10848779908579993

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Discipline and Pedagogics in history:Foucault, aries, and the history ofpanoptical educationJeroen J.H. Dekker a & Daniel M. Lechner aa Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands

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Discipline and Pedagogics in History:Foucault, Ariès, and the History of Panoptical Education

JEROEN J.H. DEKKER AND DANIEL M. LECHNER

INTRODUCTION

For Michel Foucault, the agrarian colony of Mettray, founded in 1839 near Tours inFrance, aimed at the resocialisation of criminal boys—one of them being the famousFrench writer Jean Genet, who stayed at Mettray between 1926 and 1929—serves as theevidence par excellence for his thesis of the genealogy of discipline, as developed in Disci-pline and Punish on the history of the prison.1 Foucault seems to stand alone in this inter-pretation of Mettray. In historiography as well as in testimonies of nineteenth century con-temporaries, Mettray is regarded as a true pedagogical institution, notwithstanding its ex-plicit disciplinary character. In this article, we focus on these contradictory interpretations.Our status question is: How can one explain Foucault's systematic neglect of the pedagogi-cal aspect of this part of the history of education?

In section two, the two interpretations of Mettray are exposed. It will be argued thatMettray was an institution in which close watch, punishment, and education went to-gether. Mettray was in fact a model of temporary restricted marginalisation, discipline be-ing a means in the re-education process. In section three, a short comparison will be madebetween Philippe Aries and Foucault as to education and discipline. Ariès was no doubt thefirst modern historian who systematically made use of the concept of discipline in the his-tory of education. Although Foucault admired the French historian, he nonetheless cameto fundamentally dissimilar conclusions as to the relationship between discipline and edu-cation. In section four, an analysis of Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish) results inthe argument that Foucault's underlying philosophy was responsible for his negligence ofthe pedagogical dimension. At the same time it will be argued that Foucault's ideas, devel-oped after Surveiller et punir, were not in principle anti-pedagogical.

THE FRENCH METTRAY: CARCÉRAL INSTITUTION OR PEDAGOGICAL MECCA?

Frédéric-Auguste Demetz (1796-1873), French judge and initiator of Mettray, before real-izing the colony, founded the Société Paternelle pour l'éducation morale et professionelle desjeunes détenus, to secure Mettray a solid societal basis. The French elite, amongst themGasparin, Beaumont, Bérenger, Cochin, Falloux, Guizot, Moreau-Christophe, Rothschild,and De Tocqueville, joined this society. According to the first of its statutes, the objectiveof the society, and consequently of Mettray, was: '... to provide those children, released on

Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands.

The European Legacy, Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 37-49, 1999©1999 by the International Society for the Study of European Ideas

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38 o*-» JEROEN J.H. DEKKER AND DANIEL M. LECHNER

a provisional basis, and gathered in an agrarian colony, with a moral and religious educa-tion, as well as with a basic elementary education; to have them learn a trade; to accustomthem to agricultural work, and eventually to find a position for them at the countrysidewith craftsmen or farmers' [our translation] ?

First, Foucault's view on Mettray is exposed. Then, some testimonies of contempo-rary philanthropists who visited Mettray in its first years, in the 1830s and 1840s, arelooked at. It is our thesis that the pair of 'surveiller / punir' is inadequate in covering theintentions and practices of Mettray. In regarding Mettray as part of the broad Westernmovement of the foundation of institutions providing temporary restrictedmarginalisation for children at risk, it becomes possible to find a solution to the contradic-tions between the Mettray as seen through Foucault's eyes, and the one existing in theheads of the contemporaries. A third element then, i.e. education, should be added to the'surveiller / punir' pair.

'[I]t is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentratedall the coercive technologies of behaviour. In it were to be found "cloister, prison, school,regiment".... Where Mettray was especially exemplary was in the specificity that it recog-nized in this operation of training. It was related to other forms of supervision, on whichit was based: medicine, general education, religious direction.' Foucault develops his inter-pretation of Mettray in analysing the different situations in which the Mettray staff is sup-posed to act in their different roles, namely 'that of the family ...; that of the army... ; thatof the workshop, with supervisors and foremen ...; that of the school...; and lastly, thejudicial model (each day "justice" was meted out in the parlour)'. The daily course of eventsat Mettray is characterised as a 'practice that by means of coercion normalizes the conductof undisciplined and dangerous individuals'. This practice is being executed by'techniciansof behaviour: engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of the individual'. Within this complexinstitution, 'the principal punishment inflicted was confinement to one's cell'.3 WithinFoucault's genealogy, Mettray constitutes the example par excellence of the carcéral insti-tutions for young criminals with pedagogics left out.

Contemporaries, visiting the colony, had a different opinion. They came in greatnumber to see the miracle in the neighbourhood of Tours. Mettray was famous all over thephilanthropic world. A visit to Mettray was part of the philanthropic journey, popular inthe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 Mettray belonged to the civilised world,to cite the title of the famous book, published in 1880, of the American E.C. Wines, whocrossed the world in search of residential institutions. The emergence of a sufficient num-ber of such institutions was, in his opinion, clear evidence of the civilised character of acountry.5 We will give attention to three testimonies written by philanthropic visitors: theobservations of the Dutch philanthropist Willem Suringar; and reports of two English ob-servers, Matthew Davenport Hill and the Reverend Sydney Parker.

