Subjectification

Introduction

Almost as soon as it was born as foundational to modern politics, philosophy, and the human sciences, the subject was cast into crises of meaning. Contemporary social theory, particularly structuralism, has performed varieties of postmortem on the universal subject, challenging not only its stability, its unity, its totality, its individuality, and its interiority but the uses to which constitutions of the subject and subjectivity have been put. Yet the “death of the subject” has coincided with an intense proliferation of activity around invoking, animating, regulating, defining, fulfilling, finding, and acting upon the self and subjectivity. In politics, in work, in domestic arrangements, in consumption and marketing, in the arts and media, in medicine and health, in “lifestyle,” and in all of the diverse forms and applications of psychological technologies, human beings are acted upon, addressed, and incited to constitute ourselves as if we are selves and selves of a particular type: We are more tied to and preoccupied with our subjectivity or “selfhood” than ever before (Rose, 1998, p. 169). But what do we speak of when we speak of the subject? What have we called into being and how?

Definition

Michel Foucault, the theorist most closely associated with the concept of subjectification, provides two meanings for the word subject: subject to another by control and dependence, and tied to one’s own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge (1983, p. 212). Both meanings imply a form of power that subjugates or makes subject to, and while the two are interrelated, it is the latter set of processes to which subjectification most often refers: the constitution of the subject as an object for himself or herself. Subjectification refers to the procedures by which the subject is led to observe herself, analyze herself, interpret herself, and recognize herself as a domain of possible knowledge: “the way the subject experiences [her]self in a game of truth where [s]he relates to [her]self” (Foucault, 1998, p. 461; gender inclusion added). It operates as a form of power that applies itself to immediate and everyday life, which categorizes individuals and attaches them to their own identity, imposes a law of truth on them that they and others must recognize in them – a form of power that makes individuals subjects – and submits them to others in this way (Foucault, 1983, p. 212). The concept provides a framework for analyzing the relations, connections, multiplicities, and surfaces that form the singularities and stabilizations that we subjectivize, and carefully tend and practice, as self: a process by which the “inside” – subjectivity – is constituted as depth but also as an available object of knowledge, care, and mastery by practices of self and others (Rose, 1998).

Building on Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (1988) employed the metaphor of the fold to elaborate the ways that forces and relations of the exterior come to form an “inside,” an interiority – and an other in one’s self – to which an outside can make reference. This singular depth is no more (or less) than that which has been folded in to create a “space” or series of fields that exist only in relation to the forces, techniques, inventions, and truths that sustain them: “It is as if the relations of an outside folded back upon themselves to create a doubling, to allow a relation to oneself to emerge and to constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its own unique dimension” (Deleuze, p. 100). These foldings (and unfoldings and refoldings) of subjectification – along the “lines” of body, discipline, truth, or transcendence – are not passive; they are created and sustained by various practices and relations, notably those that entail incitements to knowing and telling the truth of one’s self.

Keywords

Governmentality; Individualization; Power/Knowledge; Signification; Veridiction

Traditional Debates

One might begin with the Greeks (“know thyself”), the Christian care of the soul, Descartes’ cogito, or the Enlightenment’s rational knowingness – they are not properly gone or even past but continue to haunt contemporary formulations of the nature of the self, of its proper relations to self and others, and the relationship of the subject to truth and to power. But Hegel can be credited with historicizing consciousness and the subject, while also positing a primary longing for transcendence of the conditions of existence (and troubling the promise of enlightenment rationalism) (Butler, 1997; Hegel, 1977). In Hegel, self-consciousness emerges from the dialectical relationship of slave and master, but in throwing off the seemingly external master, Hegel’s bondsman “emerges as the unhappy consciousness through the reflexive application of ethical laws” (Butler, 1997, p. 32). It is possible to trace, as Judith Butler does, a line from Hegel through Nietzsche to Freud, in that a dialectical reversal in which longing (or will, desire, or “the drive”) is bent back on itself through prohibition (or repression): “The drive turning back on itself becomes the precipitating condition of subject formation, a primary longing in recoil that is traced in Hegel’s unhappy consciousness as well” (Butler, 1997, 22). This interiorization of the Other, of power-relations, and of Truth – the constitution of conscience – along with the importance of history and historical conditions remain influential. Foucault, however, rejects Hegel’s dialectical logic in favor of disjunction and multiplicity, along with the traces of a transcendent and universal subject. Perhaps most important is the rejection of the “repressive hypothesis,” the idea that power works primarily in negative ways, through prohibition or censorship. Rather than longing, will or drives preceding regulatory imperatives that repress them, power-relations and regimes of truth produce or incite longing and will, as well as their visibility and articulation – their availability to power/knowledge (Foucault, 1990). Not an interior turned back on itself by an exterior power, but a folding of the exterior to create that interior. As Jacques Lacan (1977) argued, the unconscious is a historical artifact which psychoanalysis “taught” subjects to take on as his own history and normalize as the personal truth of self. Lacan’s analysis of the relationship between games of truth and formations and regulation of the subject is further developed in Foucault’s conceptualization of subjectification (e.g., 2005, 2008).

