NOTES ON MICHEL FOUCAULT

French historian and philosopher (1926-1984)

DISCOURSE:

Discourse: a group of statements which provide a language for talking about, and
representing a topic a discursive formation.

A discourse refers to the rules of formation of statements which are accepted as

scientifically true. A discourse is a question of what governs statements, and the way in
which they govern each other.

Discourse is about production of knowledge through language, and through practices.

The language in which we describe facts interferes in the process of describing what is
true or false.

Power produces knowledge power is implicated in what is considered to be true or

false power and knowledge imply one another.

POWER/KNOWLEDGE (from The History of Sexuality)

Power: a multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and
which constitute their own organization.

Here, Foucault is not referring to a group of institutions that ensure the subservience of
citizens of a state, a mode of subjugation as a set of rules, or a system of domination in
which there are rulers and the ruled.

According to Foucault, power is omnipresent, not because it embraces everything

uniformly, but because it comes from everywhere.

Foucaults propositions on power:

Power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian

and mobile relations
Relations of power are immanent in other types of relations
Power comes from below there is no binary opposition between the ruled and
the ruler.
Where there is power, there is always resistance. Resistance is never exterior
to power.
One is always inside power. There is a plurality of resistances which exist in the
field of power relations.

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 Discourses can be an effect or instrument of power. But they may also be a point
of resistance.
Discourse transmits and produces power, but it also undermines and exposes it.

Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any
more than silences are. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable
process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but
also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for
an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it,
but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to
thwart it.

From Power/Knowledge:

According to him, right-wing social scientists always perceive power in terms of

sovereignty and law. And Marxists see power in terms of the state apparatus.
Foucault, on the other hand, was interested in how power is exercised and what its
techniques and tactics were.

With these concerns, he studied psychiatry and penal institutions (prison system).
Although these may seem unimportant, for him, psychiatry and penal institutions are
essential to the general functioning of the wheels of power.

Foucaults criticism of two concepts makes clear his understanding of power: the Marxist
concept of ideology and the Freudian concept of repression.

He opposes ideology because this concept always stands against something that is
supposed to count as truth. Ideology always refers to a Subject. It is always secondary to
an infrastructure; a material, economic determinant. In Marxism, base determines
superstructure, that is, the relations of production determine the ideas. As Marx said, in
every epoch, the ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. Marx and Marxist thought seeks
to unravel that ideological stratum to get down to truth, which is the conflictual
relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The Subject who is capable of
knowing this truth is the working class-in-itself.

Foucault says that, rather than ideologies, he is interested in how effects of truth are
produced within discourses which are neither false nor true.

He opposes the concept of repression because this concept is only about the effect of
power as repression, that is, power that says no, that prohibits. It is a juridical
conception of power.

For Foucault, repression is a negative conception of power. And as such, it is incomplete.

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*What makes power hold good, what makes people accept it, is that it produces things, it
induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.

According to his analyses, the productivity of power increased after the 18th century in
Europe. A new economy of power emerged. Procedures that allowed effects of power
to circulate in a continuous, uninterrupted manner emerged.

Example: In The History of Sexuality, Foucault was concerned with emerging discourses
about infant (childrens) sexuality and homosexuality, among other things. It is often
considered that the emerging bourgeois society of the 18th and 19th century Western
Europe repressed child sexuality and homosexuality as undesirable, sick, abnormal, etc.,
but Foucault rejects this view.

For him, by constantly writing about infant sexuality or homosexuality as a disease, as

abnormal, etc., in fact, the medical discourse created an infant sexual identity, it
sexualized the parent-child relationship, and also, it created a homosexual identity (as
well as a heterosexual one). It should be stressed that until the 19th century,
homosexuality was considered to be an act that a person might engage in the course of
his/her life. Although it was condemned, homosexuality was not considered to be an
identity. But the medical discourse created a homosexual identity. This opened the way
for the creation of a subjectivity around homosexuality, of homosexual desire, etc. Later,
in the second half of the 20th century, homosexual identity became the starting point
for resistance, namely, the gay rights movement in the west.

DISCIPLINES (From Discipline and Punish)

Closely related to Foucaults analysis of power is his concept of discipline or

disciplines.

Discipline is a type of power, a modality for its exercise. It comprises a whole set of
instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets. It is a physics of
power, an anatomy of power, or a technology of power.

Disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human groups with the following
aims: to exercise power at the lowest cost and maximum efficiency and effectiveness; to
increase the docility and utility of the people who are disciplined.

Disciplines emerged in the course of 18th-19th centuries in Western Europe at the

historical conjuncture of two processes: (a) The increase in national populations, and the
increase in the population of institutions which needed to be controlled (such as schools,
hospitals, prisons, armies, etc.) (b) The growth in the productive apparatus (the
production of commodities, and the production of health, education, etc.)

What distinguished the disciplines from previous forms of power based on repression and
violence are the following features:

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 Discipline objectifies the people on whom it is applied. This type of power forms
a body of knowledge about the individuals it disciplines, rather than the
deployment of visible signs of sovereignty.
Population increase and growth of capitalism are interrelated. Disciplining
techniques would not have been possible without the latter, or useful, without the
former.
There is a parallel between the emergence of a formally egalitarian juridical
framework and a parliamentary, representative political regime in Western
Europe, and the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms.
Representative regime promises sovereignty by the people, but at the same time,
panopticism and the disciplines guarantee submission of the people.

The Enlightenment, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
The main example that Foucault uses here is the Panopticon, a surveillance
technique invented by Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian theorist, for the observation
of prisoners. The panopticon consisted of a tower from which, the prisoners down on
the ground could be watched at all times.

According to Foucault, in the modern prison system, the codified power to punish
becomes the disciplinary power to observe.

The idea with the panopticon or more generally with the disciplines is that, when one
knows that one is being watched, one becomes more docile and more useful. Thus,
discipline is a more efficient instrument of power than repression. (Remember the
movies Kafka and Brazil).

TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER (from The Body of the Condemned in Discipline and

Punish)

Technology of power: the very principle of both the humanization of the penal system
and of the knowledge of man.

History of penal law and the history of the human sciences derive from a common matrix.

The body itself is invested by power relations. The body is a useful force only if it is both
a productive body and a subjected body.

In all punishment, the body is at issue: the body and its forces, their utility and docility,
and their distribution and submission.

The technology of the body is diffuse.

Microphysics of power: Power exercised on the body is not a property, but a strategy; its
effects of domination are attributed not to appropriation, but to dispositions, maneuvers,
tactics, techniques. This power is exercised, it is not possessed; it is not the privilege of
the dominant class, but an overall effect of its strategic positions.

4
This power invests the people who do not have power, it is transmitted through them
and by them. At the same time, people resist the grip of this power.

Body Politic: a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays,
communication routes, and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest
human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge.

Foucaults Discursive Subject

Foucault is credited with deconstruction of the subject, but in reality what

Foucault has given us is a critique of the Cartesian subject, the intuitively-given
individual subject deemed the original site of all cognitive representation and
social action. Foucaults critique is a continuation of the structuralist project of
weakening the concept of agency, a critique which has contributed to the actual
demolition of subjectivity since the 1980s.

In The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Foucault demonstrates that even such a

basic human need as sexuality is socially constructed; there is no pre-social sex
drive.

Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which

power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which
knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a
historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great
surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of
pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the
strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in
accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. [p. 106]

As I read this then, even if deep down in the human organism there is some need
for food, warmth, love and sexual intercourse, psychoanalysis notwithstanding, it
has been amply demonstrated that such essential drives and needs are buried so
deep beneath elastic and socially constructed interpretations, that the
constructivist hypothesis is by far the more relevant as opposed to the
essentialist, at least for the purposes of understanding modern society. Human
beings are their own product; our essence is nothing but the need to negate and
produce our own being; humanity is essentially non-essential.

If a persons needs do not originate in an individuals inner nature,

but are socially constructed, the same is even more true of cognition, the
activity of understanding the world, which is shaped by socially available
discourse and objectified in books, artefacts, languages, institutions, etc., etc.

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This word discourse is central to Foucault of course.
We must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse
and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated
one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in
various strategies. [p. 100]

Here the concept of discourse is like that of paradigm in that both arguments
for and against are posed within the terms of a single all-embracing language.
It is this distribution that we must reconstruct, with the things said and those
concealed, ... the variants and different effects according to who is speaking, his
position of power, the institutional context in which he happens to be situated ...
[p. 100]

An argument cannot be criticised just in its own terms; analysis must reveal the
unspoken outside of discourse, and how discourse shapes relations of power by
the implicit relations between the speaker and what is spoken. But it should be
noted that discourse is for Foucault, a social and material, rather than purely
ideal or linguistic category:

it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. [p.