Willem Hendrik Suringar (1790-1872) was a famous Dutch philanthropist, authorof several books on prisons and on poor relief, member of the board of the first nationalDutch philanthropic society, the Maatschappij tot Nut van 'talgemeen [The Society for theGeneral Good], and co-founder, in 1823, of the Genootschap tot Zedelijke Verbetering derGevangenen [Dutch Society for the Moral Amelioration of Prisoners]. He belonged to theinternational elite of philanthropism. In My visit to Mettray, also published in Dutch,French, and German, he wrote down his impressions of his visit to Mettray in 1845. He was

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Disrípline and Pedagogics in History <~>+-> 39

impressed as much by the moral atmosphere and the pedagogical character as by the sys-tem of rewards and punishments. For Suringar, Mettray was a pedagogical institution, oneof the first examples of the new approach to young criminals, which consisted of separat-ing them from adults and regenerating them by agricultural work. Mettray was evidenceof the superiority of such institutions to normal mixed prisons. Mettray was not thecarcéral institution par excellence: it was no prison, but a pedagogical institution.

Let's quote Suringar's words. 'I left Tours at seven o'clock in the morning, and arrivedat Mettray in one hour. Immediately I went to the church. All the pupils had met thereAt eleven o'clock all the pupils met in the school-room. Some strangers were also present.The registers were opened, and the pupils called before this moral tribunal, presided by Mr.Demetz. Each of them was accosted by him, but in a manner, so solemn and worthy, that Ifind it impossible to impart to my auditors or readers the impression, made upon me. Eachaddress was an extemporaneous and a separate one Several times I was moved to tears,by his words and by the tone and way in which he spoke. Never had I witnessed any thingsimilar, never had I believed, that heads and minds might be so well moulded and culti-vated. Demetz knows to show to each pupil the defects of his mind.... [A]nother child iscalled to the bar. The noble Demetz accosts him in these terms, "What must I say of you,my boy, you have been disobedient to the orders of the family-chief, but this was not theworse. It is worse, that you do not regret your unwillingness. You are indifferent, insensible,hardhearted. I am sorry for it, my boy. What must I do with you? Shall I abandon you as alost boy? I should not like to do so. I love you and all the pupils so very tenderly."—Thechild begins to weep bitterly, and Demetz gives to his address a masterly turn. "How, youweep?" says he. "I see tears. How I have been mistaken! I thought you insensible. My judge-ment was wrong. Come, my boy. Return to your place. It will go very well for the future,and I will not punish you now.'"

Back in Holland, Suringar decided to found a similar institution in his own countryand immediately started a campaign to collect money for it: 'If well minded persons ofboth sexes join their endeavours, in three or four years we shall possess in Holland a simi-lar establishment to that of Mettray!'6 In this Nederlandsch Mettray, founded in 1851, onlydeprived children were admitted, due to the demands of Suringar's principal money-pro-vider, Christian Schüller. Thus, the French Mettray, an institution that admitted onlycriminal boys, served as the main example for the foundation of a Dutch institution fordeprived children at risk.

'No Mahommedan ... believes more devoutly in the efficacy of a pilgrimage to Mecca,than I do in one to Mettray.'7 This was the impression of Matthew Davenport Hill (1792-1872), famous English reformer of criminal law, with much attention for juvenile criminals.He joined with Mary Carpenter (1807-1877) in their struggle for more adequate institutionsfor the criminal and deprived children in Great Britain, preferring institutions founded onthe family principle. For Hill, Mettray was clear evidence of his belief that children at riskshould not be re-educated within a youth prison, as for example Parkhurst, the English in-stitution he and many others so fanatically attacked as being the biggest mistake in Englishhistory of institutionalised care for children at risk. In Mettray, he found his Mecca. Partlyas a result of his impressions, also in England a Mettray was founded, namely Red Hill.

The Reverend Sydney Turner, belonging to the same circles as Hill and Carpenter,after his visit to Mettray celebrated the Mettray approach for its focus on love in educating

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40 o»^ JEROEN J.H. DEKKER AND DANIEL M. LECHNER

the boys: 'For the spirit of fear, which is usually the controlling one in such Schools is sub-stituted to a great extent that of love.... The master, or père, as he is called, and the twoassistants who act under him, live and constantly associate with the boys, sharing in theiramusements, and having in the main the same accommodations.... The boy feels that hismaster is not a mere officer to watch him and enforce discipline, or a mere instructor toreach him, but is a relation,—a friend—to sympathise with him and assist him', althoughat the same time, 'the principle is, that no part of the boy's conduct, however inconsider-able, be unnoticed or overlooked.'

