Rethinking Power and Subjectivity After Foucault PDF

Rethinking Power and Subjectivity after Foucault
Author(s): Joseph D. Lewandowski

Source: symplokē, Vol. 3, No. 2, special issue: The Histories of Michel Foucault (Summer
1995), pp. 221-243
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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Rethinking power and
Subjectivity after Foucault
Joseph D. Lewandowski
Introduction
Foucault's analysis of the entwinement of power and the "r

invention" of the modern human subject is Janus-faced. With
face, Foucault sees power as that non-subject centered "system
produces or objectifies human beings: power is not an instrum
possession of an agent but rather part of the force field
constitutes her as a "docile body." The subject, then, becomes an
effect of power. With another face, Foucault looks forward and sees
the possibilities of individual subjects' capacities for self-making,
thereby perceiving subjects as bodily sites of resistance to various
networks of power and truth regimes. And in between we have the
Foucault who "writes in order to have no face"; who says "Do not ask
who I am and do not ask me to remain the same" (1972, 17).
Thus Foucault leaves us waiting, wanting, looking for a face.
Perhaps for this very reason, Foucault, as both his critics and his
defenders acknowledge, is by turns challenging, disconcerting and
contradictory. To his detractors, and here I am thinking mostly of
Habermas and Taylor, this Janus-faced analysis is an irreparable
flaw in his thinking, one which leads him into a blind alley and a
series of "performative contradictions": when Foucault borrows from
modernity's claims to critical reason and social freedom in order to
undermine such claims, he loses purchase on a coherent account of
his own position.1 To his defenders, such contradictions lend a
1For example, Habermas, in his brief expose "Taking Aim at the Heart of the
Present," claims that Foucault "perseveres under productive contradictions. Only a
complex thinking produces instructive contradictions .... [Foucault] contrasts his
critique of power with the 'analysis of truth' in such a fashion that the former becomes
deprived of the normative yardsticks that it would have to borrow from the latter." Or
again, Habermas, taking aim at Foucault's characterization of his work in his essay on
Kant's "What Is Enlightenment?," asks: "how does such a singularly affirmative
understanding of modern philosophizing, always directed to our own actuality and
® Symplokê Vol. 3, No. 2 (1995) ISSN 1069-0697, 221-243.
222 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
certain richness to his work: the multi-faced analysis of the

dynamism and fluidity of power and subjectivity opens up a space, to
paraphrase Foucault, in which it is once more possible to think (1970,
342); it offers a Nietzschean notion of aesthetic self-making coupled
with a Greek ethic of the self as a transgression of limits; it resists
conservative appropriation of and accommodation to our current
condition or to current regimes of power (Hiley 114); it incites us,
according to Connolly, "to listen to a different claim" rather than to
accept the findings of a consistent and coherent argument (Connolly
368).2
If one sides with his critics, Foucault cannot help but be
characterized as working against the project of modernity. If one
sides with his defenders, Foucault, with some effort and the
privileging of the face worn in a text such as "What is
Enlightenment?," can be enlisted in the project of modernity. Of
course Foucault himself would have rejected both claims, for it was
precisely that kind of "enlightenment blackmail" he, in his Janus-
faced analysis, sought to avoid. One can appreciate Foucault's desire
to reject the either/or and dialectical form of enlightenment reason.
But does Foucault's alternative perspective work? In what sense is
his attempt to hold powerfully contradictory positions regarding
power and subjectivity in balance successful? In what follows I want
to examine Foucault's analyses of power and the human subject not
for the sake of some grand Aufhebung, but to consider why Foucault
places himself in such a web of contradictions. In short, the question
I want to raise is: What can Foucault see, and what does he fail to
see, from such a Janus-faced perspective? To address this question I
shall first frame the question of power with the work of Max Weber.
As we shall see, Weber affords a useful contrast to Foucault's
understanding of networks or capillaries of power insofar as he offers
a multi-faceted, though subject-centered, analysis of power as
imprinted in the here-and-now, fit with Foucault's unyielding criticism of modernity?

How can Foucault's self-understanding as a thinker in the tradition of the
enlightenment be compatible with his unmistakable criticism of this very form of
modernity?" (1986, 106). Rather than question Foucault's relation to the goals of the
enlightenment, my focus here is more narrow: to flesh out what, precisely, may be
productive about Foucault's diagnosis of power and its relation to subjectivity.
^Connolly's exchange with Taylor helps sharpen the contrast between Foucault's
detractors and his defenders, but at times Connolly's defense seems a bit too easy.
Consider the following passage, where Connolly seems to suggest that Taylor's charge
of contradictory positions in Foucault does not stick simply because Foucault is not
bound by coherent explanation: Foucault "knows that in the modern episteme a
coherent explanation will presuppose the very conceptions of truth and subjectivity he
wishes to call into question. He does, though, seek through genealogy to create
distance between the modern self and the discourse in which it is implicated.
Genealogy, not explanation" (370). Such a defense seems only to highlight some of the
most glaring performative contradictions of genealogy which, in the end, wants to
"explain" why there can be no explanatory account of truth or the modern subject.
Symplokë Summer 1995 223
domination typical in traditional critical theory. Second, I shall

sketch out what types of subjectivity Foucault, in his later work,
intimates are possible in the subject's relation with itself. Finally, I
will suggest what is right about Foucault's understanding of power
and subjectivity, and what is wrong about that understanding. While
I shall defend Foucault's empirical insights into power as decentered
or capillary networks against certain criticisms, I shall criticize
Foucault's privatized account of subjectivity as wholly inadequate
insofar as it fails to relate individual subjects to one another and to a
form of power that is "always already there and "endows itself."
Power: Subject-Centered or Decentered?
For Max Weber, power generally takes the form of dyadic

manipulation: the human subject purposively pursues a desired end
by imposing her will in such a way that the conduct of others is
influenced and the desired end achieved. Power is "the possibility of
imposing one's will upon the behavior of other persons" (1954, 323).
Power, then, is both the purposive, human capacity to sway others to
one's own interests and to prevent others from discerning or making
explicit their opposing interests; it thus can be measured by the
relative success or failure with which it brings about a particular
agent's goals or set of goals.
The most common form of this power Weber calls "domination,"
which Weber further subdivides into authority, violence, and so on.
But it is the general features of Weber's understanding of the
situation of domination that are important here. Weber understands
domination as the situation in which
the manifested will (command) of the ruler or rules is

