Part 2: Context

Chapter 4: Power relations
Chapter 5: Power relations in educational systems
Chapter 6: Standards, myth and ideology

Chapter 4: Power Relations

Synopsis

Power is defined in terms of relational fields rather than of personal or role attributes, of power as ruler and ruled. Arendt and Foucault articulate the construct differently in that they differentiate violence from power. I choose a broad definition of violence as any violation of personhood; so both force and physical violence are subsumed as sub-categories of that construct; and violence becomes a necessary aspect of asymmetric power relations, inevitable in hierarchies.

The other side of power relations is now highlighted; the side that produces rather than denies, that constructs rather than destroys. That is, I deal in some depth with Foucault's (1992) assertion that "power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belongs to this production"(p194). In particular, I look in detail at what is produced through two specific mechanisms fabricated within asymmetric power relations: the processes of disciplinary power, regulated through surveillance and penalty; and normalisation, achieved through linear labelling and sustained through the cult of individualism.

I look briefly at some of the "scientific" disciplines, and the micro-cultures that sustained them and helped provide their assumptions, theories and data.

Finally in this section Bourdieu's construct of symbolic violence, and the notion of habitus through which it is humanly experienced, shows how difficult it is, when playing the game our culture dictates, to recognise its limitations.

Defining power

What characterises social life is affect and effect; affect refers to those aspects of relating that are characterised by polarities such as emotional closeness-distance, of like-dislike, of attraction-repulsion, of affiliation-separateness. These affect relations are apprehended viscerally, experienced directly through the body. In the vernacular, in the field of sense relations you "feel the vibes."

Power refers to those aspects of relating that translate influence, that make a difference, that have an effect. The actions of one affect the thoughts or actions of another. The poles of a power relation could be characterised by such descriptions as dominant-submissive, controlling - rebellious, have - want, strong - weak. So within the field of power relations, what one person does affects a second, which affects a third, and so on. Such effects ripple onwards and outwards from human interactions in patterns that are indeterminate; yet even so the patterns are sometimes decipherable and probablistically predictable, for the fields that affect the patterns are stable and translatable.

For example, in all cultures there are families, groups of people genetically related whose patterns of interaction are relatively stable, whose ways of behaving towards one another are consistently patterned; the parent influences the child, the parent's demands produce action, the power vector is from parent to child. Yet even so the child's behaviour must influence the parent's behaviour, if only to maintain the parent's controlling function. In this sense power relations involve mutual influence, even though normally asymmetric, and translated into action involve dynamic events.

Such events are acted out in power fields, such as family or school or workplace, where the rules of the game are understood, and the overall direction of action influence predictable. In this sense the influence is not so much person to person as role to role; the relationship of parent to child overrides the relation of the person Jack to the younger person Julie. For this to occur we must assume some mechanism for the learning of relational roles, for the internalisation of the power injunction. For if we locate the power in a relational vector out there in the space between, we must also explain by what psycho-social means people in the field are moved to act. More of this later.

Affect and power relations are not mutually exclusive; strong affect can generate high intensity in the field of power relations. And doubtless asymmetric power fields are capable of generating considerable affect, both positive and negative. Even so, the two notions are separate, the two fields initiate different experiential effects, and are associated with different states of consciousness. Love and power are not synonymous. And which is stronger is moot. Like Bourdieu (1990 a), "We leave it to others to decide whether the relations between power relations and sense relations are, in the last analysis, sense relations or power relations"(p15).

Regardless of their relative strengths, their confusion produces dysfunction in societal relations, and pathology in individual people; love that degenerates into power play destroys itself; and power that masquerades as love is a sickening violation. However, this is too large a contention to debate in this thesis, and is not directly related to our major theme (Laing, 1967).

To summarise, I have defined power relations as the dynamics of mutual influence. In most situations such relations are activated in fields whose pattern is perceived by those who enter the field in terms of role relationships, or less consciously simply as appropriate behaviour, a predisposition to act in a certain way. People engaged in such fields are both activated and constrained, but by no means wholly determined, by the role expectations or predispositions (habitus) which, for individuals at either pole of a power relation, are activated by their entry into the field.

So let's see how this definition fits into the historical meaning of such concepts as power, force, strength, and violence.

Power and Rule

Traditionally the essence of power has been rule and command; or alternatively the act of ruling and commanding has been attributed to a faculty called power. This need to dominate was seen as an instinct in man, a psychological necessity. Force and violence in social life was thus inevitable, for they were necessary components in the command strategies of a leader. Combine this psychological instinct with the social requirement that the first learning of civilisation is that of obedience, and the two poles of a largely unidirectional power relation are accounted for. To command and be obeyed is thus the essence of Power. And the basic building block for monarchy, hierarchy, and their complex transformations into the modern state has been constructed (Arendt, 1970, p36).

A look at any parliament in action, or a peep into any political party meeting, leaves little doubt that this paradigm of the fight for dominance is still central to the inner workings of government; certainly jostling for place in the political party pecking order is a major preoccupation of politicians, particularly of those who aspire to top positions. However, tradition also specifies an alternative power game.

This was the idea of representative government, where obedience is to laws that have the people's consent rather than to dominant men, and elected leaders remain dominant only with the support of the people. This second paradigm undoubtedly has a much wider gap between vision and practice than does the first, and a fundamental question of political science has always been about whether this is ideology rather than reality, a fairy story that disguises and soothes the experience of most people of powerlessness, of alienation. Regardless, in most modern states there is some balance, some checks within limits, of the power of the state and the tyranny of its accompanying bureaucracy, articulated through the opinion of the people.

Arendt (1970) argues that all government - tyrannical, monarchical, oligarchical, democratic, bureaucratic, or whatever, depends finally on the support, the "qualified" obedience, of the people:

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them. . . (so) one of the most obvious distinctions between power and violence is that power always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence up to a point can manage without them because it relies on instruments ( p41). Arendt wants the word power to be reserved for the many, as distinct from strength, which is a property of the singular, a function of character or charisma or physical prowess. So an individual who appears to have power has it only in relayed form from the many whose support is needed. Whereas violence uses implements to multiply strength.

Power and structures

What characterises all of these notions of power is their attachment to particular agents, either singly or in groups. Power is a quality, a property, of an object or objects. But there is another way of viewing power: The major contribution of what one has to call the structuralist revolution consisted in applying to the social world a relational way of thinking, which is that of modern physics and mathematics, and which identifies the real not with substances but with relations (Bourdieu, 1990 b, p126). Bourdieu postulates the existence in the social world of objective structures, in addition to symbolic systems, and independent of consciousness and desires of agents; structures which guide and constrain their practices and representations, which produce a predisposition to act in certain ways (p123).

Foucault (1988) also moves well beyond the notion of "Power - with a capital P - dominating and imposing its rationality upon the totality of the social body." In fact, Foucault goes on to say, "there are power relations. They are multiple; they have different forms, they can be in play in family relations, or within an institution, or an administration - or between a dominating and a dominated class" (p38).

Foucault (1988), like Bourdieu, uses the relational power structure as a fundamental explanatory principle: "The characteristic of power relations is that, as agents in the structure, some men can more or less determine other men's conduct, but never exhaustively"(p83). So power relations precipitate all "the strategies, the networks, the mechanisms, all those techniques by which a decision is accepted and by which that decision could not but be taken in the way it was"(p103). Or in retrospect, that's the way it seems.

Power and violence

Yet like Arendt, Foucault (1988) wants to remove coercion, brute force, from his notion of power relations. He says: A man who is chained up and beaten is subject to force being exerted over him. Not power. But if he can be induced to speak, when his ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue, preferring death, then he has been caused to behave in a certain way. His freedom has been subjected to power. He has been submitted to government. There is no power without potential refusal or revolt (p83). Yet the man chained does have a choice; to scream or not to scream. And surely Foucault would himself argue that what is conceived as an "ultimate resource" is itself a social construction - more a production of the particularities of his cultural experience than of some "essence" of humanness. And if so the difference he postulates dissolves.

