For this reason punishment is not only
retaliatory
but also cor- rective (ibid.
Foucault-Key-Concepts
To say such a thing to the emperor, especially in public, is indeed provocative.
From Diogenes' point of view, Alexander just is not so great!
Foucault points out that "whereas Socrates plays with his interlocutor's ignorance, Dio- genes wants to hurt Alexander's pride" (ibid.
: 126).
In other words, the provocative dialogue is a unique variation of Socratic dialogue: by showing someone that they are not true to what they claim, the philosopher encourages the interlocutor to examine oneself and begin to take care of oneself.
Preaching, acting out and attacking pride: these were the three main categories of the public use of parrhesia performed by the Cynics. Foucault would have more to say about the Stoics in the 1984 lectures at the College de France. This is because, as Foucault states, "the Cynic parrhesiastic game is played at the very limits of the parrhesiastic con- tract. It borders on transgression because the parrhesiastes may have made too many insulting remarks" (ibid. : 127). 7 The Cynics reappear as examples for Foucault because they take truth-telling to its absolute limit; parrhesia is the modus operandi of the entire Cynic worldview. Perhaps no other group completely embodied parrhesia in their own persons in the way that the Cynics did.
The final arena for the use of parrhesia is in one's private life, includ- ing one's personal relationships. One needs truth-telling such that one is one's own interlocutor: pride and flattery are possible even with one's self. One needs parrhesia in order to stay away from self-deception. The group that best represents this use of truth-telling is the Stoics, although Foucault would later add early Christians to the list.
At the heart of Stoic life was self-examination. This self-examination is not the same as confession in the later Christian period. Instead, self- examination was more of an administrative activity. As Foucault notes, Seneca does not account for "sins" but:
mistakes . . . inefficient actions requiring adjustments between ends and means . . . The point of the fault concerns a practical error in his behavior since he was unable to establish an effective
? 153
? MI C H EL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
rational relation between the principles of conduct he knows and the behavior he actually engaged in. (Ibid. : 149)
Seneca is only keeping track of his errors because those errors are frus- trating his goal. If Seneca were to give up that goal, then there would be nothing to account for. In order to tell whether one is fulfilling one's goals, one must be able to give an honest, flattery-free account of oneself: this is the role of self-examination.
The second truth-telling practice that the Stoics used was self- diagnosis. Once again, Foucault warns us not to make self-diagnosis into what would later be thought of in terms of confession. Instead, self-diagnosis was a way to figure out where one's problem lies. Foucault reads from Seneca's "On the Tranquility of Mind", a letter in which Seneca responds to the self-diagnosis of Serenus, who had written to Seneca for moral advice. The self-diagnosis lays out Serenus' moral "symptoms", and leaves it to Seneca to make a moral "diagnosis". Serenus does this only because he wants tranquillity and needs help from Seneca on how to obtain it. When Serenus speaks of his "illness", he must be careful not to misrepresent himself, regardless of whether his description presents him in the most flattering light. In order for Seneca truly to help him, Serenus understands that he must say all tell the truth - about his life, his likes and his dislikes.
The third practice is self-testing. Foucault discusses Epictetus' method of testing representations and sorting them into the categories of those things that are in one's control and those things that are not in one's control. It is important, as with self-examination and self-diagnosis, to be frank, critical and truthful about this sorting. In so doing, the practitioner gains a truth about himself that is free from flattery and self-deception. As Foucault says,
The truth about the disciple emerges from a personal relation which he establishes with himself: and this truth can now be disclosed either to himself . . . or to someone else . . . And the dis- ciple must also test himself, and check to see whether he is able to achieve self-mastery. (ibid. : 164-5)
Upon deciding on self-mastery, the disciple must be able to examine himself in order to be able to disclose to himself whether he is work- ing towards self-mastery or not. Upon discovering any flaws in the plan or in its execution, the disciple diagnoses himself in order to give the master correct information in order to secure a correct "remedy" to flaws.
? ? 154
? S UB J E C TIVITY AND TRUTH
A return to morality?
Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics: these Hellenic schools ofthoughtrepre- sent, as Foucault argues in 1 9 8 3 , "a genuine golden age in the history of care of the self" (2005a: 81). Although we are unable to "return" to these schools of thought owing to archaeological reasons, we can at least pose the question of how we as subjects became so divorced from truth as a practice of the self such that "subjectivity" and "truth" are merely placeholders for something now long gone. How can we return to morality? Can we reclaim truth as a moral activity, freed from mere epistemology?
We need to offer a few caveats. First, I am not suggesting that one can no longer take care of oneself through practices of the self. Weight Watchers, for example, employs many practices that would fit into the Stoicmodelofcareoftheself. 8 Otherexamplesincludethemartialarts, meditation and, given my proximity to the beach, surfing. We are still engaged in something like practices of the self, as other contributors to this volume well illustrate. Second, I am not suggesting that one cannot tell the truth in dangerous situations. There are whistleblowers who risk job security in the name of truth. Protesters are often willing (and plan) to get arrested for the sake of their cause. There is also something akin to the use of parrhesia in interventions and psychoanalysis. We indeed have practices like care of the self and parrhesia, but they are discontinuous with their older meaning.
Foucault argues that it is impossible in the modern period for prac- tices of the self to be of much use in helping one be a parrhesiastes and vice versa. The yogi, for example, will have a hard time claiming that doing yoga justifies her critique of the government (if she were even to offer such a critique). It would be difficult to understand that the government should believe her critique as true because of her moral character as a result of doing yoga. Additionally, how many people do yoga in order to gain the moral fortitude to access the truth and tell the truth to others? In the United States, yoga is done mostly for aesthetic purposes or for medical benefit. The spiritual dimension of yoga is often internal to the practitioner: stress release and better breathing. Yoga is not the action done in order to truly gain truth about the world; it is a relaxing form of exercise. This is not to suggest that exercise cannot be a practice of the self aimed at truth, but most people exercise for the sake of health and beauty - usually the latter - not for the sake of truth and knowledge. So we see a disconnect between truth and subjectivity here. Yoga, dieting and other practices of the self in today's society seem to have nothing to do with one's moral self. Yoga is done by the virtuous
? 155
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
as expertly as the wicked, by the more intelligent as carefully as the less intelligent. One does not go to one's yoga instructor and seek solutions to serious problems; the yoga instructor is simply there to offer the class, not to live in community with the students.
In fact, when most people resolve for the New Year that they will "take better care of themselves", they usually always mean this in a strictly medical sense. One resolves to lose weight, lower their bad cho- lesterol, cut out junk food, and so on. In making those resolutions, one rarely adds to the list "become a morally better person by lowering my cholesterol". The modern period sees the body mechanically, so there is no automatic connection between one's moral self and the body as medical object. No student will believe that the knowledge taught by a given professor, for example, is true in virtue of the professor having a healthy body.
The more I discuss our modern "practices of the self", the clearer it seems that we do not "take care" of ourselves in the ancient sense at all. It might be best to say that we have self-disciplinary practices more than practices of the self per se. Therefore, our return to morality might entail being more self-conscious about how our self-disciplinary practices inform our desires to tell the truth. Let us resolve to be truth- tellers, and form ourselves in such a way that we live for the truth. But what is truth in today's world? Is it the kind of truth one should live or die for? We must therefore become more aware of what counts for truth at any moment. Perhaps the return to morality, the critique of truth and self-discipline is simply the Foucauldian project.
Notes
1. It is perhaps here that we see Foucault's greatest debt to Heidegger's "The Age of the World Picture" (Heidegger 1977: 1 15-54).
2. "Subjectivity and Truth" was a draft of his 1983 book The Care ofthe Self, the third volume of the The History ofSexuality (Foucault 1986).
3. Ofcourse,itneednotbeDescarteswhodidthis,butsincethatisthefigurethat most people would know, we go with him. Foucault does not ascribe agency to authors; therefore, we must be sure not to "blame" Descartes for the Cartesian moment we are about to describe.
4. Although Foucault runs out of time before giving a detailed account of early Christian practices, he gives many hints throughout the lecture course. His best accounts of early Christian (and later Christian) practices can be found in the essays "Technologies of the Self ", "Sexuality and Solitude" and "The Battle for Chastity" from the same period of Foucault's work (Foucault 1997c).
5. ImmanuelKant,MetaphysicsofMorals,Aldc 6:429,whereKantstatesthatour duty to tell the truth is not a duty to others but a duty to ourselves as a moral being.
156
? SUBJE CTIVITY AND TRUTH
6. Foucault mentions in the 1984 lectures that parrhesia is not about "epistemologi- cal structures", but rather "des formes alethurgiques", forms of unconcealment (Foucault 2009: 5; see Heidegger 1996: ? 44).
7. Note that the theme of transgression, a Foucauldian theme from the 1960s, reappears here. See "APreface to Transgression" (in Foucault 1998: 69-87).
