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Created: April 26, 2003
Latest Update: April 26, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Review essay on "Foucualt, feminism, and questions of identity"

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, April 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on Jana Sawicki's "Foucualt, feminism, and questions of identity," in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, at pp. 286 - 313.

Notes on Subjectivity

April 27, 2003: One of the first things Jana Sawicki mentiions is the apparent contradictions in Foucault over subjectivity. That is, over whether there is an essence, a soul, an individuality that transcends or goes beyond, the me that is shaped by all the influences of the social structure: parents, school, peers, advertising, commodification (the selling of almost everything). On the one hand, Foucault speaks of the death of man, by which he means the ultimate recognition that there is not and cannot be a nugget of truth somewhere that is me. But that doesn't mean that Foucault sees us as without agency, without choice, without something to do with who we are. Instead, he opposes the idea that we are ever defined, insisting that there is always the hope of becoming.

Now, I'm interpreting here. Foucault was a pessimist, but he saw hope to bringing out the negatives about Enlightenment. Enlightenment insisted that knowledge kept us continually growing and becoming. That there was "coherence" and "continuity", which Sawicki calls "identity" at p. 287. Foucault challenged that continuity. He saw our freedom in escaping the constraint of norms that would define us as women, as convicts, as students to follow the institutionalized patterns set for us.

I think one way to make sense of this question of subjectivity in Foucault might be to use the concept of interdependence to reimagine identity. Yes, social construction matters. There are tremendous constraints placed on us by dominant discourse, by institutionalized normativity (kind of like institutional racism, but broader), by the power of both sovereign and disciplinary authority. But the nature of humans is that we can and often do resist those constraints. Foucault was searching for ways to guide or push us in the direction of creative ways to escape the constraints. He didn't want to lead resistance or political movements. He wanted instead to push us in the direction of understanding how to do so. How to think outside the boxes in which the structural context keeps putting us.

References:

• April 26, 2003: Foucault - An Introduction Gives a good overall explanation of Foucault's ideas and defines terms. One of the texts from lectures in Reseach Practice Certificate at Nottingham Trent University.

• April 26, 2003: "the death of man" Michel Foucault: Influential French Thinker - (1926 - 1984) By Jon Mattox, a drummer, who plays here in LA. Once again, kids, notice liberal arts education. In the last paraagraph of his page on Foucault he quotes David R.Shumway (Carnegie Mellon University) as saying of Foucault:

  "To treat any continuity with suspicion".

  "Discourse is a violence we do to things".

  "What distinguishes him from Derrida , Lacan, & Barthes is the importance of history".

  "Scandously attacked the sacred cow of most French intellectuals: man. Foucault argued that Nietzche's death of God meant man's disappearance, that the birth of the superman meant the death of man. (Emphasis added.) This challenged the stable conception of human nature which the human sciences sought to elaborate (And subsequently the beliefs of the conservatives, the Marxists, and others on the left as well". . .

  Check out his art page while you're at it. jeanne

April 26, 2003: The death of man, of the author, and the hope of postmodernismA Wearable Postmodernism A Review of Foucault and Social Dialogue - Beyond Fragmentation By Christopher Falzon. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Reviewed by Winifred Wing Han Lamb, Australian National University.

Discussion Questions

1. What is meant by the "death of man"?

   April 27, 2003: Consider the explanation of subjectivity above. Consider that Foucault might have been telling us that there was no little nugget called "me" or "man" out there to discover. That maybe man was all the incoherence, all the discontinuity of relationships and identity we see emerging from the interaction of our choices and the constraints of the structural context. Then, man the nugget out there, wouldn't really exist, but me the interdependent creature that keeps growing and changing in discontinuous, incoherent ways would be very much alive, interacting with the structural context. This would be linked to Nietzsche's God is Dead in much the same way: God as some controlling nugget out there is maybe a misconception of man; but God as powers beyond us that we do not understand would continue to interact as structural context. Consider the theological perspective that sees God as within each of us. That might fit what Foucault and Nietzche were trying to describe.