As to the system of rewards and punishments, he seems to have another institutionin mind than Foucault did. Foucault stressed imprisonment as the most important andprincipal punishment. In the opinion of Turner, however, the Mettray practice was a dif-ferent one: 'The punishments are,—making the boy stand apart from his companions—privation of meals and of recreations—admonition in the "parlour" of the director—im-prisonment in a light or dark cell, with or without a dry bread and water diet—and finallyexpulsion, which is synonymous with the boys' being sent back to the prison from whichhe was received. Corporal punishment is utterly prohibited'. Thus, imprisonment is indeedpart of the punishment system, but it forms only one of many possible interventions.8

In sum: these contemporary testimonies, produced by well known philanthropistsoutside of France, show us a different institution than the one which appeared in Disciplineand Punish.9 In their eyes, Mettray was a home for the re-education of criminal children,who were regarded as children, not as criminals. Mettray was, in their opinion,characterised by discipline and close watch but at the same time also by child-focused in-tentions and pedagogical acting of the staff. Foucault's pair of'surveiller et punir' should beextended to 'educate', when we take seriously the story present in contemporary testimonies.

A way of interpreting Mettray as an institution in which close watch, punishment,and affectionately intended education went together could be to regard Mettray as an ex-ample of temporary restricted marginalisation. When boys from the urban areas are placedin agricultural institutions, far away from the urban environment, and for a couple ofyears, this can be considered as a 'temporary restricted marginalisation', a means intendedto reach normality, that is de-marginalisation, by way of temporal isolation andmarginalisation. Character and behaviour of children at risk could be redressed duringtheir preparation for a new life in the normal world, in isolating them temporarily fromthe public world, especially from the dangerous big cities. 'Temporary restrictedmarginalisation' is inspired by the Polish historian Bronislaw Geremek, who distinguishedbetween two social areas, namely the centre and the periphery, marginals living in the lat-ter one.10 The frontier between these two areas is fluid. Therefore, the model should be de-veloped further to cover what is happening just around that fluid frontier. This third zone,being principally intermediate, can be called the zone of fragility. In expanded form, themodel contains three distinguished domains, namely centre, marginality, and finally, inbetween, the space of fragility.11

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the marginal position of children be-came a subject of special reconsideration. Previously, children's marginal position wasgenerally seen as part of the social position of their parents,12 but now specific interven-tions as to marginal, at-risk children became acceptable. The European elite, present in

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Discipline and Pedagogics in History <~*+~> 41

philanthropical societies, now seriously was considering issues like youth criminality andchild abandonment.13 Various methods of intervention were proposed and introduced,consisting of techniques of charity and philanthropy, which took in consideration the re-sponsibility of the group focused on, as for example improvement of schooling and fam-ily patronage systems.14 All these methods kept the children at home, with their families.However, for certain categories of children such methods were believed to be insufficient.Risks had gone too far for the criminal and seriously deprived children, for whom a fu-ture of vagrancy or adult criminality seemed unavoidable. In most cases the parents, act-ing in their role of educators, were blamed for this.

For these children, a radical solution was necessary, in the opinion of the majority ofEuropean philanthropists, like Charles Lucas and Frédéric-Auguste Demetz from France,Edouard Ducpétiaux from Belgium, Mary Carpenter, Matthew Davenport Hill, and theReverend Sydney Parker from England, Willem Suringar from the Netherlands, andJohann-Hinrich Wichern from Germany. This opinion was shared by many schoolmasters,priests, and even parents, confronted with the daily practice of managing children at risk.It was time to take more radical measures to the benefit of both the child and society. It wasa radical method indeed, the enthusiastically propagated new method of re-education inresidential homes. Only by taking the children out of the dangerous big towns, into the iso-lated and sane country, was a healing process was possible. Various institutions emerged,mostly financed by private funds, among them famous ones like Mettray in France,Ruysselede in Belgium, the Rauhe Haus near Hamburg in Germany, Red Hill in England,and the Dutch Mettray. We call this approach 'temporary restricted marginalisation', con-sisting in temporarily isolating the children at risk at the margin of society, with the inten-tion of preventing life-long social marginalisation in the future. The birth and working ofthe French Mettray was part of this European movement.15

In other words, Mettray was not in the first place a carceral institution, although Fou-cault rightly emphasised the perfect setup of the colony as to carceral methods and disci-plinary practices. This, however, was only part of the story of Mettray. The colony was alsoexplicitly pedagogical in its organisation, intentions, and practice, as many contemporaryobservers were ready to note after their visit. Mettray was one of the many examples of re-educational homes that emerged in Europe. The archipelago of homes that resulted fromthis care for the deprived and criminal children was, both in its intentions and in its prac-tice, explicitly pedagogical. The carceral was chiefly the means by which the pedagogicalgoal, namely the transformation of criminal and deprived children into decent adults,should be realised.