100]

Such a view leaves room for agency at the margins, so to speak:

Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also
undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to
thwart it. ... [p. 101]

If both a persons needs and understanding are socially constructed, the same is
even more true of agency, in which people attempt to assert themselves in the
social field.

Is it possible to talk of power that is not the power of some subject? Power is for
Foucault like an Hegelian Spirit, a ruse of history, an almost metaphysical
substance. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything,
but because it comes from everywhere, and one is always inside
power, there is no escaping it.

For Foucault, it is in principle impossible to oppose power, because it is only

with power that power can be opposed, an observation that is possible
once one has made power into an undifferentiated metaphysical substance,
detachable from the agents whose power it is. Power comes from below; that is,
there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at
the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix. no such duality
extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to
the very depths of the social body. [p. 93]

Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather

6
consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in
relation to power. Should it be said that one is always inside power,
there is no escaping it, there is no absolute outside where it is
concerned. [p. 94]

Correctly warning us against mechanistic and nave conceptions of power which

would take institutions at face value, as sources rather than concentrations of
power, he says:

The intelligibility of the social order, must not be sought in the primary
existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which
secondary and descendant forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of
force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of
power, but the latter are always local and unstable, and Power, ... is simply the
over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities. [p. 93]

Interestingly, this form of structuralism, gives no more power to individuals who

run great institutions than it gives to individuals who have no power in the
obvious sense as decision-makers: all are caught up in relationships of force.
Major dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these
confrontations. [p. 94]

But this is a metaphysics which is in danger of falling into nullity.

The truest actualisation of this type of relation is in the market, where the small
change of commerce can be collected into vast capitals, which
nevertheless remain subject to the law of capital. Foucault was writing at
a time when the second great (monetarist) attempt at macro-economic control of
the world economy was approaching exhaustion, and the capitalist powers were
about to embark on the strategy of microeconomic reform. The symmetry with
Foucaults observations is remarkable.

In a capitalist economy, the whole network of power relations are generated on

the basis of a single ethical relation of exchange of equivalents, the truth
of which is an ethical horizon beyond which the market agents cannot see.
Doubtless, a traditional society could be understood in similar terms, with power
seeming to be wielded by a person occupying a position in a social structure,
more properly understood as originating in the impersonal social structure,
transmitted through pervasive microscopic and invisible relations of domination.
Power relations [do not] result from the choice or decision of an individual
subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; [p.
94]

I think one must give to Foucault that this is a valid description of the
mechanisms of power within any unitary culture, that is to say, within the thick
ethos of a society in which there is no outside to the governing ethos, typical of
which would be traditional societies, or feudal societies in which personality was

7
almost totally absorbed in subject-position, or even within an institution such as
the market or the family, which although not exhaustive is pervasive. Under such
conditions, the possibilities of resistance can be described in Foucauldian terms:
there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of
all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a
plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that
are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous,
savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; [p. 96]

Consistent with the method of Archaeology of Knowledge, then, revolution

requires the linking up of a multiplicity of points of resistance:
... it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that
makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies
on the institutional integration of power relationships. [p. 96]

The problem with this very powerful insight into the exercise of power without an
apparatus of repression, is that the possibility of a discourse being subject to real
critique is effectively excluded, leaving only the margins exposed:

Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines
and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. ... There is
not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite to it, another
discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks
operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even
contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary,
circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing
strategy. [p. 102]

This conception expresses the aspect of modernity as processes without

subjects:

Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are
intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that
explains them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with
calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims
and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or
decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that
presides over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups
which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important
economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society
(and makes it function); ... [p. 94-5]

A discourse is the linguistic or semiotic form adopted by a set of relationships

taken as natural, rather than socially constructed. Thus, discourse takes on the
appearance of a game, in which moves are made according to a set of rules; while
moves may be to the advantage or not of an actor, the rules are a given, the
game does not include the making of the rules.

8
In this view, society resembles a mass of people playing chess, chinese chequers
and drafts with each other. Not only the moves, but the aims, the needs to
be fulfilled, are formed by the games they play. The concept of
discourse, as Foucault presents it, does differ from language games because
the games support and express relations of power and subordination, and the
moves entail force and its effects are inscribed on the body. But a number of
important things are left out of the picture here.

