Page 215 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

204 LANGUAGE

power cannot be said to be ‘held’ or exercised by particular individuals; it does
not result ‘from the choice or decision of an individual subject’. 34
Foucault’s recent historical studies, Discipline and Punish and The History of
Sexuality, focus centrally on an analysis of the conditions for the emergence and
constitution of specific forms of discursive subjectivity within penal discourse
and discourses addressing sexuality respectively. Discipline and Punish traces
the transformations in the conception of the criminally deviant individual in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Foucault sees these transformations
as linked to the general shift in the forms of the exercise of power, in the
movement from a primarily juridical form of regulation of the rule of law, to the
growth of a ‘disciplinary society’, in which the forms of punishment and
surveillance are associated with the growth of a variety of practices (economic,
juridico-political and scientific). Foucault’s documentation of this transition
traces the emergence within legal and penal discourse of a new type of criminal
subject (with an aetiology, ‘instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments,
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effects of environment or heredity’), to whom the innovatory forms of
regulation are addressed.
Similarly, in the investigation of the expansion constituting a distinctly
‘modern’ sexuality in The History of Sexuality Foucault locates the emergence of
a number of new discursive subject positions—most significantly, ‘the mother’,
‘the child’ and ‘the pervert’. Foucault identifies a defining characteristic of the
modern regime of discursive sexuality in the consistently causal link made
between sexuality and the formation of individual identity: ‘it is through sex…
that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility…
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to the whole of his body…to his identity…’. For example, the sexually deviant
individual of the nineteenth century emerges with a particularized history,
biography and aetiology, and possibly a differentiated physiology. In fact, for
Foucault an understanding of the historically specific construction of sexuality
within discursive practices extends to include an insistence that the physical
pleasures extracted from, and intensified in, the bodies of individual subjects are
also a product of discourse. The History of Sexuality is not premised on a trans-
historical constant of the body, which can be universally defined through
physiology and anatomy, as is still partly the case in Freud’s theory of the
unconscious in its relation to instinctual drives. Rather, what we should seek to
understand are the innovatory ways in which the body is constituted within
discourse to form a distinctly modern politics of biology, population and welfare.
Foucault’s theorization of the field of language and subjectivity, in their
relation to particular social and cultural practices and institutions, has provided
the Language Group with a series of new approaches to the problems in this area
of Cultural Studies. Most significantly, it is Foucault’s general and consistent
stress on the historical specificity of the emergence of particular forms of
linguistic statements and specific subjectivities which has marked a radical
intervention in the language-subjectivity debate. That is to say, the conditions of
possibility for the emergence of a particular body of discursive statements and