Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

(Martin, Gutman, & Hutton, 1988, p. 9). The difficulty in pinning down Foucault is noted by Clifford Geertz, who wrote, “He has become a kind of impossible object: a nonhistorical historian, an anti-humanist human scientist, and a counter-structuralist structuralist” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1993, p. xviii). Faubion took this a step further when he asked

However he is described, Foucault remains one of the most original thinkers to examine modern lives in the last century, and as Dean argued, one should be less concerned with the “recuperation and integration” of Foucault’s work than with the “limits and possibilities of how we have come to think about who we are, what we do and the present in which we find our selves” (Dean, 1996, p. 210). Foucault’s questioning of how people have become who they are today has opened up debate along lines of his enquiry. His work on power, subjectivities, and the governing of the individual has created new ways of thinking about the present epoch.

One of the distinguishing features of Foucault’s work is his suspicion of those philosophies that enshrine an autonomous agent, freely acting through the development of Enlightenment ideals such as logic and rational thought (Symes & Preston, 1997, p. 31). His work suspects sweeping explanations of human experience; he is fascinated instead by the local and by the micropractices of human interaction. Foucault rejected the logic of dualism found in Enlightenment thought, “such as mind/body, thinking/feeling, nature/culture and so on” (Symes & Preston,1997, p. 31). In a description of his own work, published under the pseudonym Maurice Florence, Foucault chose to describe his work as a “critical history of thought” that entailed “an analysis of the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed or modified” (Florence, 1998, p. 459). Foucault wrote this in the early 1980s,