meant to influence the conduct of one or more others
(the ruled) and actually does influence it in such a way
that their conduct to a socially relevant degree occurs
as if the ruled had made the content of the command
the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake.
(1954, 328)
In his "Politics as a Vocation," Weber attempts to discern the

structure of this situation of domination, and distinguishes among
three inner justifications or legitimations of domination: traditional,
charismatic, and legal. The "traditional" legitimation of domination
is "the authority of the 'eternal yesterday,' i.e., of the mores sanctified
through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual
orientation to conform. This is the 'traditional* domination exercised

by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of yore" (1946, 78-79).
The "charismatic" lévitation of domination is "the authority of the
extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely
personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or
other qualities of leadership. This is 'charismatic' domination, as
exercised by a prophet or ... by the elected war lord, the
plebiscitarían ruler, the demagogue, or the political party leader"
(1946, 79). The "legal" legitimation of domination is "by virtue of
legality/ by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and
functional 'competence' based on rationally created rules .... This is
domination as exercised by the modern 'servant of the state' and by
all those bearers of power who in this respect resemble him" (1946,
79). The common feature of this Weberian typology of domination is
the role of the subject: she "conforms" to tradition; she "devotes"
herself to a powerful figure; she yields to or "bears" power according
to her belief in the validity of rationally created rules. For Weber,
where there is power there are power-holders who willfully possess
and exercise that power, and there are those over whom power is
exercised and who seek to gain or oppose that power.
Foucault's understanding of power relations bears little
resemblance to Weber's typological analysis of the structures of
domination, though one might draw certain parallels between
Weber's rationalization of the life-world and the consequent "iron
cage" of modernity and the panopticon of Foucault's Discipline and
Punish. 3 Nevertheless, I want briefly to contrast that Foucaultian
text's sense of power with what we have seen in Weber. Foucault
suggests early on that the "micro-physics" of power he intends to
analyze in Discipline and Punish cannot be understood in the terms
3For a useful comparative analysis of Weber and Foucault, see Gordon, pp. 293-
316. Gordon attempts to discern the "pattern of contrasts and connections between
Weber's work and Foucault's interest in governmental rationality" (311). He suggests
that "Foucault's definition of government as 'conduct of conduct' might be taken as in
tune with Weber's theme of Lebensführung" (306). Much of what Gordon says about
Foucault and governmental rationality resonates with what I will claim in this section,
e.g., that "the modern state is, for Foucault, a mechanism at once of individualization
[that is, the conditions of possibility of transforming the self into a self] and totalization
[that is, the structures of power relations that determine the scope of that
individualization]" (297). And for an analysis of Weber's relation to "postmodern"
thinking, (to which Foucault's work may or may not belong) see the introductory
chapter to Turner (1992). Turner suggests, and I tend to agree, though I cannot
develop the argument fully in the context of this paper, that "there is a tension in
Weber between a Nietzschean celebration of life against system-rationality, which at
least prefigures more contemporary uncertainties about the end of history, the end of
philosophy and the end of the social" (5). Foucault would seem to share some of this
"Nietzschean" promise of freedom echoed in something like the "philosophical laughter"
of the latter sections of The Order of Things, a text I shall treat in some detail in the
next section.
of traditional social theory. Indeed, he argues that power cannot

cast as a property to be possessed by a reflective agent but rather as
a network of relations, constantly in tension, in

activity, rather than a privilege that one might
possess . . . this power is not exercised simply as an
obligation or a prohibition on those who "do not have
it"; it invests them, is transmitted by them and
through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as
they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the
grip it has on them. (1977, 26-27)
This capillary notion of power pervades modernity and permeates

("invests," "transmits through") the body in ways not captured by the
Weberian typology of power, which presupposes the interconnection of
a rational subject and consciousness that manipulates and is
manipulated by power.4 Foucault argues that a new configuration of
power emerges in modernity - one informed by a radically different
physics of systematized, hierarchized and structured power relations
(1977, 115-116).
Yet despite Foucault's insights into the workings of emergent
forms of subjectless or decentered strategic power relations, his work
has been criticized for ignoring Weberian social theory. Nancy
Fraser, for example, argues in an influential essay that Foucault
"writes as if he were oblivious to the whole body of Weberian social
theory" (Fraser 32). 5 She goes on to claim that because of Foucault's
"catchall concept of power," the
potential for a broad range of normative nuances is

surrendered, and the result is a certain normative
one-dimensionality. . . . Foucault vacillates between
4Though Foucault diverges from Weber, there is a convergence between his

disembodied notion of power and that of Talcott Parsons. As Kroker has argued in his
"Modern Power in Reverse Image: The Paradigm Shift of Michel Foucault and Talcott
Parsons," "Foucault's understanding of the surface play of power ... is perhaps nothing
more than the completion, and certainly not less than the mirror image, of another
disembodied discourse on power, presented by that most grimly realistic of bourgeois
sociologists, Talcott Parsons" (75). Kroker goes on to claim that "it would not be
inaccurate to state that Foucault's opaque way of circling around and around this
decentered power is an almost crude description (and a nonspecific one) of what
Parsons has already described as 'generalized, symbolic medium of exchange'" (97).
See especially Kroker, pp. 91-99.
5Habermas makes the same point about norms that Fraser does in his first lecture
on Foucault (lecture X) in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Foucault's critique
"brackets normative validity claims as well as claims to propositional truth and
abstains from the question of whether some discourse and power formations could be
more legitimate than others" (282). I discuss Habermas's lectures on Foucault in
greater detail below.
two equally inadequate stances. On the one hand, he

adopts a concept of power that permits him no
condemnation of any objectionable features of modern
societies. But at the same time, and on the other
hand, his rhetoric betrays the conviction that modern
societies are utterly without redeeming features.
Clearly, what Foucault needs, and needs desperately,
are normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable
from unacceptable forms of power. (Fraser 32-33)
To be sure, Foucault has too much to say about power and too
little to say about the norms necessary for distinguishing acceptable
and unacceptable forms of power. And Fraser is certainly right to
point out that much of the confusion surrounding the analysis of
power in Foucault stems from the simple fact that Foucault calls too
many things power and leaves it at that.6 But I think we can extract
certain features of Foucault's understanding of modern power as a
specific type of decentered or "capillary" relations in contradistinction
to something like Weber's subject-centered analysis of power. It is
misleading to say, as Fraser and others do, that Foucault is
"oblivious" to Weberian theory. I would suggest that Foucault's
"oblivion" to Weberian theory remains a kind of red herring: Foucault
would see Weber's distinctions as founded upon the "recent invention"
of the modern subject - a kind of subject-centered analysis he
perceives as ill-suited to a modern world wherein the exercise of
power has itself been radically altered. Indeed, Foucault criticizes
Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structures (1939)
for its failure to see power as a productive and capillary and not
simply limited to the dominatory juridical structure of society:
We must analyse rather the "concrete systems of