Foucault's negligence of the pedagogical dimension is the more remarkable becauseAries, whom he admired, developed ideas on discipline in 1960 in his Centuries of Child-hood, in which he also introduced the concept of childhood, 'le sentiment d'enfance'. Onthat book, Adrian Wilson wrote in the first sentence of his article in History and Theory.'Few works have exerted a greater influence upon British and American social historiansthan Philippe Ariès L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime'.16 Therefore, it is appro-priate to examine in the next section similarities and differences as to the history of edu-cation and the concept of discipline present respectively in these two books of Ariès andFoucault.

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42 <->^ JEROENJ.H. DEKKER AND DANIEL M. LECHNER

ARIÈS AND FOUCAULT ON EDUCATION AND DISCIPLINE

Foucault relates the origins of the carcéral system to the transformation of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries European school system. In other words, the Enlightenmentideas on the prison, as formulated by Jeremy Bentham, for example, should be seen as thedevelopment of earlier ideas and practices of school discipline. In doing so, Foucault fol-lows the footsteps of Ariès, whose Centuries of Childhood was the only work quoted, al-though only once, in Discipline and Punish.17 Ariès and Foucault knew each other person-ally. In their academic careers, some remarkable similarities can be observed. Both workedoutside the established French academic circles for many years, Ariès managing his infor-mation centre for tropical agriculture, Foucault working at universities abroad. In severalmagazine articles and in interviews, Foucault demonstrated his admiration for Ariès, call-ing him one of the pioneers of the history of mentalities in an article entitled 'A stunningerudition'.18 In an interview with Ariette Farge et al. he recognized Ariès as the pioneer ofvarious historical themes.19 After Aries' death in 1984, in his obituary in Le NouvelObservateur, Foucault expressed his admiration for Ariès with tones of warmth and sym-pathy, giving all credit to Ariès for the transformation of the history of mentalities as to thetheme of life events: birth, growing up, adulthood, and death.20

Indeed, Foucault developed key concepts and ideas from Ariès' Centuries of Child-hood. However, Foucault, in his Discipline and Punish, did not make any reference, exceptthe one mentioned, to Ariès, making it very difficult for the reader to see that he indeedowed much to Ariès, and was conscious of that too. In this section, we will compare twoimportant topics, present in both books, namely the militarisation of society in the En-lightenment, and discipline and educational practice in history. Also the paradoxical con-nection between both processes will be examined.21

On the combination of liberalism and militarism, Ariès formulates the following:'The liberalism of the eighteenth century was therefore offset by a contrary influence,which obtained a partial triumph, and which imposed a semi-military condition on theschool population. This tendency cannot be attributed entirely to Napoleon. It went backin fact to a more distant source: during the whole of the second half of the eighteenth cen-tury, one can trace the rise of the military idea, at the same time as that of the liberal idea,inside school life.'22 Foucault, on the same theme: 'Historians of ideas usually attribute thedream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; butthere was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the stateof nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal so-cial contract, but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitelyprogressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility.' As to theNapoleonic regime: 'While jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal modelfor the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them thetechnicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective co-ercion of bodies.'23 In other words, Foucault was following the ideas formulated fifteenyears earlier in Centuries of Childhood.

As to the development of discipline in the school system, Ariès formulates the follow-ing: 'An authoritarian and hierarchical discipline was established in the college It origi-nated in ecclesiastical or religious discipline; it was not so much an instrument of coercionas an instrument of moral and spiritual improvement, and it was adopted not only for its

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efficiency, because it was the necessary condition of work in common, but also because ofits intrinsic moral and ascetic value. The pedagogues would adapt it to a system of super-vising children which, at least in theory, was constantly in operation, night and day alike[our italics] ,'24 Centuries of Childhood is full of places referring to the development of dis-cipline and supervision, as for example this one: 'The final establishment of a code of dis-cipline completed an evolution which led from the medieval school, a mere classroom, tothe modern college, a complex institution, designed not only for the tuition but also for thesupervision and care of youth.'25

Aries does not confine the process of discipline to school, the span of his concept ofdiscipline being comparable with that of Foucault: '[S]choolboys and students were orga-nized on new principles of authoritarian hierarchy. Admittedly this evolution was not pe-culiar to childhood: it extended to the whole of society, and the establishment of monar-chical absolutism was one aspect of it. But at school it produced—or followed—a changeparallel to the concept of childhood which is of particular interest to us.'26

Foucault was even more explicit on discipline, the word being the title of Part III ofDiscipline and Punish. 'It is this disciplinary time that was gradually imposed on pedagogi-cal practice—specializing the time of training and detaching it from the adult time, fromthe time of mastery; ... For the "initiatory" time of traditional training ..., disciplinarytime had substituted its multiple and progressive series. A whole analytical pedagogy wasbeing formed, meticulous in its detail... and also very precocious in its history... .'27

Two years after the publication of Discipline and Punish, Foucault made an interest-ing remark on Bentham and Rousseau, both being representatives, albeit distinct, from theEnlightenment. The demand for panoptism was in the air, physicians, factory owners,school managers, specialists on penal issues all asking for a solution to order and disciplineproblems. With his Panopticum, Bentham offered exactly what they were demanding. Ac-cording to Foucault, Bentham formed the complement of Rousseau, whose main themewas that of the transparent society, Bentham's obsession being the Panopticum, the omni-regarding power.28

