Page 99 - Critical and Cultural Theory

SOCIAL IDENTITIES
processes through which human beings are constructed and
controlled, Poststructuralism has challenged radically certain
conventional notions of identity, particularly liberal-humanist
ones. Where liberal humanism saw the subject as permanent and
autonomous, Poststructuralism sees it as split and unstable. For
Michel Foucault (1926-84), ideology works according to one main
rule: defining the difference between normal and abnormal
subjects. It is on the basis of this distinction that people's beha-
viour is supervised and policed. Although there are no immutable
criteria for establishing what is aberrant - since definitions of
insanity, disability and criminality are ideologically determined
and hence variable - the concept of abnormality is used in fairly
consistent ways. Indeed, it is instrumental to the construction of
dominant notions of identity, for the idea of normality can only
be asserted against an other that deviates from the authorized
norm. Thus, although perceptions of the abnormal alter over time,
the ideological function of the deviant does not. Cultures inces-
santly fabricate novel versions of abnormality in order to go on
legitimizing prevalent versions of normality.
Ideology's disciplinary strategies impact directly on the human
body as the primary object of both the social sciences (psychology,
medicine, sociology, criminology) and of the institutions through
which such sciences articulate their ideologies (hospitals, schools,
prisons, law courts). The body's drives are thoroughly manipu-
lated for the purpose of producing efficient and docile subjects,
and subjugated to abstract notions of propriety and usefulness
that make the soul the prison of the body. The body is disciplined
primarily through dividing practices designed to segregate the
diseased, the insane and the lawless. Up to the eighteenth century,
power relied substantially on gruesome spectacles of execution and
torture as deterrents. With the development of the modern penal
system, public display was superseded by confinement as the single
and most effective form of punishment for practically all crimes.
Concurrently, the prison system provided a model for other insti-
tutions (schools, armies, hospitals, factories) and for their own
disciplinary mechanisms (Foucault 1979). 5
Louis Althusser (1918-90) rejects economic determinism by

5
§*~Foucault's theories are examined at greater length in Part II, Chapter 2, 'Sub-
jectivity'.

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