is well beyond the scope of this paper, we might accept with Butler (1987: 183) that for both Derrida and Foucault:

the Hegelian theme of relational opposition is radically challenged through a formulation of difference as a primary and irrefutable lin- guisticlhistorical constant.

Butler (1987:185) plots the growing instability of the subject in the writings of KojCve, Hyppolite and Sartre and summarises the progression in French thought as series of reflections on Hegel’s “anthropocentrism”:

While the subject in Hegel is projected and then recovered in Sartre it is projected endlessly without recovery, but nevertheless knows itself in its estrangement and so remains a unitary consciousness, reflexively self-identical. In the psychoanalytical structuralism of Lacan and in the Nietzschean writings of Deleuze and Foucault, the subject is once again understood as a projected unity, but this projec- tion disguises and falsifies the multiplicitous disunity constitutive of experience, whether conceived as libidinal forces, the will-to- power, or the strategies of powerldiscourse”.

I1 Liberal Discourse, Education and Communitarian Critiques of Individualism Dewey’s (1931) guiding metaphor is that of America as a house divided against itself. What he means by this metaphor is that America had two opposing cultural traditions- an older tradition, based on the principles of money exchange (capitalism) and a younger tradition, based on equality of opportunity and freedom of association. We might summarise these two traditions as two forms of competing liberalism- a market liberalism and a humanist liberalism.

The period of the 1960s and the early 1970s was witness to a series of cultural crises heralding the triumph of principles of liberal humanism- the civil and human rights movements, the growth of anti-establishment postwar youth cultures, the revitalisation of ethnic minorities, the peace movement and, in particular, the Vietnam protest movement, the anti-apartheid movement and the student movement - all these so-called cultural crises which posed problems of social legitimation for then existing civil institutions resulted in significant gains in person rights.

However in the late 1970s and the decade of the 1980s there has been a revival of the main articles of faith of market liberalism. The so-called New Right is now the ascendant sign and under strategies of privatisation designed to restructure capital- to provide favourable public conditions for the new reac- cumulation of capital under conditions of declining productivity - the defini- tions of public and private are being redrawn. The historical struggle continues,

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perhaps as an indication of the contradiction in liberal-capitalist democracies between the demands for capital accumulation on the one hand and those for democratic legitimation on the other, as neo-Marxists such as James O'Connor and Jurgen Habermas claim.

We do not wish to align ourselves theoretically with Dewey's optimistic faith in the nature of Western "progress" under science and technology, for this notion of rational progress is both naive and misplaced. But we do suggest that his metaphor of a house divided against itself is appropriate for understanding the present political situation in the Western world. To a large extent we are experiencing the contradiction (our word, not Dewey's) between the imperatives of a liberal humanism underlying the role of government and the traditional welfare state, and that of a market liberalism which seeks to reduce government intervention both in the economy and in society more generally.

Specifxally, we suggest that the discourse of liberalism is concerned with the ideological reproduction of us - of human beings - as "individuals". This is a difficult thesis to develop, for historically liberal discourse since the French Revolution has shaped the concepts- the institutions and practices by which new members of Eurocentric-based societies came to view and understand themselves. Liberalism, we are claiming, has shaped and determined to a very large extent self-understandings of ourselves as rationally autonomous individuals. Liberalism has "manufactured" the notion of a human being as a rationally autonomous person (post-Kant) and liberal discourse (and practice) has constructed us accordingly. (The notion of "construction" used here is developed more fully in reference to Foucault's work in the third section of the paper).

Against these commonsense (or theoretical) institutions we have about ourselves as "individuals", we wish to make the case that we are socially constructed, in a strong sense, as individuals, and that this process is in part one of ideological self production. In general terms the major task is first to problematise the category of "the individual" as the central underlying category of liberal discourse. The second task is to show how we might be constructed as consumer individuals.

