Shades of Discipline. Regarding Power, Resistance, and the Delicate art of Destratification

Author(s):

Joakim Larsson(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2011

Network:

13. Philosophy of Education - Standard submissions

Format:

Paper

Session Information

13 SES 06,

Paper Session

Time:

2011-09-14

15:00-16:30

Room:

J 24/22,1 FL., 30

Chair:

Roland Reichenbach

Contribution

Approaching three hundred years of duty, disciplinary power still seems to prove the correct answer to the ever urgent question of how society should organize and train its labour. Surviving the transition into network society, its services as regulator, orchestrator and examinator of education’s metric spaces seem to remain in high demand as well. There is a possibility, however, that the price paid for its progression in terms of resistances, anti-disciplines, and counter-powers in society has yet to be determined. Inspired by the philosophies of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, this article discusses how such resistances, and the anti-social tendencies they sometimes embody, may give us valuable lessons regarding the overall success of disciplinary power in education.

Method

This article attempts to draw on philosophical resources, such as Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari, but also on recent social science studies that address the transformations of power, discipline and resistance in late modern society, to discuss the following research questions: 1.In what forms do we meet counter-power that diverges from the medium of rational argumentation, and that diverges from the vantage position of a sovereign individual, and instead take the form of a conscious practice of non-individuality, of ‘becoming-molecular’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988)? 2. What would such observations tell us about the drawbacks of late modern disciplinary power, and more importantly, what can they tell us about the possibilities for a philosophy of education to arrive at a more well-informed critique of disciplinary power?

Expected Outcomes

To conclude, the article argues for the need to regard expressions of anti-discipline as rhizomatically interconnected (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) with the disciplinary regimes they react upon, and as such, being valuable resources for evaluating the overall performance of disciplinary power in contemporary educational contexts. Also, it draws attention to the need to envisage creative procedures of destratification, in order to moderate the anti-social effects of resistance.

References

Ball, S.J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 215-228. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. Bushnell, M. (2003). Teachers in the Schoolhouse Panopticon: Complicity and Resistance. Education And Urban Society, 35(3), 251-272. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Foucault, M. (1977/1995). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1980a). Truth and Power. In C. Gordon (1980). Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault. Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. (1980b). The eye of Power. In C. Gordon (1980). Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault. Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. (1983). The Subject and Power. In H.L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (1983). Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Fletcher, A.; Bonell, C.; Rhodes, T. (2009) New counter-school cultures: female students' drug use at a high-achieving secondary school. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30(5), 549—562. Goodson, I.F. (2010). Times of educational change: towards an understanding of patterns of historical and cultural refraction. Journal of Education Policy, 25 (6), 767-775. Munro, L. (2000). Non-Disciplinary Power and the Network Society. Organization, 7(4), 679-695. Perryman, J. (2006). Panoptic performativity and school inspection regimes: disciplinary mechanisms and life under special measures. In: Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 147-161(15).

Author Information

Joakim Larsson (presenting / submitting)

Karlstad University

Education

Arvika

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