Review 


144 
 

 
 

 Samuel Rocha 2009 

ISSN: 1832-5203 

Foucault Studies, No 7, pp. 144-147, September 2009 

 

REVIEW 

 

Michael A. Peters and Tina (A.C.) Besley (eds.), Why Foucault? New Directions 

in Educational Research (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), ISBN: 978-

0820478906 

 

Why Foucault? New Directions in Educational Research seems to be well-suited for two 

particular audiences and purposes.  For those engaged in the academic study of 

education who are either unfamiliar with Foucault or who have not found his work 

applicable to educational scholarship, it will introduce Foucauldian ideas.  To 

Foucault scholars from other fields, it will direct their attention to educational 

studies.  In other words, depending on the audience, this book can be seen as 

primarily Foucauldian and/or educational.  At the same time, there is little doubt 

that these dual purposes are not mutually exclusive and have many reciprocal and 

overlapping interests.  Though there are many other potential uses for this collec-

tion, in this review I will focus on the range of interpretations that orbit around 

Foucault’s relation to the subject, provide a few remarks on the notion of 

‚educational research,‛ and conclude with my overall impression of the book. 

 In the Introduction, the editors address the titular question ‚Why Foucault?‛ 

in the more attenuated interrogation ‚Why read Foucault today?‛  In other words, 

they raise the question of whether Foucault (and poststructuralist thought in 

general) is still necessary and important.  Yet, they conclude that ‚the question is too 

melodramatic‛ and seems to be more a matter of reception than one of finality or 

importance.  They reframe the issue as ‚a hermeneutical question in the philosophy 

of reading and the sociology of knowledge and culture.‛ (1)  

 Addressing this hermeneutical question, the editors put the initial question 

aside and begin to organize their collection according to the complexities of 

identifying, situating, and naming Foucault himself—whom they refer to as ‚Mr. 

Elastic Man‛ (3)—and the cacophony of interpretations, trends, and disciplinary 

(ab)uses of his work.  That is to say, for the editors, this international survey of 

Foucauldian treatments of educational issues is not for the sake of variety, pure and 

simple; indeed, the scholarly breadth of the book is the methodological key to their 

project.  Appropriately, then, they offer a wide range of interpretations from 

respected scholars in the field of educational studies.  Peters also dedicates chapter 

12 to discussing the many-sidedness of Foucault in Anglo-American discourse.  



Rocha: review of Why Foucault? 

145 
 

As diverse as the essays in this collection are, chapters 2 through 5 present an 

intelligible progression of Foucauldian interpretations that encapsulate both the 

stronger and weaker points of this book.  This sequence begins with two essays 

(chapters 2 and 3) that use Foucault to consider the disciplinary aspects of schooling.  

Those chapters give way to the next pair of essays (chapters 4 and 5), which focus on 

the confessional elements of pedagogical practice as they substitute for more overt 

disciplinary practices, and begin to address the formation of the self.  These four 

chapters describe the range of Foucauldian analysis in this book as beginning with 

the view of education and schooling as they relate to questions of power and 

discipline—educational ‚regimes of truth‛—and ending in the relation of education 

to the ascetic and ethical constitution of the self—educational ‚games of truth.‛  

 These differences between the ‚regime‛ and the ‚game‛ (also noted by Peters 

in chapter 12), that is, between the discipline-power/knowledge and the formation-

of-the-self Foucault, are well-known in recent Foucauldian scholarship and vary in 

many ways.  In these essays, each interpretation seems to turn on the author’s own 

navigation (or lack thereof) of these interpretations.  As sharp and polemical as this 

apparent difference may seem, I think it is important to emphasize that it need not 

be construed as a dualism.  The fact that the subject is constituted in her relations 

with power—the core of Foucault’s notion of subjectification and subjection—

appears to be a dynamic relationship that is spoiled and distorted when we try to 

isolate it.  Nonetheless, it is possible to ignore this relational aspect of Foucault’s 

thought by assuming that the relation need not address the subject as something real 

and serious for Foucault.  

An interesting treatment of this polemic is in chapter 6 where James Wong 

addresses this interpretive difference by discussing Foucault’s relationship to the 

Enlightenment through the Kantian notion of ‚critical ontology.‛  This chapter 

provides a unique view of Foucault’s relation to the subject from his affinity—not his 

disdain—for the Enlightenment, as described by Kant’s 1794 essay, What is 

Enlightenment?  This is an interesting argument that differs from the usual chrono-

logical argument that Foucault gradually left behind ‚power‛ or, as he put it (and 

which was *is+ cited more than once in the book), he ‚*insisted+ too much on the 

technologies of domination and power.‛ (57)  Wong argues that ‚Foucault takes 

from Kant’s essay the idea that the hallmark of enlightenment is the attitude of 

challenging assumptions about what we know and how we act.‛ (72)  This leads to 

Foucault’s critical ontology, which Wong uses to question the developmental model 

of childhood, which is not a simple matter of how power is exerted; more than that, 

the key point rests in how such techniques constitute the subject, in this case, the 

‚developmental‛ child.  

