Summary:
PANOPTICISM AND HETEROTOPIA: A FOUCAULDIAN READING OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
SUMMARY
This study emanated from the teacher's reflections on contemporary pedagogical practices, the system of knowledge and power that shapes school and the role of education in the constitution of its subjects and it is organized on the basis of two emblematical metaphors in the work of Michel Foucault, panopticism and heterotopia. Contact with Foucauldian thought can stimulate critical inquiry of those involved in educational function regarding the formation of the self through the regulatory processes and the games of truth that it imposes and to provide them with material for awareness and reflection on things which are considered in society and in the school as "accepted", "necessary" or "normal".
In the first part, basic terms of the Foucauldian analysis (discourses, archaeology, genealogy, subject, power, knowledge and truth) are introduced and their connection with the educational process is examined. Education provides individuals with access to various types of discourses, but also controls their promotion and selective distribution. Foucault disputes the notion that man gets more reasonable and accumulates valid knowledge, precisely the view that permeates the curriculum and is offered as a dialectical reading to the students. His research focuses on institutional functioning and power technologies that affect human bodies, while highlighting the materiality of its mechanisms and records how rationality as sovereignty normalizes people. Modernity checked the properties and behavior of the individual through the human sciences and Foucault's work is a study of the attempt of power to achieve this result, but at the same time includes the examination of the subject's ability to constitute itself in the direction of non-domination.
Discussed below are the dominant paradigms of humanistic and liberal education, according to which the subject itself is the source of reason and meaning, clearly separated from the external reality. Foucault describes the modernization of education as "illusion", because the adhesion to the traditional substrate of "humanism" ensures the maintenance of social organization. Especially the area of secondary education, governed by humanism, receives his strict criticism, because it offers an education of ignorance, giving absolutely no means for an understanding of what happens in the world, being "outdated" and "sentimental". As for the liberal education, in terms of the Foucauldian analysis the existence of universal rules that allow for a person to act in a morally autonomous way and the very notion of autonomous "human nature" are two issues introduced in western thought since the Enlightenment and conceal the essentially political project of the power to set up through the educational system, not a free but a governable subject.
The third part refers to the discipline that includes the techniques of distribution of individuals in space and control of the activity of bodies in relation to time and performance, which are applied in various places of internment, including school, organizing space, time and capacity in the quest of the largest possible effect. Inside these places, separation, timing and subjugation of individuals are carried out by the application of techniques of rational management that serve their transformation into productive and consuming units in the capitalist economy. Even before it was put in architectural terms in the example of the panopticon, there already had existed the conditions for an operating utilitarian panopticism. The composition of spatial classification with discipline was realized in the panopticon of Bentham, a model prison plan that would "humanize" the form of the British correctional system and in which the architecture is transformed into subjugation factor, facilitating the gaze of the power to supervise the area. As a machine in the field of education, the panopticon carries out valid recordings: scores performance safely, identifies skills, assesses characters, reveals individual differences and is also ideal for parallel pedagogical experiments. Panopticism as transecting principle inherent in modernity, guaranteed the effectiveness of the incarcerations in the disciplinary society and after that dominates the society of control, under the neoliberal demand of efficient and safe training that shapes the individual. The market incorporates rapidly the school space to its operations and enforces its principles and rules on the procedures of education. Surveillance technologies providing the probability of observing, enhance self-monitoring of students and teachers causing them to behave as conformed subjects who watch their own behavior. Management in education is the modern equivalent of the panopticon synthesizing the discipline and the technologies of the self within a regulatory administrative framework. The economic and political developments of recent decades made the logic of industrial production and market competition prevailing in education by imposing a bureaucratic rationality that stifles the politically and ideologically charged choices and ignores the moral and cultural issues in the face of economic efficiency.
