ABSTRACT
Taking up the challenge in the above quotation does not imply that, by knowing
how disorderly children are made, we can simply ‘unmake them’. Rather, it can
be drawn on to cross-examine the rationality that diagnoses disorderly children,
those practices that segregate, refer to, label or describe them as disorderly. In
making the above statement Foucault is alluding to how history can be used ‘to
show how that-which-is may no longer be “that-which-is” ’,
by following lines of fragility in the present – in managing to grasp why
and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is. In this sense, any
description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual
fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete
freedom, i.e., of possible transformation.
