Producing Islands of Self-Mastery: The Biopolitics of Self-Determination in Special Education

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Special education places a premium on teaching self-determination to special needs students. In this essay, I explore the philosophical history as to why selfdetermination carries such influence. I locate the genealogy of self-determination in John Locke’s conception of the body as property. In addition, as an explanation to why this happened, I turn to Michel Foucault’s conception of “governmentality” and its role in education with respect to self-determination as a mode of control. Next, I discuss the deleterious consequences of this idealization of self-determination that obscures the interdependent nature of all persons, putatively disabled or not. One chief consequence is the portrayal of dependence as a pejorative state of affairs that makes dependent individuals appear dangerous. I augment my reading of Foucault with Roberto Esposito’s “paradigm of immunization,” in which persons are “immunized” against obligation towards others beyond contractual arrangements. The paradigm for contractual relations arises from a neoliberal view of the market as the protector of freedom and self-sovereignty. Consequently, the driving force behind special education and self-determination, as a strategy of empowerment, is for special needs students to take their place in the market. Special educator Michael Wehmeyer’s attempt to clarify the meaning of self-determination in the context of a “causal agency theory” still promulgates a view of agency that underemphasizes its communal roots. In conclusion, I propose John Dewy as a needed corrective for valorizing agency as a function of community. Hence, a curriculum for selfdetermination for special needs students would no longer require an erasure of the reality of the interdependence of all persons.