Foucault, Educational Research and the Issue of Autonomy

382 Mark Olssen It was the principle of transparency, abolishing arcana imperii that had always characterized the foreign policies of democracies and tyrannies alike, under the pretext that affairs of state were too complex and delicate to broadcast to the public, and too dangerous to reveal to the enemy.

Such secrecy could not but erode democracy itself, as innumerable actions— at home and abroad—as the national security services of contemporary states testified. Here a vicious circle was at work. States could only become fully democratic once the international system become transparent, but the system could only become fully transparent once every state was democratic.

Such transparency, extended as an operating principle of democracy at all levels— individual, national, global—interferes with, erodes and transforms, the very forms of sovereignty that traditionally defined ‘privacy’ and ‘autonomy’. Both become undermined as a new relation of individual to collective is enacted. This recognises what has always been profoundly true: that nobody is autonomous; but that every one can have rights.

Democracy for Foucault does not rely on or need autonomy. Rights are given, and capabilities provided, in its absence. In fact, in Foucauldian terms autonomy is a strategy for decreasing the role of the state and increasing individual responsibility for welfare. As Jim Marshall (1996, p. 83) puts it, ‘to believe that personal autonomy in modern times is liberating is mistaken—according to Foucault … its pursuit leads to unfreedom’. According to Marshall, ‘from Foucault’s perspective the political has become masked and the true nature of this alleged autonomy and its role in governmentality hidden’ (p. 85). In this sense, to advocate greater autonomy is to advocate greater individualisation in society and greater ‘responsibilisation’ of individuals and families.

In addition to expanding the public sphere, Foucault would encourage educational policies that represent it as a relation of power that develops agency and resistance. For Foucault, it is not autonomy, but mature judgement on the basis of existing terrain of forces. What are required are the arts of criticism. In a pluralistic universe, contradictory possibilities need to be analysed. They are analysed in relation to survival, from a particular point and place. They are mature, and not arbitrary. Discursive historical possibilities can be referenced to other mature discursive systems, that have generated confidence over time, as well as to practical issues and possibilities. Although through appeal to other mature discursive systems and rules of practice, one obtains a type of ‘distance’, of ‘perspective’, a perspective is nevertheless always historical, always expressed in relation to its relevance a particular time and place.

That education should intellectually and charactorlogically empower all individuals is a worthy ideal, and one that is important for the development of democratic values, but again, if power is the essence, in what sense is it accurate or meaningful to identify ‘autonomy’ as the foundation of the architecture to the neglect of other important goods and values, or social processes like social class.

If the concept of autonomy were to mean anything, it represents an equally balanced network of spaces, or points of reference, where the arts of criticism are © 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia