Reading: Benign Violence (Part II: Populations)
By: Ansgar Allen related tags: #SchoolDiscussion
A key link between biopower and discipline was established during the high watermark of early twentieth-century eugenic activity. This eugenic collaboration had enduring consequences for schooling, examination and meritocracy. The enduring relevance of eugenics may come as a surprise. It would serve a progressive narrative well to present eugenics as a long- abandoned project, one that can be located in, and resolutely confined to, a past era of despotic excess. The early twentieth century is our repository for many such excesses that we hold at a distance, thereby preventing a disturbance in the present. Eugenics becomes itself a disease, a short-lived malady that was overcome without enduring complications for the society of which it was once a part. Figured in this way, eugenics can be marginalised if not forgotten.
Here we must return to Nietzsche, for whom forgetfulness was an active capacity without which ‘there would be no happiness, no serenity, no hope, no pride, no present’. For those ‘in whom this inhibiting apparatus is damaged’ a condition is suffered as a result of which they are never “through” with anything’. Without this ability to forget we would never be ‘through’ with eugenics. Admittedly, eugenics is still mentioned from time to time. We are occasionally reminded, for example, of the eugenic motives that spurred on the development of intelligence testing in the early twentieth century. But this seems too weak a reason to recall and then dwell upon the horrors of a eugenic imagination. If we are to recall eugenics and risk a genuine disturbance in our capacity to forget, an influence more deeply formative than this must be discoverable. And so, in remembering eugenics, and promoting restlessness in those who wilfully deny themselves the pleasure of forgetting, I propose the following: it is my claim below that lesser-known aspects of the eugenic logic – combinations of eugenics with religious potential – provide us with a set of clues for unravelling later twentieth-century developments that extend, indeed, to the educational present.
This is something that I've been long highlighting. There are so many eugenic elements within our schooling, and people are rarely willing to engage with any of them besides the IQ test. It's so infuriating.
Whilst Foucault’s conclusion to his historical survey of the counter-historian serves as a warning, it does not entail a rejection of counter-historical modes of enquiry. Instead, we should consider whether a form of power analysis that models itself on disparate struggles could again become internalised within the operations of government, or find itself becoming reduced to a potentially tyrannical singularity. The challenge for counter-historical work is to devise a resistive strategy that maintains its distance from both government and tyranny.
This is something that I want to come back to in order to explore it further, but I do like the idea of how counter-historical work should function.
So how does a Foucauldian critic fight? If we take our lead from respected Foucauldian scholars, it would appear that the critic barely fights at all. Members of this prolific, yet small and politically detached, cadre of academic writers ordinarily distance themselves from struggle, urging caution, intellectual modesty and analytic reserve.
Just amusing, and it was something I wanted to keep. I have little to add here because so much of it requires a lot of unpicking.