Abstract

Since Kant's pivotal essay, What is Enlightenment? the metaphor of maturity as enlightenment or courageous self-governance has played a pivotal role in political philosophy, philosophy of education and ethical theory, as well as professional therapeutic, schooling and activist practices. The temporality that characterizes human change has become critical, to heirs of the western tradition, to our sense of how we grow and, importantly, of how we can speed it up or direct its course. ;While Kant drew from the metaphor of maturity to incite inventions of relationships in which govern ourselves with others, in the late 20 th century, the developmental model holds us firmly within power. Michel Foucault, best known for his critical genealogies of the emergence of disciplinary and bio-power in the enlightenment era through intellectual, social and material innovations harnessing human development, shows that the metaphor of maturity depopulates, rather than populates, the polis . Instead of serving as a means of holding social utility accountable to our self-governance and our capacities to imagine "today as difference in history," Foucault argues, human change is docilized in the developmental model. Further Foucault returns to temporal vulnerability as a site of possibility in temporal difference, retrieving ancient Greek and Roman "arts of existence" as itself a practice of becoming differently than one has been made to be. ;This dissertation particularly investigates relationships constituted in development, between those who develop and those who participate in others' development. Through a genealogy of the 19th century U.S. movement for universal education, I argue that gender is linked inextricably to the elaboration of developmental pedagogy. Rather than replacing the family as a model of governmentality, I argue that the developmental model in the U.S. Common School movement extends the family as an intergenerational patriarchal context of development. Turning to Carol Gilligan's 20 th century investigation of the "selfishness problem" in girls, I argue that the possibility in our temporality availability also entails our relational availability. In this way, I argue that "care of the self" exercised in "professions of intimacy" and participation in others' learning risks and gathers temporal availability and relational possession