Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

towards the end of his writing career, organising a sometimes baffling body of work that moved from medical science to a history of sexuality, from an exploration of the construction of madness to the birth of the clinic. Because Foucault wrote over a long period and his output was prolific, there naturally are shifts in the focus of his work. These shifts, I argue, make it difficult to define Foucault as a structuralist, a postmodernist, or a poststructuralist (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1993). Although I use the term postmodernist to describe Foucault, this is as much for ease of writing as it is reflective of his rejection of the metanarratives (such as Marxism) that signalled a philosophical shift ending the modernist hold over intellectual debate. I recognise that labelling Foucault is like trying to collect water with a net; no matter how hard one tries, Foucault slips out of one’s grasp and returns in a slightly different form, making him almost impossible to define. Contradictions regularly emerge: Despite his suspicion of Enlightenment ideas, Foucault’s work is heavily influenced by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, who are part of the Enlightenment tradition (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1993, p. xxi). Though Foucault’s work bears some similarities to poststructuralism, it is not sufficiently concerned with grammatology, semiotics, and language games to make him the poststructuralist “rock star” some believe he is (Symes & Preston, 1997). And it could be argued that attempts to pigeonhole Foucault are senseless: By trying to define him, one runs the risk of forcing him into a classification he does not fit, and this limits the effectiveness of Foucault’s work and its ability to unmask those commonsense processes that have become accepted as governing who humankind is today.

Over the course of his career, Foucault moved from an examination of discourses to an examination of subjectification. His early work examines how the individual is constructed as an object through the creation of the “human sciences.” Foucault posited the thesis that the human sciences have their own internal self-regulation and autonomy (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1993). Many human sciences, which include systems of knowledge such as anthropology, psychology, and criminology, have constituted the human being in a discursive space that is