What has this to do with educational philosophy? The philosophy part is, perhaps, not hard to grasp for we are dealing with the philosophy of the subject and how subjects become "individuals". But why educational philosophy? Because education is concerned with understanding the principal socialising means in our society, and in particular, that of schooling. The school, along with the family as an institution, constructs us as "individuals" through a network of educational practices, including for example, examinations, forms of surveillance, records, reports, competitions and so on. These practices are both part of the formal, and the informal or hidden curriculum (Illich 1973). In relation to the first task one commentator (Dunn 1979:32-33) summarises liberalism in the following way:

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We have already mustered a dismaying number of categories for setting out the main features of liberalism: political rationalism, hostility to autocracy, cultural distaste for consellratism and for tradition in general, tolerance. But there is one further category which we need to note explicitly before we can begin a historical account of liberalism’s development and fate. This category is in some ways the most elusive of the lot. Indeed it is not even clear what is the right verbal form under which to consider it. Liberalism i f is sometimes said is a form of individualism. Liberal thinkers seek to understand society, state and economy as the sum of the actions of individuals. Indeed they have even developed a systematic pro- fessional intellectual ideology for this practice, known as methodo- logical individualism, which insists that this is the only non-superstitious way in which these entities can be understood, that there is literally nothing else there to understand but one damned individual after another.

Dunn (loc. cit.) draws a distinction between being individual, which he says, is to be distinctive, and being an individual which is not distinctive at all, but merely a reflection of the human condition. In this second sense he writes that we are all individuals is a palpable biological fact, part of the common human fate. All this means is that we have separate bodies and cannot occupy exactly the same place in time and space. He goes on to suggest that being individual is “an almost purely aesthetic category and on the whole an affirmative one”. Further, Dunn distinguishes between two main varieties of liberalism, each with a distinctive psychology:

One rationalist and inclined toward transcendence, much preoc- cupied with the aesthetics of consciousness. The other is mechanical reductive, with a strong propensity to reduce human nature to a stream of intrinsically meaningless and self-reverential desires.

The first is broadly associated with Enlightenment thought, with the development of the notion of the rationally autonomous agent, and is, politically, the form of liberalism that Marxism saw itself coming to fulfil. The second has taken a form which renders liberalism, as a doctrine, the political form of capitalist production. The first, reflected in the work of Kant and Rousseau, focuses on the way reason (or rationality) relates to liberal values. It puts a central value on the individual will, the moral self or agent who uses reason to transcend natural causality and carry out actions for which they bear sole responsibility. The second form, which is both reductive and mechanical places human beings within natural causality and ”fosters a narrow egoist individualism at the expense of free, inventive and generous individuality” (Dunn, 1979:37).

In one sense it is possible to relate these forms to the more popular labels for the two kinds of liberalism mentioned earlier: humanist liberalism and

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market liberalism. They also have similarities to Hayek's notions of collective individualism and true individualism respectively. However both forms of liberalism rest on underlying notions of abstract individualism. Here is how one feminist scholar interprets abstract individualism (Friedman, 1989273);

Abstract individualism considers individual human beings as social atoms, abstracted from their social contexts, and disregards the role of social relationships and human community in constituting the very identity and nature of individual human beings. Sometimes the individuals of abstract individualism are posited as rationally self-interested utility maximizers. Sometimes, also, they are theorized to form communities based fundamentally on competition and conflict among persons vying for scarce resources, communities which represent no deeper social bond than that of instrumental relations based on calculated self-interest.

Marilyn Friedman goes on to provide an account of the way many feminists have asserted a notion of the "social self", against the abstract individualism so prominent in modern liberal theory. This notion of the "social self", she suggests, rests upon "the role of social relationships and human community in constituting both self-identity and the nature and meaning of the partic- ulars of individual lives'' (1989276). Such a conception of the self carries with it a different notion of community. She explains it as follows:

Conflict and competition are no longer considered to be the basic human relationships: instead they are being replaced by alternative visions of the foundation of human society derived from nurturance, caring attachment, and mutual interestedness. Some feminists, for example, recommend that the mother-child relationship be viewed as central to human society, and they project major changes in moral theory from such a revised focus.

