Foucault: The Construction of the Subject
Foucault is clearly influenced by the work of Nietzsche, the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century German philosopher who is sometimes listed under the heading ‘existentialist’.
Though Nietzsche’s philosophy does not fit easily beside others found under that label, neither does he fit easily into the mainstream of Western philosophy. He develops a history which he calls a ‘genealogy’ in which development is seen not as a smooth or dialectical process forward but as a series of discontinuous shifts; Althusser reinterpreted the Marxist version of history in this light (Althusser 1969; Althusser and Balibar 1970) and Foucault developed a structuralist history of ideas (Foucault 1972) in which structures of ideas (‘epistemes,) were seen as replacing each other when all the available positions within the previous structure have been used up. This has produced a range of studies passing under the name of ‘discourse analysis’ (although some owe more to linguistics than to Foucault) and another way of thinking about identity and subjectivity. This was first seen in terms of the individual subject being the product of a particular discourse, but it was developed by Foucault and his interpreters into a more complex version in which subjectivity or identity is seen as the point where different discourses come together in a point of ‘suture’ The metaphor here is the joining together of the edges of a wound - a surgical analogy which captures both the sense of precision in real surgery and the sense of a gap, the space between words which is vital to the generation of meaning in structuralist linguistics. This inverts the interpretive approaches discussed in earlier chapters - the individual subject is created by being subjected to a particular discourse or particular discourses. In the Althusserian framework the subjection is to modes of production or ideological apparatuses. In both cases the play on the word ‘subject’ (the person who is the subject of action and the person who is subjected to something) is a favourite strategy for this sort of approach.A second aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy which is clearly evident in Foucault is the inversion of the conventional, Enlightenment-based conception of the relationship between knowledge, power and freedom. The conventional relationship which is deeply rooted, at least in Western common sense, is that knowledge increases our freedom in relation both to the natural world and to ourselves. The more we know the more we are able to do. We saw this questioned by the Frankfurt School theorists, who suggested that the development of the modern sciences was a dialectical process involving both liberation and domination. For Nietzsche it was primarily a process of domination, and this was taken up by Foucault in a series of studies of the way in which scientific discourses were applied to deviants: the mad, the criminal and those whom we would now call sexual deviants, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Foucault 1973, 1977).
In these studies, it is not epistemes, the grand discourses, that create subjects but the discourses of the social sciences such as criminology and psychology and sociology, theories of mental illness and sexuality. They sort out, classify and define different types of person who in one sense did not exist before. For example, although there were certainly always people who engaged in homosexual acts which would have been punishable in some societies and not in others, it was only with the development of the science of psychology (especially psychoanalysis) and of modern medical discourses on sexuality that the ‘homosexual’ as a sort of person with a supposed specific character structure and lifestyle emerged.
The development of much knowledge in the social sciences can be seen in this way and Foucault’s work is at the origin of many studies under the heading of ‘governmentality’ which take up issues that were once dealt with under the heading of the sociology of the professions.
One book in particular, produced by Foucault and his students, illustrates this well. It is a study of the confession and trial of a nineteenth-century French peasant, Pierre Riviere, who took an axe to a number of his immediate family. What the study draws out is the arguments between the emerging psychiatric profession and the legal profession over whether Riviere was bad or mad. It is not an argument over something that can be established according to some external or absolute standard outside each of the conflicting discourses and against which both can be measured. Rather one constitutes him as a responsible agent who should be punished for his crimes, while the other constitutes him, from the same material, as an insane man in need of whatever treatment might be available. They then fight out a power struggle about the jurisdiction of each profession - the new profession of psychiatry of course representing a threat to the well-established legal profession (Foucault 1978b).One way of thinking about Foucault is as being concerned about the relationship between reason and unreason, constantly exploring the way in which the former creates the latter - the way in which the sciences and reason necessarily imply their opposite, ‘non-science’ and unreason, the way in which the rational implies the ‘irrational’. In political terms this is translated into thinking about how the exclusion of social groups takes place, and we often find a juxtaposing of science and reason and those with power - the white races, men - on the one hand, and, on the other, those without power - nonwhite ethnic groups and women, the arts and emotion. It is as if such thought often sets up a rigidified dialectic - there are two opposites but there is no interpenetration or movement; this is something which will be considered again later. Unlike in the theories of identity and subjectivity which developed from Lacan’s work, the emphasis is less on the multiplicity of identities and more on rigid forms of constructed identity - technological metaphors are often used (Craib 1998).
One of Foucault’s main themes is the way in which social order in the modern world relies less upon external force and policing and more upon the internal disciplining of individual. We are not made to behave in a particular way, but we make ourselves behave in that way. We are not the more or less free-choosing agents of rational choice theory or any other of the interpretive approaches - rather, these very ideas of choice and freedom ensure our subordination.