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25 responses to “Even Foucault couldn’t make this up (hat-tip Rod Dreher)”

1. 

   dmf

   March 6, 2014

   reminds me of 80’s style identity-politics and other “ethics” employee training workshops, these are dreadful and to be resisted, but what are the better alternatives that we might bring to the table?

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2. 

   dmf

   March 6, 2014

   also I don’t think that this “it takes quite a bit of intelligence to get people so complicit in their own immiseration” is so (have you met these folks?), you don’t need to be Robert McNamara to cook up these schemes you just need the relevant power over peoples’ job-security/economic-futures.

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3. 

   Jon Cogburn

   March 6, 2014

   Yeah, you’re probably right about there not needing to be a diabolical genius behind all of this. It may just have to do with what kinds of behaviors get selected for given the way power dynamics work out. Chimpanzees almost certainly do analogous things to one another. . .
   If a Foucault person wants to jump in and improve on the just-so evolutionary psychology story I’m dangerously close to articulating here, it really would help the rest of us understand this kind of thing better.

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4. 

   dmf

   March 6, 2014

   Bruno Latour is going to be leading a related workshop on accounting practices/influences and not to get too reductive (or into the banality of evil) but I think there is something to these managerial (bean-counting?) practices/disciplines (in a family-of-resemblance kind of way)of people as programmable/account-able, shades of Heidegger’s worries about cybernetics:
   http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/06/peter-miller-the-calculating-self/

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5. 

   Turkle

   March 6, 2014

   I’ve always thought, at least w/r/t those insulting and embarrassing “team-building” exercises that the humiliation is, rather than incidental, the whole point. It’s a similar logic to any hazing ritual: we have all suffered the same, etc. I think that they are mostly just a softer, nicer way to extract the same benefits received from violent hazing.

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6. 

   In

   March 6, 2014

   Idiots rule!

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7. 

   dmf

   March 6, 2014

   I try to avoid projecting intentions but certainly one of the outcomes/effects is to render the subjected employees responsible for any future performance failures as they have received “expert” training to succeed at their jobs from their benevolent employers.

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8. 

   Gordon

   March 6, 2014

   Foucauldian answer: it attempts to mold the subjectivity of those subjected to these sorts of things towards greater compliance with corporate, managerial dictates. An exercise like that reinforces to the teachers that they are in no way in charge, but that isn’t probably the most important part. Much more important is that the exercise makes it impossible to think or act in a way that deviates from approved managerial norms: once everyone has had their professional development, financial and other inducements will be set in place to insure that everyone “uses what they have learned,” and administrators will refuse to recognize discussion or complaints unless they’re made using the words that get reinforced in such training sessions. In the meantime, anybody who resists going to them or otherwise kicks up a fuss about them can be cast as opposed to their own professional development, and thus irresponsible with Our Children’s Futures.

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9. 

   Jonathan Weisberg

   March 6, 2014

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1kaPL8ltN4

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10. 

    Eric Brown (Budapest)

    March 6, 2014

    I work on business ethics and teach it in a very, very practical setting and my touchstone in thinking about the general dynamics of ethical and diversity training was influenced by the film “Three Kings”. It’s not a great movie, cinematically or politically, but it portrays in a condensed but realistic way how people from diverse situations can come to respect each other: that is, you have to to get the job done. And as the movie shows, the job changes the more people who are necessary for it. But in my work I present it more generally–to get any job done, you have to bring in everyone relevant and they have to recognize your respect. I deliberately and straightforwardly blur the lines between morality and practically, without eliminating them.
    I try to give my students some reflective resources to form some resistance within their organizations. I talk about, in brief, Foucault’s notion of subjectivity as in Discipline and Punish and technology and care of the self you can find in the late Foucault. Despite the bad reputation of business students they are almost always receptive and very aware of ethical considerations, including stuff like that.

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11. 

    Curtis L

    March 7, 2014

    So the “teachers” teaching teachers have no clue about how to teach. Brilliant.

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12. 

    Jon Cogburn

    March 7, 2014

    Thank you. This makes a lot of sense, and I think it works as a null hypothesis.
    We’ve blogged before about just how common it is for people to be strongly pressured into going along with harmful falsehoods in professional and social settings. It’s strange how many of these important falsehoods are such that people going along with them is part of the mechanic that Foucault characterizes.
    I still want to ask “Why?” with respect to these trends (and anyone who does any service work at all in their institution confronts them, though I’m sure the level varies from institution to institution). Some Foucalutians I’ve read sort of describe it in evolutionary or dialectical terms of how power works and evolves. But maybe explanation stops at some point around here and this is just the reality we live in?
    I know some people think Foucault was entering a third, ethical, period before he died. I don’t know the extent to which that was about the possibility of strategies for resistance and the extent to which it also provided deeper explanations for why power and control works the way he earlier showed them to. Thinking about things like the above video make me wish I understood all of his work much better than I do.