The "communitarian self" is therefore not a social atom as liberals would have us believe but rather "a being constituted and defined by its social relationships" (Friedman 1989:276). Communitarian philosophy in its critique of individualism rejects the instrumental conception of social relationships. Friedman (1989) notes how some of these anti-individualist developments are strikingly similar to other theoretical developments which are not specifically feminist and yet she is just as quick to point out that cornunitarian philosophy disregards gender-related problems of traditional communities. The point we think she makes well is that in developing a communitarian critique of individualism as it underlies liberal theory we must be careful not to romanticise notions of community in much the same way that modern liberals want to romanticise the individual. It is clear that traditional communities are and have been highly oppressive for woman, ascribing them subservient roles on the basis of a primitive division of labour.

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From the viewpoint of feminist communitarians, modern liberal thought

Males are theorized to seek and value autonomy, individuation, separation, and the moral ideals of rights and justice which are thought to depend on a highly individuated conception of persons. By contrast, females are theorized to seek and value connection, sociality, inclusion, and moral ideals of care and nurturance.

From this perspective, highly individuated selves have been viewed as a problem. They are seen as incapable of human attach- ments based on mutuality and trust, unresponsive to human needs, approaching social relationships merely as rationally self-interested utility maximizers, thriving on separation and competition, and creating social institutions which tolerate, even legitimise, violence and aggression.

is based on individualistic male values (Friedman, 1989:280):

Marilyn Friedman is only one of a number of writers to have provided a “communitarian” critique of liberalism. Her critique is based upon feminist values and is suspicious of arguments that invoke a traditional and genderless notion of community. To that extent it represents an advance on earlier thinkers who in the past decade have mounted an attack on liberal political theory.

Yet Friedman while articulating a notion of the self which is compatible with that of community, from the viewpoint of a feminist, is p l t y of sub- stituting one universalistic notion (that of the “social self”) for another (the ”individual self”). In one sense, it could be argued, she is privileging unity over difference in a way which is politically problematic. Young (1990;301), for example, argues that “a desire for unity or wholeness in discourse generates borders, dichotomies, and exclusions” and that the ideal of community is undesirably utopian in several ways (Young, 1oc.cit.):

It fails to see that alienation and violence are not only a function of mediation of social relations but also can and do exist in face-to- face relations. It implausibly proposes a society without a city. It fails to address the political questions of the relations among face- to-face communities. The ideal of community, finally, totalises and detemporalises the conception of social life by setting up an opposition between authentic and inauthentic social relations.

She proposes that a politics of difference is a better normative ideal for understanding social relations “in which persons live together in relations of mediation among strangers with whom they are not in community” (ibid.:303). In making this proposal and in providing a critique of communitarianism Young relies upon insights from Demda and Kristeva principally.

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Neal and Paris (1990) have summarised the basic themes that critics as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), Michael Sandel (1982), Charles Taylor (1979) and Benjamin Barber (1984), among others, share (Neal & Paris, 1990:419):

Liberal political theory, it is claimed, is excessively individualistic and insufficiently historicist. In particular, the individualism charac- teristic of liberal political theory is said to produce a peculiar view of the self, one divorced from social relations which might constitute it. At the same time, the liberal claim that society should be neutral regarding conceptions of the good is said to misunderstand the idea of community and the fact that liberal societies inevitably promote certain kinds of virtue and ignore others. Finally, liberalism is said to misunderstand claims to rights, treating them as transcen- dent principles rather than as historical and contingent features of liberal communities.

In response to these criticisms, liberals such as Amy Gutmann (1985), Joel Feinberg (1987) and Allen Buchanan (1989) have attempted to argue that there is nothing at odds in the basic philosophy of liberalism which makes it incompatible with an expanded view of the individual to accommodate the communitarians’ criticisms. Gutmann (1985:316), for instance, first argues that:

neither MacIntyre’s nor Sandel’s critique succeeds in undermining liberal rights because neither gives an accurate account of their foundations. MacIntyre mistakenly denies liberalism the possibility of foundations: Sandel ascribes to liberalism foundations it need not have.