Foucault (1982b) insists that

What defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly or immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those that may arise in the present or the future. A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends . . . A power relation (demands) . . . the one over whom power be exercised be thoroughly recognised and maintained to the very end as a person who acts: . . (so that) a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up (p220). In an otherwise articulate and logical essay on The Subject and the Power written at the end of his long career, Foucault in this passage seems to get lost. Actions now act directly on indefinite actions in an indefinite future in utterly magical ways; if power acts on the body it doesn't act on an action; the person at the dominated end of the power relation has to be recognised. By whom? Most of this is contradictory to all those subtle and unconscious "strategies, networks and mechanisms" through which he says the effects of power structures are promulgated.

There is some romantic idealism involved in this refusal to see violence as a special case of power relations, in this wish to make it a separate category. As Arendt (1970) admits, "nothing . . . is more common than the combination of violence and power, nothing less frequent than to find them in their pure and therefore extreme form" (p46). So what, if anything, is gained by making of violence a separate class of event? Is it that to separate them is to separate the human body, which can be subjected to the ravages of violence, from the "human spirit", which relates to power and can remain inviolate? This is a separation deeply ingrained in Western culture, which denies the integrity of the human organism, and wishes to separate body from soul, and nature (which includes woman) from man.

Perhaps both Foucault and Arendt, appreciating the necessity of power relations for all social functioning, and wanting to emphasise its positive constructive side, want to remove from its definition that which utterly negates the possibility of a spirited response; want to leave open the possibility of a political response in asymmetric power structures that are aided by overwhelming instruments of violence.

In other words, they reject a notion of structuralism in which only surfaces of humans, their bodies and behaviours, are involved; they wish to include the spirit, the internal meanings, as part of the equation; and the confusion arises from their own lack of clarity about how to slot in the subjective element.

Regardless, if we refuse to reify violence, and see it as a process, an interaction in which a living being is violated, then it becomes impossible to separate power relations and physical violations in this way, and it is clear that violations of an instrumental kind are but one strategy in a whole armoury of mechanisms available in the field of power relations for violating people.

Violation of personhood

Brown (1973) encapsulates this view in his definition of violence: The basic definition of violence (is) violation of personhood . . . And since personhood means the totality of the individual, and never just the body or just the soul, we are reinforced in our notion that violation of personhood can take place even when no overt physical harm is being done. In the broadest terms then, an act that depersonalizes would then be an act of violence, since . . .it transforms a person into a thing (p1). So abuse, beatings, injury, torture and killing, what we normally recognise as violence, are more obvious forms of violation, and perhaps it is the intention to harm and the personalization of the act that makes such actions so abhorrent; the killing of a child with a bayonet seems more heinous than the more objectifiable destruction of a city with bombs. There is a different focus. Yet in the sum total of human misery and violation such intentional physical violence is minuscule.

People certainly are violated when abused or beaten or injured; yet just as certainly are they violated when disregarded or denied, infringed upon or intimidated.

People are disregarded when they are denied the basic rights of food, shelter or care, or full human status in communities. The mechanics of this disregard may be articulated through many systems, based on economics, class, caste, colour, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, or whatever; or more often some combination of these.

Denial, not recognising their existence as fully human persons, is one of the cruellest ways of violating, especially when perpetrated on young children, with its ultimate internalization of the destructive self image "I don't exist."

At a more general level, any positivist stance that treats people as objects, that directly or indirectly ignores of depreciates the internal meanings people create of events, is a violation of their personhood. On this basis much of current political ideology, economics, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and educational and management practice, must stand condemned.