8. I am thinking primarily ofthe food journal, although there are other techniques. See Heyes (2006, 2007).
? 157
? ELEVEN
Subjectivity an ? power
Cressida J. Heyes
One must remember that power is not an ensemble of mecha- nisms of negation, refusal, exclusion. But it produces effectively. It is likely that it produces right down to individuals themselves. Individuality, individual identity are the products of power. 1
"Subjectivity" and its cognates are philosophical terms that describe a possibility for lived experience within a larger historical and political context. "The subject" (le sujet) is not simply a synonym for "person"; instead the term captures the possibility of being a certain kind of per- son, which, for the theorists who tend to use it, is typically a contingent historical possibility rather than a universal or essential truth about human nature. These terms are especially philosophically important for Michel Foucault, who, in his middle works Discipline and Punish and The History ofSexuality, Volume I, develops a theoretical-historical account of the emergence of the modern subject in the context of what he calls "disciplinary power". This chapter draws on these texts to elaborate how Foucault believes such subjects come into being and what the implications are for us: the persons who, he argues, have inherited a system of power that both creates our possibilities and constrains our existence. I examine two related challenges to Foucault's account, and then conclude by drawing on contemporary discourses of weight and weight loss to show how his work can be applied to case studies beyond those Foucault himself discussed.
In French, the key term Foucault uses to capture the emergence of subjectivities (or subject-positions: particular spaces for being a subject) is assujettissement. Variously translated as "subjectivation", "subjection"
? 159
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
or even "subjagation", the difficulties in rendering the word into Eng- lish reflect the philosophical difficulties associated with its meaning. It describes a double process of the actions of power in relation to selves that is both negative and positive. First, assujettissement captures the idea that we are subjected or oppressed by relations of power. When a norm (which Foucault understands as a standard to which individuals are held as well as by which populations are defined) imposes itself on us, we are pressed to follow it. In this sense assujettissement describes a process of constraint and limitation. For example, "homosexuals" are constrained by the oppressive beliefs and practices of those who discriminate against them. In these moments, power serves its more familiar repressive function, holding back the capacities of those indi- viduals against whom it acts. In many political theories of oppression, power plays only this negative role, and must be out-manoeuvred if we are to become free. For Foucault, however, power always also plays a positive role: it enables certain subject-positions (or certain actions or capacities for the individual). Thus at the same time as "homosexu- als" are discriminated against, the invocation of this very label (which Foucault believes is a historically specific and contingent possibility, rather than simply the truth about a pre-existing group of people) itself permits political mobilization, solidarity, mutual identification, the creation of social spaces, and so on. Without homosexuals there would be no homophobia and no gay-bashing, but there would also be no gay bars or gay pride marches.
Many alternative political theoretical models of the individual assume that we - individuals - are ontologically prior to the exercise of power. That is, human beings have certain universal qualities that are then exercised, suppressed, or otherwise moulded by the exercise of power. Indeed, many of us commonly think of power as something that acts upon us - an outside force to which we may succumb or not, but never as something that made us who we are. "Be yourself" is a popular injunction in Western cultures, where the self one is supposed to be can be identified, eventually, or just in theory, as an object that is not determined by relations of power (where power is also often under- stood as a repressive force). This model of the self has been used for many progressive purposes: for example, feminism has urged women to look beyond male dominance to find the true selves patriarchy has denied and suppressed. Foucault, however, famously argued that power is not only repressive, and nor does it act only upon the already formed subject. Rather power enables the identities we claim at the same time as it represses or limits us - and these two actions ultimately cannot be separated. If this is the nutshell version (and perhaps the most
? 160
? SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER
philosophically controversial aspect) of Foucault's account of assujet- tissement, let us look very briefly at how he reaches this conclusion.
"The Subject"and Assujettissement
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveillir et Punir: Naissance de IaPrison, first published in French in 1975) Foucault rather indirectly sets out his account of power through a historical account of statepunishment(Foucault 1979). Whatcouldahistoryofpunishment and the prison - specifically, a history of how the French state enacted punishment between 1 75 7 and 1 8 3 7 - tell us about how subjects come into being? 2 The mechanisms of penality that "the carceral" comes to use are like those that permeate society more broadly; the "disciplinary" power developed in the context of the prison is continuous with edu- cational, psychological and medical contexts. In particular,
the activity of judging has increased precisely to the extent that the normalizing power has spread. Borne along by the omnipresence of the mechanisms of discipline, basing itself on all the carceral apparatuses, it has become one of the major functions of our society . . . The carceral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalizing power. (Ibid. : 304)
Not only does the prison "support" the new form of power that con- cerns Foucault, but it also creates a way of thinking about subjectivity. He proclaims that:
by an analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power, one might understand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual have come to duplicate crime as objects of penal inter- vention; and in what way a specific mode of assujettissement was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge. (Ibid. : 24)
How did this come about? Foucault famously opens Discipline and Punish with a graphic and brutal account of the public torture and execution of Damiens, the man who in 1757 attempted to kill King Louis XV. Here "the body of the condemned" is made into a spectacle. The sovereign enacts through public extreme violence the retribution that will befall the body of anyone who makes an attempt on his life.
? 161
? ? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Suddenly this narrative stops, and Foucault jumps forward eighty years, to an 1838 text in which Leon Faucher describes the daily timetable of a Paris prison (ibid. : 3-7). The prisoners' waking hours are closely divided into periods for prayer, work, eating, recreation and education, and their activities (such as receiving instruction, or prayer) are con- structive as much as they are overtly punitive. Furthermore, Foucault suggests that the body of the prisoner is a fundamentally different kind of object in each example: Damiens' suffering is a public spectacle. His passive body manifests the power of the sovereign, against his will. The prisoners of Faucher, by contrast, live their own bodies, and discipline themselves according to the timetable constructed to mould them into certain kinds of persons; they exercise, they engage in recreation.
What emerges for Foucault as the eighteenth century unfolds, then, is a new set of methods for controlling the operations of bodies. Prisoners must be rendered obedient in order to be managed, but this manage- ment must come at least in part from their own actions. This new form of power, which acts without the guidance of a central sovereign upon bodies to make certain kinds of persons, Foucault labels "disciplinary power". Although I will not elaborate here on Foucault's important distinction between sovereign and disciplinary power (see e. g. Allen 1999: 31-7), it is central to the kind ofassujettissement that Foucault argues characterizes modernity. Disciplines create a subject who is self- monitoring, developmental, the object at the intersection of numerous vectors of management and coercion and, most of all, useful, produc- tive. Not only prisons, but the military, medicine, education and the emerging human sciences all play a role in the development of this new kindofsubject,usingfourkeymechanisms(Foucault1979: 149-69). In brief, first, the relation of the individual to space is redefined, through novel forms of architecture (most famously, the Panoptic prison) and mechanisms of population management; second, the individual's activ- ity is exhaustively controlled and monitored and his body incorporated into that process (as, for example, in the precise drilling of soldiers) ; third, time is organized and monitored much more closely, and comes to be understood as both progressive (one of Foucault's examples is incremental examinations for the advancing school pupil) and minutely (even infinitely) divisible; finally, the composition of forces is restruc- tured to maximize the productive effects of people working together, organizing bodies according to their relative position and mutual effects, and redirecting attention to efficient "tactics".
Foucault distils three techniques that cut across these four mecha- nisms to consolidate modern subjectivity (ibid. : 170--94). Hierarchi- cal observation functions by making subjects constantly visible and
? 162
? SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER
knowable, through a single gaze that sees everything constantly. In the Panopticon this is a literal mechanism, but Foucault treats this kind of visibility as a metaphor for how power works on subjects more broadly. Second, normalizing judgement is enacted through the micromanage- ment of behaviour in areas of social life from which penality had pre- viously been absent. Although in the orphanage or barracks there are explicit regulations, the order imposed through discipline legislates "natural and observable processes" to ensure greater conformity to a norm.
For this reason punishment is not only retaliatory but also cor- rective (ibid. : 179): from beating the child who errs, for example, the teacher moves to assigning "lines": a repetitive exercise that serves as both punishment and training. "Through this micro-economy of a per- petual penality operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level or their value" (ibid. : 1 8 1 ) . The third technique of disciplinary power is the examination (an instrument that combines hierarchical observation and normalizing judgement) . In ritualized form, examination techniques incorporate the normalizing gaze as a mechanism of differentiation and evaluation, and Foucault's examples include the physician's rounds, the school exam and army inspections. Disciplinary power is itself invisible yet renders its subjects hyper-visible in order to tighten its grip: "it is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection" (ibid. : 1 8 7) .
In short, discipline creates a novel subject-position: the individual. This individual is a conformist, docile, self-monitoring person, who is expected (including by emergent models in the biological and human sciences) to develop in particular ways and is subject to much closer yet more seemingly benign forms of management. At the same time (and, paradoxically, through many of the same mechanisms) we are told that we each have our own distinctive biography (worthy of investigation and representation) and that we are marked by qualities internal to ourselves (not only by a generic social status as members of kinship net- works or socioeconomic classes) . This discourse of the distinctiveness and authenticity of the individual is for other political philosophers a boon of modernity, which marks the emergence of democracy, egalitar- ian citizenship and autonomy. Foucault's attitude is more ambivalent, and he is critical of narratives of historical progress that see the increase in autonomy for the individual only as liberating her from relations of power. Instead, he thinks, what we consider an increase in autonomy is complicated by a concomitant intensification of our subjection to discipline (Foucault 1997e). For many political philosophers, human beings simply are, foundationally, individuals with certain definitive
? 163
? MI CHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
qualities (perhaps rationality, or certain capabilities), where this claim is not seen as historically contingent or dependent on any particular cultural frame of reference. Human progress then consists in the gradual realization of this individuality, through, perhaps, the acquisition of rights, or economic frameworks that permit the development of capa- bilities. Foucault, by contrast, insists that the idea of the individual is historically specific (indeed, embedded within a particular "genealogi- cal" understanding of what history is [see Gutting 2005: 43-53]) and that the rise of individualism does not mark the unqualified realization of our human potential. Rather, it represents the emergence of some new capacities, and the intensification of our subjection to power; we become different kinds of subject, but not necessary "better" subjects than we were.