punishment," study them as social phenomena that
cannot be accounted for by the juridical structure of
society alone, nor by its fundamental ethical choices;
6Yet even here her criticism is a bit unfair: later Foucault himself admits to
ambiguities in his notion of power. "Myself, I am not sure, when I began to interest
myself in this problem of power, of having spoken very clearly about it or used the
words needed. Now I have a much clearer idea of all that. It seems to me that we must
first distinguish the relationships of power as strategic games between liberties -
strategic games that result in the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of
others - and the states of domination, which are what we ordinarily call p wer. And,
between the two, between the games of power and the states of domination, you have
governmental technologies - giving this term a very wide meaning for it is also the way
in which you govern your wife, your children, as well as the way you govern an
institution" (1988, 19). Whether this three-pronged definition of power is any clearer
than his earlier formulations, it nevertheless reflects Foucault's painful awareness of
the inadequately nuanced notion of power that marks his earlier work.
we must situate them in their field of operation, in

which the punishment of crime is not the sole
element; we must show that punitive measures are
not simply "negative" mechanisms that make it
possible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to
eliminate; but that they are linked to a whole series of
positive and useful effects which it is their task to
support. (1977,24)
Like Rusche and Kirchheimer's study, Weber's theory of power is

dependent upon a "top down" analysis of the phenomena of power
that sees it as a negative mechanism of repression - as localized in
the power relations between the state and its citizens. The criticism
here in some ways echoes Marx's critique of Hegel. Modern analyses
of power are coated with a peculiarly idealist residue - they start from
the heavens of consciousness and proceed to descend to the material
concretion of power mechanisms on earth.
Foucault sees the situation of power in a very different way.
Power is not determined by consciousness, but rather consciousness
or, more precisely, bodies, bodies, by power. Hence Foucault wants to
pose what he thinks is the more materialist question of power and its
deployment in "concrete systems of punishment." This is not
ideology's critique of domination - indeed, whatever Foucault means
by power, he consistently claims that he means "something other
than domination" (1988, 3). But if an analysis of power is not an
analysis of structures of domination, what is it? Let us tentatively call
the following "Foucault's theses on power":
(1) Power is never subject-centered: "The individual ... is not the vis-
à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects" (1980, 98);
"Discipline 'makes' individuals" (1977, 170). Or again: "The
individual, with its identity and characteristics, is the product of a
relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements,
desires, forces" (1980, 74). Hence power is everywhere but, properly
speaking, subjectless - "never in anybody's hands" (1980, 98); "not
something that is acquired, seized, or shared" (1978, 94); "power has
its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted
distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes" (1977, 202).
(2) Power is productive and not repressive: "What makes power hold
good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only
weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces
things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It
needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through
the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose
function is repressive* (1980, 119).
(3) The exercise of Power (with a capital "P") does not exist in a
concentrated (sovereign) or diffused (liberal democratic) form; rather,
it is an ensemble of relations with a strictly relational character
(1978, 95). Further, this exercise of power is "not violence; nor is it a
consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total structure of
actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it
seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains
or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon
an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being
capable of actions. A set of actions upon other actions" (Rabinow and
Dreyfus 220). Power "can retreat . . . reorganise its forces, invest
itself (1980, 56) and "endows itself with processes which are more or
less adjusted to the situation" (Rabinow and Dreyfus 224).
(4) These "power relations" or "modalities of power" are radically

different from earlier forms of power insofar as they are "both
intentional and nonsubjective" (1978, 94). That is, power relations
produce intentional effects (e.g., the control of large numbers of
people with hidden video cameras) that cannot be traced directly to a
particular agent's will or capacity (e.g., the sovereign); that is, they
are visible and unverifiable (1977, 201).
(5) Though there is no escaping power relations - they are "always

already there" (1980, 141) - they are nevertheless resistible. For
"where there is power, there is resistance" (1978, 95); and there is,
further, a plurality of resistances in any given relationship of power.
Resistances "are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed
in the latter as an irreducible opposite" (1978, 96). Or again: "Every
power relationship implies, at least inpotentia, a strategy of struggle"
(Rabinow and Dreyfus 225). And power can be resisted via self-
making or an aesthetics of existence.
(6) To conduct properly any analysis of power relations we cannot

proffer some kind of "deduction of power" from the sovereign or state
or law or subject downward; rather, we should "conduct an ascending
analysis of power, starting, that is, from its infinitesimal
mechanisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory,
their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms
of power have been - and continue to be - invested, colonised, utilised"
(1980, 99).
Even a cursory glance at these "theses" suggest several things.

Clearly, Foucault lumps far too many heterogeneous phenomena
together in his conceptualization of "power* and consequently fails
give us an adequately nuanced sense of power. For example, what
kinds of resistances to power are possible? What can a body do?
Where does an "ascending analysis" of power go? Who - or what - cam
develop such an analysis? Also, Foucault tends to ontologize the
concept of power:7 like Heidegger's Being, power grounds or "endows"
itself. Further, in this ontology, Foucault's theory of power undergoes
a kind of hypostatization - it pervades social relations, practices and
bodies, but nevertheless is ungraspable, "subjectless" and objectless.
Finally, there is nothing critical about this theory of power - it has no
normative dimension, as Fraser rightly points out, and thus cannot
say what types of power are to be resisted and what types are to be
accepted, nor which strategies for resistance are to be deployed (or
rejected).
But what is at issue in Foucault's notion of power is not the kind
of "theory" critical theory has hitherto produced. Foucault's is not a
"theory" of power (he himself denied that he was interested in such a
theory), but rather a descriptive diagnosis of the problematic of power
relations unleashed in modernity: How is it that decentered or
"capillary" forms of power peculiar to modernity produce effects "x"
and "y"? How should/could one analyze such forms of power? And how
could one resist such all-pervasive, strategic forms of power,
particularly when power "endows itself? As David Ingram has
argued, Foucault's analysis of power
chooses to address a different question: how do the

