Page 142 - Cultural Theory

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••• Foucault: Interpretive Analysis and the Social •••

Self-subjectification practices inter-relate with classification and dividing practices
to construct modern subjects. For instance, subjects are created by human sciences
that classify problems, identities and experiences; the systems of power that divide,
stratify and institutionalize types of ‘elderly’ subjects and the technologies of the self
provide individuals with the reflexive means to problematize themselves. What
Foucault seems to be confronting us with is a disturbing vision that our ideas about
the depth of human experience are simply cultural veneers that exist in an interplay
between power and knowledge. Shumway calls this a ‘strategy of exteriority’: a strat-
egy that ‘does not stem from a claim that the true being plain and visible, but from
a rejection of the claim that the true is systematically disguised’ (1989: 26). Foucault’s
analysis of subjectification practices highlights techniques used by administrative
powers to problematize subjects and the games of truth employed by those who seek
to know them through classification techniques.

Subjectivity: Three Domains

Foucault juxtaposes his axis of classifying, dividing and self-subjectification practices
with one that delineates three domains of subjectivity: the body, the individual and
population. These domains detail how modes of subjectivity impinge on modern
social relations.

The body

The ‘body’ is a subject of discursive and political identification. In Discipline and
Punish (1977), Foucault claims that penal practices produce the ‘soul’ of the offender
by disciplining the body and corporealizing prison spaces. In prisons, the body’s
most ‘essentialist needs’ – food, space, exercise, sleep, privacy, light and heat –
become the materials upon which schedules, timetables and micro-punishments are
enacted. The body discipline developed in prisons has parallels throughout the
broader disciplinary society. Indeed, the success of modernity’s domination over effi-
cient bodies in industry, docile bodies in prisons, patient bodies in clinical research
and regimented bodies in schools and residential centres attests to Foucault’s thesis
that the human body is a highly adaptable terminus for the circulation of power rela-
tions (McNay, 1993). It would be a mistake to believe Foucault is alone in arguing
that the rule of the body is fundamental to modern politico-economical and profes-
sional regimes of power. Critiques of the domination of the body were the mainstay
of Frankfurt theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer (1944) long before Foucault’s
work. As he noted of their work:

As far as I’m concerned, I think that the Frankfurt School set problems that are
still being worked on. Among others, the effects of power that are connected
to a rationality that has been historically and geographically defined in the

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