People are infringed upon in many ways: police or media or sexual harassment, smoke pollution in public places; confinement in school classrooms. Emotional or symbolic infringement is more subtle: a mother withdrawing love for disobedience; a preacher selling eternal insurance through inclusion in a particular group.

Intimidation also takes many forms; at its most obvious it is the threat of physical pain, at its more subtle the threat of hell. Intimidation feeds on fear; its father is the sword, its mother the imagination. Civilisation enshrines it in Law.

For the more sophisticated, intimidation is predicated on shame and guilt. Shame is the internalization of society's adverse verdict on behaviour, self disgust generated by what others think. Guilt represents a deeper internalization, the adverse criticism of self by self. Of all forms of human violation, the inculcation of guilt is perhaps the most oppressive, for guilt is pervasive in its influence and insidious in its effects.

In addition, humans are growing organisms. Their normal state is development, not stasis. So humans are violated not only when their physical existence or their psyche is threatened, but also when their capacity for growth is stunted, when their potential for expansion is diminished (Wilson, 1991, p16).

So we approach a dilemma: power structures are cultural necessities, the essence of community life, and at this point in cultural history all cultures are predicated in one form or another on asymmetric power relations; and all of the violations described above are manifestations of asymmetric power structures. It follows that violence necessarily flows from human culture as currently experienced. And attempts to separate power from violence involve inherent contradictions.

Power and production

One issue here is not whether asymmetric power relations predispose violations. They do. An equally important issue is whether they also have a productive role to play in the human condition. And they do. Foucault's great contribution has been to spell this out. "The refusal, the prohibition, far from being essential forms of power, are only its limits, power in its frustrated or extreme forms. The relations of power are, above all, productive" (Foucault, 1988, p118).

This view does redress the balance and help us to see the other side of the coin. People are produced and reproduced through their immersion in power structures. So are cultures. And the human spirit sometimes soars above the violence. Even so, the violations are often not extreme forms; they are inherently, pervasively and insidiously embedded into the structure.

So we must ask, what does "productive" mean in this context? If knowledge and people are socially constructed, what constitute the productive, rather than destructive manifestations of power relations? From what frame of reference is the separation between intellectual or emotional production and destruction recognised? As a starting point, let's first look briefly at Foucault's views about the mechanisms of this production, and then at Bourdieu's ideas about the inevitability of symbolic violence within reproductive cultures.

Disciplinary power

Over the past three hundred years, power on this planet has assumed a new face. Foucault (1992) traces this transformation brilliantly in Discipline and Punish: Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested, and paradoxically, found the principle of its force in the movement by which it deployed that force. Those on whom it was exercised could remain in the shade; they received light only from that portion of power that was conceded to them, or from the reflection of it that for a moment they carried. Disciplinary power, on the other hand , is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility . . . the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its mark on the subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification ( p187). Foucault is using the term "examination" here in its widest context. The written test as we know it is a refined and intense form of that "hierarchical observation" and "normalizing judgment" that characterise all examinations, whether they be pedagogic, medical, legal, penal, supervisory, psychiatric or whatever.

How is this power transmitted? What is the mechanism of its distribution?

The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. And although it is true that its pyramidal organization gives it a "head," it is the apparatus as a whole that produces "power," and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field. This enables the disciplinary power to be both absolutely indiscreet, because it is everywhere and always alert, since by its very principle it leaves no zone or shade and constantly supervises the very individuals who are entrusted with the task of supervising; and absolutely "discreet," for it functions permanently and largely in silence. Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes ( p177). The details of this disciplinary power seem trivial in their manifestation: The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micropenalty of time (lateness, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behaviour (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body ("incorrect" attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness) of sexuality (impurity, indecency). At the same time, by way of punishment, a whole series of subtle procedures was used, from light physical punishment to minor deprivations and petty humiliations (p178). Together these trivialities articulate a milieu, produce an enveloping social environment, so that the people who live in that space accept it as a way of life, as a natural way of being. And so we find that, in the field of education A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency (p176).