effects (intended and unintended) of a given action
structure the field of possible responses. In contrast
to the theory of power or, more specifically, the theory
of domination developed by theorists in the Marxist
tradition, such as Steven Lukes and Habermas,
Foucault's "analytic of power" does not conceptualize
power as something that certain subjects possess and
consciously exercise in the repression of others.
(Ingram 50-51)
Foucault thinks that this kind of analysis of power is more adequate

because the human subject is necessarily situated and dependent,
and can never figure as a transcendental activity or as empirical
consciousness that possesses power.
7McCarthy (1991, 54-55) makes a similar point.
Nevertheless, much criticism has been made of Foucault's

peculiar ascending critique of power. Habermas, for example, claims
that this line of questioning of power "veered off into a theory of
power that has shown itself to be a dead end" (1987, 296) because it
leads to a series of contradictions and begs questions about norms and
the subject's capacity for resistance and cognition (Habermas says
"intuition") that it simply cannot answer. In lecture X in TA e
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas attempts to assess
the adequacy of Foucault's analysis of power. Like Fraser, he too
senses a "systematically ambiguous use of the category of 'power"'
(1987, 270) in Foucault's work. On the one hand, Foucault's
genealogy of power "plays the empirical role of an analysis of
technologies of power that are meant to explain the functional social
context of the science of man. Here power relationships are of
interest as conditions for the rise of scientific knowledge and as its
social effects" (1987, 273-274). Yet, on the other hand, that same
genealogy of power "plays the transcendental role of an analysis of
technologies of power that are meant to explain how scientific
discourse about man is possible at all. Here the interest is in power
relationships as constitutive conditions for scientific knowledge"
(1987, 274). The problem with such a fusion of the empirical analysis
of power relations as enabling conditions of knowledge (the
medicalization of the subject vis-à-vis prisons, hospitals, asylums and
so on) and the transcendental analysis of power as constitutive of
knowledge (a capillary power that is "always already" there and
makes subjects) is, according to Habermas, that such a synthesis does
not lead Foucault out of the humanist philosophy of the subject he
wants to reject. From Habermas's perspective, Foucault's
foundationalizing of power only reverses traditional notions of
subject-centered power relations.8
8Though I agree with Habermas's general claim that Foucault borrows from
modernity's philosophy of the subject in order to undermine it, and is thus involved in a
variety of performative contradictions, I think his specific claim that for Foucault
"power is that by which the subject has an effect on objects in successful actions" (1987,
274) and is therefore borrowed from the lexicon of the philosophy of the subject is
inaccurate. As I have tried to show above, Foucault seeks a notion of power that is not
bound up with the subject's capacities for instrumental action or reflection. What
Habermas does offer, and what Foucault never considers in his decentered notion of
power, is a "third" alternative to subject-centered and decentered notions of power, one
grounded in intersubjective communicative reason rather than oriented towards
success and mastery. Habermas suggests such a notion in his essay, "Hannah Arendt:
On the Concept of Power." In this analysis, power is oriented toward intersubjective
agreement, rationally motivated recognition and consensual action: "The soundness of
a consensus brought about by coercion-free communication is not measured in terms of
any kind of success except that of the claim to rational validity immanent within
speech. Even convictions formed publicly in the give and take of discussion can be
manipulated, but effective manipulation still has to take the claims of reason into
account. We allow ourselves to be persuaded by the truth of a statement, the Tightness
Symplokê Summer 1995 231
Of course, Habermas's criticism is bound up with a commitment

to enlightenment reason, teleology and universal norms "always
already" present in action oriented toward mutual understanding - h
makes the point that Foucault's analysis of power relations in
Discipline and Punish passes over "the unmistakable gains in
liberality and legal security, and the expansion of civil-rights" (1987,
290) in modernity.9 Habermas and Foucault share little in their
understanding and characterization of the "ongoing" project of
enlightenment. Indeed, more often than not Foucault inverts the
enlightenment teleology to which Habermas is committed: in
Discipline and Punish, for example, Foucault claims that the
enlightenment that "discovered the liberties, also invented the
disciplines" (1977, 222); coercive power relations proliferate in
modernity, where Weber's "iron cage" thesis stands to be realized.
What results, then, pace Habermas, is Foucault's thoroughgoing
belief that modernity heralds the arrival of different strategic power
relations that supervene on the reflective capabilities of the human
subject and reduce him to an effect.
In his later thinking, however, the nature of these power relations
begins to change: the role of the subject - now understood as capable
of acting intentionally and voluntarily - and its possibilities for
resistance take center stage, and power relations, says Foucault in
"The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom," are now to
be understood "as means by which individuals try to conduct, to
determine the behavior of others. The problem is not of trying to
dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication
[with Habermas], but to give one's self the rules of law, the
techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice
of the self, which would allow these games of power to be played with
a minimum of domination" (1988, 18). By giving one's self the
"techniques of management," by caring for one's self, one gives one's
self an ethics and a practice of "freedom." Here the subject has
of a norm, or the truthfulness of an utterance; the authenticity of our conviction stands

and falls with the awareness that the acknowledgment of these validity claims is
rational (that is, motivated by reason). Convictions are manipulable, but the rational
claim from which they draw their subjective force is not.
In brief: "The communicatively engendered power of common convictions goes
back to the fact that the parties are oriented toward agreement and not just toward
their own respective success" (1987a, 175).
Obviously, the linchpin of this argument, the one a Foucault-minded reader would
want to dispute, is the claim that the "soundness of consensus" can be measured with
the yardstick of "rational validity immanent within speech." Habermas and Foucault
share very little in their understanding of enlightenment reason, and I can only offer a
cursory analysis here.
9Of course, one could, in good Marxist fashion, argue that Habermas's objection is
simply an appropriate internal criticism of Foucault's one-sided critique of
enlightenment in Discipline and Punish.
reentered Foucault's reflections on power in important ways (and