 This particular essay (and other ones in this collection) provides insightful 

views into different prisons and other madnesses. These essays, at their best, allow 

the reader to imagine other modern institutions and technologies—education and 



Foucault Studies, No. 7, pp. 144-147 

146 

 

schooling comes to mind most straightforwardly in this collection—that are not 

merely ripe for ‚new‛ Foucauldian analysis, but rather, such institutions and 

technologies were already present in Foucault’s general critique of modernity, albeit 

without the elaboration he gave to prisons, madness, sexuality etc.  To say 

otherwise,  to describe education as something ‚new‛ to Foucault, would be the 

equivalent of contending that Foucault’s genealogies were absent from the ethos of 

Nietzsche’s genealogical project and general critique of modernity.  These critiques 

of modernity—including the erasure of modern ‚man‛—cannot be adequately 

explained without considering the full range of issues that include power and the 

subject, something we must say about both Foucault and Nietzsche.  

 The essays that leave out the constitution of the self in their analysis and 

focus exclusively on power and discipline lack depth (for the reasons I mentioned 

above) and, in the end, seem outdated, insistent on a Foucauldian hermeneutic that 

leaves too much of his work unconsidered.  Now, it is certainly important to see 

education, schooling, and pedagogical norms etc. as disciplinary practices in which 

power is present. However, if that is the answer to ‚Why Foucault?‛ in this book, 

then, it may be a stale answer we have heard (again and again) before.  In the 

chapters where this is the case, I think that without losing different points of 

emphasis and without instituting a permanent and ‚real‛ Foucault, some of the 

work in this book requires a deeper consideration of the opening question (‛Why 

Foucault?‛) in relation to the subject.  This seems to the point of Foucault’s own 

interest—wherever and whenever one considers this interest to be in the 

Foucauldian corpus—in the ethics, ascetics, and care of the self and the games of 

truth.  Thankfully, most of the essays deal with these issues at length.  

 What I have left out so far is the very idea of ‚research‛ and, more 

specifically, what this book means by ‚educational research.‛  James Marshall raises 

this question in chapter 2 and offers a direct and insightful response to it.  He writes, 

‚The title for this book suggests that we need new directions for educational 

research.  Michel Foucault, however, would not have offered “new directions‛ for 

educational research, though he might have offered suggestions as to how research 

might be done.‛ (15, emphasis in original)  This seems right, as ‚new directions‛ has 

a certain ring to it that sounds very non-Foucauldian (although there is sure to be a 

nuanced interpretation that could justify it). But, regarding the ‚research‛ element of 

the title, to those familiar with what is usually considered to be ‚educational 

research‛—or, to put it another way, the modern-scientific studies that go on in 

modern universities (places that are outlined and investigated in chapter 10) and 

affect public schools and their policies—it goes without saying that Foucault would 

have had very little patience with such rigid regimes and games of truth. But, lest 

anyone be deceived about what is normative in educational research today, 

‚educational research‛ is used in this book in a way that might be better put by 

borrowing Derrida’s description of democracy in the Politics of Friendship (2005) as a 



Rocha: review of Why Foucault? 

147 
 

venir: educational research-to-come. Unfortunately, there is much more that could 

be, and perhaps should be, said about this matter in this book.  

 All in all, though the essays are as advertised—that is, they are a diverse 

arrangement of theoretical and cultural interpretations of Foucault written by an 

international cast of leading scholars of educational studies—the dismissal by the 

editors of the titular question in the beginning appears premature and the 

corresponding subtitle is misleading. ‚Why Foucault?‛ in education is a deep 

question that does not simply ask about the relevance and need for more or less 

Foucault; it also asks the critical ontological question central to his own project: How 

do educational discourses and pedagogical practices serve in the constitution of 

modern subjects? So, leaving that question aside for a range of options to better 

describe Foucault and his spectrum of intellectual traditions might have been 

premature. More importantly, it may obscure the point that when considering the 

broad range of Foucault‘s project, any genealogical investigation does not end with 

an analysis of power; there is more to be said that brings us to the question of 

constitution—a question that can addressed and approached in a variety of ways but 

cannot, to my mind, be ignored. Also, as Marshall pointed out earlier, ‚New 

Directions in Educational Research‛ is a mysterious, if not inappropriate, subtitle 

without subsequent deeper reflection and explanation of what it means. This, of 

course, says very little about the pages that follow the title and subtitle, but it seems 

worth mentioning.  

Putting aside that minor issue, the contents of the book do provide a rich 

array of resource for the purposes I mentioned at the beginning of this review.  For 

someone interested in seeing how educational scholarship might be affected—and 

disturbed—by Michel Foucault‘s seminal thought, this collection will stimulate new 

ways of thinking about education.  For the Foucauldian scholar who has yet to 

consider the implications of Foucauldian analysis in the specific, yet broad, area of 

educational discourse, this collection will be stimulating in both harmonious and 

agonistic ways that parallel and augment Foucault’s own genealogical treatments of 

other modern institutions.  And this can only be a good thing for Foucauldian and 

educational studies. 

 

Samuel Rocha, Doctoral Candidate & Gates Millennium Scholar,  

Ohio State University