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THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY 203

available subject positions from which it is possible for a specific individual to
formulate or enunciate linguistic statements. Within discourse analysis it is
necessary to distinguish who is qualified to speak and who must remain silent,
and to locate the institutional sites or terrain on which subjects are constituted. 28
However, Foucault is insistent that the subject who formulates a statement
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‘should not be regarded as identical with the author of the formulation’. Given
the explicit critique of conscious (or unconscious) speaking subjectivity,
Foucault maintains that statements should no longer be situated in relation to a
‘sovereign subjectivity’: ‘The analysis of statements operates therefore without
reference to a cognito. It does not pose the question of the speaking subject, who
reveals or who conceals himself in what he says, who, in speaking, exercises his
sovereign freedom.’ The various forms of speech and the modes of speaking
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which are possible within a given discourse (what Foucault calls the ‘enunciative
modalities’) are not referenced to an original, unified subject but are defined
according to the principle of discursive regularity, which distributes and
disperses subjects across a variety of sites and positions within a discourse.
‘Subjectivity’, in the Foucauldian sense, is always discursive: that is to say, it
refers to the general subject positions, conceived of as empty places, or functions,
which can be occupied by a variety of particular individuals in the enunciation of
specific statements. We should be aware that a Foucauldian understanding of
‘subjectivity’ is not in any sense concerned with the relation between discursive
subject positions and the particular individuals who occupy them—that is, the
area which has been theorized primarily by Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis and variants of social psychology. For Foucault the subject of a
linguistic statement is ‘absolutely general’, ‘in so far as it can be filled by
virtually any individual when he formulates the statement; and in so far as one
and the same individual may occupy in turn, in the same series of statements,
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different positions, and assume the role of different subjects’. Foucault is able
to maintain this position precisely because the enunciation of a discursive
statement is not dependent on the subject/author as its cause or origin but rather
on ‘the prior existence of a number of effective operations that need not have
been performed by one and the same individual…’. 32
Further, Foucault’s theorization of the enunciative subject is importantly
linked to his understanding of the operation of power within a discourse. For
Foucault the exercise of power relations should not be seen as external to a
particular discursive practice; that is, it should not be sought ‘in the primary
existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which
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secondary and descendant forms would emanate’. Rather, power should be
seen as ‘immanent’ or implicit in the constitution of discourse. Power, for
Foucault, defines the type of relations of force which operate within a specific
discursive practice and, more specifically, it can be seen to distribute and
hierarchize the various discursive subject positions within a field of unequal
relations. Given Foucault’s understanding of the constitution of subjectivity,