contradictory ways, for is it not Foucault who sees power relations as
something other than subject-centered modes of domination? indeed,
not domination at all?), as voluntarily practicing freedom in its self-
making. Foucault shifts his focus from how human beings are made
subjects by power relations to the human subject's capacity to form
and transform herself into an oeuvre. It is this emerging and
problematic account of subjectivity as the privatized techne of the self
that we must now begin to trace.
Subjectivity: End of Man or End of Agency?
One of the things that sets Foucault's genealogy apart from

critical theory's historical interest in power as ideology critique - the
re-forming and consciousness-raising of subjects' beliefs; the
unmasking of deceptions - is the way the subject functions in
Foucault's thinking. As we have seen in his early accounts of power,
Foucault wants to develop a materialist account of the ways in which
power relations affect the "body" (as opposed to power's effect upon
consciousness or belief formation):
As regards Marxism, I'm not one of those who try to

elicit the effects of power at the level of ideology.
Indeed I wonder whether, before one poses the
question of ideology, it wouldn't be more materialist to
study first the question of the body and the effects of
power on it. Because what troubles me with these
analyses which prioritise ideology is that there is
always presupposed a human subject on the lines of
the model provided by classical philosophy, endowed
with a consciousness which power is then thought to
seize on. (1980, 58)
Such a materialist study of a power/body nexus, nevertheless, forces

the early Foucault into a corner: in Discipline and Punish the human
subject is cast as a "docile body" affected and produced by the
"marvellous machine" of disciplinary practices exemplified by the
panopticon, and wholly uncoupled from any reflective consciousness.
Though Foucault will never speak of a consciousness or
consciousness-raising ideology critique, in his later work a more
active and willing subject emerges. Indeed, the idea of self-fashioning
bodies stands in stark contrast to something like the docile bodies
automatically punched out by the disciplinary practices described in
Discipline and Punish. As Bernstein rightly points out, "one migh

think . . . that Foucault ... is claiming that the subject itself is onl
the result of the effects of power/knowledge regimes, that he
completely undermines and ridicules any and all talk of human
agency. . . . But it is also clear, especially in his late writings when he
deals with the question of the selfs relation to itself and the
possibility of 'the man who tries to invent himself/ that he is not
abandoning the idea that 'we constitute ourselves as subjects acting
on others"' (Bernstein 154). Here Bernstein touches upon one of the
most difficult aspects of Foucault's account of subjectivity and its
possible relation to power mechanisms: on the one hand Foucault
wants to hold on to an inverted enlightenment teleology in his
analysis of decentered power relations and sense of the "end of man,"
as we saw in the previous section; and on the other hand, he wants to
keep open the possibility of freedom for self-made bodies without
lapsing into some sort of ideology critique or "classical philosophy," as
we shall see in this section. Though there are many texts we could
look at in this context, I shall focus on three: the critique of the
"presupposed human subject" and the nearness of the "end of man"
adumbrated in The Order of Things, where Foucault intimates a
deconstructive potential for the "counter sciences" of psychoanalysis
and ethnology and a resulting Nietzschean-like freedom and laughter;
sections of "What Is Enlightenment?" that suggest even more positive
notions of subjectivity and thus more promising possibilities of
freedom; and Foucault's later interview, "On the Genealogy of Ethics"
and essay, "The Subject and Power." In all these, Foucault seems to
suggest the possibility of and need to invent "new forms" of
subjectivity that may transgress seemingly totalizing limits.
The deconstructive critique of the Kantian subject in the closing
sections of The Order of Things echoes with the supposedly liberating
philosophical laughter of Zarathustra. It is Zarathustra, his laughter
and his will to self-mastery, after all, that is supposed to be beyond
modern, historical consciousness - that empirico-transcendental
subject of modernity. But Foucault squares Nietzsche. Foucault's is
a Nietzschean reading of Nietzsche's notion of aesthetic self-
constitution:
man will disappear. Rather than the death of God -

or, rather, in the wake ofthat death and in a profound
correlation with it - what Nietzsche's thought heralds
is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man's
face in laughter, and the return of masks. (1970, 385)
In other words, the end of the end of man (that is, the end of
Nietzsche, that last man who could proclaim God's death and thereby
install himself as a god) and the return of masks and laughter "marks
the threshold beyond which contemporary philosophy can begin
thinking again .... It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the
unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think again"
(1970, 342).
Yet in The Order of Things these formulations are, at best,
intimations: we never get a positive account of what, precisely, this
deconstructed Kantian subject can or will do, other than "think again"
in an "unfolded space" or burst out in philosophical laughter. While
Foucault adopts a deeply Nietzschean reading of the (Kantian,
modern) subject in The Order of Things, such a reading leaves him
(like Nietzsche) with a parodie play of masks and no players. One
imagines a grand ballroom, brilliantly lighted, filled with wonderful
and frightful masks, and no subjects to don them.
Or so it would seem in a text such as The Order of Things. But in
his later work, namely in his reflections upon Kant's "What Is
Enlightenment?" we find Foucault - now placing himself awkwardly
alongside Kant - struggling to give a positive account of subjectivity
and freedom, "seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as
possible, to the undefined work of freedom" (1984, 46). In this text
the subject and "the work of freedom" are bound up with what
Foucault understands as modernity - not an historical epoch or age,
but rather as "a mode of relationship that has to be established with
oneself (1984, 41). This, Foucault thinks, parallels Kant's notion of
enlightened "maturity" in Kant's response to the question, "What Is
Enlightenment?". Foucault explicates this notion of subjectivity - a
mode of relationship with oneself - via Baudelaire's "dandy": "Modern
man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself,
his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent
himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in his own being'; it
compels him to face the task of producing himself (1984 42).
This is Foucault at his most striking and provoking: the
enlightenment goal of liberating man "in his own being," of seeing his
development through to "maturity," is replaced with the promissory
note of "maturity" as aesthetic self-making. The technology of power
relations is replaced with a technology of the self, an aesthetics of
existence. So it is not so much that Foucault calls for the "unmaking"
of man in the "counter sciences" of psychoanalysis and ethnology in
The Order of Things and leaves it at that, proffering no positive
account of subjectivity; but rather that in his earlier thinking on
subjectivity what he refuses is
precisely that you first of all set up a theory of the

subject - as could be done in phenomenology and
existentialism - and that, beginning from the theory
Symploke Summer 1995 235
of the subject, you come to pose the question of

knowing, for example, how such and such a form of
knowledge was possible. What I wanted to know was
how the subject constituted himself, in such and such
a determined form, as a mad subject or as a normal
subject, through a certain number of practices which
were games of truth, applications of power, etc. I had
to reject a certain a priori theory of the subject in
order to make this analysis of the relationships which
can exist between the constitution of the subject or
different forms of the subject and games of truth,
practices of power and so forth. (1988, 10)
So subjects are not simply unmade by psychoanalysis and ethnology

as they appear to be in The Order of Things; nor are they simply
made by disciplinary mechanisms, as it seems in a text like Disciplin
and Punish; instead, they are self-made and may transgress limit
imposed upon them. Unmade subjects and made "docile bodies"
produced by a hypostatized power in Foucault's earlier work can be
properly understood as his attempt to reject modernity's a priori
theory of the subject as autonomous and self-transparent. In their
place, Foucault now gives a positive (albeit problematic, as we shall
see) account of a subject that achieves autonomy ("maturity") by
aesthetic self-constitution.
This reconceptualization of the subject's capacities to transgress
limits and be free and autonomous, however difficult to relate to
Foucault's previously totalizing analysis of power, is perhaps best
understood as what Hiley calls Foucault's "implied notions" of
liberation and autonomy (Hiley 105). Hiley privileges the Foucault of
'What Is Enlightenment?" to argue (contra Habermas, Fräser, Taylor,
et al.) "that in eschewing the framework of legitimacy and truth in
analyzing power, Foucault did not eschew the goal of liberation,
though clearly his notions of liberation and autonomy are implied
rather than explicit" (Hiley 105). In Hiley's reading, Foucault couples
"a Nietzschean notion of freedom as self-creation with a Stoic and
Kantian notion (suggested by Foucault's work on Greek ethics in The
Use of Pleasure) of autonomy as self-mastery and self-rule" (Hiley
106). If we read Foucault this way - as very much committed to the
possibilities of individual subjects' freedom and autonomy - then the
quarrel between Foucault and those committed to the project of
modernity is founded on a category mistake. As with his thinking on
power, Foucault once again chooses to pose and think through a
different question: not whether one should be for or against freeing
the a priori subject and establishing his sovereignty, but how one
should go about relating to and constituting one's self in a such a way
as to achieve freedom and autonomy. Accordingly for Hiley, then, the

issue between Foucault and his critics "turns not on the
Enlightenment commitment to the goal of autonomy and cri
on the nature of critique and the nature of autonomy" (Hiley
Strained though this reading is, it allows us to underst
Foucault is doing in his later work on subjectivity. Perh
strained way to examine the same issue would be to consi
Foucault calls "the paradox of the relations of capacity a
(1984, 47). Foucault says
the great hope of the eighteenth century, or a part of

the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous and
proportional growth of individuals with respect to one
another .... And we have been able to see what forms
of power relation were conveyed by various
technologies: disciplines, both collective and
individual, procedures of normalization exercised in
the name of the power of the state, demands of society
or of population zones, are examples. (1984, 47-48)
In other words, whereas the enlightenment promised the growth

("maturity") of individuals with respect to one another (more
"humane" forms of punishment designed to rehabilitate subjects,
rather than public torture), it tended to promote only order, efficiency,
and totalized, subjectless power relations (increasing the precision,
ease and anonymity with which such punishments were doled out, as
opposed to the relatively inefficient scaffold). Foucault's point here is
simply that "the relations between the growth of capabilities and the
growth of autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may
have believed" (1984, 48). What is at stake in modernity is not
realizing "maturity," but rather in disconnecting the growth of
capabilities (those notions bound up with an enlightenment teleology
of the subject's ever-increasing capacity for instrumental mastery)
from the intensification of power relations (anonymous disciplinary
systems, mechanisms, etc.) (1984, 48). So Foucault sees in modernity
a possible emergence of a different kind of subject, one that must be
uncoupled from the enlightenment emphasis on the progressive
growth of subjective capabilities that are supposed to liberate the
subject from myth, tradition or the state. Instead, for Foucault,
the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of

our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the
state, and from the state's institutions, but to liberate
us both from the state and from the type of
individualization which is linked to the state. We
have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the

refusal of this kind of individuality which has been
imposed on us for several centuries. (Rabinow and
Dreyfus 216)
The way subjects may "refuse" this kind of juridical individuation

and promote new forms of subjectivity is, Foucault suggests in "On
the Genealogy of Ethics" and volumes two and three of The History of
Sexuality, an "aesthetics of existence" or capacity for purposeful self-
making. Aesthetic individualism will stand in opposition to the
intensifications of power relations peculiar to modernity: "we have to
create ourselves as a work of art" (Rabinow and Dreyfus 237); we do
not need to discover what we are (a "deep selfhood"), but refuse what
we are and imagine and build what we may be (Rabinow and Dreyfus
216). Foucault finds in the Greek's epimeleia heautou a practice in
which human subjects
give to their life certain values (reproduce certain

examples, leave behind them an exalted reputation,
give the maximum possible brilliance to their lives).
It was a question of making one's life into an object for
a sort of knowledge, for a techne - for an art.
(Rabinow and Dreyfus 245)
Yet Charles Taylor finds in this promissory note of the Greek's

care for the self a certain incoherence and the impossibility of
freedom. The thrust of Taylor's criticisms is, in the most general
terms, that Foucault's account of subjectivity is incoherent inasmuch
as Foucault wants both a place for resistance and freedom, and to
give no alternative to relative and perpetual power regimes that
circumscribe the limits of freedom, subjectivity and truth.
There has to be a place for revolt/resistance aided by

unmasking in a position like Foucault's, and he allows
for it. But the general relativity thesis will not allow
for liberation through a transformation of power
relations. Because of relativity, transformation from
one regime to another cannot be a gain in truth or
freedom, because each is redefined in the new context.
They are incomparable. And because of the
Nietzschean notion of truth imposed by a regime of
power, Foucault cannot envisage liberating
transformations within a regime. (Taylor 178)
Taylor's point here is that Foucault's account of endless power

relations that endow themselves cannot accommodate his notion of
freedom and autonomy - a "gain" in freedom is simply unmeasurabl
since "freedom" is always context-dependent and produced by regimes
of truth and mechanisms of power. Taylor goes on to say that
[i]t is understandable how Foucault, from the