Praise and blame

Disciplinary power uses the twin instruments of observation and judgment, and the judgment is by necessity judgmental; is categorised by a satisfactory- unsatisfactory dichotomy. Such normalizing judgments are so pervasive as to override their specific instances. "Humanistic" teachers may protest that they punish the misbehaviour and not the person; this may be true of their intentions, but does not describe the effects. Again Foucault spells it out; the judgments not only diminish the aberrant behaviour; they also produce the person: Through this micro-economy of perpetual penalty operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level or their value. By assessing with precision, discipline judges individuals "in truth"; the penalty that it implements is integrated into the cycle of knowledge of individuals (p181). This translation of act into essence, of misbehaviour into attitude, of error into ignorance, of absence into inability, is one of the political functions of Psychology. This transformation of event into label is an epistemological error, a misrepresentation of the functioning process, but is crucial to the construction of those "individuals" of whom Foucault speaks. For as he indicates so clearly, that individual first constructed in the eighteenth century, that educated individual being continuously recreated in "developed" twentieth century countries, is not characterised by passion, creativity and an independent mind. On the contrary, the individual is a person cleverly moulded by disciplinary power to be utterly reasonable (that is, to deny emotion), completely responsible (that is, to deny spontaneity and creativity), and to be loyal and dependable (that is, to deny independent thought and action).

Illich (1971) reached similar conclusions:

Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legality and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple case. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down ( p32).

Normalizing

This process of creating the conformist and at the same time supporting the cult of the individual, is what Foucault calls normalizing. It involves five distinct operations. "The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes" (Foucault, 1992, p183).

So what a child (or adult) does is seen not in its own right, but in the light of what others do. Behaviour and product, and ultimately relations and being, are constructed and thus perceived and conceived in comparative terms. So I do not exist in relation to others, but in comparison to them; I become an object in the field of comparison, rather than a subject in the field of creative and responsive relation.

The thrust of this comparison is not identification, but differentiation; the comparison focuses not on the similarities, but on the differences. The effect then is not to produce belonging and cohesion, but rather alienation and separation. And this differentiation is not in terms of the infinite variety of human behaviour and persona, but within a simple hierarchical catagorization of better or worse. To achieve this it is necessary to collapse the variety, the complexity, into a few single dimensions of value. And because the individual performances are indeed always multi-dimensional, and idiosyncrasies always do become visible, it becomes logically necessary to attach the value to the person, and not to the performance. The notions of skill, ability, attitude, intelligence, competence, morality, are uni-dimensional, and thus can be categorised and hierarchized as more or less, because they meet the joint requirements of unity and invisibility, and incidentally, of fantasy. (This argument is developed more fully in the chapter on comparability.)

And so we become homogenised, perceiving ourselves, and thus being ourselves, in the times and places constructed for us along the one-dimensional spaces into which we are constrained. It is as though hundreds of cakes, all made of different quantities of different ingredients, have to be rated in a competition. It is noted that most of the cakes expand on cooking. So we create a single variable called sponginess as a major dimension of comparison. Now we can proceed. The cakes are all more or less spongy. Now comes the moral shift. Some, indeed, are seen to be too spongy or not spongy enough. And so there evolves a notion of value within limits, of quality defined by conformity, of a homogeneity to which all good cakes must aspire.

These processes of comparison, differentiation and hierarchization lead necessarily to notions of the normal, of the acceptable, to the limits within which life must be lived, and outside of which punishments naturally accrue. The pervasive threat and final punishment is exclusion.

These modes of living are learned in most family settings, but the school classroom is the great levelling field where it pervades the life of the group. It is this pervasive quality that so affects the way of seeing other people and oneself that any other way seems alien.

In the late 1970s I was involved in a project in secondary schools involving non-judgmental assessment of students. That is, assessments that simply stated what they had done without that statement containing overtones of satisfactory-unsatisfactory, good-bad.

