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January 2, 2006
Another quote from the Introduction to Johanna Oksala's book Foucault on Freedom. These quotes explore the way that human beings are shaped, and shape themselves, into modern subjects. This does away with the idea of the natural human being standing autonomously outside networks and relations of power.
Oksala says that:
Foucault characterized his work as a genealogy of the modern subject: a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. He further distinguished three modes of objectification that transform human beings into subjects. These modes correspond with three relatively distinct periods in his thought (SP, 208.)
Oksala says that:
The first is the modes of inquiry that give themselves the status of science. Human beings are turned into subjects in processes of scientific study and classification, for example, into speaking subjects in linguistics, subjects who labour in economics, subjects of life in biology. Foucault's archaeology deals with this first mode in analyzing systems of knowledge. In The Order of Things he showed how the discourses of life, labour and language historically developed and structured themselves as sciences, and how human sciences further constituted man as their object of study.
The second mode of shaping to be found in Foucault's work is associated with his genealogies.
Oksala says that the texts of this period studied:
"....what he [Foucault] himself called 'dividing practices' (SP, 208). These are practices of
manipulation and examination that classify, locate and shape bodies in the social field. His books Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality are inquiries into this second mode of objectification. He shows how modern disciplinary technologies constitute the subject as their object of control: human beings are examined,measured and categorized. This process defines them as modern individuals. The disciplinary mechanisms do not shape subjectivity only by external coercion; they also function through being ‘interiorized’. In The History of Sexuality, for example, Foucault shows how our belief in a true sexual nature is a disciplinary mode of knowledge that makes us objects of control as well as subjects of sexuality.
The third mode of the shaping of the human being into a modern subject is the ethical one. Oksala says that the
third phase of Foucault’s work, represented by volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality. These texts study:
...the way the human being turns himself or herself into a subject. It is an analysis of the subject's relationship to itself in the domain of sexuality. He asks how human beings recognize and constitute themselves as subjects of sexuality. The subject's self-understanding and relationship to the self are important dimensions in the constitution of forms of subjectivity. The subject is studied now not only as an effect of power/knowledge networks, but also as capable of moral self-reflexivity ---critical reflection on its own constitutive
conditions---and therefore also of resistance to normative practices and ideas. Subjects constitute themselves through different modes of self-understanding and self-formation.
What this does deny is the denies the autonomy of the subject since the subject is always constituted in
the power/knowledge networks of a culture. As Oksala comments the modes of self-knowledge and techniques of the self that we subjects utilize in shaping ourselves as subjects of sexuality or politics are not created or freely chosen.' She adds:
Rather, they are culturally and historically intelligible conceptions and patterns of behaviour
that subjects draw from the surrounding society. Self-understanding is internally tied to historically varying social and discursive practices ---techniques of governmentality. The governing of oneself is tied to the governing of others.
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