standpoint of an ethic of this kind, should want to
distance himself from the banners of "freedom" and
"truth," since these have been the key terms in the
view he is repudiating, that we ought to bring to light
our true nature or deep self. And the affinity with
Nietzsche in the stress on self-making is very
understandable also. But this in no way lessens the
paradox involved in the attempt to avoid these terms
altogether. Indeed, in offering us a new way of re-
appropriating our history, and in rescuing us from the
supposed illusion that the issues of the deep self are
somehow escapable, what is Foucault laying open for
us, if not a truth which frees us for self-making?
(Taylor 183)
Without pressing Taylor's criticisms further (for I think much of the

force of his argument stems from an inadequately nuanced reading of
Foucault's notion of power and freedom and a peculiar appeal to
precisely the kind of philosophical consistency and logic Foucault
openly and intentionally sought to undermine), I think they illustrate
how Foucault's work on the self is bound up with very modern notions
of freedom and autonomy - a freedom and autonomy simply not
thinkable if only disciplines make individuals. If we agree with
Hiley's claim that in Foucault's unmaking of the modern subject a
"true," "better" or authentic notion the subject is "implied," then
Taylor's point is well-taken here. He justifiably wants to know how
the "freedom" implied in Foucault's self-fashioning can be reconciled
with his earlier analyses of power networks and truth regimes that
mechanically punch out bodies. How are we to understand this
"implied" freedom in relation to systems of power? Inside them?
Still, there are more serious objections to be raised against
Foucault's promotion of new forms of subjectivity that transgress
power mechanisms than mere incoherence - objections, for example,
about the nature of the Nietzschean-Greek subject or the Baudelarian
"dandy" itself. How are we to understand aesthetic "self-fashioning"
in relation to other subjects? In what sense are self-made subjects -
are they still "subjects" - collectively "free"? As Bernstein argues, "the
very notion of the Undefined work of freedom' implies an agent that
Symplokê Summer 1995 239
can be free and master itself. But Foucault not only fails to explicate
this sense of agency, his genealogical analyses seem effectively to
undermine any talk of agency which is not a precipitate of
power/knowledge regimes. Who or what is left to transgress
historical limits" (Bernstein 164) and mechanisms of power? And in
much the same vein, Habermas argues that "Foucault throws
overboard that intuition that was to have been conceptualized in
terms of 'subjectivity' .... From [Foucault's] perspective, socialized
individuals can only be perceived as exemplars ... as individual
copies that are mechanically punched out" (1987, 292-293). Or, to put
the matter another way: for Foucault, power relations still affect only
bodies, though now those bodies are voluntarily self-made, but never
minds or cognitive functioning ("intuition") in ways that would be
necessary for subjects to reflect upon, refuse and decide or voluntarily
will to transgress particular regimes of power at particular historical
moments.
Another serious and related problem with the aestheticism of self-
making is that Foucault fails to give us any sense of the inter-
subjective and collective nature of social agency. For Kant, subjects
are constituted by their membership in a universally accessible group
and a peculiar use of reflectively critical, public reason; for Habermas
subjects are constituted by communicative competencies oriented
towards reaching mutual and reciprocal understanding in the
everyday give and take of life-world interaction. Yet for the later
Foucault, one becomes a subject only in establishing a relation with
one's self. The aesthetics of existence is a wholly privatized account
of subjectivity. Foucault's Baudelarian "dandyism" carries with it a
host of ethical and political aporias: To what extent is self-
constitution and mastery reconcilable with the ethical and political
ideals of liberal democracy - mutual recognition, collective decision
making and universal rights, say - that still underpin modern social
relations? How, in mastering one's self, would social actors act in
concert towards publicly agreed upon goals? And how can better and
worse techniques of the "self be collectively discerned, criticized or
rejected? It is not at all clear that the "end of man" and the renewed
emphasis on the work to be done on one's self in any way allow for the
other's autonomy and freedom.
Thus Foucault's positive account of subjectivity begs questions
about intersubjective ethics and freedom for agents that his
suggestive and aestheticized account of bodily self-making simply
cannot answer. On the one hand "the end of man" signals the
possibility of a space in which new subjectivities may emerge and, on
the other hand, that new subject has as its goals and form the
peculiarly modern notion of freedom criticized in Foucault's earlier
work: an agent that can be free and master itself. Yet if we are to
take this notion of agency as a relation with one's self seriously, then
we are left with a wholly privatized and strategic account of isolated
bodies: Foucault's aesthetic individualism offers us a kind of
privatized will to power, a self-constituting subjectivity that sets o
strategic form of power (self-mastered subjects) against another fo
of productive (but faceless or "subjectless") and strategic p
relations. In Foucault's attempt to articulate a kind of aesthet
existence that is freed of certain modern notions of the subjec
never see quite how subjects may act inter subjectively with o
another. In short, we never see an adequate analysis of agency
can never quite be sure what (or who) is doing the making
resisting, what (or whom) is to be made or resisted, or how
ontology of strategic power is to be reconciled with these "new for
of strategic subjectivity that establish the selfs relation to its
Foucault contrasts his analysis of totalizing, strategic power rela
with an account of strategic subjectivity, autonomy and freedo
such a way that the aestheticized and privatized latter colla
under the weight of the ontologized former.
Conclusion
Foucault is right to point out and criticize the various wa

