Considering Pastoral Power: A Commentary on Aaron Schutz's “Rethinking Domination and Resistance: Challenging Postmodernism”:

techniques—seeks to instill self-regulation of desire and action. Foucault points out that power operates at both the local level of continuous, productive interactions and at the larger, systemic level of institutions, regulations, and hegemonies (1976/1990, p. 93). These two levels depend on each other: “[O]ne must conceive of the double conditioning of a strategy by the specificity of possible tactics, and of tactics by the strategic envelope that makes them work” (1976/1990, p. 100). Schutz criticizes postmodernists for limiting their studies to the local resistance tactics practiced at individual sites, which enable some modicum of agency to be practiced by those subjected to soft, “pastoral” controls (p. 19), while larger social, cultural, and institutional systems remain intact. However, Foucault maintains that it is precisely through such multiple, local relations of power that larger effects of domination are produced, rather than through the topdown imposition of disciplinary controls (1976/1990, p. 94). However, this “which came first” argument is merely academic if, as Schutz suggests, marginalized populations are primarily subjected to discipline and the threat of violence. Disciplinary techniques work on the body (Foucault, 1975/1977, 1983), but they do not necessarily work through the threat of violence. According to Bevir (1999), on whom Schutz relies heavily for his distinction between discipline and pastoral power, Foucault “suggests” that discipline is necessarily violent. But Foucault himself says otherwise. Power exercised through violence, power acted immediately on others, “closes the door on all possibilities” (1983, p. 220). It limits what the state is able to do. Instead, power operates through inherently productive In his “Rethinking Domination and Resistance: Challenging Postmodernism” (Educational Researcher, January– February, 2004), Aaron Schutz questions what he sees as postmodernism’s fascination with the workings of pastoral modes of control, a preoccupation that prevents postmodernists from locating and opposing the disciplinary controls experienced by marginalized populations. While he concedes that oppression and resistance are not simple—indeed, that resistance often does not improve the conditions of the resistant—he is frustrated by what he sees as the tendency of postmodernists to focus on local acts and performances when it is clear that certain groups systematically and fairly consistently lack access to social and material goods. If postmodernism offers a more sophisticated view of power relations, it should also offer new insights on ways to alter those relations when they are inegalitarian. However, Schutz’s critique is based on an unnecessarily narrow conception of pastoral power and places it in a binary and opposing relationship with disciplinary power, moves that ignore Foucault’s conceptualization of pastoral power and his discussions of power more generally. In addition, in locating pastoral power mainly in middle-class and new capitalist1 learning situations, Schutz overlooks the pervasive nature of pastoral modes of control and their particularly corrosive variants in highpoverty settings. Pastoral care and control have a history in urban and marginalized school settings, where they are intended to instill self-discipline and self-monitoring in individuals seen as lacking those attributes. Both historical and more recent studies provide examples of pastoral techniques targeted specifically to populations seen by Schutz as largely subject to disciplinary controls; such findings suggest that people who are interested in effecting social change might find analyses of pastoral power very useful, indeed. This is not to deny the operation of some of the more coercive disciplinary controls in such settings, as illustrated by the heavy presence of police and security guards in urban schools. In addition, disciplinary technologies such as seating charts, forming lines, and taking attendance are found in most public schools in the United States, regardless of class, and are included in the general techniques outlined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish: timetables, the distribution of individual bodies within a partitioned space, individuation and documentation, hierarchical observation, normalizing judgments, and examination (Foucault, 1975/1977). However, if we are to do as Schutz wishes and cut through the mystification of control to enable people to resist their own domination, then we need to be accurate and specific about how and when domination occurs; and that includes understanding how pastoral control historically has operated differently in different settings. Foucault (1983) speaks of the power of the state as simultaneously totalizing and individualizing. It is totalizing in that it reasons in terms of populations and their control and government. It is individualizing in that it locates each individual and— through both disciplinary and pastoral Research News and Comment