Blacks; femininity instead of women, homosexuality instead of homo- sexuals, childhood ... ancient Greece, medieval, modem, and contemporary discourses of.
3 The Sociology of Knowledge and the Sociology of Education:' Michel Foucault and Critical Traditions
o Thomas S. Popkewitz
Introduction My concern in this chapter is with how Michel Foucault's methodologies for the study of power enable us to reexamine and revision the "foundations" of critical traditions inherited from nineteenth-century European forbearers. I see Foucault's work as both generative and illustrative of an intellectual tradition that provide certain breaks with the ordering principles of critical traditions dominating Western left thinking since the turn of the, century. His concern with how the subject is constituted in power relations forms an important contribution to recent social theory concerned with the politics of "identity," as witnessed by the theoretical and historical work within the feminist movement. His consideration of change as ruptures and breaks, related to French philosophical and history schools, has thrown into sharp relief our conceptions of history and of the conventions of progress that underlie social and educational sciences. The pragmatism of Foucault's scholarship raises important questions about the relation of intellectual production to social practices, questions that are taken up as well within the work of Pierre Bourdieu, among others. The attention given to Foucault is part of a larger sea-migration of critical traditions of social science since the post World War II period. By sea-migration, I mean the post-World War II mixing of European continental social theories that integrate historical and 47
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philosophical discourses with that of more pragmatic (and analytic) traditions in United States, Britain, and Australia. l If one reads educational literature in the United States since the 1970s, for example, different European writings provide important conceptual and methodological directions for the study of the politics of school curriculum. The translations and incorporation of European Marxists social philosophy, such as that of the Frankfurt School of critical theory from Germany, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and more recently, French "postmodern" and feminist theories are important to the production of a "critical" space within the education. My raising the issue of "sea-migrations" early in this essay is to provide a reading of Foucault as occurring within intellectuals traditions that organize problems and methods of study. My use of the term "critical" places the work of Foucault in a field concerned with the issues of power and domination in, schooling. At one level, critical refers to a broad band of disciplined questioning of the ways in which power works through the discursive practices and performances of schooling. The various modes of critical inquiry are to understand, for example, how the marginization of people is constructed, the various forms in which power operates, and "of interrogating anew the evidence and the postulates, of shaking up habits, ways of acting and thinking, of dispelling commonplace beliefs, of taking a new measure of rules and institutions" (Foucault 1991, 11-12). Further, critical also entails a self-reflectivity about the implications of intellectual work as political projects. Foucault's work, I believe, is important for entering into a conversation about a particular turn in critical thought during the past few decades. Whereas previous critical scholarship has associated knowledge as separate from and as part of the epiphenomena through which social material practices are formed, Foucault's work is illustrative of a move within critical traditions to focus on knowledge as a material element in social life. In particular, Foucault provides methodological strategies for interpreting how the constitution of the "self' and "individuality" are the effects of power; he joins that issue to a consideration of the social sciences as practices that deploy power. While I would want to relate the current moves in critical research to the sociology of knowledge conceptualized by Emile Durkheim and Karl Mannheim during the early years of this century, we also need to recognize a revitalization and revisicming of that work that responds to and is part of changing social and political conditions. Foucault provides entrance to an intellectual tradition to emerge forcefully in the past decade to challenge the hegemony of Marxist
theories about issues of power and the politics of social change. This challenge to Marxist theories, I am arguing, is not to displace them with another hegemony, but to recognize that there are certain changing conditions in the construction of power that are not adequately articulated through Marxist theories and, in some instances, obscured in previous critical traditions. 2 While I accept a need to be sensitive to structural relations, my concern is mainly with a view of power that is different from and, at certain points, complementary with that of the structuralism of Marxist theories. The essay proceeds to provide a scaffolding of ideas whose resultant "logic" relates a number of cross-currents in social theory and history that vision and revision the critical projects of intellectuals. I first discuss historically the forming of critical traditions in the United States. I then proceed to Foucault's "decentering of the subject" in which he argues for understanding the relation of power and knowledge. In this discussion, I argue that Foucault maintains Enlightenment commitments to reason and rationality in the process of change; but alters the methodological approaches to the study of change and the politics of intellectual work. I further explore the shift in the study of power by considering power as that of sovereignty/repression and that of deployment/production. In the final sections, I consider the politics of intellectual work to challenge certain philosophical assumptions about the agent in considering social change.
Shifts in the Critical of Critical Research If we look historically at critical traditions, they have been evident in Europe since at least the work of Marx in the nineteenth century, although they had a muted institutional development in the United States until the end of World War II. To understand this muted development, we can focus on the development of the social sciences into the DOG university, at the turn of the century. This institutionalization of social scientific knowledge was part of what current literature has called the "modernizing project" (see, e.g., Wagner 1994). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, changes were occurring that involved physical changes in labor, the development of the welfare state, and a social organization related to urbanization. At the same time, and significant in this discussion, modernization involved reconstructions of the principles through which individuals deemed personal competence, achievement, and a secularized notion of salvation in everyday life (see, e.g., Berger et al.
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1973; Giddens 1990). The social sciences gave focus to "the social question"-how the rise of the intervention state could be interrelated with questions of individual freedom, personal self-discipline, and liberty. The debate and struggles about how the knowledge of the nascent social science could relate to the management of freedom and the organization of social progress occurred within a particular liberal framework. That framework accepted the broad outline of progress that focused on the individual as the center of social progress. The state was to guide social betterment through the rationalization and administration of social institutions. Within this project of modernization was little room for traditions that problematized social relations (Silva and Slaughter 1984; Noble 1991). Critical intellectual traditions, often focusing on relational issues of society, politics, and schooling, tended to be structured out of disciplinary debates. 3 The sociological work of teachers in the United States by Willard Wailer during the 1920s and 1930s was critical of existing mores but was not valued in the field until three decades later when conflict approaches were brought back into vogue. 4 In educational literature, we find that publications of The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the Psychological League of New York City, and the New America received little or no institutional support from the American Psychological Association during the depression years (Napoli 1981). The Kappan research series in 1936 published a Marxist interpretation of schools, but with an introduction to the pamphlet that looks similar to a warning on a cigarette package today-the reader should beware that the contents might cause some horrible disease. The educational pamphlets of the Labor Research Association tend to be lost to educational historians. 5 While there was debates about social class and race during the depression and early years of the war, and the conflict theories of the 1940s, they were forgotten, for the most part, 6 in the social science and public discourse by the 1950s. The moral/political space in which social sciences emerged produce disciplinary systems that marginalized critical cliscourses until the late 1960s. At least four elements of the United States can be identified here. First, there was a belief in an exceptionalism of the United States as a nation; with the notion of a nation tied to a religious sense of a "New World" and a manifest
