Page 141 - Cultural Theory

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••• Tim May and Jason Powell •••

The knowledge and practices are also referred to as ‘epistemes’ which are ‘the total
set of relations that unite at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to
epistemological figures, sciences and formalised systems’ (Foucault, 1972: 191).
Social science disciplines, in different ways, order the status of those who can vali-
date knowledge through inquiry. Foucault designates a discourse’s function of dis-
persing subjects and objects as its ‘enunciative modality’ (ibid.: 50). This modality
encompasses roles and statuses and circumscribed subject positions. Together they
act to structure the space of surveillance where the institutionalization of knowledge
is formed.

Dividing practices

Dividing practices are deployed in order to maintain social order – to separate, cate-
gorize, normalize and institutionalize populations. In Madness and Civilization
(1967), The Birth of the Clinic (1973) and Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault illus-
trates how ‘unproductive’ people were identified as political problems with the ‘rise
of modernity’. The state divided these people into ‘the mad’, ‘the poor’ and ‘the
delinquent’ and subsequently disciplined them in institutions: asylums, hospitals,
prisons and schools (Foucault 1977). These exercises of ‘disciplinary power’ were tar-
geted at the subject and constituted techniques in these institutions. For instance, as
we noted earlier, in Discipline and Punish Foucault argues that since the eighteenth
century, prison authorities increasingly employed subtle regulatory methods of
examination, training, timetabling and surveillance of conduct on offenders in
which we find a whole ‘micro-penality’. Overall, dividing practices are seen as inte-
gral to the rationalism of the Enlightenment narratives of liberty, individuality and
rights and as coalesced with governmental forms of audit and calculation.

Self-subjectification practices

The previous modes of classification and dividing practices co-exist. Professions
examine, calculate and classify the groups that governments and institutions regu-
late, discipline and divide. The third mode of self-subjectification is more intangible.
These practices designate the ways in which people turn themselves into social sub-
jects. Foucault claims that self-subjectification entails the deployment of technolo-
gies of the self: ‘Techniques that permit individuals to affect, by their own means, a
certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own selves,
modify themselves, and attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, super-
natural power’ (Foucault, 1982: 10). In Foucault’s work, self-subjectification practices
proliferate in the domain of sexuality because the occupying sciences of medicine,
psychology and psychoanalysis obligate subjects to speak about their sexuality. In
turn, these scientific domains characterize sexual identity as pathologically ‘danger-
ous’ (Foucault, 1980). Thus, the association of sexual truth with self-subjectification
gives ‘experts’ their power.

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