On Sat, 25 May 1996, N.P.BARON [CREES] wrote:
>
> I'd like to believe Foucault believes these things too - that there
> is agency, and there are subjects, and that there is a potent,
> causal 'extra-discursive'. From what little of his work I've read
> (and from some of the debates on this list), however, I'm just not
> sure he does.
>
> Thanks
>
> Nick
This has been somewhat of a recurrent theme on the list, and it should be
since the questions of agency and subjetivity lie so close the the heart
fo foucault's work, however I'm osmewhat troubled by the treatment that
these issues are generally given here. To begin with foucault does not
explicitly deny the existence of agency and subjectivity. By the same
token neither does he explicitly accept the understanding of these
concepts which is dominant within the tradition of philosophy or within
the larger cultural substraight in which we exist. Rather foucault has
attempted to problematize the issues of agency and subjectivity, and this
holds across his entire corpus. True enough, there is a different
relation to these issues in the early work and the later work, but in
both places the questions of 'What is agency?, and 'What is
subjectivity?, take up a central point. There is no place where foucault
blindly accepts or rejects a thinking subject, a knowing subject, a
self-conscious subject, or any other form of singular and substantial
subjetivity that one might be able to dredge up from the bowels of the
tradition, rather subjectivity is multiple, it is a discreet balance of
forces which must be questioned in its specificity if one is to be
capable of saying anythign about it at all.
The manner in which foucault enacts the problematic in relation to
subjectivity and agency is somewhat different from Althusser's
understanding of the problematic, but Althuser's definition at least
provides a very solid starting point. So this is from the glossary to
_Reading Capital_:
"PROBLEMATIC. A word or a concept cannot be considered in isolation; it
only exists in the theoretical or ideological framework in which it is
used: its problematic. A related concept can clearly be seen at work in
Foucault's _Madness and Civilization_. It should be stressed that the
problematic is not a world-view. It is not the essence of thought of an
individual or an epochwhich can be deduced from a body of texts by an
empirical, generalizing reading; it is centered on the _abscence_ of
problems and concepts within the problematic as much as their presence;
it can therefore only be reached by a symptomatic reading on the model of
the Freudian analyst's reading of his patient's utterances."
Now in foucault's case the symptomatology is not strictly Freudian and
foucault does not accede to the division between theory and ideology that
Althusser would maintain. But for the most part this provides a usefull
mechanism for trying to get at what foucault is doing with agency and
subjectivity.
Flannon