Though Foucault was intrigued by the possibilities of radical social transformation, he resolutely resisted the idea that such transformation could escape the effects of power and expressed caution when it came to the question of revolution. In this article we argue that in one particularly influential line of development of Foucault’s work his exemplary caution has been exaggerated in a way that weakens the political aspirations of post-Foucaldian scholarship. The site of this reduction is a complex debate over the role of normativity in Foucaldian research, where it has been claimed that Foucault’s genealogical approach is unable to answer the question ‘Why fight?’ The terms of this debate (on the neo-Foucaldian side) are limited by a dominant though selective interpretation of Foucault’s analytics of power, where power is understood primarily in terms of government, rather than struggle. In response we suggest that if we reconfigure power-as-government to power-as-war, this adjusts the central concern. ‘Why fight?’ becomes replaced by the more immediate question, ‘How fight?’ Without denying the obvious benefits of cautious scholarly work, we argue that a reconfiguration of Foucault’s analytics of power might help Foucaldian research to transcend the self-imposed ethic of political quietism that currently dominates the field.

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Article:Goddard, R. and Payne, M.I. orcid.org/0000-0002-1019-7375 (2013) Criticality and the practice-based MA: an argument drawn from teaching on

IntroductionIn 1988 the cultural policy theorist Ian Hunter produced a genealogy of literary culture, which included a reappraisal of the origins, the purposes and the pedagogies of English teaching during the period of the inception and development of popular education, from the early decades of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. In a review of Culture and Government (1988), Brian Doyle (1990, 146) described the book as 'the most important and original study of the history and sociology of English in education to date' and made clear that this was an application of Foucauldian analysis that superseded 'dominant ideology or social control' theses, which is to say, it offered a more convincing version of the subject's history than the hitherto dominant Marxist or sociological accounts. Over the last twenty years the arguments presented in Hunter's book, and in his subsequent writings, have gone almost entirely unengaged by researchers and teachers in subject English. 1 Culture and Government, an application of Michel Foucault's ideas about disciplinary technologies and governmentality, is as upsetting of liberal understandings of English as it is of radical constructions. It stages an unremitting assault upon liberal progressive histories of English, which may explain why it was apparently refused review in the NATE journal, English in Education. 2 A review of Hunter's later book on mass education, Rethinking the School (1994) described 'a merciless blitzkrieg on … liberal and critical theory' which was 'startling, shocking' and 'frightening' (da Silva, 1995, 317). One can imagine that the earlier book would have had a similar impact upon an English teaching orthodoxy still in thrall to the emancipatory convictions of English as personal growth. As we shall see, Hunter depicts English as the convenient instrument of a bureaucratic technology aimed at the moral shaping of the citizenry required by modern nation states. Its sole and unsurpassable function is to mould a biddable subjectivity as defined by an expert, governmental elite, and -this is one of the points where his analysis departs from politically radical theorisationssuch a function is not to be sneered at by critical intellectuals, because government has the right and responsibility to develop self-governing and conformable citizens. English teaching's dreams of liberation, of an individual or a collectivist stripe, are no more than the delusions of theorists and practitioners infected by an irredeemably unworldly and reflexly oppositionalist misunderstanding of the limits of their knowledge and expertise. English's neglect of Hunter cannot be accounted for by what must

Since 1998 there has been an ambitious attempt to raise standards of literacy in English schools through national strategies targeted at primary schools and at Key Stage 3 in secondary schools. This article views this initiative as a governmental enterprise aimed at forming the capacities and reshaping the understandings of teachers and their pupils in order to produce the citizenry required by a modern nation-state. It is argued that this endeavour has been vitiated by a guiding rationality that is undemocratic and impatient of scholarly process. The national strategies are ill fitted to the task of forming individuals capable of sustaining and enhancing democratic society in a period of cultural and communal plurality. This article attempts to clear some of the ground for considering how such an educational and governmental task might be more appropriately addressed. Preamble