Firstly, the concept of discourse excludes the idea that there is an outside to
discourse which is not socially constructed, but natural science for
example has always had to wrestle with the fact that any theory,
notwithstanding the fact that everyone believes in it, can fail the test
of practice, and will eventually, as a result, attract opponents and
undergo the famous paradigm shift associated with scientific
revolutions; the same is true of discourses which simply fail to meet human
needs, either the needs that they create or other needs. In the test of practice
there is undoubtedly a significant cultural and historical moment, but there is
also always a natural or extra-social moment. Unless you believe that global
warming, exhaustion of energy reserves, atmospheric and ocean pollution, etc.,
are all myths (i.e., just discourses), these phenomena mark one limit for the
Foucauldian conception of the world. In fact Nature shows itself in many ways
within social relations. There are objective measures of the validity of a
discourse.

Secondly, discourses can confront one another as opponents, with rival

institutions and social classes harbouring explicitly hostile discourses, mobilising
force against one another. In such cases no special science is needed to be aware
of the conflict, but nor should science blind us to the obvious. Foucaults insight
that power may be exercised without such open contradiction, does not exclude
the fact that this is a normal situation in class society. Real ethical conflicts
essentially escape the Foucauldian viewpoint. How should we live? Except
insofar as this should refers back to the discourse against which it is directed,
Foucault can have no answer to this question. One discourse is as good as
another.

Thirdly and finally, the conception of processes without subjects, of intentional

but nonsubjective exercise of power does characterise an aspect of the modern
condition. But in theorising this aspect of modernity we must take care to
critique it, rather than reifying it by rationalising it. The inability of people to
attain an effective voice in their own lives and our collective failure to achieve
simple social objectives, such as the elimination of poverty and war, is testimony
to the fact that lack of subjectivity is a source of social injustice today.

But what exactly would subjectivity mean in the Foucauldian world? Or, to put it
differently, is it possible to recover a notion of subjectivity which retains the
essential insights that Foucault has given us?

9
1 Can we recover a notion of practical knowledge of an objective world
distinguishable from knowledge internal to a discourse?
2 Can we recover a notion of a subject with human needs which are more than
just an effect of discourse, or does this necessarily lead us into an
indefensible essentialism'?
3 Can we recover a meaningful notion of agency, consistent with the idea of
discourse and availability without falling into determinism or
voluntarism?
4
We will take these issues one at a time, but before we can take a step forward, we
have to let go of the Cartesian conception of the subject as a knowing, individual
agent. The human psyche is a real thing just as the human body is a real thing,
but neither a body nor a psyche constitute a subject. Subjectivity is a relationship,
an active, human relationship, and it is only in terms of such a collaborative
relationship that we can talk of practical knowledge, human needs which are
more than the basest of biological inputs, and agency. We have to conceive of a
subject which encompasses the agency of mortal individuals as well as discourse
understood as both really-existing practical relations of cooperation and ideal
products of culture words images, concepts, artefacts, and so on.

1. Knowledge
The epistemological problem of whether knowledge is entirely enclosed by the
paradigm or discourse within which it exists is one that has received ample
attention over the past century, and there is no need to recapitulate that debate
here. A recent example is the question as to whether poverty exists and can be
measured objectively or is on the contrary simply a construct of the setting of the
poverty line in welfare discourses. Foucault seemed on strong ground when he
pointed out that the very concept of sex is constructed from a
multiplicity of pleasures, discourses, needs, and so on, and poverty
researchers would do well to learn from this: both poverty and the concept of
poverty are social constructs, differing in nature from one epoch or culture to the
next, so if they are to be objective and socially relevant, measures of poverty must
be constructed critically. It turns out in fact that poverty is subject to objective
measurement (life expectancy, rates of psychiatric admissions, child abuse,
imprisonment, etc.), even though such measures only present themselves as a
result of a critique of the nave/intuitive conception of poverty based exclusively
on income and monetary wealth. And the line which asserts that on the contrary,
the concept of poverty is simply a linguistic construct leads to profoundly
reactionary conclusions.