Indeed, Foucault was influenced decisively by Aries and he was aware of this, notwith-standing the fact that readers of Discipline and Punish were not informed about that, dueto the absence of references. Aries was the initiator in emphasising the importance of disci-pline in the history of education and schooling. Yet, the idea of the 'carcéral system' is notmerely a copy of Aries' concept. Foucault's concept has some new elements. In this respect,most important for the history of education is the relationship between the development ofeducational practice on the one hand, and the development of scientific disciplines on theother. Especially the idea of a 'déblocage épistémologique', resulting in the birth of'normal-izing sciences' such as medicine and pedagogy, is distinctly Foucault's contribution.29

Another question that arises is why Aries' original concept of discipline did not at-tract the attention it should have deserved, while Foucault's concept, fifteen years later,made him more famous than ever before. One reason might be that Aries' concept ofchildhood was so overwhelmingly present throughout his book that the ideas on disciplinewere neglected. This negligence might also have been stimulated by the fact that his bookwas largely regarded as an epoch-making contribution to the history of childhood and thefamily, not to school history, notwithstanding the fact that almost half of Centuries ofChildhood was indeed devoted to the latter theme. Aries' concept of discipline was devel-

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44 O»J JEROEN J.H. DEKKER AND DANIEL M . LECHNER

oped in the sizable chapter on school history, and was therefore developed in relation tothe history of school and to school architecture. These factors might explain why Aries'contribution to the concept of discipline was not regarded as an essential element of hisbook, resulting in the fact that Aries was not acknowledged for it. Perhaps one of the mainreasons why Foucault, on the contrary, was, might be the fact that Foucault's Discipline andPunish was published in 1975, in other words in the years after the cultural revolution of1968 (during which, by the way, Foucault was working at universities abroad). Duringthese years, topics like discipline and power were at the heart of student discussions all overthe world, certainly also in France. In these years, Aries was set aside by several fellow his-torians, amongst them Lawrence Stone, as belonging to the right side of the political spec-trum. Foucault, on the contrary, became one of the anti-establishment symbols, and wasappointed at the newly founded, revolutionary minded Vincennes University. Some yearslater, in 1971, he accepted a prestigious chair at the French intellectual establishment parexcellence, the Collège de France.30

In sum, Foucault was influenced by Aries and was fully aware of this. Due to the his-torical circumstances, Aries views on discipline could not rise to the same popularity asFoucault's. Another question, however, remains to be answered, viz. why Foucault so fun-damentally and absolutely disregarded the pedagogical dimension, notwithstanding thefact that his ideas were so strongly influenced by Aries. Aries was very attentive to educa-tional and pedagogical intentions and practices, even when they appeared in the context ofdiscipline. Our hypothesis as to Foucault's negligence of the pedagogical dimension is thatthis was the consequence of his underlying philosophy. In the next section, we shall try toanswer this question.

THE UNDERLYING PHILOSOPHY OF DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH

The contrast between Foucault's interpretation and the views of the historical actors, as de-scribed in section 2, comes strikingly to the fore at the level of aims and intentions. Foucaultremains silent on the aims and intentions which the historical actors themselves formulatedregarding Mettray. For him, the overall objective of the institution consisted of its aim todiscipline. In order to uphold this claim, Foucault deliberately had to distance himself fromthe views of the historical actors. This can be illustrated by examining Foucault's genealogy.

Amongst historians, Foucault has often been reproached for either his lack of knowl-edge of the sources, or his superimposition of an a priori theoretical scheme upon thesources.31 The way Foucault was constructing his historical narrative on Mettray, namelyone in which the overtly stated intentions of the historical actors are consciously and sys-tematically being ignored, can be considered as a variant on this general kind of historicalcriticism. However, it is important to be aware of the differences between Foucault's genea-logical projects and the historian's craft.

The venture of the Foucauldian genealogy is not to provide an accurate historicalpicture of phenomena like imprisonment, the judiciary system, or re-education. Foucault'sobject of study was not historical reality, but 'the discourse of the true and the false'.32 Thisdiscourse Foucault has tried to unravel genealogically, by showing the intertwinement ofpower relations on the one hand, and the construction of knowledge and truth on the

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Discipline and Pedagogics in History f^-> 45

other. The closing sentence of the last chapter of Discipline and Punish (which is actually afootnote in the French version) in this respect speaks volumes: 'At this point I end a bookthat must serve as a historical background to various studies of the power of normaliza-tion and the formation of knowledge in modern society.'33 From this perspective on Disci-pline and Punish it can be made clear why Foucault passed over the utterances and self-concepts of the historical figures around Mettray. In order to employ the productive op-eration of modern power in the analysis of the discourse of the true and the false, Foucaulthad to deal with and offer an alternative for the standard view on power. Foucault's under-standing of power differs on several aspects from this standard conception of power, whichwe could identify as the modernist-humanistic conception of power, and which has foundits apex in critical social theory. We limit ourselves to three main differences, namely as tothe productivity, the property, and the structure.