Phenomenology also posits a preexisting in the form of intentionality: consciousness is directed toward “the thing” and gains significance through experience in the world. Intentionality is meant to “surpass” any founding psychologism or naturalism, but as Deleuze (1988) argues, it creates a new psychologism and a new naturalism “to the point where…it can hardly be distinguished from a learning process” (p. 89). Intentionality “synthesizes consciousness with significations,” seeing (or experiencing) and saying – the seen provides something to speak – and never fully escapes a “naturalism of the ‘savage experience’ and of the thing, of the aimless existence of the thing in the world”: it is “the same world that speaks itself in language and sees itself in sight…as if signification haunted the visible which in turn murmured meaning” (p. 90-91; see also Merleau-Ponty, 1969). For Foucault, intentionality is knowledge and this is why there is no “savage experience,” there is nothing beneath or prior to knowledge; phenomenology is converted into epistemology (Deleuze, 1988). But for Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Being (Sein) offered the surpassing of intentionality: The fold of Being, from being to Being, from phenomenology to ontology, and the extent to which ontology was inseparable from the fold, since Being was precisely the fold that it made with being. Heidegger’s inquiries into ontology, and into questions of what thinking signifies – what is it that we call thinking and how does thought affect itself – continued to engage and inform Foucault’s work on knowledge and the subject. Ultimately, however, phenomenology is “too pacifying and ended up blessing too many things” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 93). What it blessed, the ramifications of its pacifism and its originary intentionality, can be seen in Sartre’s existentialism, the psychology of Carl Rogers, and the contemporary constructivism of, for example, Gergen and Bruner (Rose, 1998).

Critical Debates

A contemporary influence and key point of departure for Foucault was Louis Althusser (1971), whose concept of interpellation is relevant here:

[T]he individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall freely submit to the commandments of the Subject, i.e., in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e., in order that he shall make gestures and actions of his subjections ‘all by himself’ (p. 182; emphasis in original)

Clearly there is the legacy of Hegel, Marx, and Freud, along with a critique of classical political and economic liberalism: One is subjected in order that one can come to act and govern oneself as a “free” subject. For Althusser, the “commandments of the Subject,” refer to some absolute meaning-giving structure or entity – God, the Law, capitalism, or imperialism – and the promise it makes of deliverance from the basic human experience of anxiety and fragmentation (1971). This leads to critical distinctions. One is that Foucault would likely view the experience of fragmentation, anxiety, or uncontrollability as themselves modern forms and effects of subjectification, which in turn further authorize forms of power and knowledge. Second, Foucault does not view power as possessed or centralized but as transversal, dispersed in varied and variable power relations. Subjection is not derived from, say, forces of production or class struggle. Foucault’s concept differs from concepts like hegemony and interpellation because of the way he situates subjectification in relation to truth and power, and its relationship to concepts of governmentality and normalization. Subjectification involves:

the analysis of complex relations between three distinct elements none of which can be reduced to or absorbed by the others, but whose relations are constitutive of each other. These three elements are: forms of knowledge, studied in terms of their specific modes of veridiction; relations of power, not studied as an emanation of a substantial and invasive power, but in the procedures by which people’s conduct is governed; and finally the modes of formation of the subject through practices of the self. It seems to me that carrying out this triple theoretical shift—from the theme of acquired knowledge to that of veridiction, from the theme of domination to that of governmentality, and from the theme of the individual to that of practices of the self—we can truly study the relations between truth, power, and subject without ever reducing each of them to the others (2008, p. 9)

The subject is not produced secondarily or simply as strategy of some more primary site or form of power (the state, political economy, or science), but in a complex circularity with other, varied and variously instantiated, relations of power. Subjectivity is an effect only in Deleuze’s (1990) sense of the term: “it is strictly co-present to, and co-extensive with, its own cause, and determines this cause as an immanent cause, inseparable from its effects” (p. 70). Subjectification then is an individualizing operation that characterizes a series of powers – those of the family, medicine, psychology, education, labor, law, economics, and so on – which must be studied in relation to those sites and fields; it is not ultimately reducible to them, but neither is it exclusive of them, or of capitalism, or of colonialism, or of state domination (Athanasiadou, Canakis, & Cornillie, 2006; Buhrmann & Ernst, 2010; Venn, 2000; cf). Nor can it be understood simply as an effect of language, as purely grammatical, because it arises out of a “regime of signs rather than a condition internal to language,” a regime of signs bound up with an organization of power, an “enunciative assemblage” (Cuyckens, Vandelenotte, & Davidse, 2010; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 130; cf). It is not so much language itself, as the “primacy of the signifying semiology,” and the specific conditions of veridiction and relations of power that must be analyzed in relation to subjectification (Guattari & Zahm, 2011).

Subjectification refers to processes and effects that are not produced once and for all but repeatedly and variably, as such it is never complete, perfect, without contradiction, or possibility of reversal. Judith Butler (1997) can, because of that repetition, identify a “proliferation of effects which undermine the effects of normalization” so that the “subject is never fully constituted in its subjection” (pp. 93–94). The “way out” of subjectification, then, is not a matter of identifying another truth of the self, a politically progressive framework of signification. On the contrary, it is a matter of transversal resistances, of disclaiming, of refusal, of proliferation, and even of mistakes. If veridiction and signification are tactics of subjectification, then resistance would involve what Guattari calls strategies of a-signification: “And this isn’t something that is given up to a transcendent, undifferentiated subjectivity. It is something that is worked at. This is art, this is the unnameable point, this point of non-sense that the artist works” (Guattari & Zahm, 2011, p. 47). Foucault suggested that the contemporary target should not be to “discover what we are, but to refuse what we are” (Foucault, 1983, p. 216). Or, as Butler put it, the one who offers the critique must be “willing, as it were, to be undone by the critique that he or she performs” (1997, p. 106, emphasis added).