We explained to over a hundred teachers what we wanted. We asked them to consider particular students whose work they knew well, and to describe some particular examples of their work in this way. We ended up with some two hundred descriptions, of which we hoped to use twenty in our report as examples of non-judgmental descriptions of student work. In fact, none of them was suitable. The teachers were simply unable to write such descriptions; they were unable to see their students (or their student's work) in other than normalizing terms.

Their reality, based on standards, nullified their best intentions.

Individualism

We must not confuse the individualism of our current society with that myth of wild west rugged individualism which is part of the American dream, and exemplifies the "Aussie battler," though doubtless ideologues might welcome the confusion. The individual differences we produce are characterised by creating levels within homogeneous orders, by categorising along linear dimensions of value, by dichotomising continuous performances.

The person's individuality is thus produced by placing him or her along a simple scale, good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory, suitability or unsuitability along a number of dimensions. The individual becomes categorised, described, and indeed produced by the grade, the mark, and finally the profile, which becomes the true description of the shape of the person.

The disciplines

Before we look in more detail at how the formal examination fits into all this, and more specifically the part that the notion of standard has to play, it is useful to fit this development into an historical context. For life was not always this way: Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all these systems of micropower that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetric that we call the disciplines. And although, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; . . . The "enlightenment," which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines (Foucault, 1992, p222). Here then, brilliantly summarised, is the monstrous double bind that accompanied the introduction of parliamentary democracy, the genesis of that sense that all thinking people have of "with all these freedoms, how come I don't feel free?" And looking around, they do see all those economic, class, race, gender sources of inequality, and direct their attention to their amelioration, and forget that all were constructed out of the same structural cake mix, from the relations of disciplinary power embedded in hierarchy.

Yet there was a further development here that added immensely to the effects. The hospital, the school, and the workplace, once they had become located as gardens for the growth of disciplinary techniques, at the same time provided nourishment for the accumulation of new branches of knowledge. Clinical Medicine and Psychiatry became branches of knowledge predicated on hospitals and asylums; Education and Child Psychology were branches of knowledge predicated on schools; and Management Theory is predicated on offices and factories. (Offices are no less offices because their power relations and communications are crystallised through computers and their agents can be physically widely dispersed).

It is important to realise that these branches of knowledge developed after the structures, both physical and relational, were in place, and not the other way around. What we have here is knowledge developed within institutionalised relations; knowledge of people already objectified by disciplinary power; knowledge, that is, predicated on institutional inequity, and thus committed to rationalising that objectification.

So pedagogy is knowledge of the learning of children confined in classrooms, just as child developmental psychology is an accurate description of the growth patterns of children produced (both constructed and oppressed) in family and school. When the common translates into the normal and hence the real, these descriptive charactertures define the nature of children.

The unexamined givens of these systems of knowledge are the institutions in which they are based, just as the power relations that are embedded in these institutions comprise the assumptions on which these disciplines are built. And in its turn, the knowledge produces a magnification of that power asymmetry, both because it forms the basis of a verbalised truth that necessarily supports the institutional structure, and because it becomes the property of the professionals who practice it, thus necessarily excluding all others from its mysteries.

Ideologically, these disciplines claim to modify the negative effects of disciplinary power, which

.seems to have undergone a speculative purification by integrating itself with such sciences as psychology and psychiatry. And, in effect, its appearance in the form of tests, interviews, interrogations and consultations is apparently in order to rectify the mechanisms of discipline: educational psychology is supposed to correct the rigours of the school, just as the medical or psychiatric interview is supposed to rectify the effects of the discipline of work. But we must not be misled; these techniques merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in a concentrated or formalized form, the schema of powerknowledge proper to each discipline . . .the examination . . .is still caught up in disciplinary technology (Foucault, 1992, p226). Now perhaps we can begin to get a little glimpse at the forces that we are contending with here in the field of education. If Foucault is right, then the tenacity of the examination as an educational technique, no matter how professionally denigrated, is easier to understand. And if, as I shall try to show, the examination has no teeth, indeed becomes a paper tiger, without the notion of the standard to support it, then we begin to understand why the empirical facts about the instability, idiosyncrasy, non-transferability - in short, the factual non-existence - of the standard and its measure, has been so consistently and successfully suppressed and repressed.