Second, Gutmann wants to argue that there is a fundamental dualistic mistake at root in their interpretive method (Gutmann, 19853316f.):

either our identities are independent of our ends . . . or they are constituted by community; either justice takes absolute priority over the good or the good takes the place of justice; either justice must be independent of all historical and social particularities or virtue must depend completely on the particular social practices of each society, and so on.

Her conclusion is to recognise a constructive potential in communitarianism for it ”has the potential for helping us to discover a politics that combines community with a commitment to basic liberal values” (ibid.:320). Communitarian values, we are told, therefore, ought to be ”properly viewed as supplementing rather than supplanting basic liberal ones” and she suggests that such a ”reformed liberalism might entail “creating new political institutions or reviving old ones” (ibid.:321).

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Gutmann’s (1985) ’reformed’ liberalism suffers a number of faults. First, her main objective is to attempt to show how the communitarians, MacIntyre and Sandel, have misinterpreted the liberal position and how there is a basic defect in their interpretative method. From this point of view, her posture is primarily a defensive one. Only later, and in sketchy terms, does she attempt to lay down an expanded or reformed liberalism. Second, she deals only with MacIntyre and Sandel rather than .with the tradition of the philosophy of subject-centred reason and its postmodernist critique. To this extent it might be argued that Gutmann misses, perhaps, the most trenchant criticisms of individualism that have been made to date. In this respect it could be argued that the basic opposition between individualism and community remains caught up in the contradiction between liberalism and Marxism as the two grand meta- narratives of modernity. Third, even given her attempts to argue the case in theory for a reformed, communitarian, liberalism, she is insufficiently historical in her basic orientation. Gutmann, weighed down in theoretical activities, ignores both the wealth of historical detail in Foucault’s critique of liberal humanist institutions (which emerge with the growth of the human sciences during the nineteenth century) and the contemporary reality of the rise of a particular pernicious form of neo-liberal individualism, in the ascendent sign since the late 1970s, which threatens to permanently alter the parameters of Western societies - their institutions and practices - in favour of a revived, possessive, consumer-oriented, individualism that admits little qualification. In this sense, Gutmann’s endeavours can be described as “misplaced theoreti- cism or critique” which is potentially dangerous in that, pretending an histori- cism, it dislocates criticism at a time that it is socially most necessary.

This is a question taken up indirectly by Neal and Paris (1990). Having argued that not enough attention has been directed to distinguishing between either different types of communitarian criticisms -of the actual practices of liberal societies or political theories advanced by liberals - or different conceptions of ”shared relation”, Neal and Paris (1990:439) conclude by warning us that we should:

avoid fully detaching contemporary political philosophy from its political and practical dimensions. Our view is that the problem lies in thinking that this detachment is either a possible or desirable endeavour in the frrst place. The issues of self and community, shared relations and autonomy, and justification are crucial ulti- mately because they affect how we define and just@ a liberal community, or alternatives to it.

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I11 Education, Power and the Individual According to Andrew Gamble (1990:419) a more diverse and fragmented study of British politics has emerged in recent years:

Marxism was once the main challenger to the Westminster model; today the principal challenges comes from the New Right. It has emerged as a major organising perspective for thinking about contemporary problems of British politics. Among its distinctive features are suspicion of the state, faith in markets and hostility to any processes that extend the survey of politics over individual choice and behaviour.

David Miller (1990) recognises a resurgence of political theory in Britain based on the emergence of ”conceptual history” and the shift from conceptional analyses to normative political theory. As regards the latter trend he mentions individualist and communitarian approaches as representing two opposed starting points for the formulation of social and political theory. Having com- mented that Rawls in his post-1980 writings has moved towards a communitarian position, he distinguishes the alternative in terms of “a tougher-minded application of individualist method as a basis for normative political theory”. In this, Miller (1990:432) recognises the rational choice theory of Jon Elster (and the work of public choice theorists) and indicates the force of the aiticisms that have been made: that individuals do not conform to canons of rationality; that rational choice theory assumes h e d preferences and finds it difficult to account for changes in individual preferences, and that “the very notion of individuals making rational choices between options presupposes a social and cultural context within which the capacity to make choices can be developed“. He distinguishes the alternative in terms of “a tougher-minded application of individualist method as a basis for normative political theory”.

