ABSTRACT
The family and the primary school are sites for the regulation and production of the modern conception of the individual. In this chapter I want to explore, in a preliminary way, some aspects of current practices, concentrating on how the power to speak and conflict have been regulated and understood. In particular I shall be concerned with the idea of the rational independent, autonomous child as a quasi-natural phe nomenon who progresses through a universalised develop mental sequence towards the possibility of rational argument. This ‘normal development’ is taken to be facilitated by a sequence of cognitive development on the one hand and language development on the other, both being viewed as depending on the presence of the mother. The previous chapter examined how normal development is central to the
204 On the regulation o
regulation of contemporary mothering. Here I shall explore the connection between the family and the school, examining these as sites in which individuals are understood as being actively produced. In particular I shall focus on some contem porary effects of historical shifts from overt regulation of the population to apparatuses of covert regulation which depend upon the production of self-regulating, rational individuals. Such accounts of normal development seek to describe all children and all families. But since normalisation hinges on the detection of the pathology, the targets of intervention con tinue to be the poor, the working class and ethnic minorities. In such practices, the position of women as mothers and teachers is central and strategic. As I shall show, psycho analysis is doubly implicated here. On the one hand aspects of psychoanalysis have been crucial in the regulation of sexuality, passion and the irrational. More recently, normalised accounts focusing on the mother’s role have made women the object of the production of a maternal nurturance, understood as the guarantor of the rational subject. However, I shall seek to go further than a simple deconstruction of the productive power of modern apparatuses. As the previous chapter demons trated, intertwined in modern practices are the workings of desire, which suggest a complex subjective investment in what I shall call ‘subject-positions’. These positions, given in the relations of the practices themselves, are not unitary, but are multiple and often contradictory such that the constitution of subjectivity is not all of one piece without seams and ruptures. This means that we can examine those very practices and ruptures as sites of production of subject-positions and of either potential coherence or fragmentation. Utilising some insights from a re-working of certain concepts adapted from Lacanian psychoanalysis and Freud’s analysis of mechanisms of defence1 1 shall suggest how it might be possible to re-work existing explanations in order to examine the production of class and gender relations within and between existing prac tices. In doing so, I hope to illustrate how relations of power and desire interpenetrate the complex workings of apparatuses for the production of subject-positions, and how those posi tions, in their contradiction and multiplicity, are lived. In doing so I shall suggest that the modern conception of the
rational, contained in logocentric discourses, sets up as its opposite an irrational. This is invested in and understood as the province of women, who must contain it at the same time as being responsible for its removal in their children. A crucial consequence of this analysis is a re-working of conflict and its relation to language. The achievement of rationality becomes, in part at least, understood as the transformation of conflict into rational argument by means ofuniversalised capacities for language and reason.