The first point of divergence concerns the aspect of productivity. According to Fou-cault, power does not operate just repressively, exclusionary and concealing, but containsbesides this negative dimension first and foremost a positive dimension: power organisesexperience and produces subjects and objects, in short, power generates reality. This waythe subject does not—as in the humanistic theory on the subject—form the source ofpower (and knowledge), but is its result; the subject does not exist a priori, but is beingproduced. In Discipline and Punish, he states: 'In fact, power produces; it produces reality;it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge thatmay be gained of him belong to this production'.34 Secondly, according to the standardview, power is either the exclusive possession of the autonomous subject—in the liberalversion—or the repressive instrument of the ruling class—in the critical version. For Fou-cault, however, power is a property of certain relations between individuals. Power in thisview emerges within a complex and differentiated web of physical, spatio-temporal prac-tices, in which the outward conduct of subjects is directed, controlled, and evaluated. Fi-nally, Foucault's notion of power does not refer to a clearly defined, asymmetrical relationbetween two dichotomous entities, the rulers and the oppressed, but instead exhibits a dif-fuse and decentral character. An excerpt from the first volume of The History of Sexualitydistinctly demonstrates this insight. 'Power comes from below; that is, there is no binaryand all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power-relations,and serving as a general matrix—no such duality extending from the top down and react-ing on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body. One must sup-pose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play inthe machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis forwide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole.'35

Against the background of this 'microphysics of power' it becomes clear why Fou-cault has so strikingly subordinated the historical evidence to his theoretical constructions.Foucault's objective was to develop an alternative interpretation of the operation of mod-ern power. Such a Foucauldian theory of power could be constructed successfully only if aconsiderable measure of distance from the historical actors was being safeguarded. Wherethe subject—or the ruling class—is regarded as the exercising agency of power, that canemploy power at will to the benefit of its own interests, it would still be legitimate to speakof a self-conscious historical praxis that reflects its own mastery of power. Where, however,

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46 <̂»-> JEROEN J.H. DEKKER AND DANIEL M. LECHNER

the subject is merely the result of a productive power, where power is generated in com-plex constellations of heterogeneous and multi-dimensional functional relationships, as inFoucault's theory of power, there the subject cannot be expected to show any awareness ofthese supra-individual power structures.

Nevertheless, Foucault indeed violated historical reality, when he fully ignored thecaring, benevolent, in other words the pedagogical aspects of the intentions and actionsthat the masters, teachers, preachers, and supervisors at Mettray displayed. In fact, there issomething counterintuitive to Foucault's claim that Mettray was merely a disciplinary in-stitution, all the self-proclaimed educational efforts of its staff-members being aimed ex-clusively at a full-scale discipline. Perhaps the later Foucault might not have been entirelycomfortable with the idea that true education can be nothing more than a desperatelyhaunted phantom. Kenneth Wain emphasises the distinction Foucault has made betweenprocesses of domination and control on the one hand, and processes of self-creation on theother. Wain shows that Foucault's objective was not just to track down the processes bywhich human beings are turned into subjects, viz. the processes of subjection, but alsothose 'ethical practices through which the individual turns himself or herself into a subject',for which Foucault reserved the expression of subjectivation. The former set of practiceswere the subject of study of Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization,36 and otherearlier studies, while the latter set of practices was the subject of History of Sexuality in theWestern World. Wain claims that Foucault's view as to education was not exclusively nega-tive. Drawing upon several statements relating to education, made by Foucault in inter-views in the 1980s, Wain states that Foucault envisioned the possibility of genuine educa-tion. That sort of education should correspond with 'a pedagogical project that enablessubjects "to give laws to themselves" ..., which provides them with skills to exercise power,with "techniques of management", and, more fundamentally, with certain "practices of theself and of freedom".'37 In other words, on the one hand Foucault is disposing of the peda-gogical through the front door by declaring that all pedagogical action in the traditionalsense in truth is nothing more than disciplinary action, showing a deep aversion towardsthe educational archipelago. On the other hand, he opens up the back door to let the peda-gogical reenter as a pedagogical project in the sphere of ethics.

Moreover, the idea of a pedagogical project that enables the student to work in free-dom on the development of his self-chosen individuality is of course not new. Already in1778, in Rousseau's Emile, ideas occur about the pedagogical virtues of sincere freedom,social tolerance, self-determination, and aesthetic self-formation. Foucault seems to drawhis educational views for a large part from the Enlightenment pedagogical tradition he sovehemently has criticised. By doing so, he in fact was undermining his own criticisms ofeducational theory and practice, as for example in his description of Mettray. His programof human empowerment does presuppose the possibility of communicative,noninstrumental interaction between teacher and student. Therefore, not all teacher-stu-dent interaction, according to the later Foucault, needs to be instrumental,noncommunicative action, that is, action directed at discipline. This impinges directlyupon Foucault's analysis of the agricultural colony of Mettray, for if we can distinguishgenuine pedagogical action from disciplinary action within an educational setting, thenthis leaves room to distinguish—even upon Foucault's own terms—a pedagogical dimen-sion in Mettray as well.