In the following passage Foucault (1992) indicates the centrality of the idea of the standard. And whilst he is referring here more to standards of social behaviour, they apply equally to more cognitive matters:

in the genealogy of modern society, they (the minute disciplines) have been, with the class domination which traverses it, the political counterpart of the juridical norms according to which power was redistributed. Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long to the small techniques of discipline, to those apparently insignificant tricks that have been invented, and even to those "sciences" that give it a respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very foundation of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques (p223). Educators have been slow to appreciate the implications of Foucault's work to their own discipline. Foucault and Education (Ball, 1990) does explore this domain. And many of the contributors to this book identify the examination as the crucial stategy for embedding knowledge relations into power relations. For example, Hoskin (p31-32) and Jones (p84-97) identify the examination as the pivot of those small techniques through which the modern person is both constructed and controlled.

Symbolic Violence

Before discussing further the place that the examination plays in disciplinary power, I want to examine in more detail the notion of symbolic violence, and the particular way in which it is concerned in the continuance and intensification of violating structures through the imposition of meanings.

The child who is beaten by her father, and is then told that it is God's command that she must always love and respect her parents as indeed her parents love and respect her, and whatever they do is for her own good, is being subjected to symbolic, as well as physical violence. Her experience of being violated is being contradicted and negated. She is told that she is not being violated, but is being helped and loved. And it is not her parents who wish this, but God. She is unable to see that the perpetrators of the violence, and of the meaning system, are both primarily concerned to maintain their own, and each other's, authority structures; that is, the hierarchical power structures that have become institutionalised as family and church. And it is the institutions themselves, not parental love or god, that legitimise the violence, and the justification for it. So these structures become stronger, and the human victims more confused and powerless.

Let's take another example from schooling. Some young people are denied the right to continue their studies. Schools deny them access to further education and hence exclude them from a number of occupations. This is obviously a violation and unjust, even before we look at the inequalities of exclusion in terms of social class, gender and race. How is this exclusion achieved? Schools impose what specific knowledge and skills will be taught, and in so doing define what is useful and legitimate knowledge, and how it will be taught, learnt and assessed. And these processes discriminate against certain groups, and certain particular sorts of people.

The exclusions are legitimated supposedly through the professional judgment of the teacher, who is able to distinguish a "pass" from a "failure." In fact, this is not true. It is the institution itself, the school, that legitimises the exclusion, and inclusion. For the teacher outside the institution, no matter how highly qualified professionally, cannot accredit. On the other hand, the institution can accredit with a multiple-choice, computer-marked assessment system that completely bypasses the professional teacher. So what are in fact rather arbitrary impositions by the school are disguised as professional judgments about skill, ability, and intelligence, and then codified pass or fail with the appropriate label attached to the student. These judgments are then accepted as legitimate by all parties involved, including the great bulk of excluded students, who know at one level that they have been duped, but don't know how.

In these two examples I have tried to elucidate the particular properties of symbolically violent meanings. Firstly they are meanings imposed and legitimated by institutions of authority. For example, by institutions that control morals or education or health or information. Secondly they are designed to convince that what is violent is indeed not so. That what is unjust is indeed just. That what is inequitable is indeed fair. That is, meanings that are symbolically violent negate our experience and feelings. And thirdly, the authority appears to come from a source other than its true one. From God or some moral or professional source, rather than being delegated from less visible power structures of church, caste or class (Wilson, 1991, p26).