Natural science first took up this question on its own territory with Charles
Sanders Peirces conception of Pragmatism (1878) and Percy Bridgmans
Operationalism (1927), culminating in Thomas Kuhns concept of paradigm
(1962). Ultimately however, the validity of a theory is tested on the ground of
ethics, that is to say, on the domain of a whole form of life. This insight, which
can be traced back to Hegel, was first formulated within the discourse of natural

10
science by Jacques Monod, the 1965 Nobel Laureate for Biology. Critique of
knowledge can find a firm ground only in ethics, and this is something that
Foucault fails to provide.
How is knowledge constituted then? Knowledge is the knowledge of a subject.
The Cartesian conception of the subject as a thinking ego came under attack
centuries before M. Foucault came on the scene. An individual with working
nervous system and sense organs, can know nothing; in addition to the nervous
and sensori-motor systems with which every human individual is endowed,
knowledge presupposes that the individual is participating in some collaborative
activity, engaging both systems, with other people, by means of which their needs
a met. Collaborative activity connects people with the entire history of humanity
through languages, symbols and images, artefacts, not to mention the human
bodies and sense organs shaped by many generations of such activity. The
knowledge a person has makes sense to them only to the extent that it is
connected with their active use of their body in meeting human needs; but closer
examination shows that the specific content of that knowledge is formed not by
the individual themself but by the efforts of the individual to collaborate with
others using and modifying the ideal entities which mediate their collaboration.
The knowing subject therefore includes not only the (socially constructed)
nervous and sensori-motor systems of the individual person, but also the concept
and the material products (including words and images) embodying that concept,
used to recognise and make sense of sense perceptions, and the system of human
relations and institutions, through which the concept is brought into relation to
the person.
Let me be clear here: it is not my contention that an individual uses artefacts
and other people in order to acquire knowledge. I am saying that the knowing
subject is a specific dynamic combination of individuals, ideals and social
collaboration. A thought unrelated to any social action or meaningful artefact
(word, symbol, etc.) would be as absurd as a reflection without its object, the
meaning of a nonsense word, or a nation with no citizens.
Foucault directs his fire against the nave/intuitive Cartesian conception of
knowledge, in support of an idea of knowledge constituted by discourse;
discourse is understood as the unity of an ideal conceptual structure and a real
set of power relations between people. However, Foucault is seen not as
describing a more concrete conception of the subject, but rather as
deconstructing the subject, leaving us the absurdity of knowledge without a
subject.
On the contrary, knowledge is knowledge of some subject, some needy social
agent.

2. Human Needs
As Marx said at length in the 1844 Manuscripts, the forming of the five senses is
a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.
The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human
object an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become
directly in their practice theoreticians. [Private Property and Communism,
Marx 1844]

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Both human capacities and human needs have been shaped by the historical
development of the social cooperation and the division of labour. A persons
needs are not found in some inner personal world, but on the contrary in the
social world in which both their needs and the means of their satisfaction are
produced; and not just needs, but a persons entire identity is produced
through their activity with other people. The insight that the sense organs
are the product of social development, and can sense only what is socially
meaningful certainly undermines the idea of a sovereign individual subject, but it
does not undermine the concept of subjectivity as such. Discourse shapes the
sense organs, but equally, social relations acquire their sense organs
in human individuals. Human eyes and ears are the sense organs of subjects,
not of individual subjects, but of social subjects, structured around a division of
labour and the social production of human life.

So Foucault is right when he argues that there is no such thing as a pre-social

sex in the human organism, only a range of pleasures and stimuli, arbitrarily
bunched together under a concept of sexuality which is a cultural-historical
product; but it is equally evident that there can be no sexuality without
those pleasures and stimuli which exist only in human bodies. It turns
out that human needs are immensely malleable, more malleable than seems
imaginable at first, but they remain, nevertheless, human needs.
all the organs of his individual being [are] the appropriation of human reality.
Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, ... it is
human activity and human suffering [Private Property and Communism, Marx
1844]

3. Agency
If it be granted that human knowledge and human needs are the labour of social
subjects actualised by individuals, and that knowledge and needs are irreducibly
the functions of real, individual, suffering human beings, it may still be doubted
that it is in any way sensible to talk about individual agency.