Miller (1990:433) concludes his analysis with the following observation:

If we turn to communitarian political theory itself, what is striking is its failure to match its powerful critique with constructive theory- building of its own.

While this may be the case, it is not clear that this is the only or even the best, way to proceed. To some theorists of poststructuralist persuasion, the notion of “constructive theory-building” smacks of a totalising reason, the attempt to restore theory to a universalist and global dimension, whilst ignoring the subjugation of local knowledges and identities which have and will be subsumed under universal premises. Yet there are attempts to go beyond the philosophy of the subject which are, so to speak, both “negative” and “positive” approaches. The latter might be seen to be represented in Benhabib’s 198634744) attempt to outline a ”politics of empowerment” which aims at

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revising the foundations for critical theory "to make it more compatible with a radical, participatory, and pluralist conception of politic^".^ Such a view rests on the importance of the new social movements and the way in which a shared perspective is created through acting collectively with others in a process where the recognition of difference is vital to achieving a more genuine unit. It is only through such a community of interaction that we learn to exercise moral and political judgement and discover our self (and collective) identity.3

The "negative" approach is that provided by Foucault's theory of power. We say "negative" only in the photographic sense: when the negative is processed it returns a positive image. In this way one might argue that the positive image of Foucault's "historical" investigations of the different modes by which human beings are made subjects provides an outline of a politics of resistance based on the recognition of collective subjects.'

The second task then is to show how we are all individualised, as individuals of a particular kind. According to Foucault this is done through practices, which were perfected and refined by the human sciences but which, if they are directed at the care and welfare of populations, at one and the same time serve a normalising and individualising function that produces us as subjects-subjected to forms of domination so as to lead useful docile and practical lives (Foucault, 1979a). "Subject" is deliberately ambiguous then between a notion of self as self-identity, and a self which is also subjected. This deliberate ambiguity, of which other examples abound in Foucault, comes from Lacan but is glorified in Derrida.

Essentially we become both individualised and normalised, as subjects who are subjected through disciplinary power. This, produces new "better" knowledge about individuals and the processes of subjection, which are then employed in disciplinary power. According to Foucault there are two types of techniques that human beings use to understand and control themselves. These are what can be called technologies of the self (and they are to be further distinguished from technologies of production and technologies of sign systems which, while they hardly ever function separately, are usually associated with the study and applications of the sciences and linguistics (Foucault, 198218). Technologies of domination are concerned with defining and controlling the condud of individuals, submitting them through the exercise of power to certain ends so as to lead useful, docile and practical lives. Technologies of the self, on the other hand, permit individuals "to effect certain operations on their own bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being" (ibid.), so as to reconstruct and transform their selves to attain certain states of wisdom, perfection, purity, and even happiness.

Foucault argues that in the West, and essentially post-Enlightenment, we have produced and disseminated various discourses and associated practices which, whilst professing truth to be their aim, i.e. that they function to produce truth, in fact mask their real function. It is not the will-to-knowledge but Nietzsche's will-to-power. Professing to be advancing truth in the develop-

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ment and circulation of such discourses, specific powers are attained and used to produce certain effects. His particular target is the discourse(s) of the human sciences (sometimes referred to by him as ”humanism”). In brief, ”the history of the West cannot be dissociated from the way its ‘truth‘ is produced and produces its effects” (Foucault,1977:112).