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Discipline and Pedagogics in History <^> 47

CONCLUSION

Our main question was how to explain why Foucault neglected systematically the pedagogi-cal aspect of nineteenth century re-education, especially as to French Mettray, focusing onthe disciplinary aspect. Through the examination of testimonies of contemporary actors, itcould be argued that Mettray was an institution in which close watch, punishment, and edu-cation went together. The colony was a model of temporary restricted marginalisation, fo-cused on re-education, for which discipline was an important, even an indispensable, means.

A comparison between Aries and Foucault as to education and discipline made clearthat Aries was indeed the first modern historian who systematically used the concept of dis-cipline in the history of education. Aries did not neglect pedagogical aspects. On the con-trary, he fostered the concept of'sentiment de l'enfance'. Foucault's negligence of educationwas the consequence of his genealogical approach and views on power. His object of studywas not historical reality, but 'the discourse of the true and the false'. In order to clarify thatdiscourse, he applied his genealogical method, by showing the intertwinement of power re-lations on the one hand, and the construction of knowledge and truth on the other.

Nevertheless, Foucault was not principally anti-pedagogical in all his works. Hisstatement on the omnipresence of disciplinary power has recurrently been criticised byadvocates of the humanistic legacy. Foucault's rejoinder to such criticisms, formulated byfor example Geertz, Habermas, and Rorty, has essentially been this: 'My point is not thateverything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad'.38

If everything is dangerous, not bad, this certainly holds for Mettray. The view that therewas nothing pedagogical about Mettray, the view that Foucault initially held, essentiallycomes down to the belief that all and everything about Mettray is bad. According to thelater position Foucault took, in his famous 1983 interview, such a point of view should bediscarded and be seen as a misconception of his own ideas. After all, it is not as if every-thing is bad, but merely dangerous. It makes much more sense, therefore, to treat Mettrayas a potentially dangerous venue, where a compassionate intention to educate could easilydigress into a disciplinary situation.

NOTES

1. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Middlesex/New York/Victoria: PenguinBooks, 1977) (orig.: Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975). A.Dichy and P. Fouché, Jean Genet, Essai de chronologie, 1920-1944 (Paris: Bibliothèque de littératurefrançaise contemporaine de l'Université Paris, 7, 1988). Genet's novels Miracle de la rose and L'Enfantcriminel were inspired by his stay at Mettray.

2. Rapport Annuel adressé à MM les membres de la Société Paternelle, Colonie agricole et pénitentiairede Mettray, douzième annee (Tours, 1854).

3. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 293-296 (Surveiller et punir, 300-301 ); on Mettray and other Frenchagrarian colonies, see J-G. Petit, Ces peines obscures: La prison pénale en France 1780-1875 (Paris:Fayard, 1990); C. Carlier, La prison aux champs: Les colonies d'enfants délinquants du nord de la Franceau XIXe siècle (Paris: Les Éditions de l'Atelier, 1994); H. Gaillac, Les maisons de correction, 1830-1945(Paris: Éditions Cujas, or. 1970); M. Perrot, L'Impossible prison: Recherches sur le système pénitentiaireau XIX e siècle I réunies par Michelle Perrot; débat avec Michel Focault (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980).

4. J.J.H. Dekker, 'Transforming the Nation and the Child: Philanthropy in the Netherlands, Belgium,France and England, c.1780-c.1850', in H. Cunningham and I. Innes, eds., Charity, Philanthropy andReform: From the 1690s to 1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin, 1998), 130-147, 137.

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48 o»-» JEROEN J.H. DEKKER AND DANIEL M. LECHNER

5. E.C. Wines, The State of Prisons and of Child-Saving Institutions in the Civilised World (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1880).

6. W. Suringar, My visit to Mettray (Leeuwarden: G.T.N. Suringar, sd [1847]), 11-12, 14, 23. On theDutch Mettray, see J.J.H. Dekker, Straffen, redden en opvoeden. Het ontstaan en de ontwikkeling vande residentiële heropvoeding in West-Europa, 1814—1914, met bijzondere aandacht voor 'NederlandschMettray' (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985). On Suringar, see Dekker, 'Transforming the Nation and theChild', 141; J.J.H. Dekker, 'Rituals and Reeducation in the Nineteenth Century: Ritual and MoralEducation in a Dutch Children's Home', in Continuity and Change 9 (1994), 121-144; Ch. Leonards,De ontdekking van het unschuldige criminele kind. Bestraffing en opvoeding van crimínele kinderen injeugdgevangenis en opvoedingsgesticht 1833-1886 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1995), 73-74.

7. Cited in D. Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660-1960 (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp Press, 1964), 153. OnHill, see L. Stephen and S. Lee (eds.), The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1917-...), vol. IX, 853-855.

8. Cited in M. Carpenter, Reformatory Schools for the Children of Perishing and Dangerous Classes andfor Juvenile Offenders (London: Gilpin, 1851), 325-327.