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13. 

    Gordon

    March 7, 2014

    I think Foucault will resist pushing the ‘why’ question too far, particularly w/r/t historical causes. It’s part of how he distances himself from thinkers like Hegel (and even more from PCF-style Marxism).
    The question of periodization of his thought is tricky. I’m coming around to the view (which he himself expresses) that there’s no enormous change in subject matter between “biopower” and “ethics”/subjectification. Even if you only look at History of Sexuality I, a fairly straightforward reading will come up with the idea that, for Foucault, sexuality as a form of power by necessity involves methods of subjectification. This happens at a couple of levels. One is that sexuality becomes the “truth” of humans in the sense of providing a ‘scientific’ and explanatory mechanism through which human behaviors can be understood (think Freud for a particularly unsubtle example). The other is that there are certain behaviors and ways of being which are proscribed or encouraged. We are, for example, supposed to constantly talk about sex. A lot of the regime of sexuality (this is more clear in the last couple of lectures of Abnormal) is organized around stopping children from masturbating by structuring their environment such that they aren’t alone; that in turn requires profoundly shifting the notion of the family and the appropriate roles of its members during the 19c. And so on. So you get veridiction and subjectification as part of biopower.
    The turn to the Greek texts then strikes me as his effort to understand these techniques more generally, and in a cultural context very different from our own. How does, for example, sexuality function for Athenians? (answer: not at all like it does for us. It’s about very complex social roles, not what you do. So they don’t have a “sexuality” in the modern sense. This shows up in HS2, and that’s also where there’s a few pages on “ethics”)?
    One topic that shows up in the parresia lectures (The Courage of Truth; I’ve only read the first volume so far – I’m referring here to the last couple of lectures in that volume) is that he also returns to the question of the status of philosophy both as a regime of truth and as a practice (one that requires a particular form of person to do it). His general response of Marxism had been that it was too bossy, always telling people what to do and think. My sense is that he was returning to this problem in a general way in those lectures.
    So in sum, I don’t think there’s a huge gap b/t biopower and ethics. That’s somewhat of a minority view. I also didn’t see it this way until I’d spent some time with his lectures, so the prevalence of the other way of reading is probably partly an artifact of the availability of texts.

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14. 

    dmf

    March 7, 2014

    isn’t it at least in part an effect of trying to have/enforce common rules/disciplines/standards across a system that is made up of all the inevitable variations that come with people and their environs?

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15. 

    Jon Cogburn

    March 7, 2014

    Maybe so. One would think that norms could be enforced without cultural revolution type stuff. But probably nothing is optimal.

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16. 

    Jon Cogburn

    March 7, 2014

    Ooh thanks. That’s very nice.

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17. 

    dmf

    March 7, 2014

    I don’t know once you get to the scale/style of operations where you are coming up with training manuals or professional codes of conduct…

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18. 

    Gordon

    March 7, 2014

    In a sense I think that’s right – but of course there’s different kinds of discipline and standardization. This one seems pretty pernicious. The text of the material itself advocates the usage of “grade appropriate” pedagogy. Surely there are other ways to get teachers to buy into standards than by having them repeat infantalizing garbage that constructs them as very young children, according to its own logic? That’s why I think Jon’s right to think that there’s more going on here than making better teachers. In fact, this exercise might not have anything at all to do with making better teachers.

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19. 

    dmf

    March 7, 2014

    maybe but I don’t see any evidence for that, it’s more likely that these folks are convinced by these kinds of models (have you looked into cognitive-behavioral psychologies and their treatment manuals for example) and frankly not sure that we have better and scalable models, I would hope so but wouldn’t bet on it, plus it’s very hard to find workers who can shape and manage their own practices (are reflective in that ways that Donald Schön and co. were working on), if you look into management theory/psychology this kind of scheme is all too familiar, generally speaking we suck at this kind of thing.

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20. 

    Gordon

    March 7, 2014

    So the Foucauldian in me wants to say that the presence of psychology and treatment manuals pretty much closes the deal on the idea that this is a complex form of subjectification at work, as those establish the scientific basis through which the practice is justified (and the practice will then be read to justify the science). So this is in part a regime of truth through which the capacities of teachers and the ways they will be measured is instituted. In particular, we are producing a truth about pedagogy: it involves the top-down adherence to a plan, which is the same for everyone and which everyone will follow in the same way. Teaching thus becomes quantifiable. That truth in turn abets a regime of standardized testing (“outcomes assessment”). Among its other features, this regime allows us to blame individual teachers and students for their subpar scores rather than looking at larger, structural problems (e.g., poverty).
    It also occurred to me that part of what happens here is that the instructors are modeling appropriate pedagogy. I would not be at all surprised to hear that these workshops were for teachers of predominantly poor children. I remember reading some time ago that upper class schools would tend to have the children role-playing and doing teamwork and projects, whereas lower-income schools would have the kids sit at their desks and memorize things.