In the fourth part heterotopia is treated as doubtful space that reveals something about the society in which it is located by the way that it integrates and reconciles the contradictions which this society produces but fails to resolve. Its definition through the association with the utopia and the real makes it doubly ambiguous, posing the question of whether it is a world of discipline or emancipation, resistance or complacency. In any case, Foucault had understood the critical danger of being trapped into the interior in the name of trying to overthrow the sovereign: it is not enough for someone to reverse the order of things or to entrench their materiality to get free of them, but it is necessary, in accordance with the order of discourse, to query about the appearance and function of the subject in the order of space. As the "dispersion" of the subject as "multiplicity of positions" and "discontinuity of the function" extends to the grid of heterotopia, giving it a position shaped historically from social, political and economic processes, the movement at the limits of the subject's relationship with the space will produce indistinguishably the discourse for the space and subjectivity. The exterior is no longer perceived as the empty place of isolation and negative definition of values, but as the unfolding of what exists under investigation and the limit is not the place of barren dialectal divisions, but the volatile field of transformations. Consequently, heterotopia, as a marginal place, a place in motion according to the metaphor of the ship that closes the homonymous text, is not meant as a space of existence and action of a structured subject, but as a field open to the forces of knowledge and power that they form it. Under these conditions it is possible to see the heterotopias not as places of an established diversity, but as fields where the transition to a new subjectivity takes place through the meeting of three non-reducible ontologies: power, knowledge and self. In these three dimensions appear the questions "What can I do? What do I know? Who am I?" referring to the still undefined "truth" of the present, where mutations of capitalism are facing a slow emergence of a new self, who appears as a vehicle of a struggle. So if the function of education is determined in part by the forces of knowledge and power that permeate it, it remains to be seen what the possibilities of the subject who acts in this area are to function in a heterotopic way by intervening critically in the process of his/her constitution. If education were also tasked with determining the position of the individual in society, today we have to grasp it in such a way as to allow a person to be amended in accordance with his/her own will and this is not possible unless the education constitutes an ever-open feature. In this context, the teacher is able to change something in the thought and consequently in the action of young children, if s/he shows them that they are much freer than they think, that they consider true and apparent some notions that were constructed in a particular historical moment and that this alleged probability may be subject to criticism and undone. Overcoming the perception that human existence is governed by a universal necessity the teacher will illustrate the arbitrary nature of institutions and will indicate what area of freedom we have at our disposal and also what kind of changes can still be made. Even the teacher-student relationship can go beyond the transmission of knowledge and take the form of a personal relationship that involves the help and support to the child and the influential form of an overt example which is the way of life of the teacher. Since care for oneself requires a teacher or a guide as carrier of truth, self-diligence entails the mutual relationship with the other, which poses itself as a problem but it also creates an awareness that others too are involved in struggles to learn, to care and to control themselves. As far as the care for oneself revoked by curiosity and accompanied by it opens itself in the direction of non-dogmatic problematization of the familiar, it also leaves space for the subject's transformation, linking teacher and student interaction in the educational environment with the practices of the self.
Finally, the thesis concludes by stating that attributing to the marginal area of heterotopias no longer the function of isolation and exclusion, but that of problematization and transformation through the questions posed by the subject itself about his/her relationship with "truth games" through science, with others through the power and also about the relationships between truth, power and the self, the contingent thought and action of the interrogating subject can get unfolded as gestures of freedom that constitute his/her ethics. In the case of contemporary education, suspended today between its humanitarian past and instrumental present this approach should be aimed rather to a critical transformation of the existing than to a violent confrontation.
The Foucauldian search for truth outside boundaries and standard shapes can be perceived as a pedagogical principle which, in the place of dogmatic imposition or skeptical denial, suggests exploring the transformations of the truth and taking part in the emergence of new ones. The critique of Foucault for the Enlightenment can be read as a heterotopic approach to Reason, precisely because it takes into account the physical and mental finitude of the subject and is aware that any violation of our boundaries does not amount to a total abolition of the limits and at the same time as a summary of an educational undertaking for freedom associated with the search for new ways of thinking and acting. The context in which the work in the limits of our self will take place should be experimental, specific, partial and local, that is to say will be checked empirically by contemporary reality, it will avoid the reproduction of programs from societies and ways of thought of past and it will focus in the possible transformations of present rather than planning for the complete reformation of man, consequently, it will invite us to a permanent start whenever we understand our restrictions and limitations.