How does Foucault believe that we have become entrapped? How do we come to believe, for example, that we are rationally autonomous individuals free to make certain choices when, as he says, “there are more possible freedoms . . . than we can imagine” and we are trapped in our own subjectivity? There are two general answers that Foucault gives and they are not disconnected, even though they carry with them differences in the analyses of power and appear to be ”disconnected in time. The answers are to be found in his analyses of the technologies of domination and technologies of the self: the temporal differences between Discipline and Punish: the birth ofthe prison (Foucault, 1979a), and Vols. I1 and 111 of The History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1986a:1986b) and later papers and interviews. The connecting thread is the exercises of power upon the body; the body and its powers and capacities which are to be transformed in the processes of individualisation, and the body and its desires which are to be transformed in the construction of the self. In the former case the discourse and practices of powerlknowledge developed in the disciplines produce normalised individuals, objectively classihed, and politically dominated. In the second case individuals turn themselves into subjects. These technologies of domination and of the self produce as effects the modern individual who, in Foucault’s eyes, is far from being free.

His interest in techniques, technologies and practices arises from his typical “philosophical” orientation, which is to bypass questions of the nature and legitimacy of, e.g., power, and to ask questions about how individuals have come to be significant elements of the state. His interest is not in the role of the state, its institutions and forms of decision-making, or in theories or ideol- ogies which have been developed in order to justrfy the state. Rather his interest is in how, in the emergence of the modern state, individuals become utilised by this “new” state to live, to work, to produce, to consume and, sometimes to die. His interest is what he calls disciplinary power.

Built into this ”new” notion of the state is a notion of governnnce (Foucault,1979). This is concerned with ensuring the right distribution of “things”, arranged so as to lead to an end convenient for each of the things that are to be governed. For Machiavelli’s Prince, “things” are the territory and its inhabitants, with the emphasis on the former. In the new form of the state, government does not bear upon the territory per se but, rather, upon the complex unit of humanity in all of their relations and their links with property and culture in the widest senses, including accidents and misfortunes such as famines and war (Foucault, 1979b:ll). For this a new form of rationality of the state is required.

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First, if the state is to be strengthened the state's capacity and the means to enlarge it must be established. For this a form of political knowledge different from political theories about the nature of the state and its legitimation is required. Governance required then more than implementing general prin- cipals of justice, wisdom and prudence. A certain concrete, precise and specific knowledge became necessary. Political knowledge and the utilisation of individuals becomes critically important in preserving, if not in reinforcing, the state. Included in this political knowledge, if individuals are to be utilised to reinforce the state, must be knowledge of individuals, of their propensities, abilities and capacities to be utilised. Individuals in this view become instrumental to the ends of the state. Justice, welfare and health are important for individuals, not because they are good in themselves for individuals but because they increase the strength of the state. Investment in health and education are instrumental investments now in the individual, but later to be cashed in by the increased strength of the state.

Power "exists" then at the macro-level as a general form of strategy for individualising and normalising. But ontologically for Foucault it exists only at the micro-level when particular acts bring it into existence. Foucault is a strict nominalist on power. His example (1982:218) is of interest here:

Take for example an educational institution: the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations which govern its internal life, the different activities which are organized there, the diverse persons who live there or meet one another, each with his [sic] own function, his well- defined character-all these things constitute a block of capacity- communication power. The activity which ensure apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behaviour is developed there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the "value" of each person and of levels of knowledge) and by means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy).

It is these activities in the disciplinary blocks, and the work upon the self, which produce us through power "operations" as subjects. It is through strategies such as these, in the hegemony of market liberalism and abstract individualism and work upon oneself, that we may come to construct ourselves as market individuals exercising "free" choice in the "free" market.

What is the way out? How do we resist this individualising and normalising power? Here Foucault, in returning to Kant's paper 'What is Enlightenment?", claims that Kant provides us with "a way out"; h s t through an attitude involving the critical use of reason and, second, through resistance to instances of individualising power. Kant proposed in this paper an attitude of continual critique towards the present so that, at least theoretically, in thought if not in body,

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Frederich I1 could be challenged. Foucault (1982) drops his earlier repressive notions of power (1977) to argue that, necessarily where there is power, there is resistance. The attitude of critical reason can help to determine readings of the human situation which permit resistance to individualising power.

