Page 139 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-07.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 128

••• Tim May and Jason Powell •••

discursivities, the subjected knowledge’s which were thus released would be
brought into play.
(ibid.: 85)

Foucault is claiming that archaeology is a systematic method of investigating official
statements such as dispostifs (McNay, 1994). Genealogy is a way of putting archae-
ology to practical effect, a way of linking it to cultural concerns:

A genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse
itself with a question for their ‘origins’ , will never neglect as inaccessible the
vicissitudes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents
that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty
malice; it will await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other.
Wherever it is made to go, it will not be reticent – in ‘excavating the depths’,
in allowing time for these elements to escape from a labyrinth where no truth
had ever detained them. The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras
of the origin, somewhat in the manner of the pious philosopher who needs a
doctor to exorcise the shadow of his soul.
(Foucault, 1984: 80)

The Making of the Modern Subject

Foucault’s use of genealogy cannot be divorced from an understanding of power, nor
can the constitution of the subject. With this in mind, our approach will be to con-
sider his analytical ingenuity via an examination of different modes through which
‘subjectivity’ is constituted. Foucault (1982; 1983) grounded this as a pivotal mode
of analysis that has been deployed in reflections on his own life (Miller, 1993).
Subjectivity appears as both an experiential and discursive strategy that ‘goes beyond
theory’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982) and provides us with a way to problematize the
explanatory value and relevance of his analyses.
We will discuss Foucault’s approach to subjectivity in terms of classification, divid-
ing and self-subjectification practices. These operate in ways to structure subjectivity
under the auspices of the ‘rise of modernity’ where, commencing in the seventeenth
century, the social sciences, early capitalism and institutions began to co-ordinate
new ways of objectifying ‘populations’ in western societies. In Foucault’s analysis, the
realm of the ‘social’ becomes the object of enquiry. Here, the term ‘social’ means:
‘The entire range of methods which make the members of a society relatively safe
from the effects of economic fluctuation by providing a certain security’ (Donzelot,
1980 p: xxvi). Thus, in Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault

traces the historical emergence of the social as a domain or field of inquiry and
intervention, a space structured by a multiplicity of discourses emanating from

• 128 •