which power networks have taken on an anonymous form - "eye
must see without being seen" (1977, 171), as he says- in m
institutions and seem to operate independent of subjects' will
to the point of seemingly constituting them as bodies and determ
what counts as subjectivity. Modernity's "subjectless" capilla
surveillance techniques, the culture industry, and markets do
seem to constitute subjects as bodies. This automatic function
power is in that sense "subjectless" or beyond subject-centered
and consciousness in ways someone like Weber failed to recogn
account for.
But a conceptualization of power can never be flattened out so as
to understand only mechanisms and systems (totalized strategic
structures of action) of which the human subject is purely a bodily
effect. What Foucault's analysis too often ignores is that power, too,
is a pluralistic thing of this world- a distinct capacity that both
enables actors to seek consensually agreed upon, publicly criticizable
goals, and limits or distorts what kinds of subjectivity may be possible
in a given sociocultural situation or historical episteme. Foucault
overdraws the limiting conditions of power at the expense of the
enabling conditions of subjectivity. That is, Foucault fails to balance
his account of strategic power systems, structures and networks that
are "always already there," endow and sustain themselves (1977, 177
with an adequate account of the workings of inter subjective socia
agency. In the ontologization of the former, Foucault, despite his
interest in resistances and precisely because of his notion of
autonomy as self-making, loses purchase on the latter. Foucault
wants to hold open the possibilities of bodies' resistance to power and
capacities for self-making, but one can only view this in the shadow of
the analysis of the subject as bodily effect of transcendental ("always
already") and hypostatized ("endows itself) power. And in that
shadow, the privatized autonomy and freedom forecast in
Nietzschean self-making and the Greek care of the self are eclipsed.
Under Foucault's leveling gaze, the entwinement of power and
subjectivity is reduced to and dependent upon two unclarified
strategic relations: (1) the privatized, strategic will to power of a self-
made body and (2) the totalized, strategic power network that
sustains itself.
What is wrong, then, in Foucault's critique of power and
subjectivity, is precisely this leveling quality of the analysis.
Foucault's aporias illustrate the need for an adequate account of both
seemingly autonomous or "agentless" power relations and actual
agents' capacities, however limited, not only to make themselves into
subjects, but also to understand, criticize, collectively reconfigure and
reject those power mechanisms that determine the range of
possibility of their actions. (And let us not forget that Foucault
himself was rarely a docile body.) Foucault correctly claims that
human subjects qua human subjects are produced by various types of
power; and he is similarly correct to suggest that subjectivity,
nevertheless, can never be reduced solely to power's productive
effects. That is, power is never simply an ideological instrument or
the effect of the will of a subject to say "no" or "do this"; nor is the
subject ever simply an effect of power ("where there is power, there is
resistance"). Foucault seems aware of the need to balance the two
conceptualizations; hence the tension between the ontologized
account of power and the "historical ontology of ourselves" that seeks
"to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to
determine the precise form this change should take" (1984, 46). But
he never quite succeeds in holding the two in balance. And neither
leg of the analysis can stand alone. Here McCarthy's point is
absolutely salient: "the ontology of power was too reductive and one-
dimensional for that purpose; the later, multidimensional ontology
still depicts social relations as strategic and thus forces the search for
autonomy . . . onto the private path of a rapport à soi" (McCarthy 74).
It is perhaps Foucault's contribution to critically minded social
theorists to force them to see the underlying importance of rethinking
and making explicit the complex entwinement of power and
subjectivity, and this entwinement's relation to the historical "points

where change is possible and desirable." For while Foucault's
diagnosis of the present form of power as a decentered capillary may
more adequately account for the network of anonymous and
seemingly autonomous surveillance, market and bureaucratic forces
that emerge in modernity than previous accounts of power as various
types of subject-centered domination, the emergent power relations
peculiar to modernity cannot be ontologized so as to erase the very
corporeal yet reflective subjects that must understand, criticize and
affect their productivity, pervasiveness and perpetuation. In turn,
subjectivity can never be reduced to bodily self-making. Though
always material, subjects are neither completely docile bodies (as
Foucault's analysis of power suggests) nor privatized works of
autonomous art (as Foucault's reflections on self-fashioning suggest).
The "undefined work of freedom" Foucault speaks of remains
precisely that in his thinking because he fails to see that individual
autonomy and freedom are bound up with anonymous power
networks and inter subjective recognition, action and mutual
understanding. 10
BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY
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Rethinking Power and Subjectivity after Foucault

Author(s): Joseph D. Lewandowski

Foucault's analysis of the entwinement of power and the "r

® Symplokê Vol. 3, No. 2 (1995) ISSN 1069-0697, 221-243.

certain richness to his work: the multi-faced analysis of the

imprinted in the here-and-now, fit with Foucault's unyielding criticism of modernity?

domination typical in traditional critical theory. Second, I shall

Power: Subject-Centered or Decentered?

For Max Weber, power generally takes the form of dyadic

the manifested will (command) of the ruler or rules is

In his "Politics as a Vocation," Weber attempts to discern the

orientation to conform. This is the 'traditional* domination exercised

of traditional social theory. Indeed, he argues that power cannot

a network of relations, constantly in tension, in

This capillary notion of power pervades modernity and permeates

potential for a broad range of normative nuances is

4Though Foucault diverges from Weber, there is a convergence between his

two equally inadequate stances. On the one hand, he

We must analyse rather the "concrete systems of

we must situate them in their field of operation, in

Like Rusche and Kirchheimer's study, Weber's theory of power is

(4) These "power relations" or "modalities of power" are radically

(5) Though there is no escaping power relations - they are "always

(6) To conduct properly any analysis of power relations we cannot

Even a cursory glance at these "theses" suggest several things.

chooses to address a different question: how do the

Foucault thinks that this kind of analysis of power is more adequate

7McCarthy (1991, 54-55) makes a similar point.

Nevertheless, much criticism has been made of Foucault's

Of course, Habermas's criticism is bound up with a commitment

of a norm, or the truthfulness of an utterance; the authenticity of our conviction stands

reentered Foucault's reflections on power in important ways (and

Subjectivity: End of Man or End of Agency?

One of the things that sets Foucault's genealogy apart from

As regards Marxism, I'm not one of those who try to

Such a materialist study of a power/body nexus, nevertheless, forces

Discipline and Punish. As Bernstein rightly points out, "one migh

man will disappear. Rather than the death of God -

precisely that you first of all set up a theory of the

of the subject, you come to pose the question of

So subjects are not simply unmade by psychoanalysis and ethnology

as to achieve freedom and autonomy. Accordingly for Hiley, then, the

the great hope of the eighteenth century, or a part of

In other words, whereas the enlightenment promised the growth

the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of

have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the

The way subjects may "refuse" this kind of juridical individuation

give to their life certain values (reproduce certain

Yet Charles Taylor finds in this promissory note of the Greek's

There has to be a place for revolt/resistance aided by

Taylor's point here is that Foucault's account of endless power

[i]t is understandable how Foucault, from the

Without pressing Taylor's criticisms further (for I think much of the

Foucault is right to point out and criticize the various wa

subjectivity, and this entwinement's relation to the historical "points

Bernstein, Richard. The New Constellation. Cambridge, Mass

Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.

Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1977.

York: Random House, 1978.

Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984

1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Final Foucault. Ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen.

Fraser, Nancy. "Foucault on Power: Empirical Insights and