9. Other testimonies can be found in Wines, The State of Prisons. Edouard Ducpétiaux (1804-1868), thefamous Belgian prison reformer, also visited Mettray; see M.-S. Dupont-Bouchat, De la prison ál'école. Les pénitenciers pour enfants en Belgique au XIX e siècle (1840-1914) (Kortrijk-Heule: UGA,1996), 43-44. Cf. Dekker, Straffen, redden en opvoeden, 204-206.

10. B. Geremek, 'Le marginal', in J. Le Goff (ed.), L'homme médiéval (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 381-413, 388.11. J.J.H. Dekker, 'The Fragile Relation between Normality and Marginality: Marginalization and Insti-

tutionalization in the History of Education', in Paedagogica Historica XXVI (1990), 2, 13-29. Theconcept of fragility was inspired by A. Farge, La vie fragile. Violence, pouvoirs et solidarités à Paris auXVIII e siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 321. Cf. A. Farge.'Marginaux', in A. Burguière (ed), Dictionnairedes Sciences Historiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 436-438.

12. See S. Woolf, The Poor in Western Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London:Methuen, 1986).

13. See Cunningham, Charity, Philanthropy and Reform, and C. Bec, C. Duprat, J.-N. Luc, and J.-P. Petit(eds.), Philanthropies et politiques sociales en Europe (XVIIIe-XXe siècles) (Paris: Anthropos, 1994), foran overall view on philanthropy in the nineteenth century.

14. See F. Tétard, 'Fin d'un modèle philanthropique? Crise des patronages consacrés au sauvetage del'enfance dans l'Entre-deux-guerres', in Bec et al., Philanthropies et politiques sociales, 199-212.

15. Dekker, 'Transforming the Nation and the Child', 139-142.16. Ph. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962)

(orig. L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime [Paris: Librairie Pion, 1960]; quotations from the1973 reprint at Éditions du Seuil). A. Wilson, 'The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisalof Philippe Ariès', in History and Theory, 132.

17. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 141 (Surveiller et punir, 143, n.3).18. M. Foucault, Dits et écrits: 1954-1988, III, 1976-1979, eds. D. Defert and F. Ewald, (Paris: Gallimard,

1994), 503 (orig. 'Une érudition étourdissante', Le Matin, 20 January 1978).19. Foucault, Dits et écrits, IV, 1980-1988, 650 (orig. Le Matin, 21 February 1984).20. Foucault, Dits et écrits, IV, 646-649 (orig. Le Nouvel Observateur, 17-23 February 1984). In an inter-

view with J.-P. Barou and Michelle Perrot, he referred to Ariès' new ideas on the history of architec-ture in relation to the development of discipline, Dits et écrits, III, 190-207 (orig. 1977), 192.

21. An earlier version of this comparison was published in J.J.H. Dekker, 'Éduquer et punir', in Sociétés& Représentations 3 (1996), 262-265.

22. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 267 (L'Enfant, 295).23. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 169 (Surveiller et punir, 171).24. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 284, 333 (L'Enfant, 316, 373).25. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 173 (L'Enfant, 185, 316).26. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 252 (L'Enfant, 278).27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 159 (Surveiller et punir, 161).28. Foucault, Dits et écrits, III, 190-207, interview with J.-P. Barou and Michelle Perrot (orig. 1977), 195.

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29. P. Veyne, Comment on écrit l'histoire, suivi de Foucault révolutionne l'histoire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,1978); Ulrich Brider, 'Foucaults Geschichte', in Geschichte und Gesellschaft (1998), 248-282.

30. Foucault, Dits et écrits, IV, 647, defends him in his obituary against this attack, which also includedthe suggestion of Ariès having a relationship with the Action Française. The Collège de France inau-gural lecture was published as M. Foucault, L'ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

31. G. Noiriel, 'Foucault and History: The Lessons of a Disillusion', in Journal of Modem History 66 (Sep-tember 1994), 552-3; J. Goldstein (ed.), Foucault and the Writing of History (Cambridge, MA: BasilBlackwell, 1994), 2.

32. Foucault, cited in Noiriel, 'Foucault and History', 549.33. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 308 (Surveiller et punir, 315).34. Before Foucault, knowledge was only believed to produce power, not the other way round; see Th.

Popkewitz, 'Restructuring of Social and Political Theory in Education: Foucault and a Social Episte-mology of School Practices', in Educational Theory 47:3 (1997), 297-313, 306. Foucault reverses thisby pointing out that power produces knowledge as well, Discipline and Punish, 194.

35. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (translation of La volonté de savoir)(New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 94.

36. For the impact of Foucault on the psychiatric practice, see P. Vandermeersch, 'Zur Bedeutung vonMichel Foucault für die heutige Psychiatrie', in Fundamenta Psychiatrica 1997, 11, 141-146.

37. K. Wain, 'Foucault, Education, the Self and Modernity', in Journal of Philosophy of Education 30:3(1996), 358 (citation), 352, 355.

38. Foucault cited in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneu-tics (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), 343.

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