Page 237 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

SUBJECTIVITY

and culture, rather than simply being ‘given’ by nature. Thus,
subjectivity was implicated in new theories of power.
Stuart Hall (1994) argues that there have been five decentring shifts
in the concept of identity since Enlightenment that have informed our
contemporary understanding of ‘the subject’.
. Marxism demonstrated howindividuals were subject to conditions
not of their own making (Hall, 1994: 120). Marxist theory
undermined the notion that was a universal essence to mankind by
arguing instead that individuals were products of social relations
such as those required to accommodate the expanding force of
capitalism. Marxism’s refusal of essential human nature suggested
that ethics and morals could no longer be thought of as being
universal; rather they were acquired or produced by one’s position
in society, and indeed had a political functionality in maintaining
those positions.
. Freud’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious (Hall, 1994: 121). Freud
argued that an infant’s being is formed in relation to others,
suggesting that identity was something that was learned rather than
existing as an innate essence. Theorists such as Lacan and Kristeva
have continued the psychoanalytic path, arguing that identification
and subject-formation are an ongoing process conducted in
negotiation with the unconscious. Although psychoanalysis is often
criticised for its irrecoverable object of study, it has been
enormously influential in theorising subjectivity, not least because
it was the first to showhowreason did not rule the roost in the
human imagination.
. Saussurian semiotics and structuralism marked another shift in the
way we imagine the self. Saussurian approaches to language led to
the structuralist contention that we cannot know ourselves outside
of language, that it constitutes our reality – in a sense, language
speaks us. The subject is positioned in language.
. Foucault’s reworking of the notions of power, truth and the self (Hall,
1994: 123). For Foucault the individual is ‘subject to institutions of
power, such as governments, and subject to discourses, such as
theories of the person’ (Miller, 1993: xvii). Subjectivity was
constructed and administered through discourses, including those
that investigated what it means to be human (science) and what it
means to be social (government). It is these that ‘discipline’subjects,
making them manageable, knowable and restrainable.
. Feminism (Hall, 1994: 124). Feminism gendered the subject. What
was widely assumed to be true or universal turned out not to be

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