But Foucault’s questions and concerns are at the micro-level. This therefore requires a different notion of resistance. As Krips (1990:177) says:

Resistance is no longer to be seen centrally as an intentional and violent response by an individual to his or her oppression. Instead, resistance must be reconceptualised so that it can both be nonac- tive (unintended) and dispersed, manifested in localized acts of defiance which together form a global pattern of resistance that tran- scends the intentional engagements of any of the agents.

In terms of this analysis, specific acts of resistance “may belong to several different strategies of power and resistance” (ibid.:178). They may be incor- porated and co-opted within a new context “which reconstitutes them as exercises of power” (loc. cit.) as in examples above where appeals of a return to the values of community have been reincorporated and re-commodified by later, consumer, capitalism.

Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power therefore challenges a uniform and monolithic construction of power which motivates the traditional liberal conception. In Foucault’s (1982:224) terms there are different forms of power that cannot be captured in an all encompassing concept:

The forms and specific situations of the government of men [sic] by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superim- posed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another.

If this is so, then, on the same ground one might also argue that notions of resistance and ”communities of resistance” are also multiple. Such an observation, then, might militate against “constructive theory-building” in communitarian political theory, in principle, if “theory-building” is conceived as operating on universalisable assumptions.

To recognise with Foucault the existence of different forms of power (and different forms of resistance) is to recognise empirically the historical modes of subjection of individuals which relate directly to questions of government construed in the widest sense. It is also the necessary first stage toward recog- nising the obstacles to promoting a conception of radical democracy which emphasises effective forms of community control and participation.

For the intellectual then there is a more circumscribed and specific role. It is not to articulate for self or others any form of Grand Theory or, indeed, to speak for others. That would have involved for Foucault a considerable indig- nity. Here we would stand with him. Commenting on the events of May 1968 he said (in a discussion with the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, 1972:207):

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The masses no longer need him [sic] to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he [sic] and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves.

For Foucault then the intellectual’s role is not to elucidate knowledge in abstract symbols, to pose alternative world views, or to express for the masses what they allegedly either do not know, or cannot articulate well but, rather (ibid.):

to sap the power, to take the power, it is an activity conducted along- side those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance.

Endnotes 1 The remainder of this section draws on some material from a recently published

paper, “Education and ‘Empowerment’: Postmodernism, Humanism and Critiques of Individualism”, Peters and Marshall (1991). See Peters and Marshall 1991, and “Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason and the Rise of the New Social Movements” (Peters, 1991) for a view which is theoretically, aligned very closely with Benhabib’s. In the realm of education see the attempt of Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren (1991: 77-78) to go beyond a pedagogy of reproduction and resistance by arguing for an approach to teaching “which takes seriously the question of knowledge produced through language and experience”. Giroux and McLaren’s contribution is imbued with poststructuralist concepts and insights. At one point they write (p. 81):

2

3

In sum, what a critical pedagogy of language and experience attempts to do is to provide students with ”counter-discourse” or “resistance subject positions” . . . through which they can assume a critical distance from their more familiar subject positions in order to engage in a cultural praxis better designed to further the project of social transformation.

Their position represents more an amalgamation of selected poststructuralist insights with traditional ingredients of the project for a critical pedagogy than a fundamental rework of its underlying assumptions. They reject, for instance, the ”antireferen- tiarity” of Derrida’s deconstructionism and remain suspicious of the way in which the “poststructuralist legacy” “denies the viability of political work by enacting the discourse of profound scepticism” (p. 76). While Foucault has been criticised for attempting to avoid a normative stance and for advocating ”an aesthetics of existence” which leads to a ”reinforcement of social tendencies towards atomization” (Dews, 1989:40), there is, we believe, no logic of argument or ”discourse of inevitability” which ties this historical investigation of liberal institutions to a position of individual self stylisation. Indeed, as Stephen White (1988:177) points out, Foucault in an interview the year before he died “admitted that ‘the idea of a consensual politics’ was important as ‘a critical principle with respect to other political forms’ and that there might be such things as consensual politics”.

For an account of the relation between the work of Foucault and education, especially on the question of punishment, see Marshall (1989, 1990).

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