The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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of the human subject, of human consciousness, of human existence” (FDE1, 653; see also FDE3, 590, and FDE4, 52) suggest that his own anti-humanism must have owed a good deal to structuralism.

Supericially, Foucault’s relation to structuralism can perhaps best be described as a marriage of convenience that ended in a bitter divorce. Yet even when, after the publication of The Order of Things, he decided that he had never been a structuralist, he still stressed that his method belonged to the broad and recent historical transformation that structuralism best exempliies. Whether his approach to history should be located “next to [structuralism],” as he once claimed, or “within it,” as he denied (FDE1, 779), was perhaps not for him to decide, since he lucidly admitted that his own discourse was dependent on “conditions and rules of which [he was] very largely unaware” (EOT, xiv). This concession, which follows a strong repudiation of structuralism, indicates how much he owed to this movement.

Patrick Singy

See Also

Archaeology

History

Language

Statement

Jean-Paul Sartre

Suggested Reading

Canguilhem, Georges. 1967. “Mort de l’homme ou épuisement du cogito?” Critique 24: 599–618.

Davidson, Arnold. 1997. “Structures and Strategies of Discourse: Remarks Towards a History of Foucault’s Philosophy of Language,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–17.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 170–192.

Dosse, François. 1998. History of Structuralism, trans. Deborah Glassman, 2 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eribon, Didier. 1992. Faut-il brûler Dumézil? Mythologie, Science et Politique. Paris: Flammarion. Geroulanos, Stefanos. 2010. An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Revel, Judith. 2008. Dictionnaire Foucault. Paris: Ellipses.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1995. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot and Rivages. 2000. Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris. Chicago: Open Court.

Veyne, Paul. 1984. Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

2010. Foucault: His Thought, His Character, trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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he develops can be seen as ways of bringing this double reference together, of showing how the historical development of the subject of experience is at the same time the formation of someone who is politically subjected or subjugated. In order to see this, we need to understand Foucault’s view of the emergence of a particularly modern type of power and its operation in the power-knowledge nexus that is central to Foucault’s genealogical works.

Power is usually thought of as repressive, as setting limits to what people can do or as preventing people from doing things. Foucault calls this the “juridico-dis- cursive” view of power (EHS1, 82). However, with the emergence of modern technologies and their intersection with various practices of power and knowledge, a different type of power has emerged, one that might be called creative rather than repressive. Rather than stopping or preventing something or someone from being or doing something, this modern type of power makes something emerge, it puts something in place that was not there before. In the Afterword in which Foucault deines subjectiication, he writes of power that, “it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more dificult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids, absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon a subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action” (EAIF, 220). By inciting, inducing, and seducing, modern power does not merely repress. That is something it does only, as Foucault says, “in the extreme.” More commonly, it makes something emerge in the social ield.

Perhaps the most striking example of power’s making something emerge is that of the modern soul in Discipline and Punish. Foucault insists that:

It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. (EDP, 29)

To say that the soul is an illusion or an ideological effect would be in keeping with the juridico-discursive view of power. Essentially, the idea would be that the modern soul (or what is often called in American psychology personality) is simply a smoke screen for the reality that lies beneath or beyond it. For example, for Marxists the real struggle lies at the level of economic relationships. Discussions of psychological makeup only obscure this.

If the modern soul, however, is real – if our personalities are actually produced (and not, for instance, simply obscured) by the mechanisms Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere, then power does not operate simply through what it prevents or represses but also by what it creates. And, as a corollary to this,

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there is no Archimedean point for political struggle. Resistance cannot be anchored in a particular set of relationships, say the state or the economy. Instead, it must arise wherever we are created to be the kinds of beings that (a) on relection we would not accept being and (b) that reinforce other oppressive social conditions. Politics is both subtler and more widespread than it would be in a Marxist or liberal model.

If modern power is a matter of the way we are created in many of our practices, then it will also have an intimate bond with knowledge. Foucault illustrates this in Discipline and Punish in his discussion of the rise of psychology and its relationship with the creation of the modern soul. Whereas in earlier periods the individuals distinguished and marked in a society were its leaders, with the rise of the interventions of modern power it is instead the people on the ground that are individualized: characterized by personality type, assessed with respect to proposed norms, and ultimately manipulated (i.e., created in certain ways) in order to integrate them into the social order. As Foucault comments, “All the sciences, analyses or practices employing the root ‘psycho-’ have their origin in this historical reversal of the procedures of individualization” (EDP, 193). The emergence of psychological science and knowledge over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is inseparable from the practices of power by which the modern soul is created.

The point Foucault presses regarding psychology in Discipline and Punish is an instance of a more general view. As he comments in the introduction to that book, “[W]e should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where power relationships are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests....We should admit rather that power produces knowledge ... that power and knowledge directly imply one another” (EDP, 27). This is Foucault’s description of his famous concept of powerknowledge. If modern power operates at the level of our daily practices, creating us to be certain kinds of beings rather than others, and if those practices involve various kinds of knowledge, then power and knowledge are intimately entwined. Who we are and how we know ourselves (or are known by others) are inseparable both from one another and from the political relationships characteristic of our society.

