2. Processes of Subjectivation
Many scholars have been swift to point out how governmentality recognises the multidimensionality of power relations, and suggest that the thesis overcomes much of what was
regarded as Foucault’s one-dimensional focus on disciplinary power and forces of domination.
21
As Lemke puts it; the notion of governmentality has ‛innovative potential‛ in so far as it
recognises how power is both an objectivizing and a subjectivizing force, bringing into view the
idea of a constituted-constituting subject permanently positioned within the interstice of individualising power and individual freedom.
22 McNay suggests that one of the key analytical
advantages to Foucault’s concept of governmental power over that of disciplinary power is that
it introduces the idea of an active subject who has the capacity to resist the ‛individualizing and
totalizing forces of modern power structures.‛
23
Endowed with a capacity for resistance, a citizenry of (neo-)liberal subjects are capable,
then, of transforming, subverting and challenging governmental relations of all kinds – from a
refusal to commit to a healthy diet, to a failure to provide evidence as a witness of crime,
through to a rejection of the need to recycle in the name of environmental protection. Implicitly, then, resistance is configured as a matter of self-reflexive choice or personal motivation to
opt out of, ignore or dissociate from particular technologies and practices. This sits easily within
a model of generative, autonomous agency, but is difficult to square with Foucault’s idea of
subjectivation which denotes the dialectical nature of constraint and freedom – that ‛the subject
is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices
23 Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Paul Patton, ‚Foucault’s Subject of Power,‛ in Jeremy Moss (ed.), The Later Foucault (London: Sage, 1998).
22 Thomas Lemke, ‚’The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on NeoLiberal Governmentality,‛ Economy and Society, 30, 2 (2001), 191.
23
McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction, 123.Campbell: The Emotional Life
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of liberation, of liberty.‛
Elena: What makes the individual resist the power of the status-quo? That the living forces within the individual are unwilling to accept it. The struggle between the vital human and the dominated human to call it somehow, takes place within each and every individual until some can no longer take the status quo. We should probably eventually call this the struggle between the religious dimension of the human being and the political dimension even if the word religious is questionable for so many. We cannot understand politics without psychology or psychology without religion.
It is the madness of our times to pretend to separate us into multiple arenas. The validity of that separation is that it allows us to better observe each particular arena but pretending to make them independent of each other is ‘schizophrenic’____________________
24 McNay complains that Foucault fails to offer a satisfactory account of
agency and that he vacillates ‛between moments of determinism and voluntarism.‛
Elena: There is both determinism and voluntarism, fortunately because without individual will there would be no hope!___________
25 Butler is
critical of the term ‛subjectivation,‛ seeing it as paradoxical in so far as it ‛denotes both the
becoming of the subject and the process of subjection – one inhabits the figure of autonomy only
by becoming subjected to a power, a subjection which implies a radical dependency.‛
Elena: there is definitely both a becoming of the subject and a subjection and THAT is precisely the struggle of every human being. People are determined to a great extent all through childhood and youth and can continue to be determined throughout their whole lives if they are never able to “to constitute the self as a coherent and complete entity”. But what we don’t seem to understand is that constituting the self as a coherent and complete entity does not mean an isolated individual but an ‘integrated individual’. The individual cannot fulfill his own integrity in as much as the society does not have the structure to integrate him legitimately. People today have to ‘disintegrate’ to be able to participate in the status quo. They have to act against themselves and others to belong to the hierarchy in place.
They must become egotistic and individualistic and deny the rights of others to the same resources so that they can own more than others. 400 Americans and proportionately the same everywhere, own the same as half of the American people. That is how absurd the status quo is. ______________________
26 Tie
points out that Foucault’s constructed subject stands in a difficult relationship to itself in as far
as the reflexive self is unable to ‛strike a radically resistive, critical distance from the terms of its
construction.‛
Elena: This is true in as much as the reflexive self is determining its own existence through its instinctive center but completely untrue in as much as every individual has within his and her self the ability to shift consciousness from the instinctive determination to emotional, intellectual and self-determination. Emotional and intellectual consciousness are still not as freeing as when the individual reaches self determination but we should also look at the spheres in which the emotional and/or intellectual dimensions are the determinants. They all of course play a part in any movement but there are particular accents in different arenas. We’ve been talking here about the determinism of an individual in relation to the social status quo as being particularly determined by the instinctive consciousness but if we were to look at how individuals are conditioned in the family-love-sexual arena, we would have to look at how the emotional consciousness is at play. It is more difficult to understand how the intellectual consciousness would be a determinant, I can think of the way science as a whole today is being manipulated for purely market interests as intellectual consciousness without consciousness of the human being or ‘our’ ‘self’._________________
27
Foucault’s failure to provide an account of agency makes it difficult, then, to distinguish
practices of the self that are imposed on individuals through governmental sanctions and
regulatory norms, from those which express relations of resistance. Equally there is no basis for
understanding the nature of compliance – whether it is the consequence of self-reflexivity, or the
realisation of a (perverse) attachment to subjection. In a mixed economy of power relations
wherein ‛individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which
several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized,‛
28
processes of subjectivation can never be linear or homogenous. Consequently, Tie argues, the
cumulative effects of this heterogeneity cannot be predicted, and in the absence of a
hermeneutics of selfhood and agency, the ‛possibilities for resistive action will always emerge
accidentally‛
29
rather than through a reflexive and critical process of self-realisation.