In Volume I of The History of Sexuality (first published in French in 1976), his next major work after Discipline and Punish, Foucault elaborates his account ofassujettissement (1990a). Our typical histori- cal account of sexuality, he argues, leans heavily on what he famously calls "the repressive hypothesis". We tend to think, that is, that the nineteenth century is marked by a growing discomfort with public discussion of sexuality. Sexuality happened only to those peripheral deviants, the "other Victorians", such as prostitutes, pimps and perverts. For the bourgeois classes, goes the popular historical perception, sexual- ity was taboo. The notion that the Victorian era marked a distinctively repressive origin in the history of sexuality enables a narrative extrapo- lation through the struggles of psychoanalysis with repression to the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond: our problem is (and has always been) that we are uptight about sex, and we need to challenge our own silences and shame in order to liberate ourselves (ibid. : 3-7).
Near the beginning of History ofSexuality, Foucault tells us sardoni- cally that his:
aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function . . . The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?
? ? 164
(Ibid. : 7-8)
? SUBJE CTIVITY AND POWER
He has three main doubts about the repressive hypothesis. First, a historical doubt: is repression such an incontrovertible fact about the history of sexuality? Second, a theoretical doubt: does power in fact always work through repression (does it always say "no"? ), as the hypothesis seems to assume? And third, a political qualm: is the "anti-repression" discourse of sexual liberationists actually all that dif- ferent from the very discourse of repression that it claims to expose? Foucault answers these questions, as he does in Discipline and Pun- ish, through a set of historical examples dating from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries (mostly) in France. In the chapter "The Incitement to Discourse", Foucault identifies an explosion of ways of talking about sex in the late seventeenth century, key to which is the institution of the Christian confession. Just as the functioning of power in the prison becomes a metaphor and model for disciplinary power writ large, Foucault suggests, the idea of approaching a pastoral authority and revealing the hitherto concealed truth about one's sexual transgressions comes to represent a key mechanism in all of the dis- ciplines of sexual knowledge. As the eighteenth century rolls around, sex becomes, he argues, a central object of political, economic and technical administration, through, for example, the study of popula- tion (birth control, population growth, reproductive statistics etc. ), a fascination with the sexuality of children (especially analysing and preventing masturbation), the growth of psychiatry and its study and treatment of sexual disorders, and the criminalization of certain sexual practices (ibid. : 25-3 1 ) . Perhaps most important for Foucault's account of assujettissement, in Chapter 3, "Scientia Sexualis", he argues that the new science of sex produces its truth through endless incitement and confession. We are constantly urged to reveal our sexual desires, perversions and "identities", in a variety of practices that cause us to be made into "case studies" for the quasi-medical, scientific discourses that now surround sexual truth.
Foucault provides two primary examples of sexual individuals in History of Sexuality. 3 The first is his controversial story of Jouy, a "simple-minded" farmhand who, in 1867, enticed local young girls into "caresses". Jouy, Foucault implies, is on the cusp of the historical moment when such behaviour is met not with a smack in the face, or indifferent refusal, or viewed as "inconsequential bucolic pleasures" from which both parties can walk away without any particular conclu- sion being drawn about their status as "sexual victim" or "pervert" . 4 His behaviour attracts the attention of a girl's parents, and thence further authorities; Jouy was physically assessed and interviewed, and then incarcerated without being convicted of any crime as a "pure object of
? ? 165
? ? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
medicine and knowledge" (ibid. : 32). Indeed, Foucault's interpretation comes from the published "case study " of an early example of what we would now call a "paedophile". In a second example, Foucault argues that in this crucial historical period the idea that some people are essentially "homosexuals" is posited by sexology:
As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homo- sexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiol- ogy. (1990a: 43)
His arrival is announced with Foucault's most quoted line, "the sodomite had been a temporary aberration [relaps] ; the homosexual was now a species [espece]" (ibid. ). Discovering this identity becomes a per- sonal as well as a legislative project, in which the individual deciphers the truth of the self as homosexual, or (later) heterosexual, or another taxonomic possibility, even as, Foucault argues, these are not natural kinds of human being only now being "discovered" or "understood" but rather historically contingent forms of assujettissement.
Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History ofSexu- ality, then, are the texts in which Foucault shows us most clearly how power creates subjects. They tackle different historical case studies, but their underlying philosophical arguments are closely connected. Each shows that by learning something about how a particular institu- tion functions we can learn something about how power functions to create certain kinds of individual; each aims to use historical enquiry to make the present less familiar (to unsettle our assumptions that prisons are, among other things, humanitarian institutions with no implications for "our" subjectivity, and that we are repressed about sexuality and talking about it is liberating and transgressive, respec- tively). Each also argues that this process of defamiliarization will actually invert our common-sense understanding of subjectivity: we discover that criminal justice in fact creates criminals rather than sim- ply punishing them, and that throwing off the repression of our sexu- ality in fact places us in thrall to a new kind of discursive control.
? ? 166
SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER
Objections
Critics have suggested that Foucault's historical accounts are one-sided, s i m p l i s t i c , o r p l a i n w r o n g ( e . g . A l f o r d 2 0 0 0 ; Ta y l o r 1 9 8 4 : e s p . 1 6 3 - 5 ) . Foucault's writing is undoubtedly allusive and elliptical, sometimes tracking very large themes and theses in ways suspiciously like the grand historical narratives he disdains, and at other times for no apparent reason picking on a particular "scene" or exemplary text to make his philosophical point. In Nietzschean spirit, he claims to be offering only descriptive accounts of the emergence of subjectivity after discipline, and rejecting the endorsement of particular values, but there are hints of political allegiance and aspiration in his writing. Foucault was actively involved in the anti--prison movement in France, as well as being a prominent openly gay intellectual, and commentators have wondered just how his actions fit with his words in this regard (see Enns 2007: 73-98). Critics charge that Foucault posits the theoretical necessity of resistance within any account of power (Foucault 1990a: 95) but fails to provide concrete examples of what resistance looks like in practice (Hartsock 1990).
Here I will focus on just two philosophical objections that are spe- cifically directed toward Foucault's account of assujettissement. First, critics charge that Foucault's subject of power lacks agency, and hence the capacity to resist the effects of disciplinary power Foucault describes (e. g. Fraser 1989). Mainstream philosophical understandings of resist- ance to oppressive power typically require that one stand outside the system of power (at least in theory) to push back against it. Agency, on this more familiar view, is the capacity to act on one's own behalf, drawing on beliefs and desires that are properly one's own, yet if these beliefs and desires are the product of the power one also wants to oppose, agency (of this kind) may be impossible. As Linda Alcoff says, "Foucault's demotion of subjectivity to an analytic position posterior to power results in a conception of subjectivity deprived of agency . . . In the absence o f agency . . . resistance to domination is impossible and even conceptually incoherent" (1992: 73-4; see also Taylor 1984). Because disciplinary power emanates from everywhere and nowhere, there is no sovereign against whom resistance can be enacted. Dami- ens was executed for attempting to kill the king. His case is a literal instantiationofthemoremetaphoricalpointFoucault'scriticsmake: in the absence of a clear locus of power that can be challenged, and with the insistence that we are all part of the networks of power that both form us and limit us, it is not clear how to act, or whom to act against, especially if one is interested in advancing social justice.
? 167
? ? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
At one point in his work Foucault does suggest that domination is a particular limit-case of power, in which relations are "blocked, frozen" so that no resistance is possible (1997e: 283). To deny agency only in such extreme situations, however, does not help to justify claims about the illegitimacy of those relations of power that are less than complete domination, but nonetheless politically troubling. Foucault seems to be right that increasingly the forms of power that citizens of liberal democracies need to understand are not limited to abuses of sovereign power but rather include more subtle instantiations of disciplinary power that promise greater freedom without stipulating their own price. But if all his genealogies do is to describe, then he cannot be committed to making value-judgements about which rela- tions of power are the more oppressive, damaging, or unjust. Thus, in a second closely related objection, Foucault has often been charged with having no way of making normative claims, choosing among competing values, or with any grounds on which to argue for social change. For some critics this charge is advanced a step further: perhaps Foucault does make tacit appeal to values, but he denies this appeal while depending on it for the coherence of his position (Taylor 1984). This is often referred to as the charge of crypto-normativity, a term typically used in the Foucault-Habermas debates by those who wish to highlight Foucault's implicit appeal to humanist, objective values in his genealogical texts (see, for example, Habermas's own formulation of the problem [Habermas 1994: 94-8]).
That Foucault had political opinions (and reasons for holding them) seems beyond doubt. Both these objections share the sense that without positing an exterior to disciplinary power (a place where a stronger kind of agency is possible, or from which we might appeal to better values to effect social change) we are stuck in the modes of assujettissement Foucault describes, without control of our fate. Defenders of Foucault have responded to both these objections by pointing out that his genea- logical project is to unseat a humanist theory of the subject, without thereby replacing it with some new foundational account. Foucault wants to show us that our common perceptions of our own increasing autonomy, our overcoming of repression, our gradual march toward liberation, are all ways of thinking about our subjectivity that have historical roots and are guided by a particular configuration of power. Of course some things are enabled by this configuration and others are precluded, but as Foucault famously said in an interview:
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is
? ? 168
? SUBJE CTIVITY AND POWER
dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my posi- tion leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism . . . I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.
(Foucault 1997f: 256)
Sowhatis"themaindanger"? Iseetwoprimaryavenuesofresponse for Foucault's defenders. The first simply sidesteps this question. In Foucault's practice of critique we are not told what to criticize in advance of its appearance; because he considers any account of human nature to be an exercise of power within a regime of truth, we cannot list the particular modes of assujettissement that would make us unfree versus those that are liberatory. Instead, Foucault provides us with a practice by which the subject takes on the right to "desubjectivize" him- self: "critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination [inservitude volontaire], that of reflective indocility [indocilitie reflechie]" (1990e: 39). Thus there is no specific content to critique, only a method in which we alert ourselves to what our current subjectivity allows or limits (see Butler 2002). As Paul Patton argues, autonomy (understood as the capacity to govern one's own actions) will always be held back by situations that approach domination, and will always lead to oppo- sition: "it is not a question of advocating such resistance, of praising autonomy or blaming domination as respective exemplars of a good and evil for all, but simply of understanding why such resistance does occur" (Patton 1998: 73).
The second kind of response may be more satisfying to those critics who, like Charles Taylor, argue that we simply cannot make sense of Foucault's Nietzschean account of power without some non- Nietzschean concepts of freedom and truth. As Thomas Flynn argues, the kind of genealogical critique Foucault offers always appeals to its audience's shared values - of freedom as autonomy in particular - while showing that a particular practice of power fails to live up to them in ways we have not recognized (Flynn 1989: 196-7). This is the only foundation available: the realization that our cares and commitments, on the one hand, and our ability to make sense of ourselves, on the other, are at odds in ways that make us ineffective as the very kinds of agents we aspire to be (see Owen 2003). Foucault consistently resists any theory of the subject in favour of a pragmatic recognition that making power more flexible and multivalent will open up new possi- bilities for thinking and acting: a project we are already tacitly inclined to consider politically valuable, albeit for reasons that are very much contingent to our historical and political location.
? 169
? ? MI CHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Weighty subjects
Thus Foucault argues that new subj ectivities have become available to us that are both ways to be an individual - to be distinctive - and to be sub- ject to the control of a range of extra-legal mechanisms. For some schol- ars, Foucault's example of homosexuality has been implausible : this may be for historical reasons (some critics argue that in fact the idea of "the homosexual" pre-dates Foucault's account) or scientific reasons (some think that biological explanations for homosexuality can be adduced). But for many less opinionated readers the suggestion that homosexuality is historically specific just does not feel convincing: even if Foucault were right, so much time has passed since the emergence of the homosexual "species", and the practices that consolidate the contemporary identity of "being" a homosexual have so much of a grip, that we cannot imagine things being otherwise. By contrast, the idea that one's weight might define a subject-position is, I have argued, much more recent, and still in the process of being sedimented in a variety of institutions and prac- tices. Let me conclude with this example, then, to show how Foucault's account of assujettissement might play out in practice. Any process of assujettissement happens at two levels: the management of the social body, and the disciplinary forces acting on the individual's body. At the level of population, obesity is now decried as a marker of corruption in the body politic (Herndon 2005) and a public health catastrophe. The strident, compulsive nature of public anti-obesity discourse is enabled by seemingly infinite statistical parsing and public policy strategizing about the population's "obesity epidemic". The very ability to construct such statistical and policy information of course depends on a range of disciplinary institutions and practices, from public health nurses who record the weight of schoolchildren to actuaries who analyse death rates. Of particular historical significance, the standard height/weight tables that were produced in the 195Os (based on actuarial rather than strictly medical evidence) provide a technique for analysing the population (how many more people are now "overweight" or "obese"? ) as well as a way for individuals to define their body mass index and weight status (Heyes 2007: 67-7 1 ; Gaesser 2002).
Thus at the level of the individual, weight is turned from an inciden- tal feature of a person into an identity. Being "overweight" becomes a numerically defined status as well as a marker of individual failure to regulate the body appropriately. This is made possible not just by the "disciplines" of public health and medicine, but also by endless confes- sional narratives detailing the consumption pattern, weight, fat distribu- tion, cholesterol level, caloric expenditure, exercise habits, and so forth,
? ? ? 170
? SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER
of each person. Some dieting internet discussion boards feature profiles introducing each person through opaque abbreviations that actually identify starting weight, current weight and goal weight; dieters discuss the minutiae of calorie-counting, carbohydrates and exercise options with reference to the weight deviations stipulated on the screen, invok- ing norms such as body mass index. The web is littered with video blogs of "my weight loss journey", in which ordinary people make of their biography an object worthy of representation, while also confessing the truth of their weighty selves, often dwelling on parts of their lives that might seem only tangentially related to dieting. Increasingly the identity "dieter" becomes as real as "homosexual". This consolidation of a subject-position requires that everything about a person be dragged within the remit of weight loss; the subject-position "dieter" becomes the lens through which personal identity is revealed (Heyes 2007). True to Foucault's predictions, the practice of dieting is not simply repressive (if it were, it would not be so popular) but is also enabling: people feel better about themselves (if only for a short time) , learn new information (about nutrition, for example) and develop new skills (such as how to describe and manage their personal "weaknesses"), at the same time as they are drawn ever deeper into a disciplinary system that can then exercise its control and management.
In this brief discussion I hope to have shown why Foucault believes that the modern individual is not just a fact of our humanity but is rather a historical product of disciplinary power in its overall form as well as in the specifics of the subject-positions we have inherited. My own analysis of discourses of weight has struggled with the two objections I identified: what kinds of value-judgements are justified by a genealogi- cal reading of dieting, and how can oppressed dieters fight back? In the end, I adopt both of the strategies I mentioned. I engage largely in practices of critique, showing how the intensification of power relations and the consolidation of subjectivity accompany a discourse that most of us assume simply aspires to increase our autonomy and liberate us from the demon fat. But I also show that our "cares and commitments" are in some ways at odds with the kind of subjectivity that dieting pro- motes, and that this gap between the kinds of people we aspire to be and those that our practices sediment can be exploited to ethical and political purpose.
Notes
1. "11 faut rappeler que le pouvoir n'estpas un ensemble de mecanismes de negation, de refus, d'exclusion. Mais il produit effectivement. Il produit vraisemblable-
? 171
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CON CEPTS
ment jusqu'aux individus eux"? memes. L'individualite, l'identite individuelle sont des produits du pouvoir . . . " (Michel Foucault, "Je suis un artificier" ["I am an artisan"], 1975 interview with Roger-Pol Droit, available online in French at http://foucault. info/documents/foucault. entretien1975. fr. html [accessedAugust 2010]).
2. Foucault admits the specificity of his history to the French penal system (see 1979: 309 n. 3). His translator Alan Sheridan also notes the distinctiveness of "supplice" - "the public torture and execution of criminals that provided one of the most popular spectacles of eighteenth-century France" (ibid. : "Translator's Note").
3. A third example is Foucault's reading of the memoir of Herculine Barbin, "a nineteenth century French hermaphrodite" (Foucault 1980b).
4. Feminist critics have suggested that in his haste to see Jouy as exemplary of a historical moment Foucault is too quick to characterize the power relations in which he participates as benign. See Alcoff (1996).
? ? 172
? TWELVE
Practices of th ? self
Dianna Taylor
Previous chapters have illustrated that for Foucault subjectivity is not a state we occupy but rather an activity we perform. Moreover, it is an activity that always takes place within a context of constraint. We constitute ourselves as subjects (we are enabled) by way of vari- ous "practices of the self", which include activities like writing, diet, exercise and truth-telling. At the same time, we are constituted (we are constrained) in so far as the way in which we undertake these practices is shaped by institutions such as schools, courts of law, hospitals and the state security apparatus, as well as by the more general prevailing norms and values of the society in which we live.
Put differently, subjectivity is not distinct from but is rather formed in and through relations of power. There are not emancipatory institutions and norms that enable us, on the one hand, and oppressive or normal- izing institutions and norms that constrain us, on the other; rather, we are simultaneously enabled and constrained by the same institutions and norms. We therefore find ourselves confronted with the task of figuring out when and how we are enabled and when and how we are constrained, of determining ways in which existing practices have the potential to loosen constraints and thus resist normalization, and of employing those practices not only for that purpose, but also in order to develop new and different practices - new and different ways of relating to ourselves and others. We need, in other words, to be able to reflect critically on the very process of becoming a subject.
This critically reflective activity comprises a specific set of practices, which Foucault collectively refers to as "critique". In this chapter I provide an overview of Foucault's account of the origins of modern
? 173
? ? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Western subjectivity in early Christian practices of the self.
Preaching, acting out and attacking pride: these were the three main categories of the public use of parrhesia performed by the Cynics. Foucault would have more to say about the Stoics in the 1984 lectures at the College de France. This is because, as Foucault states, "the Cynic parrhesiastic game is played at the very limits of the parrhesiastic con- tract. It borders on transgression because the parrhesiastes may have made too many insulting remarks" (ibid. : 127). 7 The Cynics reappear as examples for Foucault because they take truth-telling to its absolute limit; parrhesia is the modus operandi of the entire Cynic worldview. Perhaps no other group completely embodied parrhesia in their own persons in the way that the Cynics did.
The final arena for the use of parrhesia is in one's private life, includ- ing one's personal relationships. One needs truth-telling such that one is one's own interlocutor: pride and flattery are possible even with one's self. One needs parrhesia in order to stay away from self-deception. The group that best represents this use of truth-telling is the Stoics, although Foucault would later add early Christians to the list.
At the heart of Stoic life was self-examination. This self-examination is not the same as confession in the later Christian period. Instead, self- examination was more of an administrative activity. As Foucault notes, Seneca does not account for "sins" but:
mistakes . . . inefficient actions requiring adjustments between ends and means . . . The point of the fault concerns a practical error in his behavior since he was unable to establish an effective
? 153
? MI C H EL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
rational relation between the principles of conduct he knows and the behavior he actually engaged in. (Ibid. : 149)
Seneca is only keeping track of his errors because those errors are frus- trating his goal. If Seneca were to give up that goal, then there would be nothing to account for. In order to tell whether one is fulfilling one's goals, one must be able to give an honest, flattery-free account of oneself: this is the role of self-examination.
The second truth-telling practice that the Stoics used was self- diagnosis. Once again, Foucault warns us not to make self-diagnosis into what would later be thought of in terms of confession. Instead, self-diagnosis was a way to figure out where one's problem lies. Foucault reads from Seneca's "On the Tranquility of Mind", a letter in which Seneca responds to the self-diagnosis of Serenus, who had written to Seneca for moral advice. The self-diagnosis lays out Serenus' moral "symptoms", and leaves it to Seneca to make a moral "diagnosis". Serenus does this only because he wants tranquillity and needs help from Seneca on how to obtain it. When Serenus speaks of his "illness", he must be careful not to misrepresent himself, regardless of whether his description presents him in the most flattering light. In order for Seneca truly to help him, Serenus understands that he must say all tell the truth - about his life, his likes and his dislikes.
The third practice is self-testing. Foucault discusses Epictetus' method of testing representations and sorting them into the categories of those things that are in one's control and those things that are not in one's control. It is important, as with self-examination and self-diagnosis, to be frank, critical and truthful about this sorting. In so doing, the practitioner gains a truth about himself that is free from flattery and self-deception. As Foucault says,
The truth about the disciple emerges from a personal relation which he establishes with himself: and this truth can now be disclosed either to himself . . . or to someone else . . . And the dis- ciple must also test himself, and check to see whether he is able to achieve self-mastery. (ibid. : 164-5)
Upon deciding on self-mastery, the disciple must be able to examine himself in order to be able to disclose to himself whether he is work- ing towards self-mastery or not. Upon discovering any flaws in the plan or in its execution, the disciple diagnoses himself in order to give the master correct information in order to secure a correct "remedy" to flaws.
? ? 154
? S UB J E C TIVITY AND TRUTH
A return to morality?
Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics: these Hellenic schools ofthoughtrepre- sent, as Foucault argues in 1 9 8 3 , "a genuine golden age in the history of care of the self" (2005a: 81). Although we are unable to "return" to these schools of thought owing to archaeological reasons, we can at least pose the question of how we as subjects became so divorced from truth as a practice of the self such that "subjectivity" and "truth" are merely placeholders for something now long gone. How can we return to morality? Can we reclaim truth as a moral activity, freed from mere epistemology?
We need to offer a few caveats. First, I am not suggesting that one can no longer take care of oneself through practices of the self. Weight Watchers, for example, employs many practices that would fit into the Stoicmodelofcareoftheself. 8 Otherexamplesincludethemartialarts, meditation and, given my proximity to the beach, surfing. We are still engaged in something like practices of the self, as other contributors to this volume well illustrate. Second, I am not suggesting that one cannot tell the truth in dangerous situations. There are whistleblowers who risk job security in the name of truth. Protesters are often willing (and plan) to get arrested for the sake of their cause. There is also something akin to the use of parrhesia in interventions and psychoanalysis. We indeed have practices like care of the self and parrhesia, but they are discontinuous with their older meaning.
Foucault argues that it is impossible in the modern period for prac- tices of the self to be of much use in helping one be a parrhesiastes and vice versa. The yogi, for example, will have a hard time claiming that doing yoga justifies her critique of the government (if she were even to offer such a critique). It would be difficult to understand that the government should believe her critique as true because of her moral character as a result of doing yoga. Additionally, how many people do yoga in order to gain the moral fortitude to access the truth and tell the truth to others? In the United States, yoga is done mostly for aesthetic purposes or for medical benefit. The spiritual dimension of yoga is often internal to the practitioner: stress release and better breathing. Yoga is not the action done in order to truly gain truth about the world; it is a relaxing form of exercise. This is not to suggest that exercise cannot be a practice of the self aimed at truth, but most people exercise for the sake of health and beauty - usually the latter - not for the sake of truth and knowledge. So we see a disconnect between truth and subjectivity here. Yoga, dieting and other practices of the self in today's society seem to have nothing to do with one's moral self. Yoga is done by the virtuous
? 155
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
as expertly as the wicked, by the more intelligent as carefully as the less intelligent. One does not go to one's yoga instructor and seek solutions to serious problems; the yoga instructor is simply there to offer the class, not to live in community with the students.
In fact, when most people resolve for the New Year that they will "take better care of themselves", they usually always mean this in a strictly medical sense. One resolves to lose weight, lower their bad cho- lesterol, cut out junk food, and so on. In making those resolutions, one rarely adds to the list "become a morally better person by lowering my cholesterol". The modern period sees the body mechanically, so there is no automatic connection between one's moral self and the body as medical object. No student will believe that the knowledge taught by a given professor, for example, is true in virtue of the professor having a healthy body.
The more I discuss our modern "practices of the self", the clearer it seems that we do not "take care" of ourselves in the ancient sense at all. It might be best to say that we have self-disciplinary practices more than practices of the self per se. Therefore, our return to morality might entail being more self-conscious about how our self-disciplinary practices inform our desires to tell the truth. Let us resolve to be truth- tellers, and form ourselves in such a way that we live for the truth. But what is truth in today's world? Is it the kind of truth one should live or die for? We must therefore become more aware of what counts for truth at any moment. Perhaps the return to morality, the critique of truth and self-discipline is simply the Foucauldian project.
Notes
1. It is perhaps here that we see Foucault's greatest debt to Heidegger's "The Age of the World Picture" (Heidegger 1977: 1 15-54).
2. "Subjectivity and Truth" was a draft of his 1983 book The Care ofthe Self, the third volume of the The History ofSexuality (Foucault 1986).
3. Ofcourse,itneednotbeDescarteswhodidthis,butsincethatisthefigurethat most people would know, we go with him. Foucault does not ascribe agency to authors; therefore, we must be sure not to "blame" Descartes for the Cartesian moment we are about to describe.
4. Although Foucault runs out of time before giving a detailed account of early Christian practices, he gives many hints throughout the lecture course. His best accounts of early Christian (and later Christian) practices can be found in the essays "Technologies of the Self ", "Sexuality and Solitude" and "The Battle for Chastity" from the same period of Foucault's work (Foucault 1997c).
5. ImmanuelKant,MetaphysicsofMorals,Aldc 6:429,whereKantstatesthatour duty to tell the truth is not a duty to others but a duty to ourselves as a moral being.
156
? SUBJE CTIVITY AND TRUTH
6. Foucault mentions in the 1984 lectures that parrhesia is not about "epistemologi- cal structures", but rather "des formes alethurgiques", forms of unconcealment (Foucault 2009: 5; see Heidegger 1996: ? 44).
7. Note that the theme of transgression, a Foucauldian theme from the 1960s, reappears here. See "APreface to Transgression" (in Foucault 1998: 69-87).
8. I am thinking primarily ofthe food journal, although there are other techniques. See Heyes (2006, 2007).
? 157
? ELEVEN
Subjectivity an ? power
Cressida J. Heyes
One must remember that power is not an ensemble of mecha- nisms of negation, refusal, exclusion. But it produces effectively. It is likely that it produces right down to individuals themselves. Individuality, individual identity are the products of power. 1
"Subjectivity" and its cognates are philosophical terms that describe a possibility for lived experience within a larger historical and political context. "The subject" (le sujet) is not simply a synonym for "person"; instead the term captures the possibility of being a certain kind of per- son, which, for the theorists who tend to use it, is typically a contingent historical possibility rather than a universal or essential truth about human nature. These terms are especially philosophically important for Michel Foucault, who, in his middle works Discipline and Punish and The History ofSexuality, Volume I, develops a theoretical-historical account of the emergence of the modern subject in the context of what he calls "disciplinary power". This chapter draws on these texts to elaborate how Foucault believes such subjects come into being and what the implications are for us: the persons who, he argues, have inherited a system of power that both creates our possibilities and constrains our existence. I examine two related challenges to Foucault's account, and then conclude by drawing on contemporary discourses of weight and weight loss to show how his work can be applied to case studies beyond those Foucault himself discussed.
In French, the key term Foucault uses to capture the emergence of subjectivities (or subject-positions: particular spaces for being a subject) is assujettissement. Variously translated as "subjectivation", "subjection"
? 159
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
or even "subjagation", the difficulties in rendering the word into Eng- lish reflect the philosophical difficulties associated with its meaning. It describes a double process of the actions of power in relation to selves that is both negative and positive. First, assujettissement captures the idea that we are subjected or oppressed by relations of power. When a norm (which Foucault understands as a standard to which individuals are held as well as by which populations are defined) imposes itself on us, we are pressed to follow it. In this sense assujettissement describes a process of constraint and limitation. For example, "homosexuals" are constrained by the oppressive beliefs and practices of those who discriminate against them. In these moments, power serves its more familiar repressive function, holding back the capacities of those indi- viduals against whom it acts. In many political theories of oppression, power plays only this negative role, and must be out-manoeuvred if we are to become free. For Foucault, however, power always also plays a positive role: it enables certain subject-positions (or certain actions or capacities for the individual). Thus at the same time as "homosexu- als" are discriminated against, the invocation of this very label (which Foucault believes is a historically specific and contingent possibility, rather than simply the truth about a pre-existing group of people) itself permits political mobilization, solidarity, mutual identification, the creation of social spaces, and so on. Without homosexuals there would be no homophobia and no gay-bashing, but there would also be no gay bars or gay pride marches.
Many alternative political theoretical models of the individual assume that we - individuals - are ontologically prior to the exercise of power. That is, human beings have certain universal qualities that are then exercised, suppressed, or otherwise moulded by the exercise of power. Indeed, many of us commonly think of power as something that acts upon us - an outside force to which we may succumb or not, but never as something that made us who we are. "Be yourself" is a popular injunction in Western cultures, where the self one is supposed to be can be identified, eventually, or just in theory, as an object that is not determined by relations of power (where power is also often under- stood as a repressive force). This model of the self has been used for many progressive purposes: for example, feminism has urged women to look beyond male dominance to find the true selves patriarchy has denied and suppressed. Foucault, however, famously argued that power is not only repressive, and nor does it act only upon the already formed subject. Rather power enables the identities we claim at the same time as it represses or limits us - and these two actions ultimately cannot be separated. If this is the nutshell version (and perhaps the most
? 160
? SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER
philosophically controversial aspect) of Foucault's account of assujet- tissement, let us look very briefly at how he reaches this conclusion.
"The Subject"and Assujettissement
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveillir et Punir: Naissance de IaPrison, first published in French in 1975) Foucault rather indirectly sets out his account of power through a historical account of statepunishment(Foucault 1979). Whatcouldahistoryofpunishment and the prison - specifically, a history of how the French state enacted punishment between 1 75 7 and 1 8 3 7 - tell us about how subjects come into being? 2 The mechanisms of penality that "the carceral" comes to use are like those that permeate society more broadly; the "disciplinary" power developed in the context of the prison is continuous with edu- cational, psychological and medical contexts. In particular,
the activity of judging has increased precisely to the extent that the normalizing power has spread. Borne along by the omnipresence of the mechanisms of discipline, basing itself on all the carceral apparatuses, it has become one of the major functions of our society . . . The carceral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalizing power. (Ibid. : 304)
Not only does the prison "support" the new form of power that con- cerns Foucault, but it also creates a way of thinking about subjectivity. He proclaims that:
by an analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power, one might understand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual have come to duplicate crime as objects of penal inter- vention; and in what way a specific mode of assujettissement was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge. (Ibid. : 24)
How did this come about? Foucault famously opens Discipline and Punish with a graphic and brutal account of the public torture and execution of Damiens, the man who in 1757 attempted to kill King Louis XV. Here "the body of the condemned" is made into a spectacle. The sovereign enacts through public extreme violence the retribution that will befall the body of anyone who makes an attempt on his life.
? 161
? ? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Suddenly this narrative stops, and Foucault jumps forward eighty years, to an 1838 text in which Leon Faucher describes the daily timetable of a Paris prison (ibid. : 3-7). The prisoners' waking hours are closely divided into periods for prayer, work, eating, recreation and education, and their activities (such as receiving instruction, or prayer) are con- structive as much as they are overtly punitive. Furthermore, Foucault suggests that the body of the prisoner is a fundamentally different kind of object in each example: Damiens' suffering is a public spectacle. His passive body manifests the power of the sovereign, against his will. The prisoners of Faucher, by contrast, live their own bodies, and discipline themselves according to the timetable constructed to mould them into certain kinds of persons; they exercise, they engage in recreation.
What emerges for Foucault as the eighteenth century unfolds, then, is a new set of methods for controlling the operations of bodies. Prisoners must be rendered obedient in order to be managed, but this manage- ment must come at least in part from their own actions. This new form of power, which acts without the guidance of a central sovereign upon bodies to make certain kinds of persons, Foucault labels "disciplinary power". Although I will not elaborate here on Foucault's important distinction between sovereign and disciplinary power (see e. g. Allen 1999: 31-7), it is central to the kind ofassujettissement that Foucault argues characterizes modernity. Disciplines create a subject who is self- monitoring, developmental, the object at the intersection of numerous vectors of management and coercion and, most of all, useful, produc- tive. Not only prisons, but the military, medicine, education and the emerging human sciences all play a role in the development of this new kindofsubject,usingfourkeymechanisms(Foucault1979: 149-69). In brief, first, the relation of the individual to space is redefined, through novel forms of architecture (most famously, the Panoptic prison) and mechanisms of population management; second, the individual's activ- ity is exhaustively controlled and monitored and his body incorporated into that process (as, for example, in the precise drilling of soldiers) ; third, time is organized and monitored much more closely, and comes to be understood as both progressive (one of Foucault's examples is incremental examinations for the advancing school pupil) and minutely (even infinitely) divisible; finally, the composition of forces is restruc- tured to maximize the productive effects of people working together, organizing bodies according to their relative position and mutual effects, and redirecting attention to efficient "tactics".
Foucault distils three techniques that cut across these four mecha- nisms to consolidate modern subjectivity (ibid. : 170--94). Hierarchi- cal observation functions by making subjects constantly visible and
? 162
? SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER
knowable, through a single gaze that sees everything constantly. In the Panopticon this is a literal mechanism, but Foucault treats this kind of visibility as a metaphor for how power works on subjects more broadly. Second, normalizing judgement is enacted through the micromanage- ment of behaviour in areas of social life from which penality had pre- viously been absent. Although in the orphanage or barracks there are explicit regulations, the order imposed through discipline legislates "natural and observable processes" to ensure greater conformity to a norm.
For this reason punishment is not only retaliatory but also cor- rective (ibid. : 179): from beating the child who errs, for example, the teacher moves to assigning "lines": a repetitive exercise that serves as both punishment and training. "Through this micro-economy of a per- petual penality operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level or their value" (ibid. : 1 8 1 ) . The third technique of disciplinary power is the examination (an instrument that combines hierarchical observation and normalizing judgement) . In ritualized form, examination techniques incorporate the normalizing gaze as a mechanism of differentiation and evaluation, and Foucault's examples include the physician's rounds, the school exam and army inspections. Disciplinary power is itself invisible yet renders its subjects hyper-visible in order to tighten its grip: "it is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection" (ibid. : 1 8 7) .
In short, discipline creates a novel subject-position: the individual. This individual is a conformist, docile, self-monitoring person, who is expected (including by emergent models in the biological and human sciences) to develop in particular ways and is subject to much closer yet more seemingly benign forms of management. At the same time (and, paradoxically, through many of the same mechanisms) we are told that we each have our own distinctive biography (worthy of investigation and representation) and that we are marked by qualities internal to ourselves (not only by a generic social status as members of kinship net- works or socioeconomic classes) . This discourse of the distinctiveness and authenticity of the individual is for other political philosophers a boon of modernity, which marks the emergence of democracy, egalitar- ian citizenship and autonomy. Foucault's attitude is more ambivalent, and he is critical of narratives of historical progress that see the increase in autonomy for the individual only as liberating her from relations of power. Instead, he thinks, what we consider an increase in autonomy is complicated by a concomitant intensification of our subjection to discipline (Foucault 1997e). For many political philosophers, human beings simply are, foundationally, individuals with certain definitive
? 163
? MI CHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
qualities (perhaps rationality, or certain capabilities), where this claim is not seen as historically contingent or dependent on any particular cultural frame of reference. Human progress then consists in the gradual realization of this individuality, through, perhaps, the acquisition of rights, or economic frameworks that permit the development of capa- bilities. Foucault, by contrast, insists that the idea of the individual is historically specific (indeed, embedded within a particular "genealogi- cal" understanding of what history is [see Gutting 2005: 43-53]) and that the rise of individualism does not mark the unqualified realization of our human potential. Rather, it represents the emergence of some new capacities, and the intensification of our subjection to power; we become different kinds of subject, but not necessary "better" subjects than we were.
In Volume I of The History of Sexuality (first published in French in 1976), his next major work after Discipline and Punish, Foucault elaborates his account ofassujettissement (1990a). Our typical histori- cal account of sexuality, he argues, leans heavily on what he famously calls "the repressive hypothesis". We tend to think, that is, that the nineteenth century is marked by a growing discomfort with public discussion of sexuality. Sexuality happened only to those peripheral deviants, the "other Victorians", such as prostitutes, pimps and perverts. For the bourgeois classes, goes the popular historical perception, sexual- ity was taboo. The notion that the Victorian era marked a distinctively repressive origin in the history of sexuality enables a narrative extrapo- lation through the struggles of psychoanalysis with repression to the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond: our problem is (and has always been) that we are uptight about sex, and we need to challenge our own silences and shame in order to liberate ourselves (ibid. : 3-7).
Near the beginning of History ofSexuality, Foucault tells us sardoni- cally that his:
aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function . . . The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?
? ? 164
(Ibid. : 7-8)
? SUBJE CTIVITY AND POWER
He has three main doubts about the repressive hypothesis. First, a historical doubt: is repression such an incontrovertible fact about the history of sexuality? Second, a theoretical doubt: does power in fact always work through repression (does it always say "no"? ), as the hypothesis seems to assume? And third, a political qualm: is the "anti-repression" discourse of sexual liberationists actually all that dif- ferent from the very discourse of repression that it claims to expose? Foucault answers these questions, as he does in Discipline and Pun- ish, through a set of historical examples dating from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries (mostly) in France. In the chapter "The Incitement to Discourse", Foucault identifies an explosion of ways of talking about sex in the late seventeenth century, key to which is the institution of the Christian confession. Just as the functioning of power in the prison becomes a metaphor and model for disciplinary power writ large, Foucault suggests, the idea of approaching a pastoral authority and revealing the hitherto concealed truth about one's sexual transgressions comes to represent a key mechanism in all of the dis- ciplines of sexual knowledge. As the eighteenth century rolls around, sex becomes, he argues, a central object of political, economic and technical administration, through, for example, the study of popula- tion (birth control, population growth, reproductive statistics etc. ), a fascination with the sexuality of children (especially analysing and preventing masturbation), the growth of psychiatry and its study and treatment of sexual disorders, and the criminalization of certain sexual practices (ibid. : 25-3 1 ) . Perhaps most important for Foucault's account of assujettissement, in Chapter 3, "Scientia Sexualis", he argues that the new science of sex produces its truth through endless incitement and confession. We are constantly urged to reveal our sexual desires, perversions and "identities", in a variety of practices that cause us to be made into "case studies" for the quasi-medical, scientific discourses that now surround sexual truth.
Foucault provides two primary examples of sexual individuals in History of Sexuality. 3 The first is his controversial story of Jouy, a "simple-minded" farmhand who, in 1867, enticed local young girls into "caresses". Jouy, Foucault implies, is on the cusp of the historical moment when such behaviour is met not with a smack in the face, or indifferent refusal, or viewed as "inconsequential bucolic pleasures" from which both parties can walk away without any particular conclu- sion being drawn about their status as "sexual victim" or "pervert" . 4 His behaviour attracts the attention of a girl's parents, and thence further authorities; Jouy was physically assessed and interviewed, and then incarcerated without being convicted of any crime as a "pure object of
? ? 165
? ? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
medicine and knowledge" (ibid. : 32). Indeed, Foucault's interpretation comes from the published "case study " of an early example of what we would now call a "paedophile". In a second example, Foucault argues that in this crucial historical period the idea that some people are essentially "homosexuals" is posited by sexology:
As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homo- sexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiol- ogy. (1990a: 43)
His arrival is announced with Foucault's most quoted line, "the sodomite had been a temporary aberration [relaps] ; the homosexual was now a species [espece]" (ibid. ). Discovering this identity becomes a per- sonal as well as a legislative project, in which the individual deciphers the truth of the self as homosexual, or (later) heterosexual, or another taxonomic possibility, even as, Foucault argues, these are not natural kinds of human being only now being "discovered" or "understood" but rather historically contingent forms of assujettissement.
Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History ofSexu- ality, then, are the texts in which Foucault shows us most clearly how power creates subjects. They tackle different historical case studies, but their underlying philosophical arguments are closely connected. Each shows that by learning something about how a particular institu- tion functions we can learn something about how power functions to create certain kinds of individual; each aims to use historical enquiry to make the present less familiar (to unsettle our assumptions that prisons are, among other things, humanitarian institutions with no implications for "our" subjectivity, and that we are repressed about sexuality and talking about it is liberating and transgressive, respec- tively). Each also argues that this process of defamiliarization will actually invert our common-sense understanding of subjectivity: we discover that criminal justice in fact creates criminals rather than sim- ply punishing them, and that throwing off the repression of our sexu- ality in fact places us in thrall to a new kind of discursive control.
? ? 166
SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER
Objections
Critics have suggested that Foucault's historical accounts are one-sided, s i m p l i s t i c , o r p l a i n w r o n g ( e . g . A l f o r d 2 0 0 0 ; Ta y l o r 1 9 8 4 : e s p . 1 6 3 - 5 ) . Foucault's writing is undoubtedly allusive and elliptical, sometimes tracking very large themes and theses in ways suspiciously like the grand historical narratives he disdains, and at other times for no apparent reason picking on a particular "scene" or exemplary text to make his philosophical point. In Nietzschean spirit, he claims to be offering only descriptive accounts of the emergence of subjectivity after discipline, and rejecting the endorsement of particular values, but there are hints of political allegiance and aspiration in his writing. Foucault was actively involved in the anti--prison movement in France, as well as being a prominent openly gay intellectual, and commentators have wondered just how his actions fit with his words in this regard (see Enns 2007: 73-98). Critics charge that Foucault posits the theoretical necessity of resistance within any account of power (Foucault 1990a: 95) but fails to provide concrete examples of what resistance looks like in practice (Hartsock 1990).
Here I will focus on just two philosophical objections that are spe- cifically directed toward Foucault's account of assujettissement. First, critics charge that Foucault's subject of power lacks agency, and hence the capacity to resist the effects of disciplinary power Foucault describes (e. g. Fraser 1989). Mainstream philosophical understandings of resist- ance to oppressive power typically require that one stand outside the system of power (at least in theory) to push back against it. Agency, on this more familiar view, is the capacity to act on one's own behalf, drawing on beliefs and desires that are properly one's own, yet if these beliefs and desires are the product of the power one also wants to oppose, agency (of this kind) may be impossible. As Linda Alcoff says, "Foucault's demotion of subjectivity to an analytic position posterior to power results in a conception of subjectivity deprived of agency . . . In the absence o f agency . . . resistance to domination is impossible and even conceptually incoherent" (1992: 73-4; see also Taylor 1984). Because disciplinary power emanates from everywhere and nowhere, there is no sovereign against whom resistance can be enacted. Dami- ens was executed for attempting to kill the king. His case is a literal instantiationofthemoremetaphoricalpointFoucault'scriticsmake: in the absence of a clear locus of power that can be challenged, and with the insistence that we are all part of the networks of power that both form us and limit us, it is not clear how to act, or whom to act against, especially if one is interested in advancing social justice.
? 167
? ? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
At one point in his work Foucault does suggest that domination is a particular limit-case of power, in which relations are "blocked, frozen" so that no resistance is possible (1997e: 283). To deny agency only in such extreme situations, however, does not help to justify claims about the illegitimacy of those relations of power that are less than complete domination, but nonetheless politically troubling. Foucault seems to be right that increasingly the forms of power that citizens of liberal democracies need to understand are not limited to abuses of sovereign power but rather include more subtle instantiations of disciplinary power that promise greater freedom without stipulating their own price. But if all his genealogies do is to describe, then he cannot be committed to making value-judgements about which rela- tions of power are the more oppressive, damaging, or unjust. Thus, in a second closely related objection, Foucault has often been charged with having no way of making normative claims, choosing among competing values, or with any grounds on which to argue for social change. For some critics this charge is advanced a step further: perhaps Foucault does make tacit appeal to values, but he denies this appeal while depending on it for the coherence of his position (Taylor 1984). This is often referred to as the charge of crypto-normativity, a term typically used in the Foucault-Habermas debates by those who wish to highlight Foucault's implicit appeal to humanist, objective values in his genealogical texts (see, for example, Habermas's own formulation of the problem [Habermas 1994: 94-8]).