Freedom is the understanding of necessity said Hegel; an individual is free only

to the extent that they can make an intelligent choice between real possibilities,
rather than being governed by blind necessity. Hegel reserved real freedom for
world historic heroes, like Napoleon, who directly express the World Spirit in
their lives. Many who have rejected Hegels metaphysical conception of history
would still grant that the idea of self-determination, or sovereignty, as applied to
an individual is an absurdity. At the same time, most frequently when people use
the word subject they mean precisely that individual agent who is deemed, on
the contrary to lack agency in any real sense of the word. So it is here surely that
Foucaults critique would seem to have the most purchase.
It is worthwhile to pause and clarify what is meant by self-determination.
Compare the definition given by Kant in his original definition of the subject of
moral philosophy and the definition of sovereignty in the law of nations:
A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. ... a person is subject
to no other laws than those he gives to himself, either alone or at least along with

12
others. (Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals)
and
sovereignty, the principle that each nation answers only to its own domestic
order and is not accountable to a larger international community, save only to the
extent that it has consented to do so. (Bederman, International Law
Frameworks, p. 50)
The same parallelism is found in the recognition paradigm of sovereignty:
the relations of free beings to one another is a relation of reciprocal interaction
throughintelligence and freedom. One cannot recognise the other if both do not
mutually recognise each other. (Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, p. 42)
and
an unspoken assumption in the criterion for statehood ... that other nations are
prepared to treat a particular entity as a member of the family of nations.
(Bederman, International Law Frameworks, p. 54)
Thus we see that the concepts of sovereignty developed by the founders of
modern moral philosophy (Kant and Fichte) align with the concepts of
sovereignty still used in international law to this day. The meaning of the concept
in the context of the law of nations is somewhat clearer than in the context of
moral philosophy where the writers we have quoted, pioneers of bourgeois
ideology, proposed the individual person as a sovereign subject. Clearly such a
conception is idealistic; the individual as a sovereign subject is something that
can only be imagined for a faraway future society: ... an association in which the
free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. [The
Communist Manifesto, 1848] Nevertheless, this conception of self-determination
can serve as a norm against which the meaning of subject as a free being (to use
Fichtes terminology) can be measured.
An individual sees themself in the action of others, where that action fulfils a
persons own aspirations and is the completion of the persons own actions;
people make a psychic investment (to use James Colemans terminology) in
other people. Thus we can see that individuals even today can exercise self-
determination, that is to say agency, in and through their relationships with
others. Self-determination does not and never did imply infinite negative
freedom, that is to say, to be able to determine ones actions purely and simply
without regard to the freedom of others. Rather, self-determination implies
being subject only to laws which the subject may be deemed to have set for
themself, either alone or along with others like oneself. Implicit in this concept
are norms of procedural fairness appropriate to subjects which recognise each
other as moral equals.
Thus an individual can enjoy self-determination to the extent that they can freely
invest themselves in the actions of social subjects which enjoy self-determination
in these terms.
A number of issues bear on the question as to whether it is possible for
individuals to enjoy self-determination through participation in social
subjectivity. These include (i) the presence of discursive heterogeneity, that is,
the presence of competing discourses which give individuals the opportunity to
take a critical stance in relation to any given discourse before making a psychic
investment in it; (ii) if we allow that companies, that is, subjects whose self-

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determination is directly subject to the laws of economics can allow only
qualified access to self-determination, then (iii) the existence of relations of trust
and solidarity between mutually independent subjects, which offer opportunities
for individuals to participate in determining the conditions of their own lives, and
(iv) people in general have some measure of real control over the products of
their own labour.
As it happens, the past couple of decades have seen the growth of social
conditions in which the great mass of people are experiencing a loss of agency,
as power becomes more and more concentrated in a relatively small number of
great corporations, subject to the laws of the market, while all other forms of
social collaboration are being destroyed and society atomised. This is where our
attention needs to be focused. To theorise this as if subjectivity was only ever an
illusion, or even, as some do, paint the subject as an essentially oppressive entity
anyway, only makes the situation worse.
What Foucault can help us with though is this: in the modern world it is no
longer plausible to conceptualise agency in terms of social subjects, understood
as mutually independent institutions, organisations, social movements and so on.
The notions of discourse and interpellation into subject positions within a
multiplicity of narratives, actually give us a better approach to the conception of
subjectivity and self-determination. The kind of mechanical field presupposed in
both the above quotes defining the notion of sovereignty, needs to be replaced
with a field of interlocking discourses in which each effects a kind of matrix
transformation on relationships in the others. This is a complex task, but offers a
way forward.

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