Abstract
A tendency of previous studies of lifelong learning to focus on learning and learning subjectivities may have led to an underestimation of potential effects in terms of a system of knowledge constitutive processes that operates powerfully to shape our societies. In this paper we explore lifelong learning and practices in the construction of knowledge at the point where a new relationship is being attempted between university courses and workplaces through programmes for learning. Drawing from Foucault and others we argue a strategic relation between discourses of lifelong learning and knowledge practices in such locations. Discourses of lifelong learning appear to support the reaching out of disciplinary practices into the workplace where theoretical knowledge is combined with knowledge derived from work experience, as a new form of knowledge that has use value. Discipline as a modality of power appears reconfigured and multiplied in new power-knowledge constellations which aim to subdue the desire and power of know how. Rather than lifelong learning as learning apparatus and strategy in the promotion of a will to learn as has been suggested elsewhere, we offer an alternative account. Here the promotion of a will to learn articulates with the will to knowledge in part through discourses of lifelong learning. Practices of knowledge constitution support the pacification of know how through its reconfiguration as knowledge that can be codified and mobilized for economic innovation.
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Notes
Lifelong learning has emerged in policies of the European Commission in 1994 (Commission of the European Community 1994), in 1996 through the European Year of Lifelong Learning and the OECD and UNESCO (OECD 1996; UNESCO 1996), in the Group of Eight in 1999 (Group of Eight 1999) and European Commission a little later (European Commission 2001, 2003, 2004).
A will to truth for Foucault (1996) emerged between the times of Hesiod and Plato, through the division of true discourse from false. Here, he argues, for the first time it became possible for the truth to be distinguished from the person speaking it. This division was then reconfigured as a ‘will to knowledge’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Foucault 1996: 342–343). Through this reconfiguration, the knowing subject became one with a particular position, viewpoint and function. This was a transformation, beginning at the time of the Enlightenment, which marked a transition from the knowing subject as a reader of and commentator on the words of the scriptures, to the knowing subject as a man of science with a function to look and verify rather than read and comment. Privileged knowledge came to function through certainty that it was free of power and could be made technically useful. This has not however been the only configuration of our will to truth, there are ongoing modifications, including changes in the divisions that govern what counts as legitimate or ‘serious’ knowledge. Will to truth has a history of variation according to the range of objects that are taken as those to be known, the functions and positions of the subject who knows, and the way in which knowledge is to be used at any one time (Foucault 1996).
Disciplining practices are those in the exercise of a disciplinary power, the main function of which is to train. It does so by individualizing: ‘discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise’ (1977: 170). Such practices cannot be completely identified with a specific institution, neither with an apparatus. Rather, discipline is a modality of power exercised through instruments of hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and examination. These instruments may however be institutionally concentrated, as is the case in a university, school, workplace, or prison. The examination, in combining techniques of observation and normalizing judgment and architectures for the exercise of these, operates in the constitution and stabilization of truth in our society. In the university institution it operates through the disciplines of the human sciences, to ‘extract and constitute knowledge’ (ibid.: 185). They are practices whereby power and knowledge relations are superimposed: ‘The superimposition of the power relations and knowledge relations assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance…’ (ibid.: 1977).
The term ‘work-process knowledge’ emerged first in the disciplinary discourses of the HRD literature through the work of Wilfried Kruse in 1986 in Germany (Boreham 2002).
Foucault argues that the historical division between true discourse and false emerging between Hesiod and Plato has given a general form to our will to knowledge but that (1996: 348): ‘the great mutations of science may well sometimes be seen to flow from some discovery, but they may equally be viewed as the appearance of new forms of the will to truth’.
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We wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers and Professor Julie Allan and Professor Richard Edwards for their helpful feedback on this article.
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Nicoll, K., Fejes, A. Lifelong Learning: A Pacification of ‘Know How’. Stud Philos Educ 30, 403–417 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9235-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9235-x