With these ideas in hand, we can understand the double reference of Foucault’s deinition of subjectiication. In the modern period, to be subject to relations of power and to be a subject, one of self-knowledge, are two aspects of the same process. It is through the operation of our creation in particular ways, and the self-knowledge that accompanies it, that we are made subject to the political orders in which we ind ourselves. It is not because we are prevented from being what we otherwise might be (or at least not primarily because of that) but rather because, in our practices and in the knowledge that those practices involve, we are being molded daily as certain kinds of doers and knowers that we become subject to that which governs us. In fact, we can go a step further and say that, in good part, it is precisely those practices and

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their accompanying knowledge that govern us, or through which we govern and police ourselves. The concept of subjectiication captures this operation of modern power and its focus on how we are created through its operation.

Alongside the analyses of Discipline and Punish, the irst volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality also provides stark examples of subjectiication. In the chapter entitled “Domain,” he offers brief descriptions of “the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult” (EHS1, 105). The hysterical woman is the female whose sexualized body is illed with nervous energy, ready to break out into various symptoms. The masturbating child is the youngster whose sexuality must be monitored and prevented from expression in order to promote healthy development. The Malthusian couple is the positive igure among these. It is the couple that conforms to social, economic, and procreative norms. Finally, the perverse adult is the character of pathological sexuality, perhaps most prominently represented by the homosexual.

Each of these types of subjectiication is, in keeping with the theme of the book, a product of a particular focus on sex. Whereas Discipline and Punish is concerned with the rise of psychology and the types of subjectiication it creates, the irst volume of The History of Sexuality is focused more on the changes in religious (and later, psychiatric) practices that make sexuality the key to understanding who we are. These two approaches are not, of course, either exclusive or exhaustive. Because the creative operation of modern power occurs through practices, one would expect that different practices would mold us in different ways. In the case of Discipline and Punish and the irst volume of The History of Sexuality, these different ways of molding, although distinct, also have points of intersection (for example, around psychoanalysis).

The signiicance of the fact that different practices induce different types of power effects lies in the lesson that we must be careful not to reduce any particular person to a speciic type of subjectiication. Even though, for instance, there is a “hystericization of women’s bodies” (EHS1, 104), there is nobody who is solely a hysterical woman and nothing else. Because of people’s exposure to different practices and their power arrangements, we are all at least partially the product of the power relations of those different practices. Subjectiication is a complex process. It does not arise solely along one register or in conformity with a single type of power arrangement. Foucault’s goal in discussing various types of subjectiication is not to describe particular people but rather particular forces that can act in concert or at cross-purposes in the creation of who we are.

Although the concept of subjectiication arises later in Foucault’s work, one can see it in a nascent way in some of his earlier works. In particular, his irst extended work, The History of Madness, traces the increasing isolation of madness from reason and the different ways in which the former is categorized and intervened on. It also

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suggests, through its description of the intersection of medical practice and theory, the way those labeled mad are encouraged to have certain self-understandings that will lead them to behave, and thus become subjects in accordance with those selfunderstandings. In particular, the discussion of the interventions of Samuel Tuke and Philippe Pinel, who blamed madness on the mad themselves and sought to change them through different types of self-recognition and guilt, intersects with the treatment of the rise of psychology as a subjectifying practice in Discipline and Punish.

Not all of Foucault’s earlier works lend themselves to interpretation in terms of subjectiication. In particular, those works that focus more exclusively on the discursive aspects of practice, for example The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, seem remote from concerns with how we are molded into particular subjects. This is because, by focusing on discourse rather than on the intersection of practices with people (and especially with people’s bodies), they do not take up the moments in which people’s lives are molded by the practices in which they are engaged. This is not to say that these works are irrelevant for an understanding of how we come to be particular subjects. The changes in economic discourse described in The Order of Things, for instance, bear on how we think of ourselves. However, although these works do have bearing on our current self-understanding, they do so indirectly, not through a depiction of processes of subjectiication.

Looking forward from Discipline and Punish and the irst volume of The History of Sexuality to Foucault’s last works, one can see subjectiication in operation, but in a changed form from these two works. One might, at irst, describe this change as one of emphasis. Whereas the two works already discussed focus on how power creates certain subjectiications, the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality are more concerned with how people subjectify themselves in certain ways. This does not mean that Foucault has abandoned his view of power. Far from it. Rather, under the inluence of his reading in ancient philosophy, he shifts his emphasis from the way we are created by our practices to how we go about creating ourselves within and through them.

In his introduction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault relects on the dificulties of coming to grips with the sexual subject. He writes:

It seemed to me that one could not very well analyze the formation and development of the experience of sexuality from the eighteenth century onward, without doing a historical and critical study dealing with desire and the desiring subject....

This does not mean that I proposed to write a history of the successive conceptions of desire, of concupiscence, or of libido, but rather to analyze the practices by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire. (EHS2, 5)

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See Also

Care

Dispositif (Apparatus)

Ethics

Power

Problematization

Resistance

Suggested Reading

Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 131–164.

May, Todd. 2006. The Philosophy of Foucault. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s

University Press.