Elena: We cannot study these phenomenon as easily in ‘open’ societies (which are not as open anyway), because the sphere is too wide to grasp and yet men like Foucault are already doing wonders to understand them but if we focus on cults, we can much more easily grasp the phenomenon at play.
‘The possibilities of resistive action will always emerge accidentally’ is an interesting affirmation because it is actually the other way around. In as much as people are living in a deterministic process in which their ‘will’ hardly takes a part, they are living the ‘accident’: a life that they cannot control. The moment they apply resistance to the status quo from the depths of their Will, they start “being” and “becoming” and determine life for future generations in a particular way. The process repeats itself every generation so every generation there is the possibility of actualizing the Self for the Human being._______________________
The problematic of Foucault’s ‛subject-less subject‛ continues to haunt his analytics of
power and has generated a subsidiary scholarship that, in various ways, attempts to theorise
governmental subjectivities. Psychoanalytical approaches feature prominently in this work and
the contributions of Žižek, Butler and (the application of) Lacan, Klein and Freud to
understanding the psychic dimensions of the constituted-constituting subject is of particular
relevance. In an eloquent and perceptive article, Tie discusses the relative merits of these perspectives suggesting that ‛subjects‛ complicity in their subjectivation cannot be understood as
being purely the effect of their positioning in discourse. Rather, their complicity has an ‚affective
dimension.‛
Elena: yes, it is not merely an intellectual or instinctive complicity, it is most definitely an emotional complicity, a “subjectivation”.___________________
30
Of interest here is how that ‛affective dimension‛ is conceptualised within these
particular psychoanalytical theories, and how it is mobilised as an exercise of power. Žižek, for
example, talks of an ‛unconscious supplement,‛ and posits a kind of sub-terranean reservoir of
feeling which exists as Other to sovereign power, and which ‛provides enjoyment which serves
24 Michel Foucault, ‚An Aesthetics of Existence‛ in Foucault Live. Transl. by John Johnston. Ed. Sylvère
Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 313.
25 Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Oxford: Polity Press,
2000), 9.
26
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997),
83.
27
Warwick Tie, ‚The Psychic Life of Governmentality,‛ Culture, Theory and Critique, 45, 2 (2004), 164.
28
Foucault, ‚Afterword: the Subject and Power,‛ 221.
29 Tie, 165.
30
Ibid., 161, Emphasis added.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.
41
as the unacknowledged support of meaning.‛
31 However, it is debatable how far (or whether)
Žižek’s thesis adequately addresses the question of agency, but this is of less concern here than
his formulation of an ‛unconscious supplement.‛ It is not clear, for example, why ‛economies
of pleasure‛ are regarded as ‛extra-discursive,‛ and therefore positioned in a pre-linguistic
realm of the unconscious. This would seem to support an essentialist position that posits the
notion of a pre-social, biological and ‛extra-conscious‛ realm of emotionality.
Elena: The unconscious supplement is totally determining not only of the individual but of the whole of society, if we were to be talking about the same unconscious. There is no such a thing as a life without death or a life without an spiritual dimension that determines not only the individual but society. Society reflects its consciousness of death and the spiritual in its practices. It is the relationship with death and life what determines the whole of the status quo whether for the individual or for the society. In relation to that we should study the cultures in which death is “alive” and re-incarnation a condition as in ancient Egypt to understand how they condition the social structures without failing to understand the differences in time and experiences that separate us from them.
The economies of pleasure cannot be separated from the conscious or unconscious or extra-discursive. Wishing to separate them is another aspect of our schizophrenia. The connectedness between the sphere of life and death, sexuality and reproduction, emotionality and consciousness all need to be understood to get a glimpse into what we are trying to understand._____________________________
Meanwhile, for Butler, the ‛self-realisation‛ of the constituting subject occurs in a moment of trauma induced by a continual inability to constitute the self as a coherent and complete
entity. Butler posits the endless need to reiterate ‛who we are‛ as demonstrative of the incoherence of selfhood, a state of affairs which emerges from an unruly residue of psychic life
‛which exceeds the imprisoning effects of the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity,
to become a coherent subject.‛
Elena: This is meaningful, how far and where does she take it?
In principle I could almost agree with her but for me there is no unruly residue or trauma. We need to reiterate ‘who we are’ because we are not. We are becoming. Life is a becoming from our self to our selves: consciousness. We actualize that becoming in our history: our social orders and struggles that allow us to be one not only with our own self but with our selves in the vital connectedness of life itself. Life is life with or without our individuality, we all continue to struggle for the actualization of our selves in the social sphere whether many of us die without ever reaching consciousness but we leave traces of our struggle so that the conditions of life for future generations have a better standing towards a more human status quo.
The individual cannot do more than that but individual freedom and consciousness is also not dependent on the consciousness of the whole to actualize his or her own consciousness. In the sphere of the political, the individual actualizes his consciousness as social actor, in the sphere of the religious, the individual frees his and her self from the sphere of the living-political status quo and with that, from the determinism that engulfed them. The socio political has it’s own laws and determinations, it is a cosmos of its own and so is the individual and within their particular spheres they are each sovereign. We must better expand and understand this, it is beautiful!
Bye for now.
_______________
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