Abstract
In the schematics of chapter arrangement, the positioning of this chapter is to create useful imagery about an already established relevance of Foucault’s work to the conceptual frame of paradox and to suggest important support for what lies ahead. His work is here treated as exceeding the complementarity of its application in Chap. 2 to be considered epistemologically crucial to arguments made in the chapters which follow. The theoretical resources discussed in this chapter – built around the central concept of governmentality – are predominantly directed to my analysis of policy discourses of neoliberalism in Chap. 4 and the construction and representation of field data using paradox in Chaps. 6, 7 and 8. The deployment of Foucault’s tools of problematisation and critique is held over until Chap. 4, when they are used to both inform and illuminate a struggle for the ‘soul’ of the principal.
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Notes
- 1.
This shift to ‘technologies of the self’ garners support from Connolly’s (2002) insistence that ‘one needs to examine established tactics of self-identity … by exploring the means by which one has become constituted as what one is, by probing the structures that maintain the plausibility of those configurations, and by analyzing from a perspective that problematizes the certainty of one’s self-identity the effects these structures and tactics have on others’ (p. 9–10) . Connolly brings a ‘Foucaultian care for identity and difference’ (in conjunction with a Nietzschean affirmation of the ‘abundance of life’) to what he terms an ‘ethic of cultivation’ (p. 10–11).
- 2.
‘Subjectivation’ (sometimes translated as ‘subjectivisation’) is a word coined by Foucault and used in his post-1981 writings, to refer to ‘the process by which one obtains the constitution of a subject, or more exactly, of a subjectivity’ (Foucault, 1988a, p. 253). In his earlier writings, Foucault gave the existing French word assujettissement a similar meaning.
- 3.
The notion of ‘counter-conduct’ emerges in Foucault’s (2007) Security, Territory, Population as he rethinks the problem of resistance inside of a governmentality frame. At its core, counter-conduct is ‘the struggle in order to claim and obtain an other conduct’ (Lorenzini, 2016, p. 11 italics in original). Counter-conduct is given more extensive explanation in Chap. 5.
- 4.
In the introduction to Hunter’s renowned text Rethinking the School (1994), editor Meghan Morris describes Hunter’s understanding of ‘pastoral pedagogy’ in the school setting as concerned with ‘the arts of self-examination’ and ‘care of individual souls’ (p. vii).
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Dolan, C. (2020). Governing the Soul: The Theoretical Support of Michel Foucault. In: Paradox and the School Leader. Educational Leadership Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3086-9_3
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