Developing a theoretical framework to understand teacher’s subjectivities and emotionality
2.4 Subjectivity and Foucault’s theory of power and technologies of the self
2.4.3 Significance and limitations of Foucault’s theory of power and technologies of the self
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notions of care of the self and ethical self-formation in his study on moral education, emphasising that technologies of the self are crucial in the constitution of an ethical self.
Fenwick (2003) adopts Foucauldian notions of governmentality, pastoral power and technologies of self to explore the influence of teachers’ professional growth plans on how they negotiate their knowledge, identities and practice. She analyses how teachers’
professional growth plans through disciplinary power liberate or repress their identities and practice. She suggests that their professional growth plans constitute teachers as agents of change producing particular identities and knowledge such that “teachers become self- regulators of their own subjectivity” (Fenwick, 2003, p. 350).She nevertheless challenges the power dynamics which mobilise or repress some of their actions and desires. Dixon (2007) adopts Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power, governmentality and technologies of the self as well as Soja’s (1996), Lefebvre’s (1991) and Foucault’s (1984) concepts of space and time to explore how critical, creative, literate embodied subjects are constituted in the spaces of the Foundation Phase classroom. She emphasises the crucial role of teacher control and surveillance. Bevir (1999) draws attention to shifting notions of agency in Foucault’s work.
He differentiates between an excitable Foucault who rejects the subject as agent, declares the subject dead and disregards intentional and creative performances; and a composed Foucault who rejects autonomy and suggests that subjects are constituted within contexts of power relations. In addition to this, Bevir (1999) makes a useful distinction between biopower, as a discipline of the body, and pastoral power which refers to the influence of the consciousness of relevant laws and norms which regulate subjects. Next, I highlight the significance of Foucault’s contributions for this study as well as the limitations of his work.
2.4.3 Significance and limitations of Foucault’s theory of power and
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enabled me to understand and analyse the power relations and knowledge about HIV and AIDS produced in the classroom. His theory of technologies of the self and ethics of care for the self, allowed me to examine how teachers constitute their selves and their ethical practice of teaching. The four components of Foucault’s analytic grid or model of ethical practice namely, ethical substance, mode of subjection, practices of the self or techniques of the self and mode of being (telos) or way of life, offered a framework to analyse how teachers constituted themselves as ethical subjects in their teaching of HIV and AIDS. His ideas about visibility and surveillance have consequence for this study to examine spatiality and power dynamics in the HIV and AIDS classroom. His notion of ethics of care for the self offers possibilities to examine the links between ethics, subjectivity and emotions, which I expand on later in the chapter. Furthermore, his notion of spatiality is significant to explore the relation between subjectivity, spatiality and power. Most importantly, Foucault’s theory offered opportunities to understand diversity and difference in teachers’ subjectivities as well as their agency in the HIV and AIDS classroom.
While acknowledging the acclaim and insights of Foucault’s work, nonetheless, I am mindful of the criticisms and gaps in his work as Smart (2002, p. 13) cautions that he “became renowned as an original and provocative thinker, celebrated and criticised, paraphrased and misrepresented”. I elaborate upon the tensions and criticisms of his work in the following discussion.
Foucault’s notions of disciplinary power, power/resistance and subjectivity have been criticised as ‘deterministic’, producing docile, passive subjects and denying the possibility of agency and the liberated subject (Bevir, 1999; Elliott, 2001; Fraser, 1989; Hartsock, 1990;
McNay, 2000). His notion of subjectivity as constituted by power relations is challenged for implying that power produces ‘docile bodies’, and fails to recognise different forms of power, does not adequately explain resistance to power and fails to justify norms to guide his model of power and resistance (Fraser, 1989; Hartsock, 1990). In a similar vein, McNay (2000, p. 2) argues that Foucault’s conception of disciplinary power produces passive subjects and his account of subjectivity does not adequately address agency due to its “essentially negative understanding of subject formation”.
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Like Bevir (1999), McNay (2000) posits that Foucault’s notion of the passive subject rules out the possibility of an autonomous, active agent. McNay (2000) contends that the consequence of the dichotomy in Foucault’s conception of power and resistance is the oscillation in his thought between determinism and voluntarism, restriction and liberty. Her main criticism of Foucault’s notion of subjectification as subjection is that it cannot theoretically explicate the active dimensions of agency and how individuals act in response to difference and difficulty. Elliott (2001) also criticises Foucault’s notion that society is regulated by power relations and disagrees that disciplinary power represents general power in modern societies. For Elliott (2001), Foucault overemphasises the importance of surveillance and portrays individuals as passive bodies whose agency and knowledgeability are denied by society. For Bevir (1999, p. 70), “the main criticism of Foucault is that he cuts the ground from under his feet: in rejecting the possibility of reason and freedom, he leaves no epistemological or normative grounds on which to build his own histories with their ethical connotations”. Although Foucault’s analysis of the relationships between power, the body and sexuality inspires much interest among contemporary feminists, they are nevertheless critical of his neglect of the issue of gender and his negligible reference to women. In addition to this, Foucault draws attention to two challenges of analysing techniques of the self: firstly, they are frequently invisible and secondly, they are often related to techniques for directing or managing others, such as in schools where teachers manage others and teach them to manage themselves (1997a, p. 277).
As intimated earlier, most of these criticisms relate to Foucault’s early work. Foucault himself acknowledges some of these criticisms and re-conceptualises his notions of power, subjectivity and agency in his later work, which I adopt in this study. Foucault’s later work, Bevir (1999) contends, could develop an explanation for reason allowing us to accept an objective body of knowledge as well as formulate an appropriate ethic by using agency to differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable power relations.
Nevertheless, Foucauldian notions of power/domination, power/resistance, power/knowledge and technologies of the self, as well as ethics of care of the self are significant to make sense of and analyse the modes of power and resistance, subject positioning, constitution of ethical subjects and subjectivities of teachers in the HIV and AIDS classroom. I contend that his notions of ethical practice and ethics of care of the self and aesthetics of existence point to the
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relationship between ethics, subjectivity and emotions, which I attempt to build into my theoretical framework. Since Foucault’s theory of power and technologies of the self could not offer explanatory and analytical frameworks to make sense of the relation between teachers’ subjectivities and emotions, I turn to Hargreaves’s theory of the emotions of teaching and Zembylas’s genealogy of emotions in teaching. The following section explores how subjectivity and ethics are intricately linked with the emotions of teachers.