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21. 

    dmf

    March 8, 2014

    I just introduced the cog-behav manuals as an example of how these sorts of things go (usually coming out of research universities) but the logic likely holds in this case “So this is in part a regime of truth through which the capacities of teachers and the ways they will be measured is instituted. In particular, we are producing a truth about pedagogy: it involves the top-down adherence to a plan, which is the same for everyone and which everyone will follow in the same way. Teaching thus becomes quantifiable. That truth in turn abets a regime of standardized testing (“outcomes assessment”). Among its other features, this regime allows us to blame individual teachers and students for their subpar scores rather than looking at larger, structural problems (e.g., poverty).” yes, see my related comments above, but they think of these matters in terms of education and not social control (they leave that to , that’s a pretty rosy picture of ‘upper’ class schools which tend to be more focused on individual achievement/competition, have to beat everyone else out to get into higher-ed after all…

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22. 

    dmf

    March 8, 2014

    oops didn’t finish my thought they leave the conscious social control aspects to mental/public health clinicians (psychiatrists, psychologists, social-workers,etc), school police and juvie-probation officers and family court judges, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

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23. 

    Teresa Blankmeyer Burke

    March 8, 2014

    So the video isn’t captioned — and since this is courtesy of WaPo it should be, so I’m getting in touch with them stat. That said, the autocaptions are pretty entertaining! “Where great great me” is my favorite line, followed by “I she me him here”.

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24. 

    dmf

    March 9, 2014

    it has a sort of performative charm/resonance to it. TBB, in terms of the actual content/pedagogy of the videoed measures/formula what do you make of these sort of answering-machine rote gestures/grammars?

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25. 

    Ol Cheezer

    April 4, 2014

    Hm, not sure I’d agree it’s Foucauldian. More like the ancient impulse to religious perfectibility imposed by powerful ecclesiastical state apparatus. (The religion being democracy.) I can’t argue this issue in lofty Ph.D.-tenured-philosopher terms, only as a person with multiple liberal arts degrees, a Ph.D. in statistical analysis and research methods, and three decades of praxis in the Pedagogy Business.
    Most “management/organizational consultants/trainers” I ever knew in higher education and education policy were people who had few practical skills…but were very good at picking up on and articulating emerging discursive fashions. They were even better at convincing others to give them tax, grant, or company dollars to impose these on others as a form of perpetual movement toward perfectibility. I was usually of the view that those holding the purse strings were content to do anything, however silly, impractical, or pie-in-the-sky, so long as it retained or strengthened their show of their power over their workers.
    Hey, I just argued myself into submission. It was Foucauldian. 😀
    FWIW I left a well paying job ($60+K in my early 30s) with a state education agency that was grooming me for higher positions in the agency. I left when they promoted me into a politically motivated “school performance assessment” post which involved exactly what several commenters have noted here: creating things you could measure, of spurious importance, so that you could then later measure how, and that, those numbers improved. Yes, the variables were consciously designed so that they would always go up. Total improvement!
    I don’t think it had so much to do with “infantilizing the poor” so much the mechanisms of institutional power and access grinding along. One must expect this when very intelligent people are put in charge of schooling, everyone, including the burgeoning ranks of the very dim. It surely doesn’t improve when the ranks of the professional schoolers becomes occupied by dimmer minds who truly believe such claptrap…and believe in their own altruism without examining their motives.
    To be perfectly honest, despite being non-PC, most of “the poor” I ever encountered in K-12 and higher education did in fact have the judgmental apparatus of children, had zero comprehension of a future and planning for it in the present, and were very low in intelligence. Many colleagues in higher ed were unable to admit that many of “the poor” were in fact like this, and were developmentally intractable. Don’t even mention trying to grapple with the elephant in the room: how much of intelligence is determined genomically, and where to go from there!
    We were paid to pretend that all people would benefit from schooling, so we pretended even as we knew otherwise from our classroom teaching experience. Trying to discuss this involves a mass rush into a pan-dimensional discursive minefield. There are too many Total Improvement professionals with too much at stake to allow much of a genuine discussion/examination, never mind a rethinking of praxis. And philosophers have not to date supplied a sound framework for examining things like what do to if it turns out that intelligence IS largely genetically determined.

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