That Foucault had political opinions (and reasons for holding them) seems beyond doubt. Both these objections share the sense that without positing an exterior to disciplinary power (a place where a stronger kind of agency is possible, or from which we might appeal to better values to effect social change) we are stuck in the modes of assujettissement Foucault describes, without control of our fate. Defenders of Foucault have responded to both these objections by pointing out that his genea- logical project is to unseat a humanist theory of the subject, without thereby replacing it with some new foundational account. Foucault wants to show us that our common perceptions of our own increasing autonomy, our overcoming of repression, our gradual march toward liberation, are all ways of thinking about our subjectivity that have historical roots and are guided by a particular configuration of power. Of course some things are enabled by this configuration and others are precluded, but as Foucault famously said in an interview:
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is
? ? 168
? SUBJE CTIVITY AND POWER
dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my posi- tion leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism . . . I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.
(Foucault 1997f: 256)
Sowhatis"themaindanger"? Iseetwoprimaryavenuesofresponse for Foucault's defenders. The first simply sidesteps this question. In Foucault's practice of critique we are not told what to criticize in advance of its appearance; because he considers any account of human nature to be an exercise of power within a regime of truth, we cannot list the particular modes of assujettissement that would make us unfree versus those that are liberatory. Instead, Foucault provides us with a practice by which the subject takes on the right to "desubjectivize" him- self: "critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination [inservitude volontaire], that of reflective indocility [indocilitie reflechie]" (1990e: 39). Thus there is no specific content to critique, only a method in which we alert ourselves to what our current subjectivity allows or limits (see Butler 2002). As Paul Patton argues, autonomy (understood as the capacity to govern one's own actions) will always be held back by situations that approach domination, and will always lead to oppo- sition: "it is not a question of advocating such resistance, of praising autonomy or blaming domination as respective exemplars of a good and evil for all, but simply of understanding why such resistance does occur" (Patton 1998: 73).
The second kind of response may be more satisfying to those critics who, like Charles Taylor, argue that we simply cannot make sense of Foucault's Nietzschean account of power without some non- Nietzschean concepts of freedom and truth. As Thomas Flynn argues, the kind of genealogical critique Foucault offers always appeals to its audience's shared values - of freedom as autonomy in particular - while showing that a particular practice of power fails to live up to them in ways we have not recognized (Flynn 1989: 196-7). This is the only foundation available: the realization that our cares and commitments, on the one hand, and our ability to make sense of ourselves, on the other, are at odds in ways that make us ineffective as the very kinds of agents we aspire to be (see Owen 2003). Foucault consistently resists any theory of the subject in favour of a pragmatic recognition that making power more flexible and multivalent will open up new possi- bilities for thinking and acting: a project we are already tacitly inclined to consider politically valuable, albeit for reasons that are very much contingent to our historical and political location.
? 169
? ? MI CHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Weighty subjects
Thus Foucault argues that new subj ectivities have become available to us that are both ways to be an individual - to be distinctive - and to be sub- ject to the control of a range of extra-legal mechanisms. For some schol- ars, Foucault's example of homosexuality has been implausible : this may be for historical reasons (some critics argue that in fact the idea of "the homosexual" pre-dates Foucault's account) or scientific reasons (some think that biological explanations for homosexuality can be adduced). But for many less opinionated readers the suggestion that homosexuality is historically specific just does not feel convincing: even if Foucault were right, so much time has passed since the emergence of the homosexual "species", and the practices that consolidate the contemporary identity of "being" a homosexual have so much of a grip, that we cannot imagine things being otherwise. By contrast, the idea that one's weight might define a subject-position is, I have argued, much more recent, and still in the process of being sedimented in a variety of institutions and prac- tices. Let me conclude with this example, then, to show how Foucault's account of assujettissement might play out in practice. Any process of assujettissement happens at two levels: the management of the social body, and the disciplinary forces acting on the individual's body. At the level of population, obesity is now decried as a marker of corruption in the body politic (Herndon 2005) and a public health catastrophe. The strident, compulsive nature of public anti-obesity discourse is enabled by seemingly infinite statistical parsing and public policy strategizing about the population's "obesity epidemic". The very ability to construct such statistical and policy information of course depends on a range of disciplinary institutions and practices, from public health nurses who record the weight of schoolchildren to actuaries who analyse death rates. Of particular historical significance, the standard height/weight tables that were produced in the 195Os (based on actuarial rather than strictly medical evidence) provide a technique for analysing the population (how many more people are now "overweight" or "obese"? ) as well as a way for individuals to define their body mass index and weight status (Heyes 2007: 67-7 1 ; Gaesser 2002).
Thus at the level of the individual, weight is turned from an inciden- tal feature of a person into an identity. Being "overweight" becomes a numerically defined status as well as a marker of individual failure to regulate the body appropriately. This is made possible not just by the "disciplines" of public health and medicine, but also by endless confes- sional narratives detailing the consumption pattern, weight, fat distribu- tion, cholesterol level, caloric expenditure, exercise habits, and so forth,
? ? ? 170
? SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER
of each person. Some dieting internet discussion boards feature profiles introducing each person through opaque abbreviations that actually identify starting weight, current weight and goal weight; dieters discuss the minutiae of calorie-counting, carbohydrates and exercise options with reference to the weight deviations stipulated on the screen, invok- ing norms such as body mass index. The web is littered with video blogs of "my weight loss journey", in which ordinary people make of their biography an object worthy of representation, while also confessing the truth of their weighty selves, often dwelling on parts of their lives that might seem only tangentially related to dieting. Increasingly the identity "dieter" becomes as real as "homosexual". This consolidation of a subject-position requires that everything about a person be dragged within the remit of weight loss; the subject-position "dieter" becomes the lens through which personal identity is revealed (Heyes 2007). True to Foucault's predictions, the practice of dieting is not simply repressive (if it were, it would not be so popular) but is also enabling: people feel better about themselves (if only for a short time) , learn new information (about nutrition, for example) and develop new skills (such as how to describe and manage their personal "weaknesses"), at the same time as they are drawn ever deeper into a disciplinary system that can then exercise its control and management.
In this brief discussion I hope to have shown why Foucault believes that the modern individual is not just a fact of our humanity but is rather a historical product of disciplinary power in its overall form as well as in the specifics of the subject-positions we have inherited. My own analysis of discourses of weight has struggled with the two objections I identified: what kinds of value-judgements are justified by a genealogi- cal reading of dieting, and how can oppressed dieters fight back? In the end, I adopt both of the strategies I mentioned. I engage largely in practices of critique, showing how the intensification of power relations and the consolidation of subjectivity accompany a discourse that most of us assume simply aspires to increase our autonomy and liberate us from the demon fat. But I also show that our "cares and commitments" are in some ways at odds with the kind of subjectivity that dieting pro- motes, and that this gap between the kinds of people we aspire to be and those that our practices sediment can be exploited to ethical and political purpose.
Notes
1. "11 faut rappeler que le pouvoir n'estpas un ensemble de mecanismes de negation, de refus, d'exclusion. Mais il produit effectivement. Il produit vraisemblable-
? 171
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CON CEPTS
ment jusqu'aux individus eux"? memes. L'individualite, l'identite individuelle sont des produits du pouvoir . . . " (Michel Foucault, "Je suis un artificier" ["I am an artisan"], 1975 interview with Roger-Pol Droit, available online in French at http://foucault. info/documents/foucault. entretien1975. fr. html [accessedAugust 2010]).
2. Foucault admits the specificity of his history to the French penal system (see 1979: 309 n. 3). His translator Alan Sheridan also notes the distinctiveness of "supplice" - "the public torture and execution of criminals that provided one of the most popular spectacles of eighteenth-century France" (ibid. : "Translator's Note").
3. A third example is Foucault's reading of the memoir of Herculine Barbin, "a nineteenth century French hermaphrodite" (Foucault 1980b).
4. Feminist critics have suggested that in his haste to see Jouy as exemplary of a historical moment Foucault is too quick to characterize the power relations in which he participates as benign. See Alcoff (1996).
? ? 172
? TWELVE
Practices of th ? self
Dianna Taylor
Previous chapters have illustrated that for Foucault subjectivity is not a state we occupy but rather an activity we perform. Moreover, it is an activity that always takes place within a context of constraint. We constitute ourselves as subjects (we are enabled) by way of vari- ous "practices of the self", which include activities like writing, diet, exercise and truth-telling. At the same time, we are constituted (we are constrained) in so far as the way in which we undertake these practices is shaped by institutions such as schools, courts of law, hospitals and the state security apparatus, as well as by the more general prevailing norms and values of the society in which we live.
Put differently, subjectivity is not distinct from but is rather formed in and through relations of power. There are not emancipatory institutions and norms that enable us, on the one hand, and oppressive or normal- izing institutions and norms that constrain us, on the other; rather, we are simultaneously enabled and constrained by the same institutions and norms. We therefore find ourselves confronted with the task of figuring out when and how we are enabled and when and how we are constrained, of determining ways in which existing practices have the potential to loosen constraints and thus resist normalization, and of employing those practices not only for that purpose, but also in order to develop new and different practices - new and different ways of relating to ourselves and others. We need, in other words, to be able to reflect critically on the very process of becoming a subject.
This critically reflective activity comprises a specific set of practices, which Foucault collectively refers to as "critique". In this chapter I provide an overview of Foucault's account of the origins of modern
? 173
? ? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Western subjectivity in early Christian practices of the self.