These are specific examples of Bourdieu's (1990a) more general proposition that

Every power to exert symbolic violence, ie. every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations. . . . . All pedagogic action is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power (p4,5). Bourdieu shows that pedagogic action reproduces the dominant culture in two senses; firstly because the power structure within which the learning takes place tends to mirror and legitimate, and thus reproduce, that of the dominant culture; secondly because the meanings inculcated have been selected (with corresponding exclusions) to reproduce the meanings of dominant societal groups. Both structure and meanings are arbitrary insofar as the structure and functions of that culture cannot be deduced from any universal principle, not being linked by any sort of internal relation to "the nature of things" or any "human nature"(Bourdieu, 1990a, p8): The sociological theory of pedagogic action distinguishes between the arbitrariness of the imposition and the arbitrariness of the content imposed, only so as to bring out the sociological implications of the relationship between two logical fictions, namely a pure power relationship as the objective truth of the imposition and a totally arbitrary culture as the objective truth of the meanings imposed. (p9) . . . authority plays a part in all pedagogy, even when the most universal meanings (science or technology) are to be inculcated. There is no power relation, however mechanical or ruthless which does not additionally exert a symbolic effect (Bourdieu, 1990a, p10).

Habitus

When a person has "lived" long enough through a period of inculcation of training, there is a durable product internalised by them which Bourdieu calls a habitus. Durable because it remains after the training has ceased, and is capable of perpetuating in practice the principles learnt. In this way the habitus produces and reproduces "the intellectual and moral integration of the group or class on whose belief it is carried out "(Bourdieu, 1990a, p35).

The habitus is a system of schemes of thought, perception, appreciation and action, a predisposition to "a rule-bound activity which, without being the product to obedience to rules, obeys certain regularities" (Bourdieu, 1990a, p64). Bourdieu (1990b) uses the analogy of the game to explain how the habitus functions:

The habitus as the feel for the game is the social game embodied and turned into a second nature. Nothing is simultaneously freer and more constrained that the action of the good player. He quite naturally materializes at just the place the ball is about to fall, as if the ball were in command of him - but by that very fact, he is in command of the ball. The habitus, as society written into the body, into the biological individual, enable the infinite number of acts of the game - written into the game as possibilities and objective demands - to be produced; the constraints and demands of the game, although they are not restricted to a code of rules, impose themselves on those people - and those people alone - who, because they have a feel for the game, a feel, that is, for the immanent necessity for the game, are prepared to perceive them and carry them out (p63). So the rules of the game construct the players, who in turn construct their own particular version of the game. And those who play the game the best are the winners who continually reproduce the game in its infinite variety, and create the illusion of freedom whilst the rules become ever more fixed, for The pedagogic work which produces the habitus . . . produces misrecognition of the limitations implied by this system, so that the efficacy of the ethical and logical programming it produces is enhanced by misrecognition of the inherent limits of this programming . . . The agents produced by pedagogic work would not be so totally the prisoners of the limitations which the cultural arbitrary imposes on their thought and practice, were it not that, contained within these limits by the self-discipline and self-censorship ( the more unconscious to the extent that their principles have been internalized) they live out their thought and practice in the illusion of freedom and universality (Bourdieu, 1990a, p40). Bourdieu (1990a) here demonstrates how difficult is to question the principles of one's own culture, for the very questions have their roots in that culture (p37).

Summary - power relations and standards

In this chapter I have started to reveal the backdrop for our drama, those social and political fields in which the human actors are enmeshed. The focus was on power relations, and the way in which they both violate and produce those who act out their lives within their pervasive influence.

In particular the mechanism of disciplinary power relations was examined, and the part that the normalising gaze of the examination has in controlling the players, and creating the modern individual as its supreme production; an individual defined by a competitive profile, an object positioned, classified, and articulated along a limited set of linear dimensions.

In the next chapter I show that crucial to this extremely efficient mechanism for achieving social stability is the scalpel that defines the classification that produces the person that lives in the house that disciplinary power